Strange name, I know, but I’ll be interested to try one.
Category Archives: Technology
That “iPod moment” meme
Jeff Jarvis has a forceful disquisition on “the iPod moment for newspapers”. He makes the point that the newspaper industry has for a long time assumed that its salvation lay in ‘e-paper’ — a flexible, foldable, high-res electronic display technology which would allow newspapers to continue as they were but with added e-power. Jeff’s view is that it ain’t gonna be like that, and I’m sure that he’s right. The new iPhone and iPod Touch devices are already pretty impressive as networked readers, and they will doubtless get better in the next couple of years.
I had an interesting discussion yesterday with Brian about the use of the term ‘iPod moment’. It’s slightly misleading because it implies that the appearance of a gizmo is the crucial event. Not so. The genius of the iPod was that it was paired from the outset with iTunes software — and that that software had a beautiful, intuitive interface. It was the combination of the two that made it simple for the average non-techie to manage compressed music files. There were lots of portable MP3 players before the iPod, but syncing them to a PC involved geekery to some degree and so was not for ordinary mortals.
So what really constitutes an ‘iPod moment’ is the instant when it becomes possible for the average consumer to engage in a practice that is terminally disruptive for an established industry.
Wikiwars visualised
This is a graphical visualisation of the 20 most hotly-revised articles in Wikipedia. The diagram comes from a fascinating article on how it was constructed. In essence, the authors used network theory:
We began this piece by representing the data as a network. In this case the nodes in the network are wikipedia articles and the edges are the links between articles. We then (with some help from our friends at Sandia) used an algorithm to lay out all 650,000 nodes (wikipedia articles) that had at least one link in such a way that similar articles are near one another. These are the yellow dots, which when viewed at low res give a yellow tint to the whole picture.
The sizes of the nodes (circles, dots, whatever you want to call them), are based on a model of revision activity. So large circles indicate that an article might be controversial, or the subject of lots of vandalism, or just a topic whose content frequently changes. We labeled only the largest nodes, to keep it readable. There is an interactive version of this in the works based on the google maps platform which will change the labels and pictures used as the user ‘zooms’ in or out. Stay tuned for that.
The image used for each tile was selected automatically, simply by using the first image in the most linked to article among all the articles in that tile. We were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the images that appeared.
Our hope for this visualization approach, which we continue to improve on, is that it could be updated in real time to give a macro sense of what is happening in Wikipedia. I personally hope that some variation of it will end up in high schools as a teaching tool and for generating discussions…
Wiki wars
From the Telegraph…
Submission of new articles is slowing to a trickle where in previous years it was flood, and the discussion pages are increasingly filled with arguments and cryptic references to policy documents. The rise of the deletionists is threatening the hitherto peaceful growth of the world’s most popular information source.
Even though anyone can edit all but the most controversial pages, the English-language Wikipedia is governed by a group of a little over 1,000 administrators drawn from the ranks of enthusiastic editors. Only they have the power to finally delete an article or bring it back from the dead.
The group is forming itself into two factions: inclusionists and deletionists…
The implications of infinite storage
Interesting post by Ed Felten…
Last week I spoke on a panel called “The Paradise of Infinite Storage”, at the “Pop [Music] and Policy” conference at McGill University in Montreal. The panel’s title referred to an interesting fact: sometime in the next decade, we’ll see a $100 device that fits in your pocket and holds all of the music ever recorded by humanity.
This is a simple consequence of Moore’s Law which, in one of its variants, holds that the amount of data storage available at a fixed size and price roughly doubles every eighteen months. Extrapolate that trend and, depending on your precise assumptions, you’ll find the magic date falls somewhere between 2011 and 2019. From then on, storage capacity might as well be infinite, at least as far as music is concerned.
This has at least two important consequences. First, it strains even further the economics of the traditional music business. The gap between the number of songs you might want to listen to, and the number you’re willing and able to pay a dollar each to buy, is growing ever wider. In a world of infinite storage you’ll be able to keep around a huge amount of music that is potentially interesting but not worth a dollar (or even a dime) to you yet. So why not pay a flat fee to buy access to everything?
Second, infinite storage will enable new ways of building filesharing technologies, which will be much harder for copyright owners to fight. For example, today’s filesharing systems typically have users search for a desired song by contacting strangers who might have the song, or who might have information about where the song can be found. Copyright owners’ technical attacks against filesharing often target this search feature, trying to disrupt it or to exploit the fact that it involves communication with strangers.
But in a world of infinite storage, no searching is needed…
QRcode cracking
What’s this? It’s the QR code for Memex.
When I point my suitably-configured (and ancient) Nokia 6600 cameraphone at it, the software reads it, thus:
If I wanted to, I could click and the phone would connect to the site.
Lots of possibilities here. Thanks to Quentin and Michael for their help in getting this working.
You want fries with that 802.11g?
From The Register…
Proletarian fryhouse McDonald’s has announced it will offer free Wi-Fi in its 1,200 UK burger outlets by the end of the year.
The move will make McDonald’s the country’s largest public hotspot provider, and pits it against Starbucks’ pay-as-you-go T-Mobile service for high street internet supremacy.
It’s all part of a company-wide drive upmarket and away from the traditional McDonald’s experience: scary clowns, mechanically-recovered beef, and screaming infants.
Some sites already had Wi-Fi through an arrangement with BT Openzone, but access was not free. That partnership will continue, but with McDonald’s footing the bill. As part of the expansion, it’s also signed a second deal with The Cloud.
Some 8,000 of McDonald’s 13,000 US chow sheds currently offer free connectivity.
The UK announcement comes days after BT’s launch of BT FON, a Wi-Fi sharing initiative that it hopes will expand its coverage on the cheap. Up to two million Home Hub owners are being targeted and it’ll open to other ISPs’ customers around new year.
VoIP: Very over-Inflated Price
This morning’s Observer column…
First of all, an apology. In previous editions, this column may have suggested that VoIP (internet telephony) stood for ‘Voice over Internet Protocol’. Now it turns out that it is, in fact, an acronym for ‘Very over-Inflated Price’. The proprietors deeply regret this error and hope that it has not caused any reader to make foolish investment decisions.
This matter was drawn to our attention by an announcement made last week by eBay. The company reported that in the quarter just ended, it will take £700m in write-offs and charges related to Skype – for which two short years ago it paid £1.3bn in cash and stock, plus what was enigmatically described as ‘a potential performance-based consideration’ estimated by industry sources at £750m. That’s £2.75bn in total…
I also wrote a short piece on the Wikipedia-obituary kerfuffle.
Berkeley puts courses videos on YouTube
Yep — according to TechCrunch…
The University of California Berkeley has started uploading video recordings of course lectures on to YouTube.
The initial round of lectures covers 300 hours of video on subjects including Chemistry, Physics and Non-Violence, with more content to come. The move by Berkeley is claimed to be a first by some, however some of the videos have been previously available elsewhere, including iTunes and Google Video; perhaps it’s a first for YouTube…
Here’s Sergey Brin’s lecture on search engines.
Later: Tony Hirst’s built a neat little search engine for the Berkeley shows.
Dream Realisation, release 1.0
When we embarked on the Ndiyo Project we always knew that the realisation of the vision depended on shrinking the thin client down to a chip. Well, our colleagues at DisplayLink have done it! This is the USB version of the Nivo, and it’s now in the back of monitors from two of the world’s leading manufacturers of displays — Samsung and LG. It’s an amazing achievement. And there’s more to come. Stay tuned.