The Universal Pantograph Representation is the essence of networking

Unfortunately, I could only spend 4 days at the recent WWW2008 event in Beijing (I departed the morning following the Linked Data Workshop), so I couldn't take my slot on the "Commercializing the Semantic Web panel" etc.. Anyway, thanks to the Web I can still inject my points of view in the broad Web based discourse. Well so I hoped, when I attempted to post a comment to Paul Miller's ZDNet domain hosted blog thread titled: Commercialising the Semantic Web.

Unfortunately, the cost of completing ZDNet's unwieldy signup process simply exceeded the benefits of dropping my comments in their particular space :-( Thus, I'll settle for a trackback ping instead.

What follows is the cut and paste of my intended comment contributions to Paul's post.

Paul,

As discussed earlier this week during our podcast session, commercialization of Semantic Web technology shouldn't be a mercurial matter at this stage in the game :-) It's all about looking at how it provides value :-)

From the Linked Data angle, the ability to produce, dispatch, and exploit "Context" across an array of "Perspectives" from a plethora of disparate data sources on the Web and/or behind corporate firewalls, offers immense commercial value.

Yahoo's Searchmonkey effort will certainly bring clarity to some of the points I made during the podcast re. the role of URIs as "value consumption tickets" (Data Services are exposed via URIs). There has to be a trigger (in user space) that compels Web users to seek broader, or simply varied, perspectives as a response to data encountered on the Web. Yahoo! is about to put this light on in a big way (imho).

The "self annotating" nature of the Web is what ultimately drives the manifestation of the long awaited Semantic Web. I believe I postulated about "Self Annotation & the Semantic Web" in a number of prior posts which, by the way, should be DataRSS compatible right now due to Yahoo's support of OpenSearch Data Providers (which this Blog Space has been for eons).

Today, have many communities adding strucuture to the Web (via their respective tools of preference) without explicitly realizing what they are contributing. Every RSS/Atom feed, Tag, Weblog, Shared Bookmark, Wikiword, Microformat, Microformat++ (eRDF or RDFa), GRDDL stylesheet, and RDFizer etc.. is a piece of structured data.

Finally, the different communities are all finding ways to work together (thank heavens!) and the results are going to be cataclysmic when it all plays out :-)

Data, Structure, and Extraction are the keys to the Semantic Life! First you get the Data in a container (information resource), and then you add Structure to the information resource (RSS, Atom, microformats, RDFa, eRDF, SIOC, FOAF, etc.), once you have Structure RDFization (i.e. transformation to Linked Data) is a synch thanks to RDF Middleware (as per earlier RDF middleware posts).

So, I got a Wii for Father's Day last year. It's been a lot of fun to play together with my kids, my wife, and even my parents and in-laws. It's fantastic to have a game system that we can... michael

Issue 2 of Nodalities Magazine is now available online. For those who have signed up to the free subscription, your printed copy is in the mail.

Items this month include:

• Blue Oceans - Ian Davis and Zach Beauvais discuss the ‘Blue Ocean’ opportunity facing those who embrace the Semantic Web
• Social Networking - Garlik CEO Tom Ilube introduces the notion of ’social verification’
• Environment - David Peterson puts semantic technologies to work in the fight against Climate Change
• Predictable Mavericks - Talis CEO Dave Errington looks back at the company’s past, and forward to a semantically powered future
• Open World Thinking - Nadeem Shabir argues that Semantic Web developers need to see the world differently
• Dow Jones and Thomson Reuters - Read transcripts of recent conversations with these factual information powerhouses, and learn how the Semantic Web is being put to work.

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OpenID provider JanRain has launched an interesting project called Demand OpenID, which lets users click a bookmarklet whenever they are on a website that they want to request OpenID support on. It's a handy, if a touch rude, way to demonstrate user demand for OpenID on popular websites.

Right now the most popular services for users to demand OpenID are Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Facebook, Amazon and Google.

JanRain's Brian Ellin says the project was inspired by blogger Aaron Hockley's recent oath to no longer comment on tech blogs that fail to offer OpenID login. Way to go Aaron!

Bumps in the Road

Unfortunately the service doesn't check to see if there's OpenID login already available on the site you're on - so my apologies to photo sharing site Zooomr, for example, if I made them feel at all defensive in testing.

It would also be nice if there was some way to know that the vendors were made aware of the demands. One way I can think of would be to publish a feed of each demand and ping the blogsearch engines with that feed. Then each demand would get picked up by company PR monitoring blogsearch feeds for mentions. I could set that up myself using a scraping service and FeedBurner, but that might not be so nice.

Early shortcomings aside, Demand OpenID is a great and simple idea.

Until now I've been twittering every time I get angry about the lack of OpenID somewhere. Now I'll use the bookmarklet. You should too, everyone should. Demand OpenID is built on the Google App Engine, so it can take the kind of click quantities that the lack of OpenID adoption around the web warrants.

Thanks to the Vidoop blog, a great place to unearth all kinds of OpenID related news like this.

A tip if you like free stuff... I see that some of the "free" data websites are now flogging the free 2007 TIGER/Line files (SHP format) - I saw one site whoring out the data for $100+ bucks! OR.......

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Unfortunately, I could only spend 4 days at the recent WWW2008 event in Beijing (I departed the morning following the Linked Data Workshop), so I couldn't take my slot on the "Commercializing the Semantic Web panel" etc.. Anyway, thanks to the Web I can still inject my points of view in the broad Web based discourse. Well so I hoped, when I attempted to post a comment to Paul Miller's ZDNet domain hosted blog thread titled: Commercialising the Semantic Web.

Unfortunately, the cost of completing ZDNet's unwieldy signup process simply exceeded the benefits of dropping my comments in their particular space :-( Thus, I'll settle for a trackback ping instead.

What follows is the cut and paste of my intended comment contributions to Paul's post.

Paul,

As discussed earlier this week during our podcast session, commercialization of Semantic Web technology shouldn't be a mercurial matter at this stage in the game :-) It's all about looking at how it provides value :-)

From the Linked Data angle, the ability to produce, dispatch, and exploit "Context" across an array of "Perspectives" from a plethora of disparate data sources on the Web and/or behind corporate firewalls, offers immense commercial value.

Yahoo's Searchmonkey effort will certainly bring clarity to some of the points I made during the podcast re. the role of URIs as "value consumption tickets" (Data Services are exposed via URIs). There has to be a trigger (in user space) that compels Web users to seek broader, or simply varied, perspectives as a response to data encountered on the Web. Yahoo! is about to put this light on in a big way (imho).

The "self annotating" nature of the Web is what ultimately drives the manifestation of the long awaited Semantic Web. I believe I postulated about "Self Annotation & the Semantic Web" in a number of prior posts which, by the way, should be DataRSS compatible right now due to Yahoo's support of OpenSearch Data Providers (which this Blog Space has been for eons).

Today, have many communities adding strucuture to the Web (via their respective tools of preference) without explicitly realizing what they are contributing. Every RSS/Atom feed, Tag, Weblog, Shared Bookmark, Wikiword, Microformat, Microformat++ (eRDF or RDFa), GRDDL stylesheet, and RDFizer etc.. is a piece of structured data.

Finally, the different communities are all finding ways to work together (thank heavens!) and the results are going to be cataclysmic when it all plays out :-)

Data, Structure, and Extraction are the keys to the Semantic Life! First you get the Data in a container (information resource), and then you add Structure to the information resource (RSS, Atom, microformats, RDFa, eRDF, SIOC, FOAF, etc.), once you have Structure RDFization (i.e. transformation to Linked Data) is a synch thanks to RDF Middleware (as per earlier RDF middleware posts).

Snackr is a new Adobe AIR app that lets you display items in your RSS feeds in a beautiful scrolling ticker on any edge of your screen. I am absolutely giddy about it after only a few minutes of use. Snackr is something you'd supplement your existing reader with, not a replacement. It is not for the faint of heart or information averse, either.

If you've ever fantasized about having the river of news flow straight into your brain, this is the closest I've seen yet. I've uploaded a small OPML file of my top priority feeds, limited Snackr to displaying items from within the last 5 days and am in heaven. Read on for screenshots and some critique.

Below is a screenshot of the live ticker, paused when an item is clicked. The scrolling is really smooth, story order is randomized. When you click on an item, the full text will appear if it's available in the feed. The link at the bottom of the pop-up will take you to the full post.

You can have Snackr running at the top, bottom, left or right margin of your screen. I clapped my hands and jumped up and down like a little school girl upon seeing each different view for the first time.

The idea is not to read every item here, but to give your eye some opportunity to catch items it might not otherwise. I love it.

Wishes

So far I've only got two requests for Snackr development. The site supports authenticated feeds (password protected, something Google Reader can't do) which is great. When I click on an item from a particular filter's RSS feed in my GMail account though, the popup window prompts but doesn't allow me to log-in. I wish that were different.

Second, once I uploaded an OPML file, I ended up with some feeds I wanted to unsubscribe from and had to do so one at a time. Bulk feed management would be nice. A javascript bookmarklet to add a feed to Snackr with a click, when I discover it around the web, would be great too. Media handling could be improved as well.

All in all though, I am very excited to discover the app. It was the first app I happened to look at on FreshAIR Apps today, an AIR site we reviewed earlier this week. I plan to spend a lot more time on that site, as AIR is a very exciting platform.

Dulles,VA-- GeoEye, Inc. (Nasdaq: GEOY), a premier provider of satellite, aerial and geospatial information, announced an August 22, 2008 launch date for its next-generation, earth imaging satellite GeoEye-1. Boeing Launch Services and GeoEye finalized this launch date in an amendment to the Launch Service Agreement that was signed on May 7, 2008. You can read the full press release at Directions Magazine.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

Announced earlier this week, the Yahoo! Internet Location Platform has been discussed by many geoblogs, including Yahoo's Dan Catt and CNET. Yahoo! has been very active regarding geospatial development in the last few years despite the attention towards Google and Microsoft. From the official page: "The Yahoo! Internet Location Platform provides a resource for managing all geo-permanent named places on Earth. Our purpose in creating the Internet Location Platform is to provide the Yahoo! Geographic Developer Community with the vocabulary and grammar to describe the world's geography in an unequivocal, permanent, and language-neutral manner. The Internet Location Platform is designed to facilitate spatial interoperability and geographic discovery; users can traverse the spatial hierarchy, identify the geography relevant to their users and their business, and in turn, unambiguously geotag, geotarget, and geolocate data across the Web. [...] In simple terms, the Service allows you to look up the unique identifier - called the Where on Earth ID, or WOEID - for almost any named place on the Earth; it also allows you to resolve a WOEID you have received from a third party - such as Fire Eagle or Upcoming - to the place it represents."

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

Six weeks ago, ReadWriteWeb published their definitive list of the top Twitter clients. The methodology for that list was watching the Twitter public feed and logging tweet sources. However, how does the list of clients people are using match up the list of the ones people are talking about? Using data from blog search engine Twingly, we decided to see which Twitter clients are getting the most buzz on blogs. The result is a list of the most popular 3rd-party Twitter-apps according to the blogosphere.

This is a guest post from Anton Johansson, a business developer at the Swedish startup Twingly.com, which developing a spam-free blog search engine focused on Europe.

Top 5 Overall

• Twhirl
• Mobypicture
• Twitterfeed
• Twitteriffic
• Terraminds micro search

ReadWriteWeb's public feed study in April also found Twhirl to be the most popular Twitter client. It was helped in the blogosphere by all the buzz created by its acqusition by Seesmic last month. [Incidentally, that also drove a lot of traffic to our Twitter clients list post as well. -- Ed.]

Top 5 Desktop Apps

• Twhirl
• Twitteriffic
• Snitter
• Tweetr
• Twitteroo

The top two desktop apps -- Twhirl and Twitterific -- are again the same ones ReadWriteWeb saw last month in their study. But after that, things deviate a bit. Snitter, Tweetr, and Twitteroo were all farther down the list in terms of usage, but are getting a disproportionate amount of coverage in the blogosphere.

Top 5 Web Apps

• Mobypicture
• Twitterfeed
• Terraminds
• Twistori
• Summize

Launched just a few weeks ago, Twistori (RWW coverage) has already garnered a lot of attention. Interestingly, Twistori actually uses data from Summize, one of the more popular Twitter search engines -- and clearly one of the most talked about, as well.

Top 5 Mobile Apps

• Hahlo
• Cetwit
• Twitter Answers
• Twapper
• Twittai

There have been far fewer blog posts written about mobile Twitter applications in relation to other categories. Hahlo, the first iPhone and iPod Touch client for Twitter takes first place in terms of buzz, followed by Cetwit, a popular app for Windows Mobile. Twittai is a Java-based Twitter cell phone application.

Notes and Methodology:

We used the the list of Twitter apps on the Twitter Fan Wiki as our source of applications to watch for. The list contains 209 Twitter apps, most of which have not been linked to from the blogosphere at all.

LoudTwitter, an app that publishes tweets to blogs, was excluded because most of its links came from link backs included when the service pushes tweets to blog posts. They didn't get many mentions in posts specifically about them, but their autolinks generated a ton of links within the blogosphere.

Just browsing the attendee list from Where2.0 and noticed some interesting job titles from attendees - perhaps this will give you an idea who the event is for. Where2.0 draws a real mix of talent...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

I just returned from a meeting of the recently renamed "Rocky Mountain Geotechnology Cluster" where we heard this morning from Joe Berry on an interesting Geo-Business Application to conduct retail...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Allen Stern points out that RSS filtering service AideRSS has added Twitter to its PostRank algorithm. AideRSS works by measuring social media interaction with blog posts, and then comparing them to what's normal for that blog. The service then algorithmically applies a ranking to each post allowing users to filter out only the best posts based on the theory that people will only bother interacting with the most interesting or worthwhile content.

We're huge fans of AideRSS at ReadWriteWeb. Not only have we written about them a lot, we've also used AideRSS to filter aggregate feeds for the top content for a number of our toolkit posts. Adding Twitter support is an interesting move because it confirms Twitter's growing influence in the social media space, and lets blog owners see how their content is being spread across the microblog service.

Since we published our first look at AideRSS last July, their PostRank algorithm has changed a lot. At launch, PostRank included information from comments, Digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, IceRocket, and Bloglines -- now the latter three have been replaced with Twitter links and Google blog search conversations. Some of those changes likely had to do with API restrictions, some likely with just general tweaking to make the algorithm perform better.

Because AideRSS calculates PostRank against only that blog's past performance, the ranking is a fair representation of that blog's best work. For example, a PR 10 post on ReadWriteWeb would require different interaction metrics than a post on a small personal blog. PostRank would be easy to cheat -- you could comment a million times on your post, get your friends to Digg it, tweet it, add it it del.icio.us -- but since the service isn't measuring you against other blogs, there's really no incentive to cheat it.

AideRSS also announced support for OpenID.

Several geoblogs mentioned the Google ESRI joint keynote at Where 2.0, and All Points Blog elaborates on what it may mean for the near and far future. From their conclusions: "These announcements have some important implications for the geospatial marketplace: 1) the use of and demand for ArcGIS Server should rise. 2) any geo data or services provider who wants to play on the Web needs to look at how it will provide findability and usability of its data and services in this way. 3) geodata-finding portals may, in time, become extinct - if the KML vision for search and distribution becomes a de facto one as well. 4) the technology may be available, but the institutional barriers to data sharing may still be blocking the path (as noted in a question at the end of the session)." Also interesting is the GeoServer 1.7.0 plan to be automatically crawlable by Google’s geosearch.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

The music search engine and Internet jukebox, Songza, lets you seek out any song on the web and stream it immediately. In January of this year, we announced the site's partnerships with Seeqpod and Skreemr, which allowed them to grown their online library to 28 million songs. Now, Songza grows again with a launch of a new Facebook app and the arrival of a Songza API.

The Songza Facebook app lets friends see what each other are listening to on the Songza web site. Whenever a song is added to your playlist, that information is posted to your mini-feed and your profile page. Your friends can then click the link to the song to be taken to the Songza site to listen to it for themselves. In order to use the Facebook app, you have to first sign up for an account at Songza.com

Songza in the Mini-Feed

Along with the Facebook app, Songza is now also offering RSS feeds for the site's top-played songs, the featured songs list, and each user's playlist of newly added tunes, which is found on the user profile page. With that last one, the user playlist feed, you now have the ability to add Songza to a lifestreaming service such as FriendFeed, for example.

The last part of the Songza announcement involves the launch of their API. By using the API, developers can build custom widgets and applications based on Songza data. The API can be used to access the featured songs list, a user's playlist, and the last ten songs a user has added to their playlist. At the moment, Songza isn't imposing any limitations on the number of times requests can be made to the API, but they do remind developers that their feeds only update every 15 minutes, so there isn't much point to polling more often than that. 

Because Songza finds its music on the internet, it can be useful for locating more obscure artists or live performances. And since the service doesn't allow for downloads, only streaming, it's legit. They even pay artists based on how many times a song was streamed via licenses with the major performing-rights organizations (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC). However, the best thing about Songza is that you can listen to a song as many times as you want in its entirety, unlike Last.fm, whose on-demand service lets you play any particular song, too, but only in full three times before receiving a prompt to purchase it.

I'm very late to this. When I first heard about Perceptive Pixel, I was very excited. Several videos of the very slick, very fun wall-mounted multi-touch based interface zipped around the blogosphere last year. But then there didn't seem to be much going on. Meanwhile, a number of companies started popularizing some of the elements of that interface, Apple with the iPhone (multi-touch), and Microsoft with the surface computer to name two obvious examples.

It turns out that Perceptive Pixel were in fact deploying their product. I don't watch broadcast tv so I had missed the fact that it was being used as a differentiator in discussing the primary elections in the US.

Here's an example.

Here's another one:

I'm back in Seattle after attending the excellent Future of News workshop hosted by David Robinson and Ed Felten. There were many contributing factors to the success of the workshop, not least of which was the cross disciplinary nature of speakers, panelists and attendees. In addition to participants in my line of work, or with similar areas of interest, such as David Blei (former colleague at WhizBang!Labs) and Kevin Anderson (whose career spans both the BBC, with some involvement with Backstage, and the Guardian, an organization that is not caught with with fretting about the past; and who blogs on Corante, for his sins) I met representatives (and survivors of) traditional newsprint organizations, individuals centrally involved in transforming news in the Web 2.0 world, academics with impressive access to the entire trajectory of media evolution, hackers and so on.

Given the rich range of voices, while we may not have solved any specific problems (despite Ed's closing remarks) I certainly feel as if we aired a reasonably good sample of them. On reflection, I stand by yesterday's summary: there is plenty of pessimism around old media structures and plenty of optimism around the opportunities that new sources and new forms of information, combined with new ways to filter, analyse and aggregate this data presents. Bridging the two positions, there is concern around issues of quality and value with respect to the nature of the content (that is to say, a contributor's ability to provide transparent and supportable content) - will the new information ecology support reasonable ideals for news? Note, to me, those ideals centre on making the reader better informed and more efficient at selecting content.

For other coverage of the event, a great starting place would be Kevin's posts (starting here with an account of Paul Starr's opening talk). Also Steve Boriss, Tim Lee, and Jack Kemp. Note that the presentations and discussions will soon be available online.

Last August we called Spongecell "the most intuitive of the online calendar apps," and picked it as one of our 10 Must Have Online Office Apps. Since then, though, a lot has changed. Spongecell is no longer just a personal calendar, but rather a full-scale event management platform aimed at businesses with complicated event calendars. Last week I caught up with Spongecell CEO Ben Kartzman and Chief Strategy Office Marc Guldimann to learn a little bit more about what the company is up to.

With Google Calendar now dominating the online personal calendar space, Spongecell decided to take a different approach to the market. Spongecell reworked their product and launched "Spongecell Promote" in March 2007, a full event-marketing platform provides publishing, messaging, and reporting tools to event organizers. After seeing that they were getting more traffic via embedded calendars than via the personal calendar service that had been their main product, Spongecell decide to shift gears completely and make Promote their core offering.

Adobe Flash Player version 9 is required for display of this Spongecell widget.

Please install the latest version of Adobe Flash Player from Adobe.

If you have already installed Adobe Flash Player version 9, please make sure that your browser supports javascript.

var so = new SWFObject('http://spongecell.com/flash/download/3051/listview.swf', '', '100%', '100%', '9', '#FFFFFF');so.addVariable('imgHost', 'http%3A%2F%2Fstatics%2Espongecell%2Ecom%2Fcrossdomain%2Exml');so.addVariable('widgetId', '3051');so.addVariable('maxResults', '20');so.addVariable('apiURL', 'http%3A%2F%2Fspongecell.com%2Fapi%2F');so.addVariable('type', 'promote');so.write('spongecell_widget_wrapper_3051');


Above is a sample Spongecell calendar widget.

The service compares somewhat to Evite, but Kartzman stressed that Spongecell isn't focused on one-off events like birthday parties -- though the product could be used that way -- but rather hopes to help organizations or event managers who run a large number of gatherings to manage their entire calendar.

Spongecell's service has three main components:

• Publishing: Each event gets a web page that allows people to RSVP, comment, get directions, etc. Event pages can be syndicated to MySpace, Facebook, Eventful, Upcoming and elsewhere via widgets.
• Messaging: Spongecell lets users spread the word about their event via SMS and email. About 2 million emails are sent out each month via the service.
• Reporting: Event managers can use Spongecell's reporting features to track their email and SMS blasts and guest lists.

Spongecell's calendar widget has about 12,000 installs and serves 2 million pageviews each month, Kartzman told me. About 25% of those come through the app's RESTful API, which allows developers to create custom calendar applications. Parenting site lilaguide.com, for example, uses the API to power its event section and has customized it so that parents can add events to the site's calendar.

Conclusion

Spongecell has already landed some pretty big clients for their platform, including CNN, but plans to expand into new markets over the coming year as part of an ambitious plan to become the event marketing management platform for any industry.

Spongecell may no longer be a must have office application -- if you're looking for a simple calendar, try Google -- but it is now a very well made and versatile platform for running an online event calendar on any web site. Deciding not to compete with Google was probably a smart move for the company, which now has a much better chance of cornering their intended market.

In my last post, I talked about why being punctual matters. The short version: people who are habitually late (or are late even once, when it counts) project incompetence, self-centeredness, and even a lack of integrity.

In the comments, lapka asked if there were any tricks for people who have a hard time showing up on time, and through a little bit of research and a little bit of self-examination, I think I have some answers.

First of all, though, it’s important to see being on time as part of your whole attitude towards time. You’re never going to be on time, every time — whether for appointments, meeting big deadlines, or even to catch a movie — if you haven’t put into practice a set of good time management techniques.

That means, for example, having a central place where your time commitments are recorded, whether that’s an online calendar, Outlook, a smartphone, a dayplanner, or just an index card with your schedule on it.  It seems obvious that to be on time you have to know where you have to be and when, but it’s a step a lot of people try to skip — they want to hold everything in their heads.

Secondly, being punctual requires a bit of an attitude adjustment. A lot of the time we let ourselves show up late because the event we’re showing up to isn’t all that important to us. Try this: don’t schedule events that aren’t that important to you. Use that time for things that are important to you. I know, there are a lot of things in your life that feel obligatory, like the weekly status report meeting at work, or dinner at your spouse’s or partner’s parents; either make those things important to you, or figure out how to cut them from your calendar.

Ok, with general principles out of the way, let’s move on to the tricks.

10 ways to make yourself more punctual

1. Don’t check your email or voicemail right before you leave. That “last quick check” will almost always take more time than you think — which is, after all, what you’re hoping for. If you thought there’d be nothing important in your email, you wouldn’t bother checking.
2. Plan for trouble. Always add 25% to your time estimate to get anywhere or do any task. If you think it takes 30 minutes to get to work, give yourself 40 (technically, 37 1/2, but let’s not be ridiculous here!). If you need 12 working hours to finish a proposal, give yourself 15. The worst thing that could happen is that you get a nice “Scotty effect” going, where you’re always ahead of schedule and everyone thinks you’re a miracle worker.
3. Set up the night before. If you are, like me, someone who has a hard time getting going in the morning, make sure you set up the night before. Lay out your clothes, put your keys, wallet, etc. in tomorrow’s pants pockets or your purse, load up your bag with whatever material you’ll need  in the morning, put your lunch together, and so on. In the morning, wake up, get dressed, grab your stuff, and go.
4. Set your clocks ahead a few minutes each — by different amounts. My alarm clock is 5 minutes fast, my watch only 1, my car clock 3. I think. Since I can’t be sure, I have to take each clock at face value. You might have a look at the Procrastinator’s Clock which is some random amount of time ahead, up to 15 minutes. It’s available for Mac and PC — I wonder if there’s a bedside version?
5. Learn to better estimate how much time things take. Use a time tracker app like RescueTime to learn how long typical tasks take you to complete. Record these times, and refer to your record when estimating the time needed for similar tasks.
6. Schedule events 10 minutes early. Put your 1:00 appointment into your schedule at 12:50, for example. But always have 10 minutes of work with you to fill the slack time, in case you surprise yourself by showing up “on time” 10 minutes early!
7. Set reminders. Use your calendar program’s built-in reminder function, or use a service like Sandy to send you text reminders at set intervals before each appointment. I like a reminder at least an hour beforehand, so I can plan, and another 15 minutes prior so I know where I stand.
8. Schedule events for “off-peak” times. Last year, I had a weekly meeting at 8 am. A trip that takes me 30 minutes any time after 9:00 am took me 1 1/2 hours due to rush hour traffic. Guess how many times I was late? Learn the times that traffic or other factors might make you late, and avoid scheduling during those times. For instance, give yourself at least an hour to get settled in every morning before your first meeting (so if you’re late to work, you won’t also be late for a meeting), don’t schedule meetings immediately after lunch (in case you get held up), avoid before-working-hours events (due to rush hour traffic), etc.
9. Fill your gas tank when it reaches 1/4 tank. Don’t let an empty gas tank make you late for anything. Fill up whenever you reach 1/4 and you’ll never have to make an emergency stop at a gas station during your commute. (Plus, I’m told it’s better for your engine — whether that’s true or not, I don’t know.)
10. Use a countdown timer. Grab a cheap digital timer, and use it to create a sense of urgency, and to help you keep on track at each step you need to complete to make it wherever you’re supposed to be on time. Break your preparation down into 10 minutes parts, set the timer, and GO!

What other advice do our readers have for people who just can’t figure out how to be more punctual? Let us know your tips and tricks in the comments.

Dustin M. Wax is a contributing editor and project manager at lifehack.org. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and women's studies in Las Vegas, NV. His personal site can be found at dwax.org.

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Slashdot discuss a story on streamlining and testing RFID technology. Their summary: "Multiple readers have written to let us know that an experiment at the upcoming Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference will use RFID to track the movements of at least 1,500 registrants for the duration of the conference. Those movements will be transmitted onto screens which "show in real-time where people go, with whom they associate, for how long and how often." The system will also be used for games which involve manipulation of the available data. Meanwhile, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a method for testing large quantities of RFID tags, which may serve to greatly speed distribution." See also our RFID section.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.