So time to go exploring beyond the view from my hotel room… here til Sunday, one day conference so time to have a look around, though doing anything other than getting a sense of this megacity is of course impossible.
My del.icio.us bookmarks for May 31st through June 6th
Here’s what I tagged on del.icio.us between May 31st and June 6th:
- The Open Rights Group : Blog Archive » The Future of the Internet in Focus – Me and Jonathan Zittrain, down in the school yard
- BBC NEWS | UK | Web users 'fear media intrusion' – UK press complaints commission looking at how journalist use content from social sites
- JW FLV Media Player – Useful tool
- Ourmedia: How to make a stop-motion video short – Quick and useful guide to making stop-motion with iPhoto and iMovie
The bustle of participation
I’m one of the bloggers over at the New Statesman New Media Awards blog. Latest entry considers what Sam Johnson might have made of Twitter…
I’ve been up for an hour. In that time I’ve updated my Facebook status and dismissed various invitations to become a Zombie or share virtual fish or garden plants, sent a few Tweets, looked through the various blog postings that Bloglines has picked up from the RSS feeds I subscribe to, added new services to Friendfeed and replied to a dozen emails.
I’ve been far too busy to do any work, massaging my online presence, keeping up to date with the chatter and making my modest – fewer than 140 characters on Twitter – contributions to online discussions,
And in the midst of this hard work I remembered one of my favourite essays, written in 1759 by Samuel Johnson and published in ‘The Idler’.
Putting the people to work
In his excellent science fiction novel ‘The Diamond Age’ writer Neal Stephenson describes a world in which nanotechnology and nanobots are commonplace and ‘Matter Compilers’ can create objects at will.
However there are no artificial intelligences on his imagined earth, the technology having failed to deliver on the promises made by generations of researchers. Computers do lots of things, but they are unable to replace or even convincingly impersonate humans.
One consequence of this is that some of the characters in the book make their living by providing voices for virtual reality-based entertainment since although computers are able to produce convincing 3-D worlds they cannot, in Stephenson’s alternative reality, substitute for real human intonation or emotion.
It’s an interesting idea, and when I first read the book in 1995 it resonated with my view that while non-human intelligence is perfectly possible we will never actually manage to create it ourselves because intelligence emerges from biology not technology.
My del.icio.us bookmarks for May 21st through May 29th
Here’s what I tagged on del.icio.us between May 21st and May 29th:
- The Next-Gen Web: Browser Storage Support – interesting analysis
- The New York Times should let Frankie go to Hollywood and quit with the kvetching. – By Jack Shafer – Slate Magazine – Interesting article on conflicting interests.
- Community Building on the Web:Companion Site – Still the best book for anyone building online communities, whether Web 2.0 or not
- Noticias24-Tecnologia » El suicidio de una niña amenaza la libertad de expresión en la red – Nice to see my piece translated into Spanish 🙂
Storm warning for cloud computing: more like a miasma
[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website, and Nick Carr has an excellent piece on ‘miasma computing‘ that moves the argument on nicely.]
My friend Simon is one of those net entrepreneurs with the attention to detail it takes to have an idea and turn it into an effective company. He’s currently on his second job search service, and it seems to be going very well.
One reason for the success may be that Simon has embraced the network age with a dedication that most of us can only wonder at. He uses a range of productivity tools, scheduling services and collaborative systems to manage both his personal and professional life, and once confessed to me that he had ‘outsourced his memory’ to Microsoft Outlook and its calendar service.
So far I’ve resisted the temptation to pay a team of hackers to break into his laptop and add ‘jump off a cliff’ as his 10am appointment on Thursday.
Recently I’ve noticed that Simon’s head is in the cloud. Or rather, his business is, as he and his team have moved most of their systems online, taking advantage of the move from local storage and processing to ‘cloud computing’, where data and services are provided online and accessed from a PC or any other device.
Continue reading “Storm warning for cloud computing: more like a miasma”
Landing on Mars
From NASA:
NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander can be seen parachuting down to Mars, in this image captured by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This is the first time that a spacecraft has imaged the final descent of another spacecraft onto a planetary body.
One of the most beautiful, compelling and hopeful images I have ever seen – up there with the Apollo earthrise photographs. We can do this, we can send a robot millions of miles and then take a picture of it using another robot we sent a while back.
Reading List.
I will eventually read all of the books piled up next to my desk.. just not sure when.
Are we all law-breakers?
[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website]
It has always been difficult to stay completely on the right side of the law, however law-abiding one tries to be.
I try to check the copyright status of every picture I use in my presentations, but may sometimes slip up. Copying CDs I own to my iPod may – or may not be – illegal, and copying DVDs I own certainly is. And like all drivers I sometimes see the speedometer creep up above the speed limit when I’m not paying attention to it on a quiet motorway.
But now it seems I could face prosecution for the wide range of user accounts I’ve created on MySpace, Facebook, Googlemail, Flickr and Bebo to support the various projects I’m involved with. The ‘Norfolk and Norwich Festival’, ‘Tyneside 100’ and ‘Wysing Arts Centre’ identities I have lovingly crafted may well fall foul of a US decision that breaking the terms and conditions of a social network site can count as unauthorised access, turning what would seem to be at most a civil offence into a criminal act under computer misuse laws.
I saw this…
Here’s what I’ve tagged on del.icio.us on %date%:
- Cuba supports unrestricted Internet, but US embargo makes it impossible, CB – Cuba needs our support
- TechCrunch UK » Blog Archive » BBC?s Sound Index is good, but we won?t get the data – Free our data campaigner Mike Butcher keeps on pushing
- Speech to Google Zeitgeist Conference – Suppose I should read it… but on a quick scan it hardly seems to be significant
- TechCrunch UK » Blog Archive » BookRabbit sets out to ?scrobble? bookcases – One to try