Manoel Lemos

Take a close on the movie below, click play and try to figure out what is going on.

This movie represents the amount of queries containing the word felix on a big search engine from August, 12 to September, 9 last year. Each yellow dot raising from the globe’s surface represents a query realized by an Internet user on Yahoo’s search engine. The brighter the dot (or the closest to magenta) the bigger the amount of queries realized on that hour (each movie frame represents 1 or 2 hours).

It could be just a fancy visualization rendering of some nonsense statistical web dataset, but it shows much more than that. It actually shows how the society reacted on the web during the manifestation of a massive natural disaster, the Hurricane Felix (2007). Yes, it is big, but still a single representation of a very ephemeral phenomena on the living web. That makes me think and wonder about the complexity and beauty of that. Somehow the web is probably one of the most representative environments of the modern society and its behavior. Its actually a real extension of ourselves on the network. More and more we can’t explore the world without touching the web and that way it looks like, to me, that the society is pulsing on the web. Every single event that touches our lives is immediately manifested on the web.

Yes, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Internet penetration and usage is getting higher, but that is nothing if compared to the potential of mobile applications under the same point of view. If today it take us some minutes (or hours) to reach a computer after witnessing an event on the streets and then sending the stimulus to the living web, it will take seconds for dozens, hundreds or thousands of people to beam the stimuli from their mobile phones to the net.

And then its time to go crazy and wonder even further. What if those stimuli sent from us to the web could also be relayed back to us? What if the net be sufficiently intelligent to handle all that information to, immediately, give us the feedback from what it is felling? What if we start to mix our real lives to the digital live with augmented reality tools? What if?

But those are ideas for another day. It is time to go to bed and try to sleep.

Apresentação sobre a importância dos blogs para as empresas que preparei para minha palestra no World Web Expo Forum em São Paulo. O evento foi realizado no dia 18 de Março de 2008 e foi bastante interessante.

BlogBlogs SoHo

That’s true, after a long time flirting with the Internet and the Web I decided that it was about time to give up of my job and be fully dedicated to my Internet projects and dreams. That recalls when I first used a networked computer in the old times of dial-up BBS and how amazed I got about the possibilities of that kind of things. Later in the Computer Engineering School I had the chance to witness the emerging of a brand new thing called Web Browser. It was mid 1993 when the gray scale monitor of an old Sun SPARCstation SLC X-Terminal first opened the Mosaic browser window to me and also a huge halo in my mind: “Hundreds of kilobytes of information traveling from Japan to Brazil in just a few minutes! Wow, that’s awesome!”

Yep, it sounds nostalgic and almost from the mesozoic era, but that was the seed of a passion. However I never had the chance to really engage professionally on the Internet market. I hovered 15 years around lots of different computing and engineering areas such as high performance computing, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, health information systems, distributed systems, network security and transactional systems, but never with the Internet as the main focus. Then the inevitable happened and I started an almost parallel life (and I’m not talking about Second Life) on the Internet. Since my first website still in the childhood of the Web as the webmaster of my department at UNICAMP to several voluntary activities in Brazil and Europe towards digital democracy, that passion was getting bigger and bigger.

Then in March (or April) 2006 a wave started to take form when I first heard about a technology called Ruby on Rails from one of the developers of my team while being the director of R&D for Hypercom in Brazil. It was like discovering the sorcerer’s stone for web development. immediately I started to sketch what would be my first application developed in Rails. The first idea was to build an online dive logbook (another of my passions), but it rapidly became too complex for a first application. Then I sketched another thing that was supposed to be a simple blog directory and then I named it BlogBlogs. After a few days reading documentation on the Internet and coding the first version of BlogBlogs was ready. It was almost a real application, but it was lacking two very important things: content and users. Then I forgot about sleeping for a few more days and coded a rudimentary web crawler specialized on gathering new blogs written in Portuguese. Later , in a trip to the US, I released the spider running on my notebook plugged to the hotel broadband connection and left to the movies. A few hours later I got back and found the spider still running and for my surprise it had already discovered 40.000 blogs. After that I setup an website for BlogBlogs and get in touch with some key bloggers from the Brazilian blogosphere and they got enthusiastic with the service. From that to the first thousand of users it was a matter of time. With a very special help from Leonardo Faoro and Edney Souza the BlogBlogs news was rapidly spread on the blogosphere and soon became a local hit with hundreds of blog posts about it and more and more users signing up. Almost two years later the BlogBlogs became the largest and most important blog indexing and searching platform for the Portuguese speaking blogosphere. It reached the Alexa Top 5000 globally and is among the Top 150 highest traffic websites in Brazil.

And that is it, now I’m fully dedicated to the BlogBlogs and also another Web 2.0 project already in the oven for the Brazilian Internet. It is time to pursuit my dreams.

Hope to see you soon on our next big thing.

Tchau!