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Jon blogs at:
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Concerned about smart meter privacy? Richard Stallman is looking for someone to lead the charge.
May 15 2012
My recent column on smart meters came to the attention of Richard Stallman, who worries about the privacy and surveillance issues I alluded to. In the course of our email discussion a question came up that I’d like to answer but can’t. When a smart meter is utility-owned, rather than… read moreWhy not tip for excellent online customer service?
May 14 2012
A couple of weeks ago all the posts here became invisible. There didn’t seem to be anything I could have done wrong to cause that, so I wrote to the support team at WordPress.com about it. I got a prompt acknowledgement from Erica V. that something was, indeed, wrong. Soon… read moreMay 09 2012
Yesterday’s post contains an error so embarrassing that I was briefly tempted to yank the whole thing. But of course That Would Be Wrong. What’s more, the error supports the larger point I was trying to make before I derailed myself. I was talking about Bret Victor’s notion of explorable… read moreMeta-tools for exploring explanations
May 08 2012
At the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference in January, Bret Victor gave a brilliant presentation that continues to resonate in the technical community. No programmer could fail to be inspired by Bret’s vision, which he compellingly demonstrated, of a system that makes software abstractions visual, concrete, and directly manipulable. Among… read moreSearching for Andy: an Ob-Platte puzzle
May 01 2012
In Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, Douglas Hofstadter (and a crew of talented students) argue that analogy-making is a core characteristic of human intelligence. The book is full of delightful puzzles. One class of puzzle goes like this: What is the Ob of Nebraska? (The Platte. Hence the name for… read moreJatoba at Waxy’s on Saturday night: A case study in data provenance and syndication
April 26 2012
The bedrock principle at the core of the elmcity project is: own your data, syndicate it into contexts that need it. This applies far more broadly than to calendars, but I’m focusing on calendars now because we all still struggle to make sense of various personal, professional, and public timelines,… read moreA question for Facebook developers
April 17 2012
If you keep a calendar on a Facebook Page, and wish to regard it as the authoritative source for the events on that calendar, then you can use the elmcity service to synthesize an iCalendar feed from that Facebook Page for use elsewhere. But what if you want things the… read moreApril 14 2012
On Thursday I visited Gardner Campbell’s class. For me it was a chance to try to convey, to students who are mainly not on the engineering track, some key intuitions that arise from the architecture of the web. At one point I invited them to summon a grain of sand… read morePutting her money where the innovative university’s mouth is
April 12 2012
Today I met a university instructor who works in the area of materials science and engineering. She is also a guitarist and a maker of guitars. These interests combine in the following way. Her students work on projects that involve, for example, curing of finishes on instrument-grade wood. Then they… read moreMarch 30 2012
In A tale of two dams I proposed using a tag, WestStDamKeene, to coordinate public discourse about a decision we need to make here in Keene, NH. Should we repair the Ashuelot River Dam on West Street, or remove it? On the day I wrote that post, it was the… read moreBiofeedback treatment for Raynaud’s: a progress report
March 28 2012
In recent years I’ve had increasing trouble with cold fingers. In winter I’ve gone from warmer gloves to mittens to expedition mittens. After even brief exposure to the cold, the circulation in my fingers shuts down and they go scarily white. On winter hikes I carry chemical handwarmers not just… read moreA civic scorecard for public calendars
March 13 2012
As I build out calendar hubs for various cities, I’ve begun to develop a scorecard that shows which civic institutions do, or don’t, offer iCalendar feeds that make their public calendars available to their city’s hub. Here’s the scorecard for the current set of featured hubs. It illustrates what I’ve… read moreMarch 09 2012
It’s been a while since I hung up my spurs as a columnist, and lately I’ve been missing the opportunity to write regularly for a venue other than this blog. So when Mike Barton asked me to contribute to Wired’s Cloudline I said yes. I’m calling the column The Personal… read moreTagging mechanisms and strategies part 3: Taxonomy and folksonomy
February 22 2012
Should a tag namespace be a top-down taxonomy or a bottom-up folksonomy? My answer is: both. In recent months, as I curate calendar hubs for selected cities, I’ve been working toward an approach that harmonizes the two styles. Principle: Top-down and bottom-up In the elmcity context, the most important taggable… read moreTagging mechanisms and strategies part 2: Portable tags
February 21 2012
Last month I was looking over the shoulder of my auto mechanic, Jonah, when he was retrieving my service record on his computer. I watched him search for udell and find a file called something like 2011-11-04_udell.odf. (He uses an Open Office spreadsheet to keep track of things.) The first… read moreTagging mechanisms and strategies part 1: General and specific
February 17 2012
Back in May I asked: Can elmcity and Delicious continue their partnership? The answer turned out to be no. That’s partly because the new Delicious broke some capabilities I was relying on. But it’s mainly because tagging is so fundamental to the elmcity service that I needed to be able… read moreJuly 28 2011
Think about the records that describe the status of your health, finances, insurance policies, vehicles, and computers. If the systems that manage these records could produce timestamped JSON snapshots when indicators change, it would be much easier to find out what changed, and when. read moreWhy Facebook isn't the best home for your public events
June 09 2011
Organizations should strive to own and control their online identities (and associated data) to the extent they can. read moreApril 20 2011
What if blogs had come of age in an era when a uniform kind of API was expected? We could then ask questions of blogs in the same way we could ask questions of event services. read moreHow will the elmcity service scale? Like the web!
December 22 2010
A blog feed is just a special kind of web page. Anybody can create a blog and publish its feed at some URL. Why not calendars too? read moreThe iCalendar chicken-and-egg conundrum
November 12 2010
If you're a school or a business or a band or a club whose website sports an Events tab that doesn't offer a companion iCalendar feed, I hope you'll ask your CMS vendor why not. read moreNovember 04 2010
Headlines matter. They're always visible to a scan or a search, while other information -- like decks and leads -- are active in far fewer contexts. read moreA lesson in civics, public data, and computational principles
October 26 2010
An efficient model of collective information management relies on principles like pub/sub, indirection and syndication. Translating these principles beyond computational thinkers is the tricky part. To pull it off we need to educate the kids we assume to be digital natives. read moreDeveloping intuitions about data
October 07 2010
Some kinds of computer files have different properties than others, and thus serve different purposes. Structured representation of data is one such property. If we are trying to put data onto the web, and if we want others to have the use of that data, and if we hope it… read moreSeptember 30 2010
Networks of people and data are governed by principles as basic as the commutative law of addition and multiplication. Indirection is one of those principles. read morePersonal data stores and pub/sub networks
September 22 2010
Most people and organizations think of the calendar information they push as text for people to read. Few realize it's also data networks can syndicate. When that mindset changes, a river of data will be unleashed. read moreTwitter kills the password anti-pattern, but at what cost?
September 10 2010
It's good to see Twitter driving a stake into the heart of the password anti-pattern. But the Twitter ecosystem wouldn't exist if it hadn't been possible to sketch ideas, and to explore the unanticipated uses that can emerge from the soup of active ingredients that the web has become. read moreThe laws of information chemistry
August 18 2010
Everybody learns that things in the physical world are structured in ways that govern how they can or cannot interact. The right shape will open the door, the wrong one won't. But unless you're on an IT track, you'll likely graduate from college without ever learning this corollary: The right… read moreThe power of informal contracts
August 11 2010
In a world full of services like delicious, FriendFeed, and Twitter -- services that can route feeds of data based on user-defined vocabularies -- you don't have to be a programmer to create useful mashups. You just have to understand, and find ways to apply, something Jon Udell calls the… read moreLessons learned building the elmcity service
August 03 2010
What happens when you mix open source goals, styles, and attitudes with Microsoft tools, languages, and frameworks? You get a cultural mashup. That's what the elmcity project is, and what this series will explore. read moreRecent Posts | All O'Reilly Posts
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