IBM has an impressive Web 2.0 project called Many Eyes where you come in, upload your data and choose a visualization. The visualizations are based on Java applets and are pretty dynamic: you can drill-down and search the data visually. What is impressive is that it is totally open. You can upload your data, people can then work on your data and discover new ways to do it.

Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis.

This is human-driven collaborative data mining. I like it. I think this type of research has a bright future.

Imagine researchers making available their data and asking people to play with it?

This is sad. Apple’s iSight has been discontinued in North America. There is talk that Apple will replace it with a wireless webcam and many others say that Apple will simply bundle the iSight with all its displays. This last conjecture is just silly. I do not want all my webcams to be tied with my monitors!

Some have pointed out that Unibrain has nice alternative, but they seem to also have discontinued it.

Here is what I am looking for:

• high quality images with excellent white balance and colors, possibly with builtin light (the external iSight had this option);
• high quality sound;
• compatible with Mac;
• under $1000.

My goal is to produce good quality video blogging, produce videos to promote my research, do videoconferencing, and do some some (voice) podcasting.

I could buy a camcorder, but I want something that is integrated with my computer so I do not have to upload videos to the machine and do lots of manipulation. I also want top notch sound quality.

Any advice?

(Spam gets deleted really fast here, so do not even try.)

Harold reminds us that school dropouts are can achieve great things:

Bill Gates – Microsoft
Steve Jobs – Apple
Michael Dell – Dell
Larry Ellison – Oracle
Mike Lazaridis – Blackberry
Shawn Fanning – Napster

Repeatedly, when I bring this argument about to explain why I think a full college education is far from a necessary thing, people tell me that these people are special cases. Are they really? Or are they the most famous ones?

I think there is a reason why greatness and dropouts go well together. People who don’t fit the mold are more likely to go out and break molds later on… and trying to fit is the best way to be “average.”

Myself, though I have a Ph.D. and other degrees, from good schools, I will not push, in any way, my sons to go get a college education. There are far better things a 20 years old can do rather than sit on a bench listening to a college professor. Oh! You have to listen to the smart folks, but if you don’t go out and build things, it is all for naught.

I don’t know whether this is real, but if you are like us and really hate telemarketers, you will enjoy this prank call.

(Download the MP3.)

The WWW2007 Workshop on Tagging and Metadata for Social Information Organization will be held in Banff (Canada).

We hope to bring together researchers as well as practitioners to explore social, design and computational aspects of tagging and social information organization. The topic space is wide, but the following are some of the areas of special interest:

• Semantics. Ontology and hierarchy creation; Semantics issues in cross-system tagging; Standardization efforts.
• Cognition. The cognitive aspects of categorization; Organizing and retrieving tagged objects.
• Social networks. Social sharing; Relationship building; Ratings systems and collaborative filtering; Identity management self-presentation; Tagging in blogs, wikis, etc.
• Usability and Interfaces. Search navigation, browsing and filtering; Novice users and tags; Evaluating existing tagging environments and user behavior; Motivations for tagging.
• Multimedia. Tagging multiple kinds of media; tagging across media types; Tagging at varying scales; Non-text-based annotations and tags.

Findory was one of the most innovative collaborative filtering application ever: it provided a recommender system to help you find interesting news. Greg is letting Findory go:

Findory appears to have sufficient resources to run on autopilot through most of 2007. Findory will eventually fade away, but I believe it has touched immortality through the impact it had.

Apparently, Greg wants “to spend more time on health and with family.” Also, it is no secret that Greg was unhappy about the popularity of the site and Findory was facing the “me too!” routine with all the big players copying his ideas or simply creating similar tools.

I think that in the coming decade, dropping projects and reducing your work load to spend more time on your family will become a cool thing to do.

Projects and companies have to come and go. We should not be slaves to our projects.