The TED presentation on "6th Sense" ubiquitous computing is phenomenal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUdDhWfpqxg

"Embedded media" began as journalists given first person access to government missions. But this group has literally embedded media, and two-way media no less. The "Minority Report" aspect is cute, particularly the camera gesture, but there's more to this device than obsessive, personal focus on information. There's the social aspect.

What strikes me as really fantastic are:

A special iPhone app is really required for web analytics professionals. Google Analytics is Flash-heavy and there's no Flash on the iPhone.

The most recent top-of-the-heap app is "Google Analytics App". We've also tried "Analytics Lite", which was not as satisfying.

"GAA" has a clean, handsome interface that quickly brings you to useful reports. Especially nice is a "today" app, which is very useful when testing against possible outages, and which is actually not straightforward to generate in the online Google Analytics application.

John DeFrancis, a wonderful human and preeminent scholar, passed away on January 2nd. He was 97.

A memorial website has been established for him at http://johndefrancis.wordpress.com/

Dr. DeFrancis produced exceptional scholarship in the field of Chinese Studies his entire life, having an indelibly positive impact on the field. He also had a profound impact on generations of scholars, particularly as faculty and administrator at the University of Hawaii.

The following letter is a response to this op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, today.

I apologize for the jargon, but your 12/22/08 editorial blurs caching and packet switching. Caching is the process of storing pre-rendered content and locating those servers efficiently, to speed retrieval. Packet switching refers to the way in which data chunks are put into order as they head into the traffic line on the 'net.

The Drupal community is humming. Recently I went to a Drupal NYC meetup, held at the gorgeous Mansueto offices in downtown New York City.

There were more than thirty people, maybe even 50. It was on a chilly Wednesday night and a diverse group came to hear presentations on AJAX image galleries and mobile phone content delivery, and engage in smaller discussions on topics ranging from Drupal basics through source code control and into database optimization.

In a time when much of our business world is in flux-- the financials, the politics, the headcounts-- Drupal is a bustling corner.

We're big on analytics at Limitless Horizons, LLC. We use the full suite of Google products: Analytics, Trends, Alerts... We design analytics systems for others and we implement them into our products. I guess it has to do with our background in quantitative research.

Electronic textbooks are accepted as an important step in the educational advances offered by new media. But what are they, and what could they become?

During our family vacation in San Diego I spied a Saturday front page headline. The San Diego Union-Tribune declared "Digital textbooks new word in schools". Maybe it was a slow newsday, but there it was displayed prominently in the vending machine window. So I went online and checked the story out.

On July 21st the Wall Street Journal Published Jason Fry's final "Real Time" column. At the end of this column's 6-year run, Mr. Fry took the opportunity to muse about the trend in consumer empowerment. Titled "Taking Control of the Digital World", Mr. Fry reflects on the trend from album sales to singles downloads, from planning an evening around prime-time schedules to having "Tivo" as a verb, or from waiting for a print newspaper to headlines sent to our email inbox.

This website and our flagship GoNellGo.com run Drupal. We don't run Drupal just because Sony/BMG's MyPlay, Popular Science, and US Weekly run it, although what a set of endorsements!

No, we run Drupal because it is an absolute joy.