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Information R/evolution is a five minute video telling the story of the transformation from a world of categorized information to a world of living information the we all enrich continually. It’s from the same guy (Michael Wesch) and in the same style as "Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us."

When his "Web 2.0," video came out I wrote that

Perhaps the so-called ’social web’ isn’t about connecting people, but about information conservation: If a person chooses to do something — no matter how small — it’s inherently interesting, precious, and valuable.

I still think that’s true, and I find more support in this new video:

Here is "Information R/evolution" by Prof. Michael Wesch:

Hap tip to the information aesthetics blog which is a great source for "data visualization & visual design."

Alex Russell (of Dojo fame) has an good post up right now called Browser.Next in which he lists 10 key things browsers need to give us poor developers so we can do our jobs without going insane. Here’s the list, but head to his blog to read the details:

1. Event Opacity
2. Long-Lived Connections
3. Expose [DontEnum] To Library Authors
4. Fast LiveCollection -> Array Transforms
5. Provided A Blessed Cache For Ajax Libraries
6. Mutation Events
7. onLayoutComplete
8. HttpOnly cookies
9. Bundle Gears
10. Standardize on the Firebug APIs

I’ve long felt that the balance of power between web developers and browser vendors is out of whack: for every one developer working on the browser itself there are probably 1000 web developers at companies around the world toiling endlessly, struggling to overcome the shortcomings and weaknesses of the browsers. It’s wrong. It’s wasteful. It’s expensive - a drain on the economy, and serious sand in the gears of what should be the world’s most powerful innovation platform.

And so, from that perspective, I’m very happy to see visible developers like Alex telling the world (*cough* browser vendors *cough) what needs to change. He’s got a good list of comments going over on his blog - I hope you’ll join in the rally.

I let the cat out of the bag about the forthcoming YSlow plugin for Firebug during my @media presentation (High Performance Web Sites) last month. But the wait is finally over and I’m happy to let you know that Steve Souders, Yahoo!’s Chief Performance Yahoo! (and the guy who’s data I used in my presentation), made the announcement during his session at OSCon yesterday.

YSlow has three main views: Performance, Stats, and Components. Performance view scores the page against each performance rule, generates an overall YSlow grade for the page, and lists specific recommendations for making the page faster. Stats view summarizes the total page weight, cookie size, and HTTP request count. Components view lists each component (image, stylesheet, script, Flash object, etc.) in the page along with HTTP information relevant to page load times. It also contains several tools including [Douglas Crockford’s] JSLint.

Give YSlow a try, your users will thank you. And for more about performance, check out the Exceptional Performance section on the Yahoo! Developer Network.

StartUp Camp 2 is this Monday in San Francisco.

Startup Camp is an unconference-style event that’s dedicated to bringing together the various members of the startup community for a face-to-face collaborative meetup where its the attendees that drive the agenda (in true unconference fashion).

I’m really looking forward to tasting the excitement in air and seeing all the cool projects. 100s of people have registered - it should be fun. (But the real reason work’s giving me the day to attend is so I can be on hand to help people realize their dreams using YUI.)

If you’re there, please come find me and say Hi (even if you don’t need YUI support).

I blogged this over on the YUIBlog last week (You’re Invited: YUI First Year Party), but figured I’d quickly post a notice here too in case you missed it. There are still a few dozen RSVP slots open, but they probably won’t last long.

If you’re interested in giving a quick five minute demo of something you’ve build with YUI, let me know…

See you there.

A video called “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us” is an engaging and enjoyable 4.5 minute non-verbal documentary taking us from ‘pencil’ to ‘Web 2.0′. It adds context to the advances that got us here, and suggests what might yet be in store. At about 03:40, highlights from an August 2005 Wired article, “We Are the Web,” are used to suggest that we are “teaching the machine.” I’m afraid that that notion is still inadequately understood and appreciated.

Perhaps the so-called “social web” isn’t about connecting people (not about helping people socialize), but about information conservation: If a person chooses to do something — no matter how small — it’s inherently interesting, precious, and valuable. We’ve barely started to figure out what to do with this second-generation information. Where we have it’s been exciting, useful, and successful: Flickr’s Interestingness and Clusters, the notion of “watching” on Upcoming, the newer “people who looked at this ultimately bought that” in Amazon, and of course Google’s PageRank. The idea isn’t new, but it’s still under appreciated.

Here’s the paragraph from Wired that surrounds the words used in the video:

And who will write the software that makes this contraption useful and productive? We will. In fact, we’re already doing it, each of us, every day. When we post and then tag pictures on the community photo album Flickr, we are teaching the Machine to give names to images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a neural net that can learn. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a Web page as a way of teaching the Machine what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea. Wikipedia encourages its citizen authors to link each fact in an article to a reference citation. Over time, a Wikipedia article becomes totally underlined in blue as ideas are cross-referenced. That massive cross-referencing is how brains think and remember. It is how neural nets answer questions. It is how our global skin of neurons will adapt autonomously and acquire a higher level of knowledge.

Here’s the video, which was created by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University:

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