Geeks Will Save the World

Definition: Background Pollution

2011-11-01T06:47:00.000-07:00

Definition:

Pollution so small or inconsequential at the individual level that it is ignored. At the macro level, however, it the kind of pollution is often quite significant.

Synthetic Clothing may cause microplastic pollution (Inhabitat)
Given a chance, your plastic garbage will eventually find its way into the ocean (Telegraph)
Silver nanoparticles found in many domestic applications are killing bacteria that underpin the nitrogen cycle (Alaska Dispatch)

Unintended Consequences/Kludging the environment

2011-10-31T07:32:00.000-07:00

The environment are one area where unintended consequences with regard to human behavior. Unfortunately, the system is so complex and problems so intractable and multivariate that humankind is reduced to kludging together suboptimal fixes for environmental problems that are entirely of our own making.

Some examples:

Maker Industries now designing shells for hermit crabs, as the pet store trade has wiped out the availability of those same shells in the wild. The idea is to offer these synthetic shells to pet owners, thus eventually reducing the trade in wild-sourced shells.
New Zealand penguins who were "slimed" by a recent oil spill near that country are dying because they keep on trying to clean themselves off (thus ingesting a lot of oil). New Zealand has actually asked for help from knitters to create miniature sweaters for the birds, so they don't preen themselves and don't freeze to death. They've released a pattern to follow, as well.

While there are some real positives in these stories (Geeks are Saving the World!), the biggest upshot is that big, structural issues (unsustainable/unregulated trade and fossil fuel dependence) are facing us with more and more intractable problems. We're able to kludge our way out of specific, acute difficulties (by printing shells or knitting sweaters), but the source problems remain unchanged, and the market realities are still balanced against finding a working, long-term solution.

If printing shells for crabs and knitting sweaters for penguins sound like the warning bells for bigger, upcoming problems, then I'd agree. Who knows what kludge we'll come up with to deal with global warming?

Arab Uprisings: The Language Problem

2011-02-21T00:07:00.000-08:00

Over the last few weeks, during the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Bahrain, much has been made about the power of social media to change the world -- beyond national borders.

One major barrier to communication remains: language. Even as we receive real-time updates of where the protests are occurring via sites like Feb17.info and Anonymous sets up free internet access for Libyans via dial-up, the language barrier to some extent prevents netizens from helping out Libyans on a one-to-one basis.

The tools developed to combat this problem have been amazing. The Next Web reported last week on how volunteers were using Google Docs to crowdsource the translation of hundreds Arabic messages into English for the @Speak2Tweet Twitter account (I highly recommend this story). Now the @AliveIn project is taking off as well.

But the fact remains, there is a limited capacity to make sense of the first-hand tweets of the revolution for non-Arabic speakers.

I'm still trying to use a variety of tools, from Yahoo! Pipes and Babel Fish/Google Translate hacks to come up with an elegant solution to deal with the Arab Twitterers that we're following. Sorry that this is kind of a non-post, but I'll update it as I figure something out.

The Wisdom of the Warfighting Crowds

2011-02-06T09:41:00.000-08:00

Darpa is working with automotive crowd sourcing design shop Local Motors on the "XC2V" design challenge for a next-generation military combat vehicle based on Local Motor's own modular chassis (coverage: Ariel Schwartz, Fast Company and Spencer Ackerman, Wired). It works like this: Local Motors and Darpa supplies the specs (structured like a standard RFP) and the community provides the design expertise. The best design wins $10,000 for the designer. For years, military procurement has consistently delivered designs that were over-budget and behind schedule. However, new initiatives like this one and the Navy's new LCS designs that use modular platforms and multiple vendors to reduce costs.

Most importantly, maybe the private sector can innovate faster than the military establishment. Remember Lancelot De Mole.

Times You Don't Want to be in the Media: Egypt Edition

2011-02-06T09:24:00.000-08:00

A Sunnyvale company gets called out on Al Jazeera:

Long Overdue Update on Education and Gaming

2011-01-29T10:53:00.001-08:00

Some things that popped up in online edutainment news over the past few months:

Ribbon Hero is a Microsoft experiment in training Office 2007 and 2010 users to get more efficient at using the Office ribbon UI. I haven't tried it yet, but game-like "training modes" or tutorials would like be very useful for desktop software. These types of exercises have been used in PC and console games for years. The open source movement should start thinking along these lines.
From the Washington Post's Comic Riffs blog: Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and an Oregon Trail game will soon be launched on Facebook. For all the talk about how using games for education is a "new" idea, it's good to remember that this genre of gaming is positively ancient. For many people, their first exposure to computers may have involved playing one of these games on a school computer.
From almost half a year ago on the Ars Technica Noble Intent blog: Gamers beat algorithms at finding protein structures. An interesting story about gaming for good that also highlights the limitations of some types of soft AI.

Google HotSpot -- Not So Hot?

2010-11-30T20:31:00.000-08:00

Anyone else feel that this is about a year too late?

We Beat Donkey Kong -- What About Global Warming?

2010-05-09T09:59:00.000-07:00

A year or so ago, I stumbled across Superstruct. Superstruct was a "massively multiplayer forecasting game." The idea is that it's 2019 and the world has gone to pot, governments are breaking down and us regular old citizens have to self-organize a response to problems ranging from global plagues to the breakdown of law and order on a global scale. Players were presented a series of YouTube-based briefings and some additional background information. Then you would collaborate, bulletin board-style on coming up with solutions. The best solutions generally got more feedback and were voted up by fellow members of the community. People were encouraged to build and expand upon others' solutions, which made the whole thing more interactive (Massively has a good summary of some of the coverage that the game received).

Jane McGonigal, one of the people from the Institute for the Future, gave a TED talk that summarized a lot of the thinking behind this project:

My educational background is in psychology and I couldn't help but noticing McGonigal's mention of feedback loops, and the fact that the feedback (or reinforcement) loop is much stronger in gaming.

However, some of her other conclusions have drawn criticism. John Robb, author of the book Brave New War (and the Global Guerrillas blog), is more skeptical of the using games to gamers' expertise to address non-gaming problems. Robb claims that identifying gaming as a form of personal superempowerment is spot-on, but finding ways to use gamers to fix the world's problems misses the point, entirely. He says that the key is use games to fix the real-world reward/economic system for these individuals (an essential point of the meta-narrative behind Robb's work is that the world's economic/reward system is broken, and needs to be fixed).

A bigger problem, perhaps, is one of domain knowledge. While gaming as a broad topic might be something that most of today's youth has some experience with, the twitch-and-shoot reflexes honed by Call of Duty aren't easily applicable to optimizing aid distribution in Haiti.

So maybe gaming can't save the world... or can it?

Another video about gaming that was making the rounds a few weeks ago was a presentation by Carnegie Mellon professor and ex-imagineer Jesse Schell. It touched on the potential of merging gaming (or at least, game-like reward systems) with real-world activities. The idea is that everyone knows how to brush their teeth, but instead of trusting that a lifetime of oral health is it's own reward you actual give out points for it. Essentially, you're creating a token economy. Incidentally, the aforementioned Mr. Robb was very complementary, saying that the presentation showed a good way of marrying action to economic consequences.

Xbox 360 Games - E3 2010 - Guitar Hero 5

It's a little breathtaking. Like most "big picture" thought pieces, there are a million "yeah, buts" that are easy to come up with. However, the underlying message of giving real-life rewards and transparent economic rewards for real-world game playing is a compelling one. I'm not sure if I want Corporate America monitoring my oatmeal consumption, though.

Perhaps that's part of the impetus behind Urgent Evoke, another of McGonigal's efforts to change the world through gaming. It's sort of like Superstruct on steroids. The problems are more closely linked to real-world situations and players are asked to contribute more time and effort. However, it's backed by $500,000 from the World Bank. Rewards include internships, scholarships or even start-up money for the "winners" who can come up with workable ways of making the real-world a better place to live. Another great part of this effort is that it builds an instant community of like-minded individuals who are collectively brainstorming solutions to problems like food security. Considering that research shows that social interaction is the most appealing part of gameplay for most people, I'd definitely consider the effort an epic win.

Blogging elsewhere

2010-05-02T13:05:00.001-07:00

FYI -- I've been blogging elsewhere, for clients and company:

MWW's Norpac team blog - PRPOV
Hubspan's Hub Bub Blog

Games, Psychology and the Benevolent Mob or The Myth of the Cognitive Surplus

2008-07-30T22:20:00.001-07:00

The appeal of crowdsourcing is obvious. The idea that almost any task can be entrusted to a self-organized community of volunteers or outsourced to engaged, enthusiastic individual workers is a revelation for the business community. The ramifications for the individuals, who will have the opportunity to translate what they love into something that is both marketable and beneficial to others, could be groundbreaking.

Clay Shirky articulates a vision of crowdsourcing that looks like a true information age revelation: social software (the applications that enable online collaboration) will extract the last bit of value from a combination of human passion and online interaction. Shirky recently discussed the idea that there is a "cognitive surplus." This is the idea that "top-down" media - media without an interactive component - does not allow people to exercise their natural impulse to create and contribute to the shared experience. It's too mediated.

Luis von Ahn's idea of "Games with a Purpose"(PDF warning) is not dissimilar. His idea is that we can utilize the idle moments of human leisure as if they were spare computing cycles (much in the way that Folding@Home uses idle Playstation 3s to further cancer research).

One related topic that is not discussed as part of this debate is the increasing ease of access to high-qualtiy educational resources. You can now find PDFs of coursework from MIT, lectures from Berkeley and tens of thousands of free books online - all for free. When combined with Games with a Purpose and crowdsourcing, widespread access to education raises the stakes - the games can become more complex and the crowd grows. It is quite possible these days for professors to teach most first year college courses solely with materials that are freely available to anyone online.

It isn't hard to imagine that crowdsourcing, tied with the ease of disseminating educational materials on the Internet will change the world as we know it. If there is a cognitive surplus, and there are millions (billions?) of would-be problem-solvers, virtual volunteers and altruistic academics out there, then the social web could offer a radical solution to many of the world's problems.

The Myth of the Cognitive Surplus

There's just one problem with this idea: the cognitive surplus isn't going away. In fact, it might be getting bigger. Shirky points out near the end of this video, the technologies underlying this revolution can be used for good or ill. The classic example is a group of young girls who acted as a pro-anorexia support group on a magazine's web forum.

But one thing he doesn't mention is time collectively sunk into watching YouTube videos (the non-educational ones, mostly), looking at LOLcats (although they're cute) or wading through the endless noise of most social networking sites (Twitter!).

It's easy to want self-organizing systems and games with a purpose to make the world a better place. But given a choice between mindless entertainment and something that takes effort (like thinking hard about a problem, learning a new skill, etc.), most people will stick with stupid.

Do I have any evidence of this beyond a few anecdotes? Sure I do.

Item 1: Here is a graph comparing the readership of ReadWriteWeb, a blog that explains exciting new developments in cutting edge online technologies, with that of Valleywag, a blog that explains exciting new developments in the personal lives of people who are somewhat connected to the technology industry.

Item 2: Here is a chart that's enough to make any optimistic humanist shed a tear. This shows visitors to The Hunger Site, a Web site that lets people contribute money to feed the hungry simply by clicking on some ads. But that site's demographics plae in comparison to Pornotube a Web site whose name leaves little the imagination. Notice a trend?

Item3: 4chan, the birthplace of Rickrolling. Need I say more?

Are people inclined to spend their time on activities that benefit us all? Judge for yourself.

So what's the solution? Is there a way to tap the surplus and unleash what many of us believe is the true power of inter-networked technologies?

There is hope much of the contemporary research on happiness has concluded that while we don't always do what makes us happy, effortful tasks are more rewarding in the long term that idle leisure. Also, more crowdsourcing/collaborative endeavors are popping up everyday, so what remains then is to find a way to get people motivated in the right direction.

That's what I hope to explore in my next few posts. These are big topic to handle, so they'll be split up into parts. This is Part 1: The Introduction

Part 1: YouTube and Utility - how the findings of positive, cognitive and behavioral psychology translate into the way we work and play in our daily lives... and how we can use these findings to make a change for the better. Also, an appearance by my cat.

Part 2: Games People Should Play - how integrating games into our everyday lives will make it easier for us to achieve our goals and make even the most menial tasks more enjoyable.

Full disclosure: I haven't had a chance to read "Here Comes Everybody." Instead of that, I've been brushing up on my positive psychology (so you don't have to). I have however, read several of Shirky's Internet Writings and viewed some of his lectures that are available online.

A change of focus or return to form

2008-07-18T08:57:00.000-07:00

On this blog I've concentrated thus far on topics that are quite popular.

Web 2.0, social networking, and the like are so popular that they've become passé to blog about. The Semantic Web, virtual worlds and open standards are all getting there. So what is the value of one more voice in the crowd?

If you are blogging simply to contribute your two cents or to weigh in on the topic du jour, then blogging will still hold great value to you. The point of social media, after all, is that it takes our electronic conversations into the realm of mass media that was once occupied by newspapers, radio and television.

But simply because the barrier to entry is lower for blog entries doesn't mean they deserve less thought. Microblogging/lifestreaming is a prime example: such tools facilitate instant communication with friends you'll never meet about things you'd never really care to say in person. Facebook is a communication utility without any utility beyond playing Scrabble. Most social networking blogs end up containing all the news not fit for print. This is what happens when you forget yourself and try to fit in with the mavens of the world-formerly-known-as-Web 2.0.

My expertise with internet technology begins and ends with a Cisco Certified Networking Associate course taken immediately after I graduated from high school. I'm not a member of the blogerati, but like most of them I am a prosumer when it comes to technology on "teh internets."

So from now on i won't be using this blog to weigh in on the newest bright shiny thing that shows up in my own tiny corner of the web. I'll stop talking about FreindFeed and mention Twitter only when forced. I won't try to beat the blogerati to the story anymore, because that only matters if you have pageviews and advertisers. I have neither.

I will, however, be talking about what I love: using technology, research, and insight to point geeks towards goals that might improve all of our lives. This is because I sincerely believe that it will talk an awful lot of time, effort, and a few geeks to save the world. By sticking to what I know, I'll be able to write about what I love. That is something that might not save the world, but it certainly does this geek a world of good.

Things That I Already Thought Of: Update

2008-04-21T23:52:00.001-07:00

Over the last year, I've talked about a couple of issues that I thought should be addressed. I've also brought up a few ideas that I was hoping someone would work on. Here's an update:

Back in January, I said that laser pointers/dazzlers would become a security issue for the airline industry. Exhibits A and B.
Back in March, I said that if I was a patent troll, I would patent "a system for purchasing goods in virtual worlds." Looks like someone got the memo.
I also was going to write about the "return of the homepage" some time ago, but... well, I had some stuff to do. Google is trying to make your iGoogle page a one-stop social networking shop, but I think this is kind yawn-inducing news. Social networking features are already built into everything, so why not your personalized Google page? Gmail+Gchat are the most ubiquitous social networking tools that I use, but no one thinks of that stuff as social networking technology (well, almost no one). When you think about it, every site requires an e-mail account to report back to for registration purposes. That's essentially OpenID without the security. Chat is something that everyone uses all the time to communicate with each other. Every social networking site will probably have their own chat client soon, but if the IM clients maintain their trend towards interoperability, the site-based chat will fall out of favor. I'm just waiting for Android to integrate my cell contacts and make things more location-aware. Of course, since you can already add OpenID and OpenSocial to any website, there's essentially nothing keeping someone from giving all of these social networks "the bird" and taking their social graph of the network grid. Just imagine a return to 1997 where everyone had a Geocities page, but this time with their own social networking tie-ins. Try monetizing that.

Are Cell Phone Signals the New Lead Paint? (Answer: No)

2008-04-20T21:13:00.001-07:00

The meme that cell phone signals cause cancer just doesn't want to die. Despite a lack of a ny consensus among the medical community, many people are convinced that cell phones are the most dangerous thing on the planet.

What's worse, some people are now singling out Wi-Fi signals. A short background: Wi-Fi uses much less energy than your cell phone. What's more, despite being bathed in cell phone signals 24 hours a day, the town of Sebastopol, Calif., decided that Wi-Fi was too dangerous for their city.

I understand that people are concerned about very concerned about their personal health and pollution. However, WI-Fi is really a non-issue when you talk about health problems on a large-scale. Below is a list of some real environmental issues that threaten everyone's health. Perhaps the good people of Sebastopol can look into the subjects below?

Declining fertility rates caused by pollution, plastics and pesticides. In fact, hormone-mimic agents are disrupting human and animal reproductive systems worldwide. This may not seem like a huge deal, but hormones cause more problems at low levels of exposure than at high levels. When you consider that these agents can be found everywhere from Antarctica to thousands of feet up in the Himalayas, you realize that this is most likely a long-term problem.
Normal, everyday "safe" plastics may actually cause cancer.
Unsanitary conditions at factory farms turn out to be great breeding grounds for antibiotic-resistant staph or MRSA.
"Green" ethanol isn't.
Artificial sweeteners such as Splenda don't break down in the environment. While this may not seem like a big deal, but this is another example of introducing persistent agents into the environment without knowing the long-term effects.
Water pollution is a huge problem that is often glossed over when people talk about environmental problems. From the disappearing salmon in California, to dead zones in the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico, pollution in aquatic ecosystems worldwide are not only threatening our future food supply, but also our health.

There are a lot of good ideas about how to get individuals to reduce their environmental impact. But almost all of these efforts have been directed at reducing energy use, which ties in to global warming.

I suspect that this is because global warming has been an "umbrella issue" that can be used to help address deforestation, fossil fuel use and a large number of other environmental problems. But until people are educated about the long-term repercussions of real environmental problems - and are able to separate the science from the superstition - we won't be able to address environmental problems in a common sense manner.

Coming up next: More Things I Already Thought Of, A Sustainable Approach to Popularity, and Map Porn

Q: Why Do Real People Not Have Time For Social Media? A: Because it's F'ing Boring!

2008-04-16T23:26:00.001-07:00

After tonight's episode of South Park, my girlfriend asked me how the internet worked. During my hour-long response to her question (sometime during my naunced description of the Data Transport layer of the OSI Model), I noticed that she had passed out.

This reminded me of a similar experience that occurred while reading a ReadWriteWeb post about how social media bloggers/early adopters were not "real people." They even included some pictures which proved that most people who use social media obsessively have been trapped in little boxes and can only communicate in 140 characters or less (look at the post if you don't understand what I'm saying). The point of the post was essentially this: there are only about 250 that care about the latest social media news (oh wait, that was Scoble). Okay, the point was that social media takes too much time for people to really get involved. Bollocks, I say. Here are the real reasons why real people don't get more deeply involved with social media:

The technology doesn't have staying power. Despite some people's hopes that the internet will make them effectively immortal, there's a huge amount of turnover among social media companies, let alone technologies. People were talking about blogs going extinct, but what about Twitter? What, you thing that is going to be around in 10 years? I'll go even farther than that: lifestreaming apps are the bad 80's hair of Web 2.0 technology. Five years from now we'll all be like: "Remember when Twitter was cool?"
Social media isn't new. Social media is a return to the good old days, when content and communication were one in the same. I don't have any more time to explain this, read it here.
Most of us aren't interesting enough to warrant a 24/7 life stream. Back when cell phones initially became popular, everyone know that one guy who was always on the cell phone. The thing is, there was never anything interesting for them to say. They were just fascinated by the fact that they had a cell phone. This phenomenon accounts for 90% of the posts on Twitter (I refuse to say "tweets").
Social media isn't about technology. It isn't about content. It's about socializing with your fellow human beings. If all of the above is true, then most people aren't getting it. Our primitive monkey brains make us feel good when we have positive interactions with other people. Great conversations and great experiences are things that technology should be enabling, not inhibiting. When you make it all about the Twitter stream, getting on Techmeme, or getting the latest invites you aren't just making yourself less social. When you focus on the mediated experience, you make your immediate experience less valuable.

Who really needs a new version of Firefox?

2008-04-08T17:03:00.001-07:00

Nobody, unless you care about web standards. Compliance to standards, incidentally, is rapidly becoming a necessity for every business, even Microsoft.

However, people are becoming more dependent on web services, as well. The only problem is that in order to access applications stored in the cloud, we're currently forced to go through clunky, unsecured browsers. Check out this RWW post on the subject.

Mobile Update - CTIA Edition

2008-04-05T03:31:00.001-07:00

One of the biggest eye-openers of this year's CTIA show was the number of smartphones that featured GPS built-in. These days, having a cell phone is a basic safety issue. After the death of James Kim, I saw why people might see GPS devices in a similar light. The Spot Messenger, for instance, was built with wilderness-survival scenarios in mind.

GPS tech seems to be moving from "preferred option" to "necessity" status rather rapidly, as indicated by reports that in the future, GPS will not only decrease aggregate fuel consumption (Treehugger coverage), but also save drivers money on insurance (GPS Obsessed coverage). Apparently, drivers who know where they are going are less anxious when driving - which may lead to fewer accidents.

Other CTIA Stuff

For the definitive coverage of CTIA 2008, see CNET's microsite.
For the short version, read this Wall Street Journal story.
BuddyFinder calls themselves the only free geo-tracking service.
BlackLine offers... more... geo-tracking. Eh.
One new startup unveiled at CTIA was Wuawee (TechCrunch's coverage here), another social network for your phone. The startup is based in Europe, and allows you to post to other social networks from your phone. For this, you pay the company a monthly fee. This seems a bit redundant to me, because most people have figured out by now that the social network that most people rely on is already contained in their cell phone and e-mail contacts. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that with the greater flexibility of Google's Android OS, there will be several open-source options for social network interoperability over the phone.
Garmin announced that their new GPS devices will be able to utilize Google Local Search to discover POIs, which is something that really should have been done at least a year ago. Everybody wins, with this. Users get the richness of constantly-updated POIs from a database that can draw on the entire web's resources, while Garmin can focus on keeping the most important real-time data (traffic, road closures, etc.) up to date.
AT&T launched their "AT&T Navigator" system to help you with your new GPS-enabled phone. No word on how soon before they switch over to Google Maps (c'mon, it's only a matter of time...)

Location-aware and mobile app updates

Check out Mashable's coverage of Loopt and Sniff, two similar yet different attempts to make phones more social. "Loopt" also describes how I feel after a night of heavy drinking. Sniff uses SMS messages to give you real-time feedback about another person's location, which would save me time when I'm trying to figure out which bar to go to on a Friday night. Loopt seems to have a better interface, integration with AIM, and backing from Verizon.
Use TwitterLocal to find out who in your area tweets [Mashable]... use Wikinear to find wiki articles about nearby places... use fullscreensearch to find anything anywhere [via GPS Obsessed]. Want to find out why Fire Eagle is so cool, when paired with third-party apps? Read this insightful commentary from the O'Reilly Radar.

Finally, read this story in Wired about the dangers of using freely available mobile apps to exercise your democratic rights.

Later today

2008-04-03T09:40:00.001-07:00

Later today I'll have a post about what I think is happening with open standards, social networks and mobile/location-aware technology. Also: the return of the homepage.

In the mean time, check out what I'm doing via FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/stephenandrewlynch

Designers Will Save the World - Bikes

2008-04-01T18:15:00.001-07:00

Here's an instance of "people power" technologies that have a use outside of hotel lobbies.

Underdeveloped countries have different troubles than you and I. While independent truckers are threatening to strike over high gas problems, one billion people live on less than a dollar a day.

While we're worrying about wealth, others are worrying about food and clean water.

In many places without an abundance of fuel or material goods, biking is the best way to travel. Much of this travel is dedicated towards procuring water or food from sources that could be miles away. So how do you make limited resources go the distance?

Check out these stories:

One that you may of heard of through a post on my old blog: the tricycle that purifies water as you ride (which still isn't as cool as the Dean Kamen distiller).
One that you probably haven't heard of: engineers from Rowan University attempting to make a pedal-powered grain crusher that will work with a large variety of bikes.

Also, don't forget to check out my previous bike-centric posts.

FF + Twitter: Recent Developments

2008-03-31T18:21:00.000-07:00

So, to continue a post from yesterday, how does FriendFeed avoid falling into the same trap as other "walled garden" social networking sites? Also, is Twitter really a mature communication tool (this is for my coworkers, who feel that tweets are part of the "tyrrany of the bored")?

I'll tackle the second question first. Everyone probably knows by now that there are a million ways to follow a conversation on Twitter. For those of you who are out of the loop, you have Quotably (above, coverage) for conversation tracking, hashtags for tagging twitter posts (see Brian Solis' coverage here), twemes for searching said tags and sleek front-end apps like Twirhl to wrap everything in one whole user-friendly package.

But what about FriendFeed, which was essentially a walled garden where you could go to look at (and comment on) social media activity, were limited in your ability to actually free yourself from another more-or-less static social networking website.

Last week, FriendFeed announced that users could send a Twitter reply whenever they used the built-in FF commenting system. This was important because 90% of the activity on FF came from Twitter, as ReadWriteWeb notes.

The maturation of Twitter is not without its potential pitfalls. The service still has lingering questions about its security and ability to handle large amounts of traffic. Also, there are already rumblings that the spam problem that have affected other sites will simply migrate to Twitter.

Not to mention the fact that Twitter itself is becoming a noisier channel as its use becomes more widespread. I was having a recent conversation about Twitter with my dad, and he turned the "If the news is important, it will find me" saying into "If what Robert Scoble says is important, it will find you." I haven't stopped following Robert Scoble, though.

But what about that walled-garden?

Well, now FF is offering an API that has already been introduced to an early version of social rss reader Favor.it. Over time this will lead to more applications that offer greater flexibility

But for now, everyone is predicting that blogs are rapidly becoming a thing of the past (even Bruce Sterling is getting in on the act). However there already seems to be some backlash against this meme.

In the mean time, there will be more and more complaints about having you social graph hosted on sites that you don't control. But API or no, the idea of having all of your social media tied to one place won't happen right away, and besides - the OpenID people have known for years that your identity is more than your social graph.

Until the semantic web community can make FOAF mature (or get anyone to use it on a large scale), we'll all be susceptible to Next Big Thing syndrome whenever someone releases an app that purports to make it easier to manage the distributed you. For instance, Ping.Fm is an app that lets you update your "status" messages across multiple platofrms. Despite the early excitement over Ping.fm, people are rapidly understanding that they want to do more than simply send update. They want to be able to see a global via of social networking activity via an aggregator, while still interacting with the web services that the aggregators are measuring.

Personally, I feel that a big part of the problem with the usability aspect of social networking technology is that we're more-or-less stuck in the browser for everything except chat. That's why I'm excited about the upcoming desktop FF app that TechCrunch and some others have reported. If social networks are really so important, why aren't they integrated into all of my applications?

Once this design issue is sorted out, I predict that more people will follow Scoble's lead and disappear from the blogosphere. Or maybe, just maybe, social networking will lose the geek mystique and become a normal part of everyone's life.

More on OpenSocial vs. Dataportability, why a distributed you (and a distributed Twitter!) is useful, and some stories that actually talk about how geeks could save the world.

FriendFeed, Twitter and a brief history of social media

2008-03-31T08:32:00.000-07:00

So what made me say that Twitter is the "real" social network? Why is FriendFeed so essential?

A lot of people have been talking about FriendFeed, Twitter and new developments in microblogging and lifestreaming tools over the last few days, but for the two or three people who don't already know what the big deal is about, I'll give you a summary.

A Brief History of Social Media

So a long time ago, there was no difference between the distribution channels for media and the communication channels used by the average person. In preliterate societies the "media" consisted of stories, songs and other types of information that were communicated from one person by word of mouth. Then around 30,000 years ago, someone started writing on cave walls.

It all went downhill after that. People began to rely on the written word, audio broadcasts and then finally moving images to communicate ideas to large groups of people. The channels of interpersonal communication became more and more seperate from the media distribution channels with each successive leap (print, radio and finally TV).

Why was this bad? One of the most important facets of any communication channel is the feedback loop that ensures that the communicator remains responsive to the communication environment. The more isolated communicators are from feedback, the easier it is for groupthink, top-down communication and other counterproductive behaviors to occur.

Over the last two decades, the internet has been the fastest-growing media distribution and communication channel. The convergence of media distribution and communication channels means that it is easier to provide feedback to media distributors. It's also easier to communicate with others and act as a member of the media yourself (and support/maintain the public sphere... but that's a different blog post).

So why do Twitter and FriendFeed make so much sense?

Over the last two weeks a number of applications which vastly enhance the functionality of Twitter as an asynchronus chat device.

Twitter already allows you a platform-independent chat capability and the "status/news feed" capability already offered by a number of services (Facebook, Google Talk, others).

FriendFeed provides the "news feed" functionality for a wide range of web services. It also allows you to comment on the activies of others.

If you think of Twitter as the communication channel (du jour) and FriendFeed as the medium through which you can most efficiently keep track of other peoples' media content, then think of the function that websites such as blogs, photoblogs, podcasts, etc. provide. Flickr, Seesmic and Wordpress are all media distribution channels for user-generated content (UGC).

Thus, the feedback loop is completed.

One of the challenges of this model is that FriendFeed replicates the functionality of the twitter "following" function. Its commenting systems is kind of redundant. It is also a "walled garden" - a site whose data is not free for use elsewhere. It's also not the most efficient way to interact with these sites that feature UGC.

That's where this past week's big updates come in. More on that later....

"Why didn't someone else think of that?"

2008-03-27T18:28:00.001-07:00

I recently ran across an old Inhabitat post that detailed plans for using revolving doors as "people power" generators. Karim Yergaliyev said that the idea was so obvious that it " makes you wonder why no one else has thought of it before."

Well, Karim Yergaliyev, I did think of it before. Of course, I'm not a designer, so I certainly couldn't do anything about it. I actually suggested it to my architect girlfriend, who said that it was kind of stupid, because "people power" collection is a very inefficient means of energy transer... but apparently Fluxxlab doesn't think so! I wish them success.

I had a similar reaction when I read about Neil Turok's TED wish that all of the opportunity-deprived children in Africa be given a chance to learn basic math. I personally felt that a good foreign policy initiative for America would be to educate and recruit some of the brightest minds from the poorest countries in the world as a kind of reverse Americorps. I thought it would work well, seeing as how America is known for being a country built by immigrants.

Supporting children in Africa is sort of like saving the rain forest - people don't like it because there isn't an immediate payoff. But any sane individual will recognize that there's too much potential there to be ignored.

Besides using people power from revolving doors and giving free education to African kids, here are some other ideas I've had that others should be developing:

A stationary bike that has a built-in charger for personal electronic devices
A widget that encrypts your iPhone using GPGP, in case you're subject to a search during a traffic stop/customs search (if you don't know about why this is important read this Techdirt post)
For patent trolls: a "system for purchasing goods in virtual worlds" would be a really good thing to patent right now

I'll explain this one - the big disconnect with virtual world advertising right now is that your virtual world advertising doesn't happen at the point-of-sale for any "real world" goods. I'm really surprised that there isn't an SL music store where you can listen to mp3s, buy them "in world," and have them downloaded onto your computer.

In praise of New World Notes... and some other Second Life stuff

2008-03-24T23:17:00.001-07:00

Although the often stellar ReadWriteWeb takes a shot at Second Life in a recent post, I want to highlight the font of SL knowledge that is New World Notes. They're the prime source for interesting tidbits on "in world" developments.

Check out the latest on SL interoperability (a key requirement, as I said before, for making SL more useful for people in RL):

Google Maps in-world mashup
Autocad in SL, in particular I think, threatens to make SL an useful design tool
This isn't an interoperability story, but the story about SL musicians taking over an unconnected social networking site is an interesting story of multi-platform network convergence
Finally, remember how I said that in-world gaming is going to be a necessary component of getting people interested in SL? People already call it a "game," so I give you VICE - essentially Combat Flight Simulator mashed up with SL

Also, here's a roundup of non-NWN virtual world news:

Mashable and the Talis guys caught on to the AI in SL story
Mashable (love those guys) highlighted Myrl, a social network for virtual world, uh, users. Kristen notes that it will soon support all of the virtual worlds build on OpenSim standard
GPS Obsessed profiles one of the (allegedly) largest collections of antique maps in the world, displayed in SL
TechCrunch and Mashable both profiled MyMiniLife (probably because of some good PR work - look at those ready-made virtual worlds!)

Footnote: I was rereading some of my old social psych books a week ago (I double-majored in PR and psych), and ran across some of the studies about attractiveness and persuasion. Given how little human brains have evolved (at least when it comes to decision-making) I wasn't incredibly shocked to see this bit of research.

Update: Check out this io9 post refuting the possibility that humans will ever creating a true "virtual earth."

Weekend roundup - random mobile news

2008-03-24T22:12:00.001-07:00

Unwired talks about the possibility of a clamshell iPhone.

Intel stretches wi-fi out to 60+ miles.

Bruno Guissani talks about something that enterprise companies have been discussing for a long time: femtocells in the home.

Google Maps now allows you to edit entries at will. Let the digital graffiti begin!

A deer now has his/her own geoblog. [via Beyond the Beyond]

Steve Jobs called for a new version of Flash for the iPhone; Adobe said "nuts"

Dell announced that it is reviving its handheld device line, which makes sense, as the migration from desktops to notebooks will probably by follow by a migration from notebooks to handhelds.

BTW, I have a Meraki repeater on the roof of my building, but the equipment is so unobtrusive that me and my roommates don't actually know where it was installed.

Weekend Update: Friend Feed, Mashable + Second Life

2008-03-16T23:18:00.000-07:00

FriendFeed

Louis Gray wrote about all the big-name bloggers who have joined FriendFeed. Scoble linked to it, and Duncan Riley hates it. But the real dialog? It was happening on FriendFeed itself (see pic).

The general consensus is that either FriendFeed has reached a tipping point... or jumped the shark. Everyone seems to be talking about this little aggregator at the moment, although no one cares to speculate about whether it will be around a few months from now.

----------

Mashable has a couple of articles this week talking about the goings-on in Second Life (a common topic of discussion for this blog).

First, they mention the RPI project to build a learning AI in Second Life -- news we covered here (see the end of the post). They give some more details on the project, so check it out.

Secondly, they predict that SL is doomed now that Philip Rosedale is stepping down as CEO. Their post makes a confusing allusion to the upcoming game Spore (which is the game du jour of the moment, but could end up being the next Daikatana), which doesn't really recognize the true potential of virtual worlds.

Don't think "the Sims," think "the Matrix"

As I discussed before, the potential of virtual worlds isn't in creating "other" places for people to go online, but rather to create an interactive digital overlay for the real world. There are already numerous instances of this, such as augmented reality gaming, mixed-reality events, and even mashups that leverage Google Earth/Maps data. The increasing interest in interoperability between virtual worlds and wearable computing technologies indicates that the potential for a successful virtual world will only increase in the near future. Read my coverage of this issue here.

SL still has some ways to go; Sun's MPK20 has some advantages, in that it seems to be better at integrating out-of-world data sources (Firefox and various other open-source applications). But Second Life still has time to make itself more relevant in the real world. That would be something truly special.

via Digg: Joongel plugin: Efficiently navigate social media sites

2008-03-13T13:53:00.001-07:00

Tired of using old-school search hacks to search Digg, Del.icio.us, etc? (see http://tinyurl.com/ywyqp2)Check out Joongel. The plugin compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

read more | digg story

Semantic Web Alert!

2008-03-13T09:30:00.001-07:00

...and the walls came a' tumblin down.

This really is a game-changer. I bet the Talis guys are going to be grinning ear-to-ear when they hear this.

UPDATED: Mobile Mondays... on Wednesday

2008-03-12T21:37:00.001-07:00

So I've missed a lot of mobile news so far; maybe if I had read this post from Mashable I'd have gotten this post up earlier.

This week in mobile computing

Application News

After the announcement of Yahoo!'s Fire Eagle make a splash early on, more wireless positioning apps came out, boosted by WPS and GPS news related to the iPhone SDK launch. Loki has been around for some time now, giving anyone with an internet browser and access to wi-fi GPS-like capabilities. The parent company, Skyhook Wireless also enables the iPhone's Location button.

NavXS hasn't been getting as much coverage (except for my favorite GPS-centric blog, GPS Obsessed)... but until Loki/Fire Eagle gets mashed up with Upcoming/My Maps/etc., it's way more personalized (and thus, more interesting). It'd be great for a social recommendation startup like MyStrands to partner with them to make the mobile web more marketable and human-scale. I mean, if I'm by a restaurant that one of my friends recommends, I want to know.

Fire Eagle had a widget out after a few days.

Updated: ...and there are more iPhone GPS options coming. Look for GPS to become ubiquitous in the near future.

Platform News

TechMeme carried an Inquirer story that says the iPhone will be going x86. Not as cool as the supercomputing thin client I reported on a little while ago, but still interesting.

Usability

Do yourself a favor and read this post about some awesome mobile UI that will (hopefully) be available in a few years. Not to mention all of the startups looking on image recognition software. It'd be useful to Evernote.

Security

Wired's Threat Level Blog had a few good stories this week. First of all, the memory-freeze passkey hack can be disabled more-or-less by turning off the "Boot from USB" option in the bios of your machine. You can hack pacemakers using wi-fi, too. I don't think that second item is a good thing.

Also, GPS units don't really delete your data, which I foresee leading to much embarrassment for someone at some point in the future.

Finally, some geek made a Bluetooth fob for his laptop, which is geekier than the Portable Apps USB drive I use as my personal operating system (more on that next week!).

The Big Picture

They're talking about serious stuff at the Where 2.0 Conference, like using twitter for disaster/emergency response and activism. No, it's not just for party planning. Tim O'Reilly's Radar has been reporting on this for a while.

ReadWriteWeb says that the Geo-Web is growing... fast.

Updated: RWW with more Minority Report-ish UI goodness and an iPhone-future post that mentions a lot of the topics covered in this blog post. It's basically this: your iPhone will be able to do everything you want it to do. However, they neglect to mention multi-sync capabilities that would get my USB-based OS to work with my iPhone. Guess we'll have to wait for that from Microsoft.

Off-topic: Turing Tuesdays

Check out this crazy story about AI learning in Second Life [via New World Notes]

Meraki my housey

2008-03-03T13:19:00.000-08:00

Right now, a crack team from Meraki and AT&T should be at my house installing a monster transmitter to boost the free wi-fi signals in the Outer Mission area. I'll let you know if there's an improvement in service later on today.

Wikia almost nails it

2008-02-28T22:36:00.000-08:00

Wikia released an open source social networking platform. Too bad it requires integration with a mediawiki install (i.e., is not distributed.

If only someone could realize that OpenID is the ultimate social networking platform.

An open-source, distributed social networking platform with integrated rss feeds... I don't have to tell you what that would mean.

Interesting analysis - as always - via ReadWriteWeb.

China, Cablegate, censorship

2008-02-27T22:44:00.001-08:00

Everyone keeps on talking about a recent Atlantic article that mentions China's plans to lower the Great Firewall as a Olympic-timed PR stunt.

As an Atlantic subscriber, what stood out to me was that the author mentioned the location of every single undersea internet cable connected to China. This isn't a huge deal by itself, as the FLAG cables can be easily found. But c'mon, if Greenpeace can afford a ship, why can't the EFF?

We're sick... of Facebook!

2008-02-27T21:04:00.000-08:00

Diaryland. Livejournal. Friendster. MySpace. Facebook.

The above is a list of social networks that that I've used an since discarded (mostly). This is in addition to numerous message boards, mailing lists, and game-associated chat rooms that I was a part of at one time.

All of the above are still around, as well. This last point seems to have left many in the Web 2.0 community confounded.

The latest meme floating around the top blogs is that Facebook is dead because its usage statistics have been down lately. Fox News even invoked the specter of AOL (oops, left it off the list) when talking about Facebook.

While the Web 2.0 speculation industry is still handicapping the personal data silos, I mean social networking sites, let us not forget that there are several factors that are shaping the social network wars:

Social networking by itself has a limited draw
Locked-in proprietary personalization features increase this draw. As I've said before, most of my friends still use MySpace because it lets them put music from their favorite bands on their profile pages. Now, after tackling the Flickr market (by expanding its users' photo capacity), Facebook is now tackling music (MySpace) and film (YouTube).
Virtually every site is adding some social networking features
There is a limited amount of time that people are willing to devote to any given social network (unless you're Robert Scoble).
There is a gap between the amount of time you can devote to these social networking sites. See Steve Rubel's post on the subject. Even Robert Scoble, who's maxed out his Facebook friends and is rumored to read over 600 RSS feeds per day, wants the sites to get better so he can see his kid more often. It's been old hat for years to talk about what an attention-sink social networking has become.
Lots of sites are trying to develop a user interface or some other effective system to make people more productive when they're networking. I'm actually getting aggregator fatigue. After FriendFeed (which I actually use), there's Iminta and a million other variations on the same thing.
People want social networks, don't want lock-in, and are increasingly becoming comfortable with being socially open online (I'll talk about why the companies should be more open later this week).

With totally open networks (or just open standards) we wouldn't have most of the problems with data portability.

The other problem is the user interface. At Read/Write Web, they think that building the right kinds of filters will solve the problem.

Personally, I think this is a classic 80/20 data-representation problem. There's too much noise in the social networking space, it's too easy to introduce more noise into the system, and ultra-aggregators like Friend Feed just make things noisier.

Think of it this way: importing all of your Facebook contacts into FriendFeed puts a lot of information in front of you. If you could add more information from Facebook beyond the News Feed, would you even have room for your Twitter/Amazon/Netflix/YouTube data?

Personally, I think that we need to move beyond the "Ruby look" of endless vertically-arrayed lines of text and cute-looking buttons. Falling back on my previous field of study (psychology), I can't understand why we haven't come up with a more human-appropriate method of arranging data.

More about UI later.

(Meant to post this yesterday, but I'm fighting off the flu, so I might be posting very much over the next few days. Hopefully I can put up another post about Web 2.0 openness and a Cablegate followup by tomorrow)

Mobile Mondays + Updates

2008-02-25T22:13:00.000-08:00

Since this blog has been decidedly mobile-focused lately, I've decided to start having what I call "Mobile Mondays," where I summarize the most interesting mobile/geoweb news of the previous week. I hope some people find it entertaining.

This week we have a few updates on past coverage as well, so without further ado...

Welcome to Mobile Monday!

Last week saw a design on the Yanko Design website (that I mentioned last week) get some major exposure from Wired's Gadget Lab, CrunchGear, and some of the other high-profile gear blogs. The posts generally repeat what I said last week in my post: this is totally cool and should be implemented immediately.

Mashable is talking about the odds of the mobile web turning into the Next Big Thing. There's apparently a symposium on wearable computing coming up.

Furthermore, there was more noise about GPS-enabled advertising, social networking on the mobile phone, and LoJack for the iPhone (which is just about the only way to "secure" an iPhone.

There were also two potentially huge developments that sort of integrate the virtual and the real everyday existence:

One was pointed out by Jason Calacanis. It's called PMOG, and it sort of turns the web into a something akin to a MUDD-based RPG environment, but with a decidedly more mainstream flavor (no D or D). What's really cool about this post is it mentions Third Voice, an early net app that I have been trying to remember the name of for the longest time with no luck. It's sort of what I meant in an earlier post when I alluded to using a persistent annotation system to facilitate communication that was restricted to a location, but not a time frame.

Go read his post, it's great.

The other development that no one has really paid any attention to comes to us via the folks at ZDNet's Open Source blog. They mention that Second Life has come out with a mobile client, open source code, and a patch that lays the groundwork for a more realistic UI. If you don't know why I think this is interesting, then you should read my post about what would make SL more like the MetaVerse.

Blue Mars looks like it may have SL beat on the casual gaming angle. Look for both of them to try to add social networking features/integration in the next few months.

On top of all this, I may finally have a reason to get a PSP (well, almost).

More later on how the "Attention Gap" meme is getting mainstream play in a big way and what Web 2.0 businesses should be learning from the Web 2.0 community (and Wikileaks).

Good Riddance!

2008-02-13T22:29:00.000-08:00

Check out this article which outlines why the flatweb's days are numbered. It also includes some not-so-subtle plugs for Google's barcodes and even Bug Labs.

Also, they don't mention it, but there's a series of Creative Commons-licensed t-shirts that use those barcodes.

Edit: Forget Overlay.Tv its Overlay.World.

Give Google feedback, they'll thank you by giving out your e-mail address

2008-02-12T18:09:00.000-08:00

Appearently, Google thinks that all the comments shared by users of their Experimental Search options should be open to everyone. That's good, except that most users who post feedback are identified in Google Group posts by their e-mail addresses.

Check out the spam fodder here.

Cablegate 2008 Roundup

2008-02-11T18:26:00.000-08:00

Security guru Bruce Schneider spreading unfounded rumors!

Confusion reigns!

CrunchGear jumping on the bandwagon!

Slashdot to the rescue!

The wonks weigh in!

Updated- MySpace is dead (and so is Facebook, Plaxo, etc.)

2008-02-11T18:14:00.000-08:00

A lot of people have been discussing Google's Social Graph API since it was announced last week. Most of these are the well-connected, well-informed Web 2.0 mavens that we're all so fond of hearing from. These are the people who thought Facebook was worth more than Ford, the people who Twitter endlessly, actually use Jaiku, etc.

What's really funny about the Social Graph API was that it coincided with me spending the weekend with friends who aren't involved in either the IT or PR industry. These friends all use the same social network: MySpace. While I listened to them joke about varous people's MySpace pages I felt a strange sort of disorientation sweep over me.

I thought, don't these people know about Facebook? Don't they know that MySpace doesn't have an open developer API yet? Don't they hate the interface? Don't they want to play Scrabulous!?

But no, they don't. Given the amount of time that they have invested into the MySpace segment of their social graph and music-centeredness of their social circle, there's not really a compelling reason to switch.

This brings up the reason that the Social Graph API is really important. It'll make it possible for people to really stay connected, instead of fragmenting into an endless number of closed-off niches. It's like making a restaurant that's so hard to get into that after a while no one bothers to try anymore.

So, back to the social graph.

There's some really nuanced/involved discussion here and here. O'Reilly is still talking about the "internet operating system" where a week ago there was a lot of discussion about whether OpenID and Dataportability still have legs (at least until OpenID announced that Google, Verisign, Microsoft, etc. were joining its board of directors).

A few people whined about privacy.

Yeah, like Google would put your privacy at risk. (Update: better diversify your accounts, btw)

There are a few things that I thought of shortly after listening to Paul Saffo's Long Now lecture on predicting over the long term. I tried making my own predictions about the Social Graph API, and came up with the following:
1. This will, over the next few years pear down the unecessarily high number of individual social networks data silos out there.
2. It will give users more control/personalization and make things easier
3. It will eliminate the need for web pages, especially for social networking sites

Huh?

You heard me. One of the thing Paul Saffo talked about was low-cost, low-powered sensors that could be networked. He figures that robotics will be taking off big time in the next 100 years.

Personally, I think the elimination of web pages makes a ton of sense.

First of all, web pages are an archaic interface based on a simulacrim of a 2D technology that was only really built for information storage not information use and interchange. Paper is meant to be written on once. It's not dynamic. Social relationships are dynamic and based on the interaction of people, not just the storage/display of electronic media. The guys at LIFT08 have it wrong when they say that e-mail is the core of what we do online. What we do is the core of what we do. It's time to take life online.

This might put a few people out of work, btw, but I think it's for the best.

Secondly, having a social web that is as portable as you are makes the whole monetization thing a lot more straightforward. The dirty little secret of social media sites is that they really don't monetize as well as advertised (see also: Facebook valuation). Infact, the whole flatweb (2D webpage-based web) has the same problem.

C'mon, CBS has already figured this out (with Loopt). Why can't the VCs?

Also, it makes the web more user-friendly (right now, it isn't). Why should we have to guess which social network silo will be around tomorrow? Why should we have to hunt for newer, shinier things all the time?

A lot of people are starting to figure this local, mobile web thing out. iFob is a good step. Seero is cool, but if I want to find out what's happening around me, I'd rather go outside.

Thatsmymouse gives you a good idea of how this decentralized/mobile/AR web could store information/enable local communication. This same concecept has been around for ages...

It doesn't have the time-bending/Long Tail element of traditional comment systems (that'll come later when we get Thatsmydelicious/Diggmymouse/Thatsmyning), but it's far more utilitarian for a decentralized/mobile interface.

We'll need standards that to make the whole thing useable....

Update: Looks like there are lots of key indicators that the whole "Attention Gap" meme is really taking off. I think this is the first time that a "Dancing with the Stars" contestant has spoken out on the issue.

Also: wearable computing gets a couple of bumps.

Update2: Maybe I should've retitled my post. If it wasn't for Scrabulous, would Facebook have any users at all?

(I kid.)

Google = maybe not evil, undersea internet cable sabotage = evil

2008-02-01T17:39:00.000-08:00

As more reasons for a distributed, open social graph/identity and networking paradigm were reported over the last 24 hours, I couldn't help but smile and think about how wonderful this new Google API for the social graph.

It's great for Google, because it erode's Microsoft/Facebook's ability to lock-in customers. It's great for everyone else because we can do what we please with our own information.

Maybe social networking might start being useful. Now, Google should try to make Gmail more secure.

Totally unrelated: who wants to bet that the three internet cables cut over the last three days are somehow related?

China mobile, shine-a mobile

2008-01-31T18:54:00.000-08:00

Forget that flap out China Mobile spying on people using their cellphones. That's old hat, and alternatives like Skype aren't any more secure.

So as an alternative, I give you...

The best cell phone surrveillance tricks

1. Finding nukes.

2. Ubiquitous surrveillance cameras.

3. For the Mac users: iSpy.

Bonus: Since it's so easy for anyone to build a cluster supercomputer (even from spare parts). There might finally be a use for cell phones as thin clients, so you might find a use for your cell phone's processing power beyond the alarm clock function. What's more, you can leverage any of the above with imagery-recognition tech in a variety of ways to make for some really interesting combinations.

Of course, none of this makes us any safer, and the countermeasures are laughably easy to acquire.

The internet: becoming dangerously... useful

2008-01-31T18:03:00.000-08:00

Please note: the following post is the result, I fear, of reading too many TechDirt entries in one sitting. Let this serve as a warning to all the other bloggers out there:

Forget the luddites. Ignore the hiccups. Accept that the online authorities you've trusted for so long... might just be wrong.

A new web is coming. A web where distributed, local technology will make technology a life-enhancer rather than a time-waster.

It's coming because it's needed - people realize that they don't want somenoe else controlling their identity or their data. It's coming because it's necessary - the power of the web is becoming more ubiquitous than ever, and the old infastructure is going to need some changes to accomodate it. It's coming, finally, because all the old myths are being busted and the basic, human-scale-centeredness of the web is becoming more apparent each day.

Oh, there'll be some hard times ahead. There'll be people who don't get it, don't want it, and don't like it.

There'll be the usual complaints about privacy, even though the tipping point on that issue was reached long ago.

New media post next week.

Roundup: Wooden Bikes, E-waste and a fake that's better than the real

2008-01-28T17:30:00.000-08:00

Check out Guitar Zeros.

Coworker quote: "With guys like these out there, I can't believe that we haven't saved the world already."

Important Issue Alert: How to make e-waste recycling more efficient.

Lots of companies are moving towards company-wide recylcing policies, but what do we do with all the stuff that ends up in developing nations?

DIY Bikes I: Cuban "motorbike."

DIY Bikes II: All-natural.

I can't wait to see this on The Register's "Rise of the Machines" page.

Debates We Should Be Having: Security

2008-01-27T00:34:00.000-08:00

Forget the national security debates - what fashion-accessory-cum-personal-security-device is right for you? For those of you looking for the latest and greatest to protect your sexy ass, check out these high-fashion personal protection devices. Which one fits your style?

Avurt IM-5

Taser C2

Pepper spray ring

Not to mention these.

How to make a virtual world successful

2008-01-23T18:20:00.000-08:00

As the virtual world with the largest amount of money sunk into it by non-virtual and non-venture companies, you would think that Second Life would be the best platform to give us the Neil Stevenson-inspired "Metaverse" that we all longed for.

Unfortunately, it's not. Although there are numerous criticisms of Second Life, I'm not going to jump on the usual bandwagons of "you can't monetize it, no one's there, and the only people who are there are perverts."

No, the problem is that Second Life provides you with a taste of the capabilities of virtual worlds to come, while the built-in restrictions limit people from exploiting the real potential of virtual worlds: seemless integration of social networking, gaming, and applications that move computer applications from the 2D "desktop" paradigm.

So what would an ideal virtual world look like?

Well, you already have an avatar, which is essentially analogous to an account with any number of social media sites. There is increasingly a movement towards portability between sites, so having a single repository for all of your information (and a single, integrated interface) doesn't seem too far off. There's no reason you shouldn't have a Facebook-like tool to connect you with any of your "friends" all over the world. Having a single platform for your social graph would vastly simplify interface and interoperability issues.

Secondly - gaming. Most SLers refuse to call SecondLife a game, but numerous bloggers and new media types constantly refer to SL as just that. What's more important, I think is that SL is based on gaming technology. While I'm not saying that SL is simply a replacement for ARQuake (or just Quake in general), but rather that the inersection of online networking and online gaming is closer than all of us think. There is already a SL Hockey League, but lets face it: SL gaming is never going to approach EA Sports-level quality, so why not integrate EA Sports into the platform?

Thirdly, the greatest potential of virtual worlds is that we can now interact with data like never before. Take, for instance, how people have found ways to use the Wii controller interfaces in Second Life. This is great, but the sad fact is that almost all of our applications still operate using interfaces based on the television, punch card, or desk analogies. No matter what folks do with Aero or neat Linux implementations, most of our applications are only working with two dimesions.

So what are the drawbacks of SL's current model? Here's what I think: lack of openness/data portability restrictions, scalability, and the current technical limits of today's computing platform.

The first two can be tackled together. When someone else owns everything you make (and Linden Labs makes all the rules, don't you forget that), what's your incentive to innovate? Part of this will be solved with open standards which will, incidentally, solve the scalability program by linking to sites without the bandwidth and avatar limits that Second Life imposes on its citizens. Furthermore, this will make it easier to port more applications and more interesting data into virtual worlds, making them more useful. Having these virtual worlds more widely available might lead to some problems, but it would get a whole bunch more people involved. Imagine, for example, porting your social graph from Facebook/Meebo/Plaxo and integrating that into SL.

The technical limits question isn't one of computing power, I think, but rather of environmental power. Check out this article from Earth2Tech: you'll be surprised how much electricity the average SLer may be using.

All in all, I think that virtual worlds will become more interesting the the coming years, once they've tackled the many important issues listed above?

Another update

2008-01-19T15:28:00.000-08:00

The Meraki toolbar is back up, this time with yelp reviews for local restaurants. They're giving you the name of the restaurant, how many stars it received on average, and an estimated walking time.

This is both insanely useful and ironic, since Meraki is funded by Google and they're featuring a Yahoo!-owned site's content. Perhaps this is a paid placement?

Also, another free distributed wifi service is rolling out in S.F. Check out TechCrunch for more details.

2008-01-17T13:04:00.000-08:00

Update

Meraki, the free wifi provider that I reported on last month is no longer running ads at the top of its users browser windows.

I wonder what made them change?

2008-01-16T19:20:00.000-08:00

This blog isn't worth the (digital) paper it's printed on.

Check out Chris Andersen's blog post about paper magazines being more eco-friendly than digital media. Is this an isolated post, or a sign of digital pushback?

People seem to be recognizing that TechCrunch/Scoble/Mashable/etc. always seem run the same stuff. Arrington loves to trash the paper media (and even CNET), but who would want his drivel written down? The New York Post is trashy, but they aren't worse than Gawker. You could do a 100-word summary of what they write about every day and it wouldn't amount to much.

Not only The stories they report on aren't very important, but I'm not sure the blogger advertising model can support too many more SocialWeb2.0 bloggers. I'm pretty sure that market is saturated, but the low barrier to entry makes everyone and their grandma (and me) think they could/should start blogging.

It's not a big secret is that most bloggers aren't what most people would characterize as good journalists... and what's with the media model online? Who clicks on web ads anyway?

Tom Clancy, futurist

2008-01-02T20:12:00.000-08:00

Is it just me, or does the airline industry need to read more Tom Clancy?

In his book Debt of Honor, he has a rogue airline pilot fly a commercial airliner into a joint session of Congress, thus predicting 9/11.

In that same book, CIA agents use a laser dazzler to crash a Boeing 747 while it is coming in for a landing. With the increasing proliferation of dazzlers on everything from Hummers to Chinese tanks, I really hope Boeing and Airbus are paying attention to the security-industrial complex's latest moves.

Friendly skies, indeed!

Sucks

2007-12-19T00:17:00.000-08:00

Adding the Hype Machine to your Reader can really ruin the mobile experience. Can we get some filters please?

Anyway, is it just me, or does it seem like the latest round of startups all revolve around p2p video deliver? Seems like people are putting their faith in crumbs instead of the cloud!

Ah Ha!

2007-12-18T23:49:00.000-08:00

Now that Google has adapted almost their full range of apps to work on my Palm, I fear that Google Reader will take over my life.

New word alert: metaconomy, an economy built on indexing the content of the indexes (Google, etc.).

Btw, The Interet Archive is cool because their cache is saved forever. Can Google do this -- and then could someone write an app that compares the two?

Update: ISPs and ads

2007-12-12T18:47:00.000-08:00

Sorry I haven't posted in a while.

While everyone is getting up in arms about a Canadian ISP inserting content onto other peoples' pages, heavily Google-vested Meraki does the exact same thing, not only inserting content but also a Google search bar.

Not that I'm complaining, I use Google's Blogger service and Meraki to run this blog, but I think there's a bit of a double-standard there.

Hidden Costs of OLPC

2007-09-12T18:35:00.000-07:00

Okay, so it's been quite a while since I've posted, due to my new apartment's lack of broadband of any kind. Not any free signal to steal, either.

Suddenly deprived of my favorite time sink, I've taken to reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond (or as I like to call it "The book that tries to explain why the Third World got screwed over so badly").

This has sparked many hours of rumination (and several attempts to get in on Meraki's free wifi service), after which I had to confront the hard reality that the local coffee shop is more wired than the third world, not to mention my apartment.

Don't believe me? Check out this WIRED report that shows, among other things, that the average cost of a broadband connection in Mozabique is several thousand times the average monthly wage.

That brings me to OLPC, the group that is promoting the "other" UMPC for under $200 and is led by the "other" Negroponte who is not connected to Iraq or human rights abuses in Honduras. This is the group that wants to convince developing nations to 1) buy 250,000 laptops and then 2) manage their distribution, all in the name of bridging the digital divide. Despite encouraging news on the laptop-end of things, I'm still at a loss as to what sort of network these kids are going to connect their machines to. Furthermore, while problems with the OLPC implementation plan are brought up regularly (and occasionally refuted), no one seems to be addressing the infrastructure costs of this plan.

Don't believe me? Check out some of the articles at OLPC News that point out some obvious barriers to OLPC implementation.

No soldiers? No problem!

2007-08-14T13:15:00.000-07:00

After repeatedly lowering its recruitment standards and turning to video games as a way to recruit youngsters, the U.S. Army has fired its latest salvo in The War On Shrinking Recruitment Pools. They bought some toy soldiers.

Well, not necessarily toy. The robot army that the Pentagon hopes to field will be completely armed and dangerous. Robots had been used previously for surveillance, bomb removal, and other noncombat jobs, but now the defense department wants to see how they will function on the battlefield. Let's hope they work out better than Johnny Five. No word yet on whether the Robot Army will be Bluetooth-compatible.

No word yet on what will happen when the insurgents find a way to jam the radio signals controlling these little buggers, and send the designers back to the drawing board.

Also: Open source solutions to IED threats (DesignNews)

Muni Wi-Fi: Why do we need it?

2007-07-31T12:28:00.000-07:00

For the first post on this new blog, I felt that I should deal with something that's close to my heart. Yahoo News reported today that the San Francisco municipal Wi-Fi project is being delayed yet again. This service would offer two plans: a paid service through Earthlink and a slower, free service provided by Google.

So why does this matter?

Two reasons. First, since there is finally a real effort to make wireless-enabled laptops that everyone can afford, people need to be able to access the internet. That's obvious. The second reason is something that every network administrator from Pacific Heights to Daly City worries about - redundancy. As a few of you may remember, a power outage in San Francisco took out most of Web 2.0 a few weeks ago. With a distributed wireless network, maybe we won't have to worry about Technorati going down again.