Google Music Search

I have been doing a search for Living on a Prayer each morning, waiting to try out the new Google music search OneBox.  I finally got mine this morning, and I am a tad underwhelmed.  I pretty much new what to expect, but I was really hoping that there would be a bit more.  There isn't.  Basically, when you search for a term that has a matching song or artist you will get a OneBox at the top of the search results which allows you to play or shop for that song(s).  The service is powered by Lala, which is a service I highly recommend, and allows you to play the songs in a popup.

While this is cool, I am not sure that it is at all helpful.  I did my search for Hungry Lucy.  It returned results for Hungry Lucy.  What I would like to see is an option for related artists or songs.  Maybe a way to do a related genre search.  Links to Wikipedia or Sound Unwound articles would be helpful also.  I guess my big problem is that there is nothing here to help me discover new music.

Now if I type in the name of an artist I have just heard of this does give me a fast way to sample the songs, and I almost always go to Lala for that now.  This is a bit helpful, I just wish that it went a couple of steps further.

Personal Thoughts on Climate Change and Species Extinction

“ I like to move it, move. He likes to move it, move, we like to….MOVE IT!”

How sad would it be if the world lost the dancing lemurs of Madagascar?  All attempts at humor aside, today is Blog Action Day 09 and this years topic is Climate Change.  The hope of the project is to raise awareness of climate change and the impacts in can have on the Earth.

I am by no means an expert in climate change or the environmental impact changes can have, but I do try to read relevant articles when I find them.  I tend to pay close attention to articles that discuss species extinction.  This subject has become more important to me in recent years because Iain is so fond of animals.  His favorite shows to watch on TV are nature documentaries, and of all of the documentaries he watches, his favorites are the Walking with series.  He loves Walking with Dinosaurs and Walking with Monsters, but his number one is Walking with Prehistoric Beasts.  I can imagine how excited he would be if he could see a real living Mammoth or Smilodon.  His fascination is one of the primary reasons that I have an interest in this topic.  We have talked about extinction in relation to the animals he see in those shows, and one of his comments relating to mammoths has been "but there are elephants, which are like mammoths".

Besides making my kid happy that his favorite animals won’t go the way of the dinosaurs, why is extinction important?  Why does it matter if some tiny shrew from southeast Asia is wiped from the planet?  According to an April 2009 article in Time Magazine one reason is:

“we're animals too, dependent on this planet like every other form of life. The more species living in an ecosystem, the healthier and more productive it is”

Beyond that, the article goes on to mention the many medical/drug discoveries that have been made by studying the various species of the world.  There have been five previous mass extinctions on the planet which have caused various degrees of biodiversity chage.  These extinctions have led us to today, with less that 1% of the species that have ever lived on our planet are still alive.  Most people know about the extinction 65 million years ago that killed the dinosaurs and while this extinction means that humans will only walk with the dinosaurs in movies, it did clear the way for the evolution of mammals.  Extinctions in the past have generally led to new species growing to dominance, which does not generally seem to be considered a bad thing.

However, not all mass extinctions are created equal.  Some scientists believe that we are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction, but instead of being caused by gamma radiation bursts, volcanoes or asteroids this one is being caused by another species, us.

There is a lot of information about how climate change is affecting species.  Much of the research I have read shows that even small changes in climate can have drastic effects on a species in a region.  In Madagascar, even tiny changes in the amount of rainfall in a rain forest can have drastic effects on infant sifakas.  In the Greater Mekong region of Southeast Asia new species are being discovered all the time, and many of them have very close ties to other species in the region.  As climate changes, some of these species will not be able to adapt.  If a species declines or becomes extinct due to these climate changes it could negatively impact further species.

Recently, I have been reading articles that discuss how targets that were set to reduce loss of biodiversity may not be met.  The fear is that we are getting started so late, and not being forceful enough in our approaches to stem the tide of species extinction.  Is it possible that with all we have done, it might be to late?  Will we lose some of the species of Lemur found only in Madagascar to climate change?  My hope is that this simple post in support of Blog Action Day will encourage a few people to take an interest in global climate change, and look closely at it's potential impact on all the living things on our planet.  It is time to step up our efforts to make sure we have a livable world for all species living on earth, not just the 6+ billion humans.

A few resources that I follow that are related to the subject.

Extinction Section on Science Daily
Climate Change Section on AllTop
Recent Climate Change and Extinction articles on Google News

Posterous for the Enterprise? Leveraging e-mail for content sharing

Over the past week I have read, or been involved in, a number of articles and discussions about e-mail and knowledge management. As I have read these various articles I have been reminded to the recent rise in popularity of Posterous. I think that rise is in large part to people like Steve Rubel, who recently abandoned a long standing blog to begin working with Posterous.

For those you do not know, Posterous is a lifestreaming/blogging tool that does two things very well. First, it allows you to send e-mail messages containing text, pictures, and videos and they will be published, in a nicely formatted way, to your Posterous blog. When you include photos, it creates a nice photo album, and videos include a nice embedded player. The second thing that Posterous does well is to take the items that you have imported and send them to other sites. If you include pictures in your e-mail, Posterous can send them to your Flickr account. Why is this so cool? E-mail is everywhere, and e-mail is familiar. Everyone I know gets e-mail, only a few of my friends really get Twitter, and this makes e-mail a powerful choice for capturing and storing information.

This week a few things happened to make me think that the Posterous idea is something that could be useful for the enterprise. First, Andrew McAfee wrote an article entitled "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Email". In the article, Andrew argues that e-mail is going to be with us for a long time, and that enterprise 2.0 proponents need to find a way to embrace it. The technology is not all bad, and has some strong benefits. Perhaps the biggest benefit is that it is used, especially by the decision/policy makers in the enterprise. It is the technology they know, and it is the technology that will be used. One key to getting enterprise 2.0 type solutions working is to get people to use them, is properly leveraging e-mail that key?

Earlier this week I had a short discussion on Twitter about capturing tacit knowledge with @LawyerKM, @jeffrey_brandt and @keithlipman where our discussion turned to the idea of capturing information for ourselves as a stepping stone to a shared KM environment. It was generally agreed that there is value in approaching knowledge management from a "what's in it for me" angle. In my opinion, what is lacking in the enterprise today is a consistent mechanism for the capture of content, regardless of it's type, that can be stored in a central location. While we are thinking "me" in the short term, we are hoping for "we" in the long term and centralized storage of all of this captured information is how we will turn these bits into the basis for an open KM system going forward. In our discussion Jeff asked, "But is personal KM (as U described) of value to the firm? If U cant share or promote collaboration, what is value?". I think there is value in the capture process for two reasons; it gets people into the mindset of capturing this information for later retrieval and, since it is captured centrally, it can be harvested by the firm.  Patrick mentioned on Twitter that capture was the easy part.  I think this is true to some extent, but the capture methodology needs to be consistent across all the software and devices you use.  We need to enable capture everywhere, everyday.

It would take a lot of work to design a system that was like Posterous behind the firewall.  Would need to design a way to parse the incoming messages in order to determine the sender and what to do with the message.  A method to allow people to register non-firm addresses so they can capture from home as well as work would need to be built.  Once we have the e-mail, and can parse it, we need a way to store the text content and any attachments.  I think that having a blog type area with nicely formatted pictures, videos and documents is a great start.  Having some sort of specific photo album function would also be nice.  I can envision offering image indexing in the future (this is a function of some enterprise search tools).  It is not beyond the realm of possibility to actually save e-mailed documents into the document management system for that person.  Like I said this is a lot of work, especially for a small IT group, but it is something that could be developed in stages and could show value even at the very early stages.

I do not think that e-mail is a good tool for collaboration and discussion, but it does have value in it's ability to help with content capture.  I am interested in this because I am getting a lot of requests for enterprise 2.0 type functionality at work.  We talk a lot about knowledge management, and I hear from people that one of the issues we have to over come is getting people to participate on a daily basis.  The comfort of e-mail might be a way to increase participation.  Once we start to regularly capture information, we can build collaboration and discussion on top of this pool of data.

A few links to check out on recent e-mail discussions.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love E-mail by Andrew McAfee
The Man Who Should Have Used Lotus Connections — Collaborating Effectively through Wikis by Luis Suarez
Email - No surrender? by Chieftech

Modular Terrain Gaming Table

As a parent, I often see the possibilities for gaming accessories in the toys the kids play with.  Ever since Iain was a baby I have thought that the interlocking foam rubber playmats they have for kids would make an awesome, portable gaming surface.  I am terrible with terrain, so I never made any, but I always thought that someone should.  It turns out that someone has.

I saw this morning on Tabletop Gaming News that The Terrain Guy has released thier EZ Terrain interlocking tiles terrain system.  The system uses the same types of tiles that are available for kids to play on, but covered with flock.  These look to be very nice, and are offered in both 1 x 1 and 2 x 2 foot sections, which is nice for people like me who prefer a smaller playing surface at times (for games like Song of Blades and Battleground Fantasy).  At 4.95 for a 1 x 1 tile the price is not too bad, and this system has the benefit of being both lockable and flexible.  I can make a rectangular or square board with equal ease.  I think I might pick some of these up.  Since the 2' and 1' tiles are compatible, I think I will get a mix.

EZ TERRAIN™ tiles are durable, versatile and portable. These interlocking tiles are made from high density foam rubber. Unlike traditional styrofoam terrain, these tiles will not break, chip or flake. They are so tough that you can stand on a tile without damaging it.