Interviews With Innovators
by Jon Udell

Sal Khan's response to the crisis in education is Khanacademy.org, a site that lists a vast and growing collection of his YouTube video lessons in math, physics, chemistry, biology, and economics. In this conversation he discusses his teaching philosophy and methods with host Jon Udell, and explains why he abandoned a career in financial services to become a new kind of teacher.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of PLATO, the pioneering educational courseware system that was also, for certain lucky individuals at certain universities, a preview of an online culture -- one that many others would not encounter for decades to come. In this conversation with host Jon Udell, PLATO historian Brian Dear recalls what it was like to experience an early distribution of a future that was, and in some ways still remains, unevenly distributed.

For many years, Greg Wilson has taught a course called Software Carpentry: to scientists, to university students, and to working programmers. In this conversation with host Jon Udell, he discusses the digital and mental tools in the software carpenter's kit, and he reflects on how the course might be taught differently in an era of agile development and ubiquitous connectivity.

Doug Day is the author of an open source library for reading and writing iCalendar files. He has also created an online validator for the venerable -- but still underutilized -- calendar format. In this conversation, Doug Day and host Jon Udell discuss why and how the validator can help bootstrap a pub/sub calendar ecosystem.

Howard Eglowstein, a principal engineer with Climate Energy, LLC -- and former BYTE colleague of host Jon Udell -- has always worked at the intersection of hardware and software hacking. In this conversation he discusses freewatt, a micro-CHP (combined heat and power) system. He also reflects on the eclipse and renewal of interest in the hybrid skillset celebrated by the "maker" movement.

Randy Julian founded Indigo BioSystems in order to bring a modern style of information management -- flexible schemas, linked data -- to the business of drug discovery. In this conversation he explains to host Jon Udell that it's not enough to represent experimental data in standard ways. We also need to describe the experimental design that provides the context for that data.

In this conversation with Martin Hepp, host Jon Udell explores GoodRelations, the e-commerce ontology that was also discussed in an earlier interview with Kingsley Idehen. When annotated using GoodRelations, pages describing products and services can be found and compared far more effectively than is possible on today's web.

Gavin Bell's new book, Building Social Web Applications, synthesizes a wealth of practical knowledge gleaned from his own long career as a web developer and from interviews with fellow practitioners. In this conversation he reviews the key principles and patterns that define what we today call the social web but will soon simply refer to as the web.

Clipperz is an online password manager that knows nothing about you or your data, and transmits no secrets over the wire. How? In this conversation with host Jon Udell, Clipperz co-founder Marco Barulli explains that recent improvements in JavaScript engines have enabled a new generation of zero-knowledge web applications.

How can you solicit honest feedback from friends and business associates? Rypple co-founder Daniel Debow says that his company's new service is the answer. It's quick, it's easy, and it's anonymous. It's true that online anonymity can often lead to trouble online. But Daniel Debow tells host Jon Udell that when used appropriately it can be a key enabler of interpersonal feedback.