./emilychang

Tonight browsing Plurk, I saw heyitskenn's plurk about the service being acquired by Pheltup . Read more...

It still strikes me as fascinating that the iPhone and the OLPC (or XO) laptop were both released in the last year, and yet they're such radically different "computing" and communication devices and concepts. I've spent some time playing simultaneously with the iPhone, the XO or OLPC laptop, and my regular computer combo - an Apple slim keyboard and MacPro tower. I thought about the emotional attachments I've formed based on user experience. Ignoring the discussion of their obviously different markets and functions for a moment, I wanted to share my experience of using each. Read more...

Botanicalls is a project by students at the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program. It's "a system that was developed to allow plants to place phone calls for human help. When a plant on the Botanicalls network needs water, it can call a person and ask for exactly what it needs. When people phone the plants, the plants orient callers to their habits and characteristics." Botanicalls Twitter DIY is a version for Twitter so your plants can send Twitter updates when they need water, or send you their thanks. Read more...

I've been a supporter of the open source movement since I first got on the web in the early 90s. Almost everything I've learned about the web and programming, I learned from downloading open source software and giving it a try, then hacking it to customize it to my own needs. Read more...

Ever since I started using Twitter, Tumblr, and Stikkit, it seems I haven't been able to finish a blog post. Instead, I'm just Twittering, collecting, reading, posting: generally zipping through the electronic universe leaving a varied trail of my activities and thoughts. Read more...

As I was designing for a client web application today, I kept living through John Maeda's first law of simplicity: thoughtful reduction. The goal was to design a new comments system for parts of the site so members were more likely to leave little notes for each other. In order to make it fun and easy, we wanted to reduce the person's input to as few clicks as possible, but with enough expression that she would want to click it. Read more...

I came across this post while looking for information on attention recording and one of the paragraphs regarding self-documentary really resonated with me. Read more...

Seems like I'm not the only one working on new site developments on a Saturday evening. As I'm re-architecting and working on what I want to add in 2007, it seems Twitter and Flickr are also at work :) Read more...

In our accelerated culture, I can think of a particular Devo song and have it downloaded from a music site within seconds. This instant gratification is in contrast to other desires: eg. the slow food movement, craft, longevity. Read more...

While waiting for something to download, I decided to take the Superhero and counterpart Super villain online quizzes that have been making their rounds through the geekosphere. Like most personality quizzes, you can almost guess the result as you're answering the clearly bipolar questions. The results also seem largely dependent on whether you answer "yes" to "are you bald?" or "do you have long hair?" but hey, it's just a little web quiz. Read more...

Recent posts have been expressing why people don't like using social software, or believe it's just a passing fad. Since I disagree, I've made a short list of why I do use social software, and why I think the social aspects of our digital interactions will only increase not decrease. Read more...

I've had phases where I was really into digital video. In the early 2000s, I shot a lot of footage of my daily life with my one-chip Sony DV cam and turned them into web clips of abstract scenes set to music. Then there was a period where I shot documentary video at electronic music events and raves in Toronto. I participated in some of the early online group video projects like Spongi and DailyDV and watched animations at AtomFilms. Read more...

Had some time to cruise through del.icio.us tonight and noticed that one of the Asian bookmarks under /tag/web2.0 had an image associated with it. Since I've been using del.icio.us, I've never seen this and was curious if anyone else noticed it. Read more...

Despite the recent news that even newspaper prose is search engine optimized, I'm sticking with my own obtuse title today. Sometimes the web moves so quickly it's hard to keep up with the explosion of ideas both big and small. I recommend reading the following for a snapshot of the web as we know it (this week) and where it might be heading. Read more...

While there have been many seminal posts on Web 2.0 in the last several months, I strongly recommend reading "Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?" by Bryan Alexander, Director for Research at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE). Thanks to Bryan for the mention of eHub at the end of the article, and thanks to Max for sending the article my way tonight. Read more...

Today turns out to be the twenty year anniversary of when George Lucas sold Pixar to Steve Jobs. In the post, "February 3, 1986: Divorce, Mogul Style," Chris Seibold tells of how Lucas decided to "see a smallish piece of his Lucas Film empire" to raise cash to settle his divorce. Given Lucas' predicament, Steve Jobs was able to bring Lucas' initial asking price of 30 million dollars to 10 million. Read more...

Having spent many years developing web products for higher education, I'm always interested when universities or colleges open up their knowledge banks to the public using new technologies (see OpenCourseWare Finder). Read more...

SuprGlu "gathers your content from popular web services and publishes them in one convenient place." My first thought was that it sounded like another simple feed aggregator. I gave SuprGlu a spin tonight and was pleasantly surprised by both the ease of use and the sense of personal discovery. Read more...

I came across an old blog post of mine that caused a double-take. The post, titled "One-Screen Access to Your Life" isn't about Netvibes or another Web 2.0 application, but cites a story at the New York Times from November 2002. Read more...

Like you, I've been reading much of the commentary online about Web 2.0 at various blogs and sites the last month or so, and particularly this last week as the O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference came and went here in SF. Read more...

In a recent blog post at O'Reilly, Giles Turnbull writes, "A while ago, I thought I'd try an experiment: could I organise all my work, all my personal stuff, all my writing, in one huge text file?" You may think he's crazy, but my first thought was "Cool! Another geek like myself who keeps everything in text files." Read more...