Ignite captures the best of geek culture in a series of five-minute speed presentations on topics ranging from The Best Way to Buy a Car to Hacking Chocolate. Imagine that you're on stage in front of an audience of hundreds of people, doing a five-minute presentation using a slide deck that auto-forwards every 15 seconds, whether you're ready or not. What would you do? What would you say? Could you stand the pressure? Every week, find out how some of the smartest minds on the planet dealt with this situation as your host, Brady Forrest, highlights a different talk from Ignites around the world.
Sion chickens caused a social meltdown in Second Life. The digital birds were bred for their color and numbered almost one-hundred thousand causing server slowdowns and attracting griefers.
Patrick Davison heard about the controversy and shares his findings. Patrick is a digital artist living in Brooklyn. The talk was filmed at Ignite NYC.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Does it always make sense to get a new car? Cash For Clunkers was a great program for offsetting the cost of that new Prius. However, the math is not always that simple. Bill Moore walks through the total cost of a new car.
Bill was filmed at Ignite Lansing. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Hilary Mason, a data researcher for Bit.ly, gave a great, geeky talk on how she has automated her email correspondence; all she used was a very small shell script.
The title of my talk is a classic geek reference (you can get the t-shirt). I’m very interested in developing automated techniques for handling the massive and growing amounts of information that we all have to deal with. I started with e-mail and twitter, both of which are easy to access programmatically (via IMAP and the Twitter API).
In the talk, I went through several of the simple and successful e-mail management scripts that I’ve developed.
I decided to talk about this project because I’m not sure where this should go next, but I got some great feedback and I’m looking forward to future work on the project!
This talk was filmed at Ignite NYC. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Cheese was a happy accident. It was discovered when animal milk was exposed to bacteria. It has since been elevated to a tasty artform. Dale Dougherty, the founder of Make Magazine, has reclaimed this art from corporations and makes his own cheese.
This was filmed at Ignite Sebastopol. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
O'Reilly Media's Founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly has used language to shape the software industry's thinking several times. In the 1990's he helped create and define the term Open Source (o help de-stigmatize "free software"). In this century he defined the term Web 2.0. By finding and evangelizing a meaningful name, Tim boosted the development and adoption of these world-changing technologies.
Tim had been exposed to the idea of using language as a map in the 1970's through a man named George Simon. As Tim wrote in his 2002 essay Science and Consensus:
At about the same time, I studied with a man named George Simon, who was trying to build what he called "languages for consciousness," believing, like Benjamin Whorf (author of Language, Thought and Reality), that our language limits our ability to perceive, and that until we have languages for certain states of consciousness and perception, we won't be able to use them. He saw his work as an extension of general semantics, a system developed in the 30's by Alfred Korzybski, author of Science and Sanity. Korzybski's famous statement, "the map is not the territory" is more than an observation; it's a tool for living more perceptively. A lot of my friend George's work was in training people to open up the ladder of perception, to recognize the difference between what you are experiencing directly vs. through various levels of abstraction, to let go preconceived notions and let the world come in fresh.
George also argued that as human consciousness evolves, certain things that were once on the frontiers of awareness, and that were experienced with near-mystical force, become commonplaces as they are routinely abstracted into language.
In my classics honors thesis at Harvard, I used this premise to assess certain of Plato's dialogues, arguing that the mystical overtones with which Socrates describes concepts like justice and truth were the result of the newness of his ideas. As we "rehearse" these now familiar ideas thousands of years later, we don't get that same rush. Most of us receive them at a level of abstraction, fitting them into our accepted system of facts, rather than taking them in through the entire ABCD perceptual cycle.
Tim expands on these beginnings in his Wired Profile, The Trend Spotter. This talk was filmed at Ignite Sebastopol. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
The U.S. Senate's legislation is the result of ever-shifting alliances. Using data from Govtrack you can get every Senator since John Adams. You also get their roll call votes. By summing the amount of times Senators voted together and dividing it by the number of sessions in a given year, Andrew Odewahn was able to calculate Senatorial affinities. He then plugged the affinities into GraphViz to visualize each year's social network.
These graphs reveal a lot about the state of bipartisanship at the time. For example in 1991 there was some cross-party voting. However, by the time 1994 rolled around with the "Republican Revolution" there was almost no cross-party voting. During the Clinton impeachment, the Democrats show a distinct rift, while the Republicans are solid (with the notable exceptions of future party-switchers Jeffords and Specter). This excellent talk reveals some of the secrets hidden in public data.
Andrew Odewahn works for O'Reilly in Cambridge. You can read more about his Senate graph research on our Broadcast blog. This talk was filmed at Ignite Boston. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Andrew Hyde runs Ignite Boulder. In this week's episode he shares his thoughts at Ignite ATL about the rapid economic shifts that can be caused by user-generated content. Andrew calls this The Posting Economy.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
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