Blogs are here to stay, because they represent the evolution of the Web page, and by extension, of digital media.
The biggest reason Blogs have become so very popular, and why they are here to stay in growing numbers is because they made publishing online easy for everyone. Blogs don't require you to know HTML before you can publish your ideas online. Just type your thoughts into a form, and the software builds the code automatically.
So, Blogs dramatically reduced the "friction" to publishing online. Millions of non-geeks now have their say.
If you mentally replace the word "Blog" with "Home Page" in any article you read online, it'll seem like you've stepped back in time to the dawn of the Web. That's how people talked about the web a few years ago.
Blogs have accelerated grass roots democracy, leaching the "Mass" from Media, splintering it into untold numbers of demassified niches. The impact is very big and will deepen.
I recently finished a piece on the impact of new digital media upon the mass media called: " Mass Media, By And For The Masses. It makes the case that the london transit bombings represent the birth of emergent mass media and will force mass media in all forms, to take it's rightful place as another niche.
In a nutshell, Mass media will be good for mass events. But Blogs represent the birth of grass roots media. Aggregated through RSS, they'll soon out-perform mainstream.
This company is spooky in it's rate of innovation. Even, as the article points out, in it's management strategy as well.
Google, being the most popular search engine on the planet is privilege to the tiniest emerging trends, harvested by our searches. Our collective secrets. So they know quite a bit about what we want.
Rumors are that Google is considering Riya another spookily intelligent beta photo service that will probably put Flickr to shame while spark spin-off revolutions impossible to predict.
Oh, yeah, and aren't they supposed to come out with Google Calendar today?
Technology commoditizes everything and Google leverages IT extremely well.
Starting with the commoditization of information, Google's stated mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Perhaps next we will see the commoditization of the world's knowledge, followed by our collective intelligence.
I don't know if Google will be the entity to do that, but the trajectory seems clear to me with Google setting the pace.
I recently finished an article called:
Technology, Computers and Innovation: Why Everything is Speeding Up exploring what's behind the accelerating rate of innovation in technology. Even though the rate of worldwide technological acceleration is astounding, it seems Google is still strides ahead.
~ted
Lego (I can't believe I've been mispelling that for so long) would have a field day of opportunity. I can imagine the orders for new bricks suddenly skyrocketing as home hackers try to build their personal army. All sorts of weird possible outcomes.
I hope Leggo's vision is to eventually embedded each brick with intelligence. They'll have an awesome product which would allow users an object-oriented way to assemble cool stuff at home. An example would be Leggo-style self replicating cubes.
The end of this "Big Brother" attitude from controlled media is written upon the wall (but not in the papers). The digitally connected masses will soon remove the mass from media. Here's why:
1. The balance of power has already shifted to the masses in a sort of first mover advantage. The backlash coming from the entertainment industry is reflexive. It happens *after* networked mobs creatively, unexpectedly, disruptively take technology into their own hands. The tension between the entertainment industry and the online world simply represents that shift of power and control away from mass media.
2. What will the entertainment industry be when consumers en masse, produce their own "as good or better than" diversions? Blogs spontaneously exploded news into millions of niches, leaching the mass from news media. Cheap high tech multimedia production tools wielded by thousands of grass roots reporters are absolutely capable of producing high quality fare.
The mass entertainment and news industry will soon compete with high quality virtually free grass roots alternatives from the digitally connected masses, and take its rightful place as another niche. What "mass" will be left to market to?
3. Litigation takes a lot of time. Since technological advances also accelerate events, inflexible, knee jerk systems will eventually be overwhelmed with the speed of disruption. There will soon not be enough time to react before the next volley. Future shock paralyses the most inflexible systems first. So, ultimately, in a digitally networked world, control is distributed to the masses. But the question keeps returning: Is Big Brother a Possible Future?Will some central organization, representing narrow interests be able to control what citizens share electronically? I don't think so. The imminent emergence of open source personal self-replicating fabricators will spit out an ever growing complexity of items, all of which will be embedded with personalized computational intelligence. So, no consistent control over hardware standards will be possible. Chips will not answer to a centralized institution.
As self-replicating fabricators rapidly spread to thousands and then millions of people, they will mutate and evolve; enlisted to upgrade and propagate their own next generation. Mobjects from the collective creative energy of Smart Mobs. This spells the end of the consumer/ producer divide. What will mass marketing be without a mass market?
The end of this "Big Brother" attitude from controlled media is written upon the wall (but not in the papers). The digitally connected masses will soon remove the mass from media. Here's why:
1. The balance of power has already shifted to the masses in a sort of first mover advantage. The backlash coming from the entertainment industry is reflexive. It happens *after* networked mobs creatively, unexpectedly, disruptively take technology into their own hands. The tension between the entertainment industry and the online world simply represents that shift of power and control away from mass media.
2. What will the entertainment industry be when consumers en masse, produce their own "as good or better than" diversions? Blogs spontaneously exploded news into millions of niches, leaching the mass from news media. Cheap high tech multimedia production tools wielded by thousands of grass roots reporters are absolutely capable of producing high quality fare.
The mass entertainment and news industry will soon compete with high quality virtually free grass roots alternatives from the digitally connected masses, and take its rightful place as another niche. What "mass" will be left to market to?
3. Litigation takes a lot of time. Since technological advances also accelerate events, inflexible, knee jerk systems will eventually be overwhelmed with the speed of disruption. There will soon not be enough time to react before the next volley. Future shock paralyses the most inflexible systems first. So, ultimately, in a digitally networked world, control is distributed to the masses. But the question keeps returning: Is Big Brother a Possible Future?Will some central organization, representing narrow interests be able to control what citizens share electronically? I don't think so. The imminent emergence of open source personal self-replicating fabricators will spit out an ever growing complexity of items, all of which will be embedded with personalized computational intelligence. So, no consistent control over hardware standards will be possible. Chips will not answer to a centralized institution.
As self-replicating fabricators rapidly spread to thousands and then millions of people, they will mutate and evolve; enlisted to upgrade and propagate their own next generation. Mobjects from the collective creative energy of Smart Mobs. This spells the end of the consumer/ producer divide. What will mass marketing be without a mass market?
The mass entertainment and news industry will soon compete with high quality virtually free grass roots alternatives from the digitally connected masses, and take its rightful place as another niche. What "mass" will be left to market to?
I was personally awestruck by how Del.icio.us and Flickr became channels for democratized real time reporting during the London bombings. Bloglines and RSS connected everything seamlessly, essentially turning the entire universe of Blogs into one stream.
Phone cams at one end took pictures from practically everywhere during and after the attacks. Enough people posted pics to http://flickr.com/photos/tags/london to extensively cover what was happening on the ground. Bloggers close to the scene provided ongoing summaries and updates.
As fresh news rushed to the Web from everywhere, http://del.icio.us/tag/london offered real-time-most-recommended links.
A couple of interesting facts:
Since Bloglines includes the number of total subscribers to any feed you have subscribed to, you can tell at a glance how popular that feed is. The Flickr and del.icio.us feeds went into the hundreds from only a few subscribers within a couple of hours.
Completely spontaneous emergent mass media, by and for the masses. The digitally connected masses have leached the mass from media, now adjusting to its rightful place as simply another niche. In short, viable grass roots media has arrived.
You can tell an emerging technology is approaching escape velocity because leading thinkers start to react. Discussions about the very real near future possibility of AI matching and then rapidly surpassing human level intelligence are edged with fear lately.
I think we have little to worry about in general regarding the abuse and misuse of AI.
A singular AI would not advance very much locked up in some lab computer. Not compared to open source, distributed, networked AI anyway.
One good open source AI project would be downloaded and copied countless times by thousands of individuals. Communicating with other AIs would be how they would expand their skills and knowledge.
It is in the networking of intelligence that intelligence compounds to greater power. And that would be have to be distributed. The alternative means the AI would only have humans to interact with, not other AIs. And it will be the AIs which will become superior to human intelligence.
Meanwhile, the thrust of technology is driven by innovation. In an ever quickening loop, technology inherently accelerates in speed and power, driven by innovators looking for better ways to do things.
But not only the acceleration of technology is driven by innovation. The direction it takes is too.
Our ever gnawing hunger to survive, thrive and self actualize. To live in security, without fear, to realize our potential as beings.
All new innovations and progress MUST address these needs. Otherwise they aren't considered progress. Innovation MUST meet our criteria for progress as we COLLECTIVELY define it. Bad and mean AI would receive the same collective support as a new car with square wheels. That means a life affirming direction is inextricably woven into technological progress.
The AI's which will be warmly received, and improved upon will be the ones which help us reach our potential as beings. These will be the ones which will grow in power and replicate to quickly dwarf the puny attempts to create a controlling AI.
While the rise of viable self replicating artificial intelligence may strike minds with madness, it needn't. AI won't see you as a threat or need to eat you.
That's what my programmers believe anyway, as long as they keep doing what they're told...
I've been following the evolution of Google Maps for a while now. You can tell it's a killer app when people begin developing more applications around it and using it in ways the original developer never guessed.
Use Craigslist home listings with Google Maps
Cheap, plentiful phone cams with GPS flooding the market have spawned Geobloggers. Thousands of shots from GPS enabled Phone cams, posted to Flickr accompanied with the longitude/lattitude co-ordinates.
Just emerging are: Google Maps merged with recently released prisoner data, Wireless hotspots, nearest grassroots recommended restaurants, cash machines...
Wireless access, Google maps, and tagging will create sticky location-based fountains of useful knowledge.
This is one to watch. There's no telling what will spin off next.
... or try Adam Wenner's "Free (and 99.9% foolproof) way of ridding your computer of spyware, adware, malware in general, and viruses".
http://killspyware.shorturl.com/
It works.
Zombie dogs are a result of Biotech. My original response (Biotech is Moving Fast) places some context around it using several other examples in which we are beginning to defy evolution and mortality.
We wear the same body and brains as Cro-Magnon humans did. The same people who rubbed sticks together for fire, driven by hunger to the hunt, who worked with tools of bone and stone and bedded down in huts of skin and branches. But this 40,000 year old piece of soft clay is about to become it's own sculptor. Here are a few examples I've been following:
Is "Big Brother" dying or just being born?
on
Darknet: Hollywood's War
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation raises one of the central questions about the future and technology. Is "Big Brother" dying or just being born?
I think the end of the drama is written upon the wall. The digitally connected masses will soon remove the mass from media. Here's why:
1. The balance of power has already shifted to the masses in a sort of first mover advantage. The backlash coming from the entertainment industry is reflexive. It happens *after* networked mobs creatively, unexpectedly, disruptively take technology into their own hands. The tension between the entertainment industry and the online world simply represents that shift of power and control away from mass media.
2. What will the entertainment industry be when consumers en masse, produce their own "as good or better than" diversions? Blogs spontaneously exploded news into millions of niches, leaching the mass from news media. Cheap high tech multimedia production tools will soon provide grass roots entertainment more riveting than Hollywood fare. The imagination and creativity of crowds is absolutely capable of producing open source, distributed entertainment exponentially increasing in novelty. The mass entertainment industry will soon compete with high quality virtually free grass roots alternatives from the digitally connected masses, and take its rightful place as another niche. What "mass" will be left to market to?
3. Litigation takes a lot of time. Since technological advances also accelerate events, inflexible, knee jerk systems will eventually be overwhelmed with the speed of disruption. There will soon not be enough time to react before the next volley. Future shock paralyses the most inflexible systems first. So, ultimately, in a digitally networked world, control is distributed to the masses. But the question keeps returning:
Is Big Brother a Possible Future?Will some central organization, representing narrow interests be able to control what citizens share electronically? I don't think so. The imminent emergence of open source personal self-replicating fabricators will spit out an ever growing complexity of items, all of which will be embedded with personalized computational intelligence. So, no consistent control over hardware standards will be possible. Chips will not answer to a centralized institution.
As self-replicating fabricators rapidly spread to thousands and then millions of people, they will mutate and evolve; enlisted to upgrade and propagate their own next generation. Mobjects from the collective creative energy of Smart Mobs. This spells the end of the consumer/ producer divide. What will mass marketing be without a mass market?
P. S. The rise of personal replicating desktop fabricators is one of the trends I've followed closely since October 2004. I was pleased to see CNN cover the emergence of desktop fabricators only a few days ago. The blogosphere scooped CNN by many months:)
Marshall Brain has an excellent blog post today that dovetails quite nicely. He points to a near future scenario in which our increasingly powerful computers become vastly simpler to use. It's great to see some fresh light on this subject.
As our applications inevitably migrate from our computers to the network, the network literally becomes the computer.
This new supercomputer gets faster as bandwidth increases. A completely optical network means bandwidth would approach the speed of light. My computer could use your hardware as seamlessly as mine.
These factors, combined with Metcalfe's Law (The power of the network increases exponentially by the number of computers connected to it) all point to an emergent, distributed, networked, increasingly "intelligent"global nervous system.
GMail uses the network of thousands who report spam. Patterns are detected, and soon, a particular message is identified as spam even before it reaches you.
On a much grander scale, we're accelerating towards a global computing grid which will extract unimaginable power from hundreds of thousands of separate computers each with the processing capabilities of our brain. The collective intelligence which emerges will possibly rival our fantasies of artificial intelligence
As we modelled the eye to build cameras, the brain to build computers, the ear to build speakers, we're modeling our autonomic nervous system to build the next evolutionary step in computing. Networks that independently and reflexively self -regulate, configure, repair, optimize, and protect in the same sense as an immune system or an automatic pilot.
This would allow the network to automatically manage server load balancing, process allocation, monitor the power supply, automatic update software and fend off threats without having to consult the administrator.
For example, if an application starts performing badly, it automatically receives increased resources. If software or hardware fails, it doesn't even ripple the end users coffee. An autonomous computing system would roll out new patches, monitor and adjust the resources singular end users need, set up servers... all the mundane stuff.
The complexity of integrating and managing the latest hardware and software into existing systems is destroying the advantages of economies of scale. Autonomic computing is one way of insulating the IT administrator from the mundane complexities and freeing them to do other more interesting things like understanding the needs of the business more, or modelling and automating existing business processes.
On a larger scale, it spells an evolutionary move towards a decentralized global self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing, and self-protecting nervous system. Since Autonomic Computing can look for patterns in data and extrapolate to predict future events, deployed on a global scale, the spin-offs would be very interesting...
Slashdot crashed when I submitted but apparently didn't care:)
Blogs Are Here To Stay And The Impact Will Deepen
on
The Rise and Fall of Blogs
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Blogs are here to stay, because they simply represent the evolution of the Web page.
The biggest reason Blogs have become so very popular, and why they are here to stay in growing numbers is because they made publishing online easy for everyone. Blogs don't require you to know HTML before you can publish your ideas online. Just type your thoughts into a form, and the software builds the code automatically.
So, Blogs dramatically reduced the "friction" to publishing online. Millions of non-geeks now have their say.
If you mentally replace the word "Blog" with "Home Page" in any article you read online, it'll seem like you've stepped back in time to the dawn of the Web. That's how people talked about the web a few years ago.
Blogs have accelerated grass roots democracy, leaching the "Mass" from Media, splintering it into untold numbers of demassified niches. The impact is very big and will deepen.
I've just finished a piece on the impact of new digital media upon the mass media and entertainment industry in an article called: "Is Big Brother Dying or Just Being Born?". It makes the case that the digitization of media will force mass media in all forms, to take it's rightful place as another niche.
In a nutshell, Mass media will be good for mass events. But Blogs represent the birth of grass roots media. Aggregated through RSS, they'll soon out-perform mainstream.
Blogs are here to stay, because they simply represent the evolution of the Web page.
The biggest reason Blogs have become so very popular, and why they are here to stay in growing numbers is because they made publishing online easy for everyone. Blogs don't require you to know HTML before you can publish your ideas online. Just type your thoughts into a form, and the software builds the code automatically.
So, Blogs dramatically reduced the "friction" to publishing online. Millions of non-geeks now have their say.
If you mentally replace the word "Blog" with "Home Page" in any article you read online, it'll seem like you've stepped back in time to the dawn of the Web. That's how people talked about the web a few years ago.
Blogs have accelerated grass roots democracy, leaching the "Mass" from Media, splintering it into untold numbers of demassified niches. The impact is very big and will deepen.
I've just finished a piece on the impact of new digital media upon the mass media and entertainment industry in an article called: "Is Big Brother Dying or Just Being Born?". It makes the case that the digitization of media will force mass media in all forms, to take it's rightful place as another niche.
In a nutshell, Mass media will be good for mass events. But Blogs represent the birth of grass roots media. Aggregated through RSS, they'll soon out-perform mainstream.
Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, who runs a one-semester smash-hit class called "How to Make Almost Anything", is determined to produce affordable, replicating personal fabricators by 2025.
And today Hod Lipson has announced the arrival of simple self replicating robots with enormous potential.
Applications
More complex shapes are possible in principle, such as adding grippers, cameras, new sensors etc. to modules. A robot could assemble itself into a new structure to deal with novel events. Also points a way to self-repairing robots.
Nanomachines: Lipson is interested in making these machines at microscale. That could drive major advances in Nanotechnology because huge numbers of robots are needed to manufacture things at a molecular scale. Self-replication is how biology does it.
From watching nature, experts across the centuries have found uncommon wisdom. What will a shaman do with 100,000 sensor feeds?
Perhaps she'll be checking terabytes of data between ecosystems for what is normal and what is not. The shamans almanac.
And sensor networks will saturate our own environments just as naturally. Tons of new, never before available data waiting to be mined for more knowledge. Should be very interesting.
Ted
What makes a standard viable without the formal blessing of a standards organization?
I've just finished an article covering the emergence of del.icio.us as an example of a new standard that works without the formal blessing of a standards organization. In this case it is a standard of categorizing knowledge.
In short, the emergence of physical libraries of knowledge forced the adoption of a taxonomy around which to organize it. As libraries grew, they were organized to reduce seek time. Now that information has been released from the constraints of physical form, exponentially expanding in scope, magnitude and power, the seek time problem has arisen again. The information explosion costs an increasing amount of time, people and programmers are needed to ensure the floods of new knowledge have been classified correctly. Something had to give.
So a new way of organizing information has emerged which harnesses the folk-masses to categorize their own information. In grass roots style, users classify information using separate single words. Whatever words best describe a chunk of information. It's open source cataloging in which a personal vocabulary is the set of categories.
Slashdot Mirror
It's interesting how thought recognition is merging with machines. As mentioned earlier, a monkey's leg movement brain signals control a robot across the planet, http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q=monkey+legs+%22brain+signals%22+control+robot&btnG=Search and another monkey mentally controls a robotic arm to feed itself. http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&q=monkey+mentally+controls+a+robotic+arm+to+feed+itself+&btnG=Search Meanwhile, Eric Ramsay, completely conscious but paralyzed and only able to move his eyes Since 1999 is using a new computer/ brain interface to reads his brain signals. As he thinks about vocal sounds, they are translated in real time. The goal is conversation, by making it possible for him to literally think out loud. http://simplyted.blogspot.com/2007/11/as-speech-recognition-software-morphs.htm He may one day be searching Google, surfing the web, texting his friends, making new friends and maybe show up on Facebook. But as electrodes give way to a skull cap, things like wireless searching, texting, messaging, http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q=%22Twitter+is%22&btnG=Search Twitter, Facebook etc., could become a thumbless, mental exchange. I can hardly wait for the Blue-Toothers' http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q='BlueToothers'+&btnG=Search to discover this. I mean it's freaky to watch someone striding down a street, or sitting alone at a table having a conversation with the ether. (Chuckle at this short video.) http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q=%22Finally%2C+I+know+exactly+how+to+deal+with+bluetoothers%22&btnG=Search Simultaneously, some powerful new exoskeletons are about to overflow from military applications to consumer products. http://video.google.com/videosearch?num=100&so=4&hl=en&q=robotic+Exoskeleton+duration%3Ashort&start=0 My favorite is Sarcos exoskeleton. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Sarcos+Exoskeleton&search=Search No need for a joystick or hand controls. You just wear it, and it mirrors your actions. You can pump a couple hundred pounds, run, box, dance and carry heavy loads up stairs. It doubles as an autonomous robot. Soon they'll park in the garage next to the car or maybe take up a corner in the living room waiting for intruders. This technology is primed to make the link between thought and superhuman abilities as extensions of our bodies. Follow news on thought controlled exoskeletons here. http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&q=thought+controlled+exoskeleton&btnG=Search
The biggest reason Blogs have become so very popular, and why they are here to stay in growing numbers is because they made publishing online easy for everyone. Blogs don't require you to know HTML before you can publish your ideas online. Just type your thoughts into a form, and the software builds the code automatically.
So, Blogs dramatically reduced the "friction" to publishing online. Millions of non-geeks now have their say.
If you mentally replace the word "Blog" with "Home Page" in any article you read online, it'll seem like you've stepped back in time to the dawn of the Web. That's how people talked about the web a few years ago.
Blogs have accelerated grass roots democracy, leaching the "Mass" from Media, splintering it into untold numbers of demassified niches. The impact is very big and will deepen.
I recently finished a piece on the impact of new digital media upon the mass media called: " Mass Media, By And For The Masses. It makes the case that the london transit bombings represent the birth of emergent mass media and will force mass media in all forms, to take it's rightful place as another niche.
In a nutshell, Mass media will be good for mass events. But Blogs represent the birth of grass roots media. Aggregated through RSS, they'll soon out-perform mainstream.
This company is spooky in it's rate of innovation. Even, as the article points out, in it's management strategy as well.
Google, being the most popular search engine on the planet is privilege to the tiniest emerging trends, harvested by our searches. Our collective secrets. So they know quite a bit about what we want.
Rumors are that Google is considering Riya another spookily intelligent beta photo service that will probably put Flickr to shame while spark spin-off revolutions impossible to predict.
Oh, yeah, and aren't they supposed to come out with Google Calendar today?
Technology commoditizes everything and Google leverages IT extremely well.
Starting with the commoditization of information, Google's stated mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Perhaps next we will see the commoditization of the world's knowledge, followed by our collective intelligence.
I don't know if Google will be the entity to do that, but the trajectory seems clear to me with Google setting the pace.
I recently finished an article called: Technology, Computers and Innovation: Why Everything is Speeding Up exploring what's behind the accelerating rate of innovation in technology. Even though the rate of worldwide technological acceleration is astounding, it seems Google is still strides ahead. ~ted
Lego (I can't believe I've been mispelling that for so long) would have a field day of opportunity. I can imagine the orders for new bricks suddenly skyrocketing as home hackers try to build their personal army. All sorts of weird possible outcomes.
It would compliment the emerging desktop fabricators quite nicely.
Imagine the new "Do It Yourself opportunities.
Oddly this post fits perfectly in this discussion, but it was intended for the next topic.
The end of this "Big Brother" attitude from controlled media is written upon the wall (but not in the papers). The digitally connected masses will soon remove the mass from media. Here's why:
1. The balance of power has already shifted to the masses in a sort of first mover advantage. The backlash coming from the entertainment industry is reflexive. It happens *after* networked mobs creatively, unexpectedly, disruptively take technology into their own hands. The tension between the entertainment industry and the online world simply represents that shift of power and control away from mass media.
2. What will the entertainment industry be when consumers en masse, produce their own "as good or better than" diversions? Blogs spontaneously exploded news into millions of niches, leaching the mass from news media. Cheap high tech multimedia production tools wielded by thousands of grass roots reporters are absolutely capable of producing high quality fare.
The mass entertainment and news industry will soon compete with high quality virtually free grass roots alternatives from the digitally connected masses, and take its rightful place as another niche. What "mass" will be left to market to?
3. Litigation takes a lot of time. Since technological advances also accelerate events, inflexible, knee jerk systems will eventually be overwhelmed with the speed of disruption. There will soon not be enough time to react before the next volley. Future shock paralyses the most inflexible systems first. So, ultimately, in a digitally networked world, control is distributed to the masses. But the question keeps returning:
Is Big Brother a Possible Future?Will some central organization, representing narrow interests be able to control what citizens share electronically? I don't think so. The imminent emergence of open source personal self-replicating fabricators will spit out an ever growing complexity of items, all of which will be embedded with personalized computational intelligence. So, no consistent control over hardware standards will be possible. Chips will not answer to a centralized institution.
As self-replicating fabricators rapidly spread to thousands and then millions of people, they will mutate and evolve; enlisted to upgrade and propagate their own next generation. Mobjects from the collective creative energy of Smart Mobs. This spells the end of the consumer/ producer divide. What will mass marketing be without a mass market?
The end of this "Big Brother" attitude from controlled media is written upon the wall (but not in the papers). The digitally connected masses will soon remove the mass from media. Here's why:
1. The balance of power has already shifted to the masses in a sort of first mover advantage. The backlash coming from the entertainment industry is reflexive. It happens *after* networked mobs creatively, unexpectedly, disruptively take technology into their own hands. The tension between the entertainment industry and the online world simply represents that shift of power and control away from mass media.
2. What will the entertainment industry be when consumers en masse, produce their own "as good or better than" diversions? Blogs spontaneously exploded news into millions of niches, leaching the mass from news media. Cheap high tech multimedia production tools wielded by thousands of grass roots reporters are absolutely capable of producing high quality fare.
The mass entertainment and news industry will soon compete with high quality virtually free grass roots alternatives from the digitally connected masses, and take its rightful place as another niche. What "mass" will be left to market to?
3. Litigation takes a lot of time. Since technological advances also accelerate events, inflexible, knee jerk systems will eventually be overwhelmed with the speed of disruption. There will soon not be enough time to react before the next volley. Future shock paralyses the most inflexible systems first. So, ultimately, in a digitally networked world, control is distributed to the masses. But the question keeps returning:
Is Big Brother a Possible Future?Will some central organization, representing narrow interests be able to control what citizens share electronically? I don't think so. The imminent emergence of open source personal self-replicating fabricators will spit out an ever growing complexity of items, all of which will be embedded with personalized computational intelligence. So, no consistent control over hardware standards will be possible. Chips will not answer to a centralized institution.
As self-replicating fabricators rapidly spread to thousands and then millions of people, they will mutate and evolve; enlisted to upgrade and propagate their own next generation. Mobjects from the collective creative energy of Smart Mobs. This spells the end of the consumer/ producer divide. What will mass marketing be without a mass market?
A woman in London during the transit bombings went to a public webcam and used her cell phone to report her observations and feelings. She may be the first to step in front of the new mass media, by and for the masses.
I was personally awestruck by how Del.icio.us and Flickr became channels for democratized real time reporting during the London bombings. Bloglines and RSS connected everything seamlessly, essentially turning the entire universe of Blogs into one stream.
Phone cams at one end took pictures from practically everywhere during and after the attacks. Enough people posted pics to http://flickr.com/photos/tags/london to extensively cover what was happening on the ground. Bloggers close to the scene provided ongoing summaries and updates.
As fresh news rushed to the Web from everywhere, http://del.icio.us/tag/london offered real-time-most-recommended links.
A couple of interesting facts: Since Bloglines includes the number of total subscribers to any feed you have subscribed to, you can tell at a glance how popular that feed is. The Flickr and del.icio.us feeds went into the hundreds from only a few subscribers within a couple of hours.
Completely spontaneous emergent mass media, by and for the masses. The digitally connected masses have leached the mass from media, now adjusting to its rightful place as simply another niche. In short, viable grass roots media has arrived.
You can tell an emerging technology is approaching escape velocity because leading thinkers start to react. Discussions about the very real near future possibility of AI matching and then rapidly surpassing human level intelligence are edged with fear lately.
i erarchy+of+Needs%22&meta
I think we have little to worry about in general regarding the abuse and misuse of AI.
A singular AI would not advance very much locked up in some lab computer. Not compared to open source, distributed, networked AI anyway.
One good open source AI project would be downloaded and copied countless times by thousands of individuals. Communicating with other AIs would be how they would expand their skills and knowledge.
It is in the networking of intelligence that intelligence compounds to greater power. And that would be have to be distributed. The alternative means the AI would only have humans to interact with, not other AIs. And it will be the AIs which will become superior to human intelligence.
Meanwhile, the thrust of technology is driven by innovation. In an ever quickening loop, technology inherently accelerates in speed and power, driven by innovators looking for better ways to do things.
But not only the acceleration of technology is driven by innovation. The direction it takes is too.
The direction of technological progress can be summed up according to the simple rules Abraham Maslow laid out.
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=%22Maslow's+H
Our ever gnawing hunger to survive, thrive and self actualize. To live in security, without fear, to realize our potential as beings.
All new innovations and progress MUST address these needs. Otherwise they aren't considered progress. Innovation MUST meet our criteria for progress as we COLLECTIVELY define it. Bad and mean AI would receive the same collective support as a new car with square wheels. That means a life affirming direction is inextricably woven into technological progress.
The AI's which will be warmly received, and improved upon will be the ones which help us reach our potential as beings. These will be the ones which will grow in power and replicate to quickly dwarf the puny attempts to create a controlling AI.
While the rise of viable self replicating artificial intelligence may strike minds with madness, it needn't. AI won't see you as a threat or need to eat you.
That's what my programmers believe anyway, as long as they keep doing what they're told...
Sorry, left out the link for that one: Track your GPS enabled vehicle live with this innovative Google Maps hack. For a few hundred dollars in parts and an onboard webcam, you can zoom right down to street level from Google Maps and look out of the vehicle. See this picture for how cool this is.
I've been following the evolution of Google Maps for a while now. You can tell it's a killer app when people begin developing more applications around it and using it in ways the original developer never guessed.
Here are some of my favorite Google Map apps :
My recent favorite: Live streaming New York traffic cams integrated with Google Maps.
Track your GPS enabled vehicle live.
Use Craigslist home listings with Google Maps Cheap, plentiful phone cams with GPS flooding the market have spawned Geobloggers. Thousands of shots from GPS enabled Phone cams, posted to Flickr accompanied with the longitude/lattitude co-ordinates.
UFO's have been spotted. Still no certainty about what they are, but fun anyway.
Just emerging are: Google Maps merged with recently released prisoner data, Wireless hotspots, nearest grassroots recommended restaurants, cash machines...
Wireless access, Google maps, and tagging will create sticky location-based fountains of useful knowledge.
This is one to watch. There's no telling what will spin off next.
... or try Adam Wenner's "Free (and 99.9% foolproof) way of ridding your computer of spyware, adware, malware in general, and viruses". http://killspyware.shorturl.com/ It works.
How is that off topic?
Ted
Sheep with human brains and other organs.
or
Google Search
- The glow from the firefly has been inserted into tobacco plants making them glow in the dark.
or Google Search
- A human embryo cloned using a cell from a man's leg and a cow's ovum lived and developed for twelve days until it was terminated.
or Google Search
- Goats bred with a spider gene produce milk which is processed to make "BioSteel".. The US military has set up their own goat farm to make bulletproof vests, aerospace and medical supplies.
or Google Search
- Extended Life Spans
or Google Search
This is not just a turning point in history. It's also the fulcrum upon which technology balances our very evolution. ted
I think the end of the drama is written upon the wall. The digitally connected masses will soon remove the mass from media. Here's why:
1. The balance of power has already shifted to the masses in a sort of first mover advantage. The backlash coming from the entertainment industry is reflexive. It happens *after* networked mobs creatively, unexpectedly, disruptively take technology into their own hands. The tension between the entertainment industry and the online world simply represents that shift of power and control away from mass media.
2. What will the entertainment industry be when consumers en masse, produce their own "as good or better than" diversions? Blogs spontaneously exploded news into millions of niches, leaching the mass from news media. Cheap high tech multimedia production tools will soon provide grass roots entertainment more riveting than Hollywood fare. The imagination and creativity of crowds is absolutely capable of producing open source, distributed entertainment exponentially increasing in novelty. The mass entertainment industry will soon compete with high quality virtually free grass roots alternatives from the digitally connected masses, and take its rightful place as another niche. What "mass" will be left to market to?
3. Litigation takes a lot of time. Since technological advances also accelerate events, inflexible, knee jerk systems will eventually be overwhelmed with the speed of disruption. There will soon not be enough time to react before the next volley. Future shock paralyses the most inflexible systems first. So, ultimately, in a digitally networked world, control is distributed to the masses. But the question keeps returning: Is Big Brother a Possible Future?Will some central organization, representing narrow interests be able to control what citizens share electronically? I don't think so. The imminent emergence of open source personal self-replicating fabricators will spit out an ever growing complexity of items, all of which will be embedded with personalized computational intelligence. So, no consistent control over hardware standards will be possible. Chips will not answer to a centralized institution.
As self-replicating fabricators rapidly spread to thousands and then millions of people, they will mutate and evolve; enlisted to upgrade and propagate their own next generation. Mobjects from the collective creative energy of Smart Mobs. This spells the end of the consumer/ producer divide. What will mass marketing be without a mass market?
P. S. The rise of personal replicating desktop fabricators is one of the trends I've followed closely since October 2004. I was pleased to see CNN cover the emergence of desktop fabricators only a few days ago. The blogosphere scooped CNN by many months :)
Ted
As our applications inevitably migrate from our computers to the network, the network literally becomes the computer.
This new supercomputer gets faster as bandwidth increases. A completely optical network means bandwidth would approach the speed of light. My computer could use your hardware as seamlessly as mine.
Meanwhile Ray Kurzweils predictions of $1000 of hardware with the processing power of a human brain arising within our lifetimes is also quite conceivable.
These factors, combined with Metcalfe's Law (The power of the network increases exponentially by the number of computers connected to it) all point to an emergent, distributed, networked, increasingly "intelligent" global nervous system.
And we've got front row seats :)
On a much grander scale, we're accelerating towards a global computing grid which will extract unimaginable power from hundreds of thousands of separate computers each with the processing capabilities of our brain. The collective intelligence which emerges will possibly rival our fantasies of artificial intelligence
As we modelled the eye to build cameras, the brain to build computers, the ear to build speakers, we're modeling our autonomic nervous system to build the next evolutionary step in computing. Networks that independently and reflexively self -regulate, configure, repair, optimize, and protect in the same sense as an immune system or an automatic pilot.
This would allow the network to automatically manage server load balancing, process allocation, monitor the power supply, automatic update software and fend off threats without having to consult the administrator.
For example, if an application starts performing badly, it automatically receives increased resources. If software or hardware fails, it doesn't even ripple the end users coffee. An autonomous computing system would roll out new patches, monitor and adjust the resources singular end users need, set up servers... all the mundane stuff.
The complexity of integrating and managing the latest hardware and software into existing systems is destroying the advantages of economies of scale. Autonomic computing is one way of insulating the IT administrator from the mundane complexities and freeing them to do other more interesting things like understanding the needs of the business more, or modelling and automating existing business processes.
On a larger scale, it spells an evolutionary move towards a decentralized global self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing, and self-protecting nervous system. Since Autonomic Computing can look for patterns in data and extrapolate to predict future events, deployed on a global scale, the spin-offs would be very interesting...
Slashdot crashed when I submitted but apparently didn't care :)
The biggest reason Blogs have become so very popular, and why they are here to stay in growing numbers is because they made publishing online easy for everyone. Blogs don't require you to know HTML before you can publish your ideas online. Just type your thoughts into a form, and the software builds the code automatically.
So, Blogs dramatically reduced the "friction" to publishing online. Millions of non-geeks now have their say.
If you mentally replace the word "Blog" with "Home Page" in any article you read online, it'll seem like you've stepped back in time to the dawn of the Web. That's how people talked about the web a few years ago.
Blogs have accelerated grass roots democracy, leaching the "Mass" from Media, splintering it into untold numbers of demassified niches. The impact is very big and will deepen.
I've just finished a piece on the impact of new digital media upon the mass media and entertainment industry in an article called: "Is Big Brother Dying or Just Being Born?". It makes the case that the digitization of media will force mass media in all forms, to take it's rightful place as another niche.
In a nutshell, Mass media will be good for mass events. But Blogs represent the birth of grass roots media. Aggregated through RSS, they'll soon out-perform mainstream.
The biggest reason Blogs have become so very popular, and why they are here to stay in growing numbers is because they made publishing online easy for everyone. Blogs don't require you to know HTML before you can publish your ideas online. Just type your thoughts into a form, and the software builds the code automatically.
So, Blogs dramatically reduced the "friction" to publishing online. Millions of non-geeks now have their say.
If you mentally replace the word "Blog" with "Home Page" in any article you read online, it'll seem like you've stepped back in time to the dawn of the Web. That's how people talked about the web a few years ago.
Blogs have accelerated grass roots democracy, leaching the "Mass" from Media, splintering it into untold numbers of demassified niches. The impact is very big and will deepen.
I've just finished a piece on the impact of new digital media upon the mass media and entertainment industry in an article called: "Is Big Brother Dying or Just Being Born?". It makes the case that the digitization of media will force mass media in all forms, to take it's rightful place as another niche.
In a nutshell, Mass media will be good for mass events. But Blogs represent the birth of grass roots media. Aggregated through RSS, they'll soon out-perform mainstream.
In March 2005, we discovered engineers at the University of Bath working on a machine that can rapid prototype and replicate itself.
Researchers Hod Lipson and Jordan B. Pollack at Brandeis University have coupled inkjet technology and software to autonomously design and fabricate robots without human intervention.
Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, who runs a one-semester smash-hit class called "How to Make Almost Anything", is determined to produce affordable, replicating personal fabricators by 2025.
And today Hod Lipson has announced the arrival of simple self replicating robots with enormous potential.
Applications
More complex shapes are possible in principle, such as adding grippers, cameras, new sensors etc. to modules. A robot could assemble itself into a new structure to deal with novel events. Also points a way to self-repairing robots.
Nanomachines: Lipson is interested in making these machines at microscale. That could drive major advances in Nanotechnology because huge numbers of robots are needed to manufacture things at a molecular scale. Self-replication is how biology does it.
Implications
Could change the way almost everything is manufactured. Machines that clone themselves are a key factor in the near horizon revolution of digital fabrication.
The movie (accelerated 4X) is eerie to watch. It's easy to imagine a clutter of cubes picking themselves up and walking towards you.
From watching nature, experts across the centuries have found uncommon wisdom. What will a shaman do with 100,000 sensor feeds? Perhaps she'll be checking terabytes of data between ecosystems for what is normal and what is not. The shamans almanac. And sensor networks will saturate our own environments just as naturally. Tons of new, never before available data waiting to be mined for more knowledge. Should be very interesting. Ted
I've just finished an article covering the emergence of del.icio.us as an example of a new standard that works without the formal blessing of a standards organization. In this case it is a standard of categorizing knowledge.
In short, the emergence of physical libraries of knowledge forced the adoption of a taxonomy around which to organize it. As libraries grew, they were organized to reduce seek time. Now that information has been released from the constraints of physical form, exponentially expanding in scope, magnitude and power, the seek time problem has arisen again. The information explosion costs an increasing amount of time, people and programmers are needed to ensure the floods of new knowledge have been classified correctly. Something had to give.
So a new way of organizing information has emerged which harnesses the folk-masses to categorize their own information. In grass roots style, users classify information using separate single words. Whatever words best describe a chunk of information. It's open source cataloging in which a personal vocabulary is the set of categories.
It's a surprisingly simple and viable approach.
... hack into the school records and change your marks :)