And I mean WILD. Best Danger product sighting I've seen in a while!

- mike lee

After Amazon sat on my order for a month, I finally got my copy of Shell Global Scenarios to 2025 - The future business environment: trends, tradeoffs and choices.

The book is part of a series of studies at Shell spanning three decades using the technique of scenario planning to imagine multiple plausible futures (stories) as a tool for strategic planning.

For me, scenarios are a way to sort out predictions of the future that range from "the world is totally f-ed," to "a prosperous technology-driven long boom for all."

Notes: 1.5mb, 24-page PDF excerpt of the Shell scenarios ... the CIA offers their version ... EPIC 2015 flash video ... Google 2084 ... and The Man Who Saw The Future.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

...at Giant Food.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

We got 4" of snow overnight. It's melting fast though.

- mike lee - washington, dc

From last night.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

I tried Mario Kart DS tonight over wifi and the internet with co-worker Kathy tonight. The setup was easy and the racing experience was smooth. It's mindboggling to think about the 6,000 McDonalds that are offering free wireless gaming access for these devices.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

I trucked up to Baltimore this afternoon to meet up with Flickr buddies Rachel and Dawn to tape a talk show segment with Lisa Morgan, who produces The Signal for WYPR. Our easygoing discussion was taped, and will be edited for airing and podcasting this Friday. Rachel snapped a pic of us reflected in the studio window. My phonecam pics here don't do justice to my Flickr buddies, so here are the faces of Rachel and Dawn in their respective photostreams.

- mike lee - baltimore, md - check out atomic books' new t-shirt designs!

Jerry Florence 1948 - 2005

- mike lee - washington, dc

This morning, I went see a talk by Jimmy Wales, President of the non-profit Wikipedia Foundation, and creator of the Wikipedia encyclopedia.

The event was produced by Forum One Communications, Center for Global Development, and the Brookings Institution, and held at the Institute for International Economics.

Here are my raw thumbtyped notes somewhat cleaned up with links added:

* English version of Wikipedia (WP) approaching 1 billion words, 800,000 articles. * 2.5 million articles across primarily 30 languages. * Wikinews is newest of their sister projects that has done a good job of filling in background information around breaking news events such as the London bombings. * Alexa.com says WP has a broader reach that the NYT, LA Times, WSJ, MSNBC, Chicago Tribune COMBINED. * 2.4 billion page views monthly. * WP Foundation has three employees! All the rest is done by volunteers. * Over 120 servers, which are mostly in Florida. Showed WP web server architecture. * Two Models ... Emergent model - needs reputation mechanisms, users are tiny, have no power ("anthill") Community Model - reputation is a natural outgrowth of human interactions, users are powerful and should be respected. * Over half of all edits to English WP are done by O.7% or 615 users! * Realtime peer review model as opposed to gatekeeper model. Tools to track recent changes, watchlists. * Complete page history for almost all articles. * Organization is managed by the community. The software makes no assumptions about how the editing process should work. * WP Governance: confusing but workable mix of concensus, democracy, artistocracy, monarchy; Wikipedians are flexible about social methodology: results over process. * Working on a WSYWYG UI for WP so more experts who not techy can join in. * Fundamental philosophies of neutrality, open inquiry, open debate, free information--it's morally good and ethical to give information to people. * Wikipedia for non- internet users: Affinity to Negroponte's $100 laptop idea as a possible way to deliver the Wikipedia. Supports Brewster Kahle's mobile book project. * JW's upcoming Newsweek article on copyright issues. * WPs attraction is its very low barrier to entry (software and community norms) to build a common ground for a group of practitioners. * WPF is pretty swamped at their org level. * SocialText building WIKIWYG UI, which should be ready for wide release in January. Will be giving this component away. It will be the default UI for MediaWIKI. * WPF has early plans to open their API. KDE adding native calls to WP. Problem with open API is cost to dynamically render pages and bandwidth required to deliver content that then is embedded by non-supporting sites in their own pages.

After the talk, I was invited by Forum One to join a private lunch discussion with Jimmy and about 20 others (pic 2 above shows Jim Cashel of Forum One on left with Jimmy at the lunch).

Most of what Jimmy talked about can be heard on a 58-minute C-SPAN Q&A interview podcast.

- mike lee - washington, dc