21 items tagged “jon-udell”
2024
Some argue that by aggregating knowledge drawn from human experience, LLMs aren’t sources of creativity, as the moniker “generative” implies, but rather purveyors of mediocrity. Yes and no. There really are very few genuinely novel ideas and methods, and I don’t expect LLMs to produce them. Most creative acts, though, entail novel recombinations of known ideas and methods. Because LLMs radically boost our ability to do that, they are amplifiers of — not threats to — human creativity.
2008
Ward Cunningham’s Visible Workings. Intriguing idea: software that explicitly reveals the underlying business logic in end-user understandable terms. I didn’t find the example very easy to comprehend but the concept is fascinating.
.aspx considered harmful. Jon Udell: “I guess I’m extra-sensitive to the .aspx thing now that I work for Microsoft, because I know that to folks outside the Microsoft ecosystem it screams: We don’t get the web.”—he goes on to mention that smart URL rewriting is thankfully built in to the upcoming ASP.NET MVC framework.
2007
What do we call personal information management when it moves into shared online spaces? I asked myself that question, and the answer that came back was: social information management.
Why Guiness tastes better in Ireland. Two reasons: it’s more popular so kegs empty faster (and you always get a fresh pint), and Guinness send someone round to every pub to flush the lines once every three weeks.
10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head (via) A great list, with a positive conclusion.
Lacking a Strunk and White Elements of Style for URI namespace, we've made a mess of it. It's long past time to grow up and recognize the serious importance of principled design in this infinitely large namespace.
I believe this tribe is, over time, growing farther away from the rest of the world. That's happening for an interesting and important reason, which is that the tools we are building and using are accelerating our ability to build and use more of these tools.
2006
A conversation with Jon Udell about his new job with Microsoft. Jon wants to bridge the gap between the alpha geeks and the mainstream.
Jon Udell’s The Screening Room: Dabble DB. Not quite as impactful as a “live” demo, but still really impressive.
The Screening Room #8: IronPython. Screamingly cool demo, with commentary from Jim Hugunin and Jon Udell.
The Screening Room #8: IronPython. Screamingly cool demo, with commentary from Jim Hugunin and Jon Udell.
2005
Toolkits for user innovation (via) Jon Udell’s last two paragraphs resonate strongly with me:
Von Hippel advances the notion of user innovation toolkits. The Apache Web server, with its modular architecture, is an example of such a toolkit. In the hands of skilled programmers, Apache can be, and often is, tailored to specific needs. When such customizations are shared, other users benefit. But so do Apache's developers, who, by observing what's done with the toolkit, can more intelligently evolve the core product.
Web-based software delivered as a service is, at its best, another kind of innovation toolkit. Users bring the data; developers wrangle the code; more useful innovation happens faster than it otherwise could.
Greasemonkey etiquette
In Meme tracking with Greasemonkey, Jon Udell introduces a userscript which grabs the number of references from del.icio.us and bloglines and appends that information to the top of every page you visit. To be fair on Jon, the version he has released defaults to only doing this for pages on Infoworld.com but modifying it to run on every web page is trivial.
[... 252 words]Content, services, and the yin-yang of intermediation (via) Jon Udell combines LibraryLookup and Greasemonkey in his latest screencast.
Greasemonkey as a lightweight intermediary
In The architecture of intermediation, Jon Udell discusses the need for a mechanism for a high-level tool for adding custom features to web applications. In Jon’s case, he wants to add a private bookmarks feature to del.icio.us. Jon thought about using a web proxy to intercept and modify del.icio.us pages, but ruled it out as too low-level.
[... 354 words]The on-demand blogosphere. I get a bit-part in a Jon Udell screencast! This actually ties in to my final year project...
InfoWorld: Year of the enterprise Wiki (via) Wikis for business collaboration make a whole ton of sense.
2004
Jon Udell: Pub/sub, tags, and human filters. Maybe del.icio.us style labels scale better than I thought.
Jon Udell: del.icio.us. Jon is doing some interesting things with the del.icio.us tagging system.