10 things to share (1)

This is a new post I'll be doing from time to time. In it I'll be sharing some of the cool stuff I encounter as I personally crawl the web. These things might be anything from a good arcticle to a funny video. Each entry will get a keyword, so that it is easy to seach it up on my blog. Enjoy these first ten links from me!


1: Thank Goodness! by Daniel Dennett (Article)
    Written by professor of philosophy at Tufts university, and prominent atheist Dan Dennett, about     being grateful for human kindness.


2: s_11 by Benjamin Sichert (Video)
    I love HDR photography. I love DSLR video. I love decaying industrial complexes, and I love slow footage on a slide. This video provides it all.



3: Note to media: We are all brands now, so get used to it. by Mathew Ingram. (Article)
    Ingram talks about how social media like twitter, facebook and google+ is forcing individual writers to proliferate themselves and become brands. This trend is reinforced by googles new feature that brings writers up in the search results when the article is presented.

4: xkcd: Connoisseur by Randall Munroe (comic strip)
    Honestly, most of the xkcd comic strips are wonderful. Some are about computer science, some about life, some about philosophy and some about mathermatcs - but all are wonderfully nerdy!


5: darkcopy.com by DarkCopy (online writing program)
    This is an online text editor along the same lines as WriteRoom. It will serve you well for your simple writing needs, but since this is an online program I miss features to easily save your file in the cloud. One of the most beautuful things about this, is that you can fill your screen with it, so that it looks like your writing on a computer from the last century.


6: Upending Anonymity, These Days the Web Unmasks Everyone by Brian Stelter (Article)
    This is an observation that...well.. other more techy media have covered a long time ago. But you know... The New York times does lend some credibility, and if they have picked up on it, then it's probably come a long way.


7: Strandbeests by Theo Jansen (TED video)
    The Strandbeests are machines that the kinetic sculpurer Theo Jansen sets loose on beaches. He also talks in a fancy way about cultural items ability to spread due to their compatibility with our mind, whatever that means.


8: Fingerprintsweb by Per Stornes (Free awesome online music)
    This is the web page Per Stornes has dedicated to his music. He is a former active member of the Harstad blues environment, but now only makes music in between family life and sociology lectures. He is also and active "kaffesosiolog".


9: Home Chalkboard use, and library  by Shelterness (design blog)
    I actually like interior decorating, and two ideas I've had a for a long time is covering a wall with a chalkboard, and one wall with a bookshelf. These are just fanciful ideas, and I don't know if I can ever  do it. (justifying buying that many books will be hard), but I love to see how people have done this in their homes.


10: Why seeing (The Unexpected) is often not believing by Alix Spiegel (article)
       This is a wonderful story about a real life situation spurred on researchers to do experiments that mimic reality - and which ultimately will help many people from not being convicted. Unfortunately it was too late for the victim in the court system, but the story is engaging.
    

Metadata Miracle

This post is inspired by an article in Wired Magazine called Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare Time Revolution, written by Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink. It deals with the massive creative force eminating from the millions of small contributions by people in their spare time. This force has undertaken great labours, and elevated the web to what we today call web. 2.0. But the concept I wish to share with you today is how web 2.0 is seeping into our daily lives, to make... life 2.0?

It might as well be named that. Version numers, and tech words like beta and app are commonplace. And so is participation on the web. It took 100 million work hours to create wikipedia. That is a massive undertaking, and the vast majority of labour was done in peoples spare time. Most of the papers are written almost singelhandidly by one person. And then follows hundreds of iterations, citations, spell checking and so on. But all contributions need not be of this magnitude.

Lots of a little becomes a lot. Wikipedia is one easy example. Equally important are youtube, millions of blogs and microblogs. While most of these are examples of how normal lives pervade and enrich the internet, microbloggin is now in a higher degree meshing with the real world.

The big bottleneck for interaction from web to real world is how the information is sorted and represented in our physical reality. The most natural way this is happening now is with cell phones, and other mobile units.

Combining maps, cell phones, microblogging and a GPS, you can instantly tap into a sort of minute by minute zeitgeist. When I logg into google maps, I can choose to view the hundreds of Buzz updates. Informing, and misinforming me. But at least giving me a fair sense of what the more tech minded people are thinking out there:  What is playing right now? Has there been any recent accidents? And so on. But remember that there are people behind every bit of information. While not strictly a spare- time endevour, such influences fall under the same category of indivudal effort, ehancing our reality.

Times are changing. That simultainiously epic and trite compination of words captures that essence of urgency which I wish to convey to you now. Times Are Changing.

The division we are starting to see now; between those who use computers for creating, and those who use computers for consuming, is shaping up to be one of the more influencal shifts in pc consumerism this decade. But a division this simple is almost always a false dichotomy. Tablet pc's and tablets are often mentioned in reviews as "low imput devices". But low imput does not mean no imput.

Microiterations to bigger texts, small text updates and above all puctures are so easily shareable, that it seems they are particularily suited for mobile updating of current events.

Opening up the screen, making it bigger, giving the internet more space is but opening a window to all the metada available outside our brains. So the famed bottle neck is shifting from access, to reading and input limitations. This is certainly not lost on the pioners of computer technology today.

Pranav Mistry at MiT has been working on something he calls the "sixt sense" technology. It is as system compromiced of a projector and a camera, all mounted in a sort of necklase that hangs on your chest. (I'm looking forward to future, more elegant riggs). It displays metadata on any surface in your vicinity, alowing you to manipulate it as you are there. One partucularily elegant use, is makine a "square gesture" to take a photo. Another is diplaying buttons in your hands for easy phone calls.  It's functions are so diverce, that rather than show it to you, I'll put a video of it so you can see for yourself.

Still. The vast majority of these technologies lie far in the future. It seems that these kinds of thecnological steps are not done in leaps and bounds, but by incremental steps. So far we have not seen the limit to what people are willing to accept into their lives.

As with every other technology there are fears and worries, but those are quickly overcome. Much more slowly the ethical conciderations creep into place. Who knows. Maybe one day it will be concidered immoral not to buzz/twitter/what ever about major happenings.

It is impossible to predict the future. But we can all dream about it, and by adopting new technologies help shape it. What technologies do you think should become a reality? Leave any interesting things in the comment section below.

 Image Curtesy of sndrv





Update:
Clay Shirky has also had a wonderful presentation about this on TED. The video deals with the same theme, but makes a new and exiting distinction. For whom is the product produced valuable. Also there is some light sociology in the mix.