Perhaps a person is not truly a great writer if he understands the meaning of everything he writes. Perhaps one is not a truly great artist if he carefully constructed each and every one of his artistic ideas in his own mind. When something comes from the Human Mind, it can only be as great as a single Human Mind. Great Art needs to be bigger than that.

Is President Bush participating in illegal file-sharing?

Simple hack using Skype as an audio interviewing and archive tool. Instead of needing phone interview recording hardware (which you might not have) you can use computer tools (which you have in abundance).

I was consulting for a company a while ago that was predicting this - and now it seems like it's going to go mainstream. Once you have flat fee data over your mobile phone, why not use a Vonage or a Skype over that link? And the first cell provider to dodge that bullet by embracing it will hopefully not cannibalize their own per-minute-billing business.

I'm delivering an all-day tutorial on the first day of the Streaming Media East Conference (Monday, May 16, 2005) and I'll be covering Windows Media streaming in depth. Like O'Reilly conferences, the Streaming Media conferences have a very high signal to noise ratio (i.e. few vendor pitches, only actual do-ers are there). It's actually a very interesting time with MPEG-4, Windows Media, and the evolution of High Def DVD and media standards(*), so if you're interested at all in net video I recommend it.

File-sharing advocates often argue that they're furthering a grassroots rebellion against the corrupt corporate music machine. That sounds good, but if it's true, why do the tops of the traditional radio charts and the download/file-sharing charts feature the same artists?

Docheads versus dataheads is obsolete: the real distinction is between annotators and atomists

Now that the Emerging Technology conference is over, I have some feedback and parting thoughts to share.

The last day of ETech had some great sessions that focused on how people work and how the mind works from a designer's perspective. These great insights into my own mind will leave me with lots of thoughts to ponder as ETech winds down.

The Maker's Fair at ETech was similar to a classic science fair -- but with much more geek appeal and... a beer in hand.