Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle’s “Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On“.

Read that, perhaps while watching/listening toKevin Kelly’s riveting talk (from the TED EG conference) on the next 5000 days of the web (that’s right, we’re only 5000 days old) and the future of the Semantic web. Kelly says we’re building not a series of small machines on the Internet, but one gigantic thinking machine, approaching the connectivity level of the human mind.

Normally I don’t re-post Twitter articles here but this one on the New York magazine was wistful, fair, balanced, and gave a good representation of what it’s like to work here.

The reporter was in the office on the very day the US Airways flight crashed into the Hudson, and he recorded our (completely boring) reactions to the event.

Sure, the Twitter guys still have no idea how to make money off their fabulous invention. But for now they are living in a dreamworld of infinite possibilities, maybe the last one on Earth.

How Tweet it Is – New York Magazine

At home I have a number of Macs, with one large machine (~1.5TB disk, 4 GB RAM) dedicated to digital photo editing. This machine houses a large volume of photos in it’s “Final Exports” folder. It’s not my main computer – my main computer is a MacBook Pro which travels with me nearly everywhere, and when I don’t have that, I have my iPhone.

I want my photos with me everywhere (or, at least, the last few hundred of them) so I can show people the last great event I went to, or that thing in the club that time. Here’s my solution.

1) Keep the photos on the large machine, where I edit photos in Adobe Lightroom and export them to the “Final Exports” folder.

2) Keep the laptop as the primary sync machine for the iPhone

3) Sync the iphone to the laptop, and retrieve the latest photos.

iPhoto 7 has a wonderful feature called Photocasting which will read lists of latest photos from the Internet (say, flickr, for example.) using a format that is very similar to RSS, but completely not compliant with current RSS standards.

The following Ruby script, and ERB template will turn a directory of directories into a pubsub feed for iphoto. You save your files in this form:

Final_Exports/dir1

Final_Exports/dir1/1.jpg

Final_Exports/dir1/2.jpg (and so on…)

Final_Exports/dir2

Final_Exports/dir…

Final_Exports/dirN (and so on…)

I use the scripts to generate RSS, and then put the RSS file somewhere on the Internet (the same directory with the photos works well, as my machines are internet accessible.) Running the script from cron once a day and syncing the phone, keeps you up to date.

Scripts:

makeiphotorss.rb

makeiphotorss.erb

Viewdle, a video search engine, launched recently, and won the 2008 LeWeb Gold prize . It’s very similar to a technology that casinos have had for years. In previous times they’d look up your face in the five-volume Griffin GOLD book, a litany of cheats. Machine vision has surpassed the book, by far.

I’ve long been fascinated by casino security. Only the military and casinos have access to massive budgets used to track, identify, and secure locations. While other corporations may have similar budgets they lack the zeal of the casinos and their lust for security technologies.

This application is essentially video facial recognition, combined with crowd sourced tagging. The casinos did this, but shared data between themselves across the Internet. Viewdle opens up this possibility to the public.

A nice flowchart of their process is here…

They appear to have close ties with Reuters, and Reuters is using Viewdle for theironline people search.

I’m in the lower left of this photo. It’s not the best, but it’s representative of our collective emotion at Twitter HQ on that historic night!

Image Courtesy of Scott Beale, Laughing Squid.

The rest of the photos and Scott’s article Lives here …

Those that were lacking in an actual LOLCat slide featured lots of LOLSpeak. I know we’re discussing the web, but do we have to insert LOLSpeak everywhere? (of course we do. duh.)

I urge you to check out the slides. There were many informative presentations this year from our friends across in Berlin and abroad.

People keep saying to me, “I don’t get Twitter, what is it that you do anyway?”

We just put out a pretty slick video showing people in San Francisco and New York using it, so maybe this’ll help !

How Do You Use Twitter? from biz stone on Vimeo.

SFBeta was what you’d expect – Lots of industry folk, barely any food left if you showed up past 5:50pm or so (they opened at 5pm!), lots of people pushing random product at you, and not a hell of a lot of good technology. Most of it? Pointless, but every time I go, though, there’s at least one company showing a worthy technology.

i give you, search me:

A few months ago, it was PicLens, and this time, in the “we use and love coverflow” technology vein that PicLens is part of, it’s SearchMe.

They’re combining cover flow, Internet search, and a topic specific, topic sensitive system that displays categorical icons at the top of the page. The stacks feature allows you to drag and drop pages into a cohesive stack, share them with people on Digg, Twitter, and nearly every social networking site out there.

Give it a try – their developer tells me they are using their own crawler, which I think is a bad idea. I worked at Inktomi for a few years and I know how difficult it is to scale search. Their plight, in the face of Google and Microsoft, will not be any easier.