A Networked World

Cyborgs and Cognitive Dissonance

Any new technology goes through a series of phases that run roughly from
"I wonder if we could make a gizmo to do this?"
through "holy cow it works"
to "I get it, its just like X and I understand that perfectly"
to "Hmmm, maybe it isn't like X so much as I thought"
to "pass the gizmo".

The sequence of Theatre, Film, TV, Video and Internet has been a lot like that, each technology defined at first in terms of the one that it most resembles from the past. Hence dumb ideas like Interactive TV and the Internet as a media environment. But robots seem to be stuck permanently in adolescence and its time we moved on.

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Artificial Intelligence, Identity and Authentication

So, just a short post then.

It all started with a very nice comment from Michael O'C Clarke about my "lucid writing style". Now I just blast away here, do a little proofing, throw out the worst of the botches and post. So the question is, could I teach someone else to write lucid prose? Then this piece started another train of thought about both how we encode our identity in practically everything we do and how efficient we are at decoding that knowledge.

Which is why artificial intelligence may be rather further off than some people might wish us to believe.

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Chaos Theory and Shakespeare - Get Me 100 Monkeys Now!

The great thing about emergent knowledge is that figuring out how to ask good questions is everything. Notice I said "good" questions, not "the right" questions. Once you get the good question, you find an answer. It doesn't mean that it's the only answer contained in that information, or the best or most useful answer, and it certainly doesn't guarantee that its an answer you will like, but its an answer. For example, this is an answer; New computer analyses can identify Shakespeare as well as cardiac problems

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Six degrees PLUS a Power Law

This piece in Nature Magazine is actually more interesting than it appears at first.
More than six degrees separate us - Perception and motivation influence social networks.

"An e-mail experiment has confirmed the famous 'six degrees of separation' of human social networks, but revealed that individuals don't necessarily benefit from their connectedness." In fact, the article quite strongly indicates to me that people do benefit from their connectedness, what they don't always do is exploit it, which is another thing entirely. And what's more, I think it reveals a power law at work in the real world.

Just for the hell of it, throw in some evidence for a damped driven system that has already taken into account the six degrees of separation.

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Annotations And Metadata That Matters

I think the next revolution on the net is going to be annotation. Blogs are the beginning of that and some of the developments with newsreaders will feed into it. For example, I can use a bookmarklet in IE (Unfortunately not Opera which is a far better browser) that launches Zempt which puts the page title into my title, the link into the main body, and the selected text into the extended entry, then I add my bit and blog's your uncleTM. As newsreaders add similar tools to integrate the reading and annotation process, the loops will be shortened and as tools such as Trackback weave opinion into ever denser webs of connections, the density itself will become metadata.

A Bit of History
It might help to get a bit of perspective on the process, because I think it has been growing and maturing, we are just now getting to the takeoff stage. First came Third Voice with its "Web notes" that allowed visitors to post comments on a Web page. That was followed (into oblivion mostly) by NovaWiz , Hypernix , uTok , and Zadu. Many of these companies took the idea further than Third Voice with tools for ranking, chatting, and exchanging information about the Web content. The goal was to enable users to build a community of Web commentary where users can share opinions and guidance on the content of Web sites. (Sound familiar?)

Interestingly, this para turned up in the original article. "The only way it can work if there's some kind of intelligent discussion going on [inside the applications]," says Dave Winer, editor of Scripting News and president of the software company UserLand . Mr. Winer tried Third Voice and didn't like it, noting that Web comments become outdated as soon as a page changes. "My bet is that it won't take off -- but then again I said that about Hotmail, so I don't have a good track record," he says.

Mhmm, and then came Radio U.

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It All Depends on the Meaning of "Interest"

I've just been reading Michael Clarke on Google News Alerts After giving Google a well deserved shot across the bows for the way tney have implemented the service, he delivers himself of this excellent paragraph.

It also relies on the user to be able to specify decent search strings for the stuff they’re interested in. Problem is, other than the obvious client names and industry sectors you know you want to watch, most people don’t know what they’re interested in until it pops up.

Exactly.

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Except That Its NOT a search Engine

It never ceases to amaze me that so many people confuse Google with a search engine when, as is apparent from its excellent results, it is vastly more than than that.

This story from The Melbourne Age perpetuates the myth. Google gets ready for heavyweight challenge

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Sailing Innocently Into dangerous waters

It seems eminently sensible, it would make law enforcement so much easier and more certain, who could object?

Black box in car to trap speed drivers

Drivers face automatic speeding fines without being caught by the police or roadside cameras under a proposal being studied by the Government to fit all cars with satellite tracking devices for road tolls.

Under the anti-congestion tolling plan being examined by the Department for Transport, all vehicles would be fitted with a 'black box' to charge drivers according to the type of road they are using and when they are driving.

But transport experts believe the equipment will pave the way for 24-hour monitoring of drivers to see if they break the speed limit. It could also be used to determine whether drivers were speeding before an accident.

The Government is backing trials of an advanced system which would tell the black box when it entered a speed limit and prevent the vehicle going faster. The equipment could also find drivers who have not paid vehicle duty or insurance.

Except...

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Cleaning Up and Moving On

Awasu, have I mentioned how much I like that Newsreader? Has some really cool tools, including a thing called Workpad that lets me add links from disparate feeds for later reading, but also outputs them as HTML which can be pasted into a blog. Here are some I've been sitting on and since I want to build a new set, I'll just leave them here.

• David WeinbergerMapping Fears
  

• [SN] Clay Shirky
  

• [SN] John Blair
  

• Larry Lessigleaving the copyright lane for the public domain
  

• LXG -- more walt disney creativity
  

• how cc works
  

• it is the recording INDUSTRY association
  

• blogs at college
  

• David WindleyBlogging in the Workplace
  

• Chad Gets RSS
  

• VoIP in My House
  

• Lisa ReinPeter Coyote Explains Why Proprietary Software Is Bad For Electronic Voting Machines
  

Next thing is to be able to blog right out of Workpad itself. Can't wait.

A Networked Media Model - Ready or Not?

Now, this is getting interesting.

Cable or Satellite? Please Stay Tuned

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