Sociate

Harlan and his team at TheBrain have set up an enterprise Brain server, loaded it with my PersonalBrain's data, and you can go get lost in it here. Please log in as guest/guest.

No need to install TheBrain, this is a Java applet that will download the first time you visit, then run more quickly thereafter.

I've thrilled to have my Brain back online. It's been too long. My Brain now has 64,000 nodes (called thoughts). Just crossed that threshhold today.

This Web Brain is set now to launch to Web pages automatically when you click on thoughts that have Web links. That doesn't seem like a useful default, so I might change it, but I'm open to keeping it that way.

The Search function on the left seems to work well. Look for things you're curious about, and it'll return all the thoughts in my Brain that contain those things, as clickable links. That's a good way to jump around, instead of just chaining from thought to thought.

Alas, you won't be able to add or edit thoughts or links, nor will you be able to appropriate parts of my Brain you find useful into your own life. That's for a later project. The Discuss function isn't enabled, either.

We should be able to update this public Brain about once a month, so suggestions you send me will take a little while to show up. But they will.

I'd love your comments. Please send me email. And thank you, Harlan.

If Andrew had been running for Public Advocate of the Blogosphere, he might have made it. There was plenty of buzz online.

Unfortunately, that didn't translate into buzz in the polling booths on primary day in New York City. Andrew came in fourth, with the incumbent, Betsy Gotbaum, essentially winning her reelection decisively (nobody's runnning against her in the actual election).

Some of Andrew's ideas made it into the fray, notably open WiFi and ways to make government more transparent and responsive. We'll see what's next.

Tomorrow is the New York City primary election, during which we'll find out whether Andrew Rasiej's outsider run for Public Advocate worked or not. I'm sitting in his campaign HQ right now, on Broadway in Manhattan, just below Union Square (just a few blocks from where I used to work and live).

I've blogged about Andrew before, as have others more notable than me (if you'd like to read the Friedman article, ping me and I'll send you a copy).

More recently, Doc described Andrew's lessons from disaster relief; Britt showed why electing Andrew matters; and Esther commented (and photographed) favorably on Andrew's approach to transparency in government.

If you're a registered New York City Democrat, or know someone who is, please consider heading to your local polling place tomorrow and bringing some friends with you. From 92 to 98 I was registered here, but since then, I vote in San Francisco. So the only way I can help right now is to shake the network.

Tomorrow's the day!

The Wikipedia page titled Effect of Katrina on New Orleans is, as I expected after my experience with its SARS page, an amazing resource.

But the scope of the Wikipedia doesn't really include details of neighborhood-by-neighborhood assessment and reconstruction efforts, and all the other sorts of mending activities that need to happen.

My always-thoughtful friend Ed has been involved in an effort to collect and organize such resources on a wiki named ThinkNOLA. Please head on over and take a look. And if you have a bright idea of how those volunteers might help people reconnect with lost loved ones, or meet other challenges, throw it in. Every effort helps.

Here's the Red Cross donation page.

I've had a marvelous ongoing conversation with Antonio Rodriguez over the past few years, in which we dream and puzzle about where software and services are heading, and where the new business models might lurk therein.

One of our common enthusiasms was Furl, a nifty turbo-bookmarking site that not only captures the URL of sites you bookmark, but also stores the page contents, lets you call out part of the page and add comments. It's not quite a blogging tool, but if you're mad at the New York Times and other sites for banishing articles to the obscurity of their paid archive after three days, as I am, it's pretty interesting.

Back when we had this enthusiasm, del.icio.us was way too hard to use. It was geek territory.

But, as Antonio tells the story in his post, del.icio.us just got better and better, and Furl, bought by Looksmart, got slower and slower.

The point of Antonio's story is that he was easily able to write a script to move his bookmarks from Furl to del.icio.us, thanks to Furl's honoring the portability we've come to expect of Web 2.0 applications. Antonio's geek exercise makes a larger point.

By the way, I've been having nearly the same conversation, in parallel, with Antonio's equally cool brother, Andres.