Reboot is rebooting, so a lot of interesting people will need to find some other way of connecting this year. For that to happen, we have begun planning a “noboot” event. A lot of people have shown their general interest and/or chimed in with preferred dates, and yesterday we met to get the process rolling.
Read more at Claus’ place.
One of the conversations that I fell into at Reboot11, was about the wonders of face-recognition software, particularly Polar Rose. In the conversation someone mentioned that the next big thing would be recognition of labels or characteristic packages, so you could have a picture of a Coke bottle or a Heinz ketchup bottle, and the software would recognise it as such. While I see potential economic value in such use, I would be happier to see it used on plants - in Wikimedia Commons, we have just short of a gazillion free images of plants, and most are labeled. Imagine if you had an image of an unknown plant, and Polar Rose then said “ah, that’s a Toxicodendron radicans“.
At Reboot 11, I tried calling upon the Wikipedia Underground Army to produce some Reboot-related content. It didn’t really work - I guess most people were busy listening to interesting stuff.
Post-Reboot, I ask again: Can someone help create articles (and/or upload pictures under a free licence) about the following people: Matt Webb, Ton Zijlstra, Steve Coast, Franceska Birks, David Weinberger*, Trine-Maria Kristensen, Dave Winer*, Henrik Føhns, Lee Bryant, Alexander Kjerulf, JP Rangaswami*, Stowe Boyd, Niels Hartvig, Bruce Sterling*, and Thomas Madsen-Mygdal**? Weinberger, Winer, Rangaswami and Sterling have English-language articles already, and Mygdal has a Danish-language one, but that’s not enough - not by far: We’re talking about visionaries who are must-haves in any worthy encyclopaedia, if you ask me. We need not only text, but also pictures.