Category: Internet Culture and Technology

Matt Patey has drawn my attention to the 50×15 Initiative by AMD to create a PIC (Personal Internet Communicator) that is low-cost and easy to use so that by 2015 we could see 50% of the world’s population connected to the Internet. For a story on this see, AMD’s PC to increase online world / Low-end Internet model would assist emerging countries.
I, like Matt, have problems with the technology choices (Windows CE in a closed box with various preinstalled apps for media viewing.) This is a recipe for expanding the base of consumers not for empowering people to participate as creators on the net. The idea, if I understand AMD’s slides, is to market this through the telecommunication companies – reminds me of Minitel.
While Linux may not be the cure for all ills, why not imagine a project like this based on a cheap Linux laptop like the Wal-Mart $500 linux laptop.

According to Reuters story, Download Site SuprNova Closes Amid Hollywood Crackdown (Dec. 21, 2004), one of the major sources of links to pirated movies, the SuprNova.org site in Slovenia, was closed down after pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America. Essentially the same process of legal pressure followed by the RIAA is now being used by the MPAA to discourage the growing P2P sharing of movies. Will we see the same incentives like iTunes to legitimate acquisition of movies online? I think the general principle is, “if the pirates show that it works then its time for a service.”
SuprNova apparently used the BitTorrent “tit-for-tat” file distribution technology which is described in a paper on the The Official BitTorrent Home Page and is analyzed at The Register in an article on The BitTorrent P2P file-sharing system by Johan Pouwelse, Dec. 18, 2004. BitTorrent has legitimate and pirate uses.

CiteULike: A free online service to organize your academic papers is a social (or public) bookmarking and referencing project similar to del.icio.us which I blogged before. The focus in CiteULike is citations to papers; such a service could replace private EndNote bibliographic databases. Looking at it quickly, I am not sure it can generate a reference for a paper I am writing using different styles the way EndNote can, but that must be coming. The added value is that you could have other people writing sharing notes (since the main issue with reference databases is remembering what the hell the reference was about a year later) that would help you remember what you have supposedly read. Another added value would be to provide a persistent citation to something where I could cite the CiteULike page in addition to the online doc. Now … I wonder if this could be connected to the Internet Archive so that cached versions of papers from when I read the paper could be called up?

As the Winnepeg Sun reports, Canuck iTunes music to a fan’s ears (Dec. 3, 2004). When I first learned about iTunes I bought an iPod – it seemed the perfect match and an easy way to learn about and buy music. Then, like many Canadians with an iPod I waited … and waited … Finally we have iTunes in Canada. How will my music consumption habits change? I’ve learned that with my iPod I tend to just listen to the same things over and over – will iTunes change that?

EPIC 2014 is a Flash/animation essay that pretends to be a history of news and the web up to 2014. It is well done and an example of how you can present ideas in the medium. This came from Adrian Miles.

Alexa is now tracking sites. On their home page they tell you what sites have jumped and they have a “Traffic Watch” feature in their Related Info for: pages that graphs “reach”. A neat feature is that you can compare any of the sites they track.
A couple of years ago I gave a paper on tracking culture by graphing web hits. We (Skip Poehlman, Michael Picheca and I) built a system that could track keywords and store results from daily searches. One could then graph any two against each other and so on. I see now that Alexa now has this feature and has been tracking some cultural comparisons like “Liberal Talk Radio”. Will they generalize this? Will they let us track our stuff?

Google Scholar is a beta service that is aimed at academics. In their words,

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

Continue reading Google Scholar

del.icio.us is an interesting pre alpha project on social bookmarks where the path is the interface. I am not sure I get it, but my intuition is that this could be a much better way to handle links if the work of entering them isn’t too cumbersome.
For an article on it at the O’Reilly XML.com site see, XML.com: Introducing del.icio.us. I love the domain name! This is courtesy of Matt P.

FireFox, Mozilla’s multiplatform browser has been released in version 1.0. It is time for us all to switch – if only because Microsoft is getting sloppy. For a review see, Mozilla Firefox Browser Review, by About.com

Slashdot | Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor is a long interview with Neal Stephenson. I love what he has to say about

My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit (I am paraphrasing his argument). And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware’s nothing more than a really complicated space heater.

Now, one could construct an argument against Raymond Kurzweil to the effect that hardware may be getting faster, but the software is just getting hairy (as in hair ball). The inevitability that Kurzweil and others see in the improvements in hardware are a false evolution – a bit like thinking that humans will be superseded because cars gets faster.
This link is courtesy of Matt K.