FDK Episode 002 : Art, Community and Jake McKee

At long last, here's Future Development Kit Episode Two. If you're having problems with the feed, you can find the mp3 file here, but please use the feed if at all possible. This episode features an update on Bar Camp Dallas, an impassioned plea for all geeks to visit their local art gallery, and an interview with Jake McKee, community evangelist, proprietor of the Community Guy blog, and North Texas resident.

• Have the cool kids thrown a party and not invited you? Don't mope. Throw your own, even cooler, party. Preferably in Dallas: http://barcamp.org/


• This is probably going to get me an "explicit" tag, but Art Prostitute is the coolest gallery in the Metrowub and must be mentioned. Go there in person (they're in Denton) and buy a T-shirt: http://www.artprostitute.com/


• Dallas feels the need to pretend it's NYC by calling its museums "The <Nickname>". In this case, it's "The Contemporary." Don't let the lame nickname fool you, check out the program, and if the Moving Pictures exhibit is still on, you should go. It's free. I may have lied about the T-shirts, but go anyway. http://www.thecontemporary.net


• The interweb is made of people, and Jake McKee's blog discusses how to talk with them not just at them: http://www.communityguy.com


• Using Lego robots to turn perfectly normal little boys and girls into socially inept techno-geeks since 1998. w00t! http://www.firstlegoleague.org


• If you can get past the "Identity 2.0" buzzphrase and the impossible-to-pronounce name, sxip has some very interesting things to say about how identity should be managed in a *cough* Web 2.0 world. Your entire identity will be online, wouldn't you rather have some say about how it's used? http://www.sxip.com


• Just Another Soldier : A Year on the Ground in Iraq


• Y: The Last Man Vol. 1: Unmanned

The next planned episode will concentrate on BarCamp Dallas, but as that's a long stretch to go without your FDK, I'll see about getting a mini-espisode out sometime between now and the end of January.

tags:podcast,december,dallas,texas,2005,barcamp,mckee,community,art,identity,sxip

FDK Episode 001 : BarCamp Dallas, Graham Glass

Well, it took forever to edit, but here's Future Development Kit Episode One. If you're having problems with the feed, you can find the mp3 file here, but please use the feed if at all possible. This episode features a call for a BarCamp Dallas and an interview with coder, educator and entrepreneur Graham Glass about starting a software company in Dallas, Web 2.0, RDF vs tags, and his new venture.

• Check Graham's blog for the latest on his company, his novel, and his life: http://grahamglass.blogs.com/
  
  
• When the "International" page on cnn.com isn't quite enough, surf over to http://www.independent.co.uk/ for a balanced look at the news from outside the US. The Independent charges for access to its archives, so you probably won't get to read the article I mention, but it's worth a look in any case.
  
  
• RDF and the big-S Semantic Web can be viewed as a re-hash of Knowledge Representation studies of the 1980's. Or, if you prefer not to be reminded of the past, as something new and completely different. I appreciate the Semantic Web less for the stated goals than for the cool tools the associated research has generated: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
  
  
• "Knowledge Representation" was/is sort of a hybrid between database and AI research. Although you don't hear much about it any more, many of things it talked about are now accepted as given. People who like Prolog probably like to read KR research papers. The wikipedia entry is a good a place as any for an introduction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_representation
  
  
• Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile
  
  
• Instead of trying to make the entire Web machine-readable, how about just marking up the important parts using simple HTML, a few tags, and some formatting conventions? That way, anyone can produce machine-parsable content using their existing publishing software, without having to learn RDF. Sound good? It is good. Check out: http://microformats.org/
  
  
• Have the cool kids thrown a party and not invited you? Don't mope. Throw your own, even cooler, party. Preferably in Dallas: http://barcamp.org/
  
  
• Ok, so the site at http://www.hotornot.com is properly called "Hot or Not" rather than "Am I Hot or Not" as I kept referring to it in the interview, but it used to be called Am I Hot or Not. See? I'm not crazy.

For the next episode, I've got Jake McKee, Global Community Development Manager for the LEGO Company and creator of http://communityguy.com I plan to ask Jake about virtual versus proximity-based communities, and how much physical location really matters in the age of internet-enabled remote collaboration.

tags: podcast, november, dallas, texas, 2005, grahamglass, barcamp, barcampdallas, startup, rdf, microformats, happiness

Welcome to the Future Development Kit

Here's the special introductory Episode Zero Podcast. No guests, just a quick introduction to what FDK is all about accompanied by a cheesy GarageBand loop.

Episode Links:

• Vernor Vinge is the science fiction author that came up with the term "Singularity". It has an obvious connection with Christian "Rapture" stories, although I suspect few on either side really want the connection examined too closely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
• I invariably read "Chinati Foundation" as "Chianti", like the Italian wine. I think I've probably mispronounced it that way in front of people who know better and who now think I'm stupid. Oh well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa
• I like textured soy protein products, especially fake sausage and that super-realistic fake squid. I'd probably like Soylent Green, even though it's not technically a pure soy product: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_green
• Graham's blog is generally pretty good. Not sure what's up with that "Happiness" entry, though, have to ask him in the next episode: http://grahamglass.blogs.com/main/
• Most people consider science fictions novels to be thought-provoking entertainment. Extropians think of them as blueprints. Some of us might get to see who has the last laugh: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extropian

For next time, I've got Graham Glass, author, educator, coder and entrepreneur, lined up. It should be interesting.

tags: podcast, october, 2005, singularity, coffee, art, dallas, texas, tx

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