Monday, August 29, 2005
On the Frontier of Search
"Search will ultimately be as good as having 1,000 human experts who know your tastes scanning billions of documents within a split second,' says Gary Flake, one of just seven Distinguished Engineers at Microsoft, who are paid to think big thoughts. 'It will model the human brain.'" /TIME.com/
Saturday, August 27, 2005
SciFi Future
Here is an interesting PDF from Business Week Online created by illustrator David B. Mattingly that "incorporates predictions for the next century from 30 works of science fiction." /A Sci-Fi Guide to the 21st Century (.pdf)/
Negative feedback worth less?
More on an interesting trend that I have wondered about for a long time: "People online are starting to discount negative feedback (for example) positive reviews (at Amazon) are marked 'helpful' nearly twice as often as negative ones." /Seth's Blog/
The Power Of Us
Behold the power of us. It's the force behind the collective clamor of Weblogs that felled CBS anchorman Dan Rather and rocked the media establishment. Global crowds of open-source Linux programmers are giving even mighty Microsoft Corp. fits. Virtual supercomputers, stitched together from millions of volunteers' PCs, are helping predict global climate change, analyze genetic diseases, and find new planets and stars.
At the same time, peer power presents difficult challenges for anyone invested in the status quo. Corporations, those citadels of command-and-control, may be in for the biggest jolt. Increasingly, they will have to contend with ad hoc groups of customers who have the power to join forces online to get what they want. Indeed, customers are creating what they want themselves -- designing their own software with colleagues, for instance, and declaring their opinions via blogs instead of waiting for newspapers to print their letters." /Business Week
At the same time, peer power presents difficult challenges for anyone invested in the status quo. Corporations, those citadels of command-and-control, may be in for the biggest jolt. Increasingly, they will have to contend with ad hoc groups of customers who have the power to join forces online to get what they want. Indeed, customers are creating what they want themselves -- designing their own software with colleagues, for instance, and declaring their opinions via blogs instead of waiting for newspapers to print their letters." /Business Week
Saturday, August 20, 2005
Hybrid Reality
"The rampant success of MMORPGs has already spawned pared-down versions for conventional cellphones... (T)he more powerful 3G phones and related networks - which can transfer data at hundreds rather than tens of kilobytes per second - will allow the emergence of increasingly complex multiplayer games (that) incorporate location-based phone technology and blend real video footage with computer graphics." /New Scientist/
Flock: The Two-Way Web
Flock is a self-described "innovative social browsing experience. We call it the two-way web."
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Virtual Mugging
"New scientist reports that 'a man has been arrested in Japan on suspicion of carrying out a virtual mugging spree by using software 'bots' to beat up and rob characters in the online computer game Lineage II.The stolen virtual possessions were then exchanged for real cash'." /Smart Mobs/
What is Orion's Arm?
"Orion's Arm is a bold new shared worldbuilding and creative writing project, creating and exploring a new vision of the future of humanity and other sentient beings, ten thousand years hence..."
Our goal is to create a dramatic far-future universe that is internally consistent and abides as much as possible with the accepted facts and theories in the physical, biological, and social sciences. Thus matter cannot travel faster than light, matter and energy are conserved, no evolved humanoid aliens have been discovered, future ultratech social issues are likely to be very different to those of today, and so on. We embrace speculative ideas like drexlerian assemblers, mind uploads, posthuman intelligences, femtotech, magnetic monopoles, wormholes, as it is proposed that future sciences, technologies, and developments will make these possible. And we attempt a logical explanation for even the most fantastic-seeming elements in OA. We aim to paint a future that is plausible at every level, from the scientific to the social to the psychological./Orion's Arm/
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
IBM VP on "Collaborative Innovation"
"Making money is important to us all. But so is gaining the respect of our families, friends, colleagues, and the community at large -- maybe even more so for most people. Why is that? Allow me to speculate. We are, after all, social animals, and perhaps some of the answers are found in evolutionary biology and our continuing attempt to become alpha members of the group. For many, what brings us together in communities is perhaps something more spiritual." /Smart Mobs/
Free Wi-fi Cafes
This helpful tool by way of the amazing Bruce Eisner: "As a follow-up to my last post about Google's interest in providing 'free wi-fi', people pointed out that you can find free wifi now in most major cities (and even some mid-sized towns). There is Free wi-fi cafes & other wireless hotspots from MetroFreeFi.com. The site provides a great guide with maps to free wi-fi hotspots in many local areas." /Bruce Eisner's Vision Thing/
Saturday, August 13, 2005
Neuromancer's Predictions, 21 Years Later
William Gibson predicting / inspiring the future: "In another twenty years, more of [Neuromancer's] ideas could come to light. Is it really a stretch to think you could control a Cyberspace alter-ego with your mind, when you can already control applications using natural motions? I recently read an article on Better Humans (see the blog link) about a technique that allowed human participants to draw on-screen graphics using thoughts and thoughts alone as their mechanism for manipulating a cursor. This could be the seed of the nervous system interface Gibson envisioned: a device which allows humans to interact with virtual electronic worlds using only their brains. Chuck the LCD display, keyboard and mouse, baby--we're going neural." /O'Reilly Network Weblogs/
Friday, August 12, 2005
Yahoo's My Web 2.0 implements Social Search
"Things are getting interesting. Yahoo's new My Web 2.0 is now in beta, which taps into your already trusted networks to (ideally) give you more relevant search results based on what the folks you know have recommended. I've had the chance to start playing around with it a bit, and it seems so far to be the adorable lovechild of traditional search and social bookmarking services." /The Social Software Weblog/
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Rapid Decision-Making & Technologies of Cooperation
Howard Rheingold: "A new capacity for rapid, ad hoc, and distributed decision making is emerging from the intersection of technologies of cooperation and new knowledge about the nature of cooperation and cooperative strategies. This report investigates the challenges, strategies, technologies, and best practices that will shape this new capacity." /Smart Mobs/
Monday, August 08, 2005
Cooperative Analysis of 'Unstructured' Data
"Eastman Kodak uses unstructured-data analysis to spot connections in its own and its competitors' patent filings. Government agents use it to hunt for insider trading or linkages between terrorist groups. Mayo Clinic researchers use it to scan physicians' notes for evidence about the efficacy of treatments.
In hopes of broadening the potential of this kind of software, several companies plan to announce an agreement Monday on a technological standard that will let multiple computing engines for sorting unstructured data work together... The cooperation is required because so many different kinds of unstructured-data engines have sprung up in recent years, driven in large part by the U.S. government's demand for intelligence analysis. The CIA has funded several unstructured-data management companies, including Attensity." /Wired News/
In hopes of broadening the potential of this kind of software, several companies plan to announce an agreement Monday on a technological standard that will let multiple computing engines for sorting unstructured data work together... The cooperation is required because so many different kinds of unstructured-data engines have sprung up in recent years, driven in large part by the U.S. government's demand for intelligence analysis. The CIA has funded several unstructured-data management companies, including Attensity." /Wired News/
Sunday, August 07, 2005
Corporate Terrorism
Cory Doctorow defines the object of terrorism: "to frighten people into behaving irrationally, and to abandon their principles." This sounds a lot like the stick side of "carrot and stick" motivation. Could supervision in the corporate world be a thinly disguised and accpetable version of terrorism? /New World Notes/
Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town
Here is a great summary of Cory Doctorow's latest novel Someone Comes to Town: "Alan is a serial entrepreneur who moved to Toronto to get away from his family. His father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine. He has several brothers, including one who is an island, three who nest like Russian dolls, a precognitive, and a demonic savage. When he was a teenager, he murdered the latter brother, with his other brothers cooperating. And now that brother is back form the dead, stalking them all. Alan has fallen in with a gang of anarcho-info-hippies who are using dumpster-dived hardware to build meshing WiFi repeaters in a mad bid to unwire all of Toronto, or at least the bohemian Kensington Market streets. Meanwhile, his neighbors--a student household-- contain a girl with wings and a mean-spirited guitar player/bartender, who, it appears, may be in league with the demonic brother." /New World Notes/
What is RSS?
"If you're new to RSS and need an introduction to help you get started, then this tutorial is a good place to learn some basics. You will also learn how to subscribe to the feeds on loadaverageZero so you can find out what's new around here without having to keep coming back to the site until you want to. That, in a nutshell, is what RSS feeds are all about: Let the information come to you instead of actively searching for it." /RSS Diary/
Saturday, August 06, 2005
Loosening Up Mind-Changing Muscles
Seth Godin: "This phenomenon is absolutely critical inside your organization. There%u2019s no point whatsoever in having a meeting designed to elicit change if the attendees are insulated against changing their minds. Assuming you are surrounded by co-workers who are willing to try, it's essential you go through exercises designed to loosen up the flip muscle." /Seth's Blog/
News as a Participatory Act
Douglas Rushkoff: "If people, young people in particular, can experience news gathering and news storytelling as a participatory act, they would come to understand that interpreting the world around them was a collective proposition. Instead of simply absorbing the interpretations of others, they would come to recognize that they, too, were capable of having and sharing a perspective." Douglas Rushkoff/
U2's City of Blinding Lights
William Gibson: "He had a PlayStation handset modified to allow him to control a number of small, infrared, black-and-white cameras, originally intending to use them to obtain covert imagery of the crowd, which he then mixes for display on the various screens above the stage... 'It's a great way of involving the audience. The physical nature of the set uses the fact that the audience wants to be part of the show.'" /Wired 13.08/
