Monday, April 30, 2007

 

Google is Number 1

The Searchblog cites two articles which report that Google is both the number one brand and number one website. Not bad for not existing 10 years ago. It also points to the power of emergent knowledge (page rank) and emergent innovation (20% time).

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Friday, April 27, 2007

 

Live Video Streaming made Easy


This week's TWIT podcast introduced Ustream, a site that allows folks to stream the video from their laptop to a website. Leo wants to set up a webpage that will aggregate the video streams from all his guests, so we can watch live.

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Thursday, April 26, 2007

 

Big Iron for Virtual Worlds

3pointD has interesting piece analyzing the IBM announcement launching a mainframe specifically designed to host 3D virtual environments.

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Tuesday, April 24, 2007

 

Law Students in Second Life

Terra Nova points to a multi-author blog called Fizzy's Second Life. This blog has a number of videos produced by 1st year law students exploring property rights inside Second Life -- through the eyes of Fizzy Soderberg.

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Avatar Expressions


3pointD points to a new book by Second Life resident Forseti Svarog called Avatar Expressions. It is available for free in-world or at Lulu.com (a print on demand service). As it turns out, my avatar knows a number of the avatars featured in the book. Fun!

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Monday, April 23, 2007

 

Knowing When to Hold and When to Fold


Remember the old Kenny Rogers song?
You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when youre sittin' at the table.
There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done.
There is a new book, called The Dip by Seth Godin that argues the best innovators excel at knowing when to quit and when to forge ahead.

(Thx to Endless Innovation for the tip.)

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Thursday, April 19, 2007

 

TED Has a Cool New Face

I love their re-scalable tag cloud!

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Mixed Reality Barbie

Just as adults have combined their virtual GPS worlds with their real world cars to have a mixed reality experience, now Mattel is creating a mixed reality experience for the users of dolls. Real world Barbies interact with a new virtual world, called BarbieGirls.com.

Mixed reality is not only our future, it is now our present. (Thx to 3pointD for the tip!)

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Wednesday, April 18, 2007

 

CFR

CFR transcript, audio and video.

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Monday, April 16, 2007

 

Go Ask Alice

Marion in Wonderland posts her conversation with an artificially intelligent chatbot in Second Life named Alice. Cool!

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Robust Yet Fragile Complexity

Irving Wladawsky-Berger (IBM) has a fascinating post on complexity systems as double-edged swords. He cites John Doyle (Cal Tech):
The complexity of technology is exploding around us, but in ways that remain largely hidden. Modern institutions and technologies facilitate robustness and accelerate evolution, but enable catastrophes on a scale unimaginable without them (from network and market crashes to war, epidemics, and climate change).
IWB concludes:
As everything around us becomes increasingly complex - from our global economies, industries and enterprises, to our technological, scientific and medical achievements - it is critical that we better understand the properties of the complex systems that are part of our lives. Only then can we hope to cope with - if not manage - the fragilities that will naturally accompany complexity.

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Inclination SciFi Novel

Cory points to a Creative Commons released SciFi novel by William Shunn. I will download to my iPod. THANKS!

He also recommends a podiobook called Heaven.

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Wednesday, April 11, 2007

 

Get Outside Yourself!

Endless Innovation pointed me to a Fast Company article which makes the case that unlike 20th Century organizations that could survive on their own internal talent, 21st Century organizations must either interconnect with outside talent, or die.
The more a company opens itself up to engage with the outside world, the better its chances. In this new era, scale won't guarantee viability in the face of massively interconnected customers, suppliers, and competitors. But all of those scientists and employees can do amazing things if they connect with what's happening outside your walls.

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Solar Flare Problems?


My wife and I had independent simultaneous wireless failures yesterday morning. As I left the house to go to work, my wireless remote to the garage door did not work. I kept trying for about 20 seconds, holding it in different positions from inside and outside the car. Then it worked.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, my wife was using the wireless remote to our bedroom ceiling fan. It did not work for about 20 seconds, then started working again. At the end of the day, when we were exchanging stories about our day, we discovered this simultaneous remote failures. I then remembered this article about unusually large solar flares disrupting GPS.

So, are there weird ad hoc warps in the local electromagnetic spectrum that could disrupt short distance wireless devices for seconds at a time? Or, were we just subjected to a long distance alien experiment on long range pulse beam disrupter technology?

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Tuesday, April 10, 2007

 

The Long Zoom

Steven Johnson's blog talks about an interview he had about a concept he wrote about in a NYTimes Magazine article of the same name about the forthcoming game of Spore. Johnson quotes Brian Eno,
we can see much smaller things and much bigger things than we ever could before. But we can also start thinking about much longer futures and much deeper pasts as well.
That is the essence of the long zoom. It is sensors and reasoning and imagining. Like a satellite taking sub-meter resolution pictures--detail from a long distance (space, time, thought). The game Spore adopts this long zoom paradigm. Interesting reading.

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Monday, April 09, 2007

 

Self Balancing Robot


Bruce points to a video of a self-balancing bi-pedal robot learning to walk. It looks a lot like a 10-month baby trying to balance on its legs, which gives some authenticity to the robot. Check it out at the ANYBOTS site.

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Friday, April 06, 2007

 

Just where is Plataea?

Don't you just hate it, when you are at the beach reading Thucydides's (460-400 BC) History of the Peloponnesian War, and you run across a sentence like you find in chapter 8:
The next summer the Peloponnesians and their allies, instead of invading Attica, marched against Plataea, under the command of Archidamus, son of Zeuxidamus, king of the Lacedaemonians.
and you wonder, just where the heck is Plataea? I thought so. Well, lucky for you the good folks at Metacarta have begun geo-parsing classic works out of the Project Gutenberg. So if you read these books at the Gutenkarte site, you can just mouse over the location name and see on a map where the place is, like this. Very cool.

I am waiting for someone to write a SciFi novel set in Second Life and have a Gutenkarte like mashup running inside the book. Won't the future be great?

(Thanks to the IT Conversations podcast for alerting me to the the Gutenkarte site.)

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Thursday, April 05, 2007

 

The College Term Paper?

Imagine a college student who is assigned to write a term paper. The student
  1. discusses the topic with a group of people from the class over ice cream cones
  2. asks a librarian to help find information and answers
  3. posts a question on Yahoo! Answers or Amazon's Mechanical Turk to get a response
  4. follows wikipedia links to other web knowledge spaces
  5. hires a tutor to help with the assignment

Which ones do you think are acceptable research techniques? Slashdot debates the value of term papers in the era of StudentofFortune.com.

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Virtual Gambling Illegal?

FBI checks gambling in Second Life virtual world. Isn't playing physical poker with physical poker chips virtual gambling? So why would it make a difference of the poker chips were virtual not physical? It is because physical poker chips are not "something of value" whereas Linden Dollars are "something of value."

So Second Life is not a game.

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Technorati's Take

Here is Dave Sifri's State of the Blogosphere graph. Looks like a disruptive technology curve should.

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Three - Bee

Yet another virtual world - 3B. It explicitly integrates with the 2-D web. It seems to be a transitional product between Firefox and Second Life.

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Monday, April 02, 2007

 

It's About Time

DRM-free music from a major label. See NYTimes article.

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Free Wireless from Google!

on 1 April 2007 Google announced free wireless for everyone. Check it out!

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