Shameless plug: I’m helping man the AANE’s WordPress blog. There’s a general call for contributions and suggestions for how to make the blog a better resource to the aspy community.

I’ve never dealt with moderating contributor-level access on an Internet-facing WordPress instance. This should be rather interesting.

Five big e-government hacks in the pipeline for 2011:

2011 Code for America Projects

They look pretty damn spiffy.

The ducks look great, and they are ready to swim. Latest word is we’ll be setting up between 3 and 6 PM near MIT’s Tang Hall. Then, the mayhem begins. If we’re not in the news come Monday then we must have done something wrong.

I’ve been too busy either living it up, or stressing over the work that needs doing, to spare a moment in a while. Let me see how quickly I can recap.

May was dominated by commencement, alumni reunions, and the raucus kickoff of Artisan’s Asylum, a new maker-space in Metro North. That project has since gained a lot of attention and momentum, and I’m proud just to say I’m friends with these people, given what they’re achieving. Whether or not I make much use of the power tools, I think the Asylum as a community is a resource with immediate value.

I’m biased, of course. More on that in a moment.

June has been largely spent with my beak in the sand, just trying to get product out the door, and being frustrated that as a result my delivery timetable hasn’t sync’d up more cleanly with everyone else’s. But even with that, and all the stress of the anticipated move to Inman Square, I can’t help but smile these days. My blood counts are holding steady and I am awash in community.

If you use Facebook, there’s a public photo album for the month of June here (at some point I’ll hopefully be putting the complete albums somewhere that allows hi-res images); you can also find highlights in my photo stream on TwitPic. June 11th is the date of the Relay For Life at CBA, one of the major ones in the Albany area. June 12th is the date I set to get my leukemia survivor tattoo at Tom Spaulding, and June 13th was this year’s capital region pride parade, to which Kate and I were spectators in solidarity. All in all it was a packed weekend, and it set the tone for the month.

I have since learned that tattoos are mostly a test of my tolerance for mess and maintenance. The first two weeks involved a lot of babying and some icky drainage. Well worth it, though.

More recently, the Asylum opened its newly-acquired main space, a massive studio near Washington and McGrath. I got in on the ground floor for the community’s first big project, the Rubber Duck Brigade. Gui has lots of photos posted on Facebook, and Olin’s Mike Maloney is covering the event through its various stages as well. Photos should be making their way to the Asylum website eventually. Basically, we’re going to show up everybody else who attends the Boston fireworks by riding in on behemoth pontoon ducks.

I love everything about this project, even though it’s requiring me to do work I am not good at. To me, it epitomizes the statement “We have lost our minds. Come join us!” which is roughly what Gui said when he and Jenn began Artisan’s Asylum. It’s wacky, it’s a chance to do something with our hands, and it will either succeed spectacularly or fail spectacularly. The most recent reports indicate success is very likely, but either would be fun and interesting.

Those of you who will be in town for the 4th of July and want to see what the fuss is about, the most recent word I know is that we’ll be putting in around 4PM from one of the Harvard/MIT boat launches, alongside Anthony’s Project Best Idea Ever crew. Look for us and I imagine we’ll be hard to miss.

Well, you can certainly hear the crickets on this feed.

I’m resurfacing for the first time in a while, actually in part to talk about why I think this blogging interface isn’t cutting it for me anymore. Up front I will say, there’s a lot of research I should have done while I was busily avoiding the issue / firming up my prejudices; and I hope to do some of that soon. Now’s as great a time as ever there was, especially in light of last week’s acquisition of a top-of-the-line smart phone.

I decisively jumped on the Android bandwagon the minute I heard Verizon was going to feature the developer-friendly platform in their new Droid series. I made it my birthday present to myself, and stood in line at 6:50 Friday morning so I could start learning to use it at work and later while out on the town. The significance of all this bears explanation, more than can really fit here, but basically Android is software akin to Mac OS or Windows, it runs on phones that compete with Apple’s iPhone, and for coders like myself it removes a lot of the entry barriers to writing cell phone apps.

Anyway, with the confluence of social utilities like Twitter, an Internet-aware phone that’s constantly in sync with these services, and repository and syndication systems like those that power this blog, I can envision a number of really cool productivity apps. Searching the Android market effectively is a skill I’m still learning, so even if I had looked about I wouldn’t necessarily know how much of the space has been explored. But here are some haphazardly arranged thoughts:

Note-taking: my earlier ideas on this centered around bulk recording and processing of speech, which incurs big costs in bandwidth and/or power. There might be some strategies to get around this, but nothing short-term feasible.

A better direction, the one that interests me now, is to do away with the tape-recorder metaphor and start with individual snippets of text, the equivalent to writing a formula on a cocktail napkin. Fragments of such size are reasonable to type when your hands are free, or to run through Google’s server-side voice recognition (although that has its shortcomings). Maybe you attach something – a photograph, or the OCR scan of a block of data; workout statistics read from a bluetooth device; any old thing.

Once you’ve got a message fragment, what would you want to do with it? The fact that it’s in such short fragments means you’re probably not going to be dictating prose of any length with this system; in that case the tape recorder really is the way to go. The output here is going to look more like a string of tweets–little messages that become part of a bigger structure.

In Twitter, the structure is just a message thread, or a feed of all the statuses posted by an individual. Here, the structure is something more complex, something of value itself, but we can still specify that structure in part through message content–i.e., through tagging.

Once meaningful structure has been built up using these little fragments, it needs to be reviewed, updated and potentially shared in some form. Visualizing and saving structured ideas is a really cool problem, and fairly well solved in the case of hierarchical or graph-like structures, although I don’t know how much people have done with cloud-bound mobile services for carting such data around.

What intrigues me most though, I think, is the cases for compiling and sharing information. Not only is there the question of what format you use to publish something, as opposed to merely visualizing it for yourself. Where’s it going? Who can see it? What piece of it do you want to send out? Do you want your connections to be able to view it, alter it, give feedback, along the way? How, and at what point in the process, would you export it to produce text documentation?

Part of this ties back into my growing vexation as I repeatedly cross the space between traditional blogging, and the micro-syndication used in social networks. They’re quite different worlds. The former offers granular privacy, but not a uniform concept of content classification and priority that I’m happy with. The latter offer varying degrees of privacy, and sometimes different streams of information with differing levels of importance, but I would not hold them up as role models for how to do it right, either.

The underlying technology’s fine. You could hypothetically do all this with one or more RSS or Atom feeds, for instance. You could use a private twitter account or something like it as the raw input to an idea mapper or spreadsheet application. But that’s not what the thing itself is, those are just optional ways in and out of the application.

And in some cases, maybe it’s not Web 2.0 data at all, maybe it’s exported as CSV or XML data that gets fed to an external app, like a nutrition logger. I realize I’m talking about a couple different components at the same time, here–the note taking app and the data sharing app aren’t the same thing. They’re just two neighboring pieces of a complicated puzzle that I’m considering. And I’m trying to look at them open-mindedly and holistically. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the future is basically here.

Anyway, tomorrow I’ll tow this back to work and Nic will tell me how it’s actually done.