Category Archives: Technology

Jimmy Wales seeking more intelligent politics

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From his Mission Statement – Central Campaign Wikia…

Broadcast media brought us broadcast politics. And let’s be simple and bluntly honest about it, left or right, conservative or liberal, broadcast politics are dumb, dumb, dumb.

Campaigns have been more about getting the television messaging right, the image, the soundbite, than about engaging ordinary people in understanding and caring how political issues really affect their lives.

Blog and wiki authors are now inventing a new era of media, and it is my belief that this new media is going to invent a new era of politics. If broadcast media brought us broadcast politics, then participatory media will bring us participatory politics.

One hallmark of the blog and wiki world is that we do not wait for permission before making things happen. If something needs to be done, we do it. Well, campaigns need to sit up and take notice of the Internet, take notice of bloggers, take notice of wikis, and engage with us in a constructive way.
The candidates who will win elections in the future will be the candidates who build genuinely participative campaigns by generating and expanding genuine communities of engaged citizens.

I am launching today a new Wikia website aimed at being a central meeting ground for people on all sides of the political spectrum who think that it is time for politics to become more participatory, and more intelligent.

This website, Campaigns Wikia, has the goal of bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging with the serious ideas of intelligent opponents, about activating and motivating ordinary people to get involved and really care about politics beyond the television soundbites.

Together, we will start to work on educating and engaging the political campaigns about how to stop being broadcast politicians, and how to start being community and participatory politicians…

The Long Tail

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Just back from the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London where I interviewed Wired Editor, Chris Anderson, about his new book, The Long Tail. He’s a voluble, intelligent, persuasive talker and he gave a polished performance to a packed house.

Two interesting points.

  • Anderson wrote his book ‘publicly’ — by publishing chapters on his Blog and inviting comments. So he harnessed the power of Eric Raymond’s motto, “with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”.
  • He’s also harnessed the blogosphere by offering to give a free copy to any blogger who will review it. Smart thinking.

    • Toll booths on the Net

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    From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

    Believers in the Internet as a free flowing, end-to-end service were talking about the end of it all today, after a Net neutrality amendment to telecom legislation was voted down in a Senate committee yesterday on an 11-11 tie. We’ve been over this ground before (see “That’s a mighty fine looking stream of data you’ve got there … shame if anything happened to it.”), so this time we’ll let ZDNet’s Mitch Ratcliffe say it: “The Senate Commerce Committee, splitting 11 to 11 and therefore rejecting compromise language, set the stage for a carrier-controlled Internet. If the bill passes the Senate and is signed by the President, you can kiss the Net you know ‘goodbye.’ Farewell, open networks and open standards. Soon every packet will be subject to inspection and surcharges based on what it carries and who sent it or where it is going. The compromise language would have guaranteed that all traffic sent over carrier backbones would be treated equally, regardless of its source or destination. Carriers will be free to target especially profitable traffic for surcharges.” Those who frame this as a fight to keep the government’s sticky fingers out of the “natural” workings of the market were pleased. “For those of you who think this is a bad thing — recall the FCC’s actions after the Super Bowl ‘wardrobe malfunction.’ If you think the U.S. government is going to lay down neutrality rules and then keep a hands off attitude beyond that, you probably also think you’ll find a pony under every large pile of manure,” writes James Robertson. Both sides agree, however, that there is fighting that remains to be done, with Net neutralists taking heart from managing the tie in committee and momentum for a Senate floor fight growing.

    A 100 megapixel chip!

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    Technology Review has the story.

    San Juan Capistrano, CA-based Semiconductor Technology Associates (STA) has designed the world’s highest-resolution digital camera chip, capable of holding an image composed of more than 111 million pixels. By comparison, the best consumer cameras take shots of 12 to 16 million pixels, and an average computer monitor offers about one million pixels.

    The imaging chip, which is a charge-coupled device (CCD), was designed for use in telescope cameras that map stars and ever-moving objects in the solar system, says Richard Bredthauer, STA’s president. But this large-scale chip — it measures four inches square — could be useful in more fields than just astronomy, he says, including high-resolution microscopic images of proteins, military surveillance applications, and even civilian mapping projects that require detailed aerial photography.

    It’s four inches square. Too big for my Hasselblad. Bah!

    WorldCat

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    Wow! Something I should have known about — Worldcat.

    WorldCat is the world’s largest bibliographic database, the merged catalogs of thousands of OCLC member libraries. Built and maintained collectively by librarians, WorldCat itself is not an OCLC service that is purchased, but rather provides the foundation for many OCLC services and the benefits they provide.

    I’ve just used it to look up a rare book and it told me which libraries in my part of the world have a copy.

    US ill-prepared for Net disruption?

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    From WSJ.com…

    The U.S. is poorly prepared for a major disruption of the Internet, according to a study that an influential group of chief executives will publish today.

    The Business Roundtable, composed of the CEOs of 160 large U.S. companies, said neither the government nor the private sector has a coordinated plan to respond to an attack, natural disaster or other disruption of the Internet. While individual government agencies and companies have their own emergency plans in place, little coordination exists between the groups, according to the study.

    “It’s a matter of more clearly defining who has responsibility,” said Edward Rust Jr., CEO of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., who leads the Roundtable’s Internet-security effort.
    Other companies with leaders active in the effort include FedEx Corp., International Business Machines Corp., Dow Chemical Co., Hewlett-Packard Co., CA Inc., Alcoa Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Pfizer Inc.

    The study points out that a massive Web disruption could potentially paralyze banks, transportation systems, health-care providers and voice calling over the Internet.

    The chief problem: There are so many public and private institutions that handle security-related tasks that their responsibilities often overlap, creating inefficiencies that can bog down an emergency response, according to the study.
    Security officials at some banks and other companies have established groups to swap data about Internet threats. Companies that make the technology behind the Internet itself have an informal group of their own to discuss security issues. Meanwhile, a government body called the National Cyber Response Coordination Group is meant to manage a response to Internet emergencies.

    Yet those groups’ roles are often unclear, and no system is in place to coordinate their efforts, the study says. It cited “serious problems stemming from the lack of consolidation, including the fact that these organizations are not accountable for their actions.”

    The first MySpace lawsuit

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    Here we go. As I envisaged in my column on Sunday, MySpace is being sued for allowing minors to wander into a dangerous space.

    A 14-year-old Travis County girl who said she was sexually assaulted by a Buda man she met on MySpace.com sued the popular social networking site Monday for $30 million, claiming that it fails to protect minors from adult sexual predators.

    The lawsuit claims that the Web site does not require users to verify their age and calls the security measures aimed at preventing strangers from contacting users younger than 16 “utterly ineffective.”

    “MySpace is more concerned about making money than protecting children online,” said Adam Loewy, who is representing the girl and her mother in the lawsuit against MySpace, parent company News Corp. and Pete Solis, the 19-year-old accused of sexually assaulting the girl.

    Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer for MySpace.com, said in a written statement: “We take aggressive measures to protect our members. We encourage everyone on the Internet to engage in smart web practices and have open family dialogue about how to apply offline lessons in the online world.”

    Founded in 2003, MySpace has more than 80 million registered users worldwide and is the world’s third most-viewed Web site, according to the lawsuit.

    Loewy said the lawsuit is the first of its kind in the nation against MySpace.

    Solis contacted the girl through her MySpace Web site in April, telling her that he was a high school senior who played on the football team, according to the lawsuit.

    In May, after a series of e-mails and phone calls, he picked her up at school, took her out to eat and to a movie, then drove her to an apartment complex parking lot in South Austin, where he sexually assaulted her, police said. He was arrested May 19.

    The lawsuit includes news reports of other assault cases in which girls were contacted through MySpace. They include a 22-year-old Wisconsin man charged with six counts of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a 27-year-old Connecticut man accused of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl.

    MySpace says on a “Tips for Parents” page that users must be 14 or older. The Web site does nothing to verify the age of the user, such as requiring a driver’s license or credit card number, Loewy said…

    Posted in Web

    The social life of networks

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    I was offline yesterday because I was giving the Beishon Memorial Lecture at the OU and needed to focus on important matters like logistics and car parking for guests. The title of the lecture was “The Social Life of Networks” and there’s a pdf here if you’re having trouble sleeping. There will also be a webcast, but it hasn’t emerged from editing yet.

    Thanks to James Miller, eagle-eyed as ever, who spotted several typos and a glaring error in a calculation!

    Jumpcut

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    The user-generated content bandwagon rolls on. Jumpcut is a web service which enables you to edit small movies (add soundtracks, efffects, etc) in your browser. According to this New York Times report, there are lots of workalike services on the way:

    Eyespot, Grouper and VideoEgg, have been introduced within the last year. This summer, they will be joined by another site, Motionbox, based in New York.

    Their shared objective, the founders of the sites say, is to reduce the complexity of video editing and to reduce the cost to zero.

    “We wanted to make video editing over the Internet faster than desktop editing,” said Jim Kaskade, co-founder and chief executive of Eyespot, based in San Diego. “We think it will broaden the base of people who are creative, but may not have thought they were, by creating this tool kit for them. Editing video is eventually going to be as simple as sending e-mail.”

    Mr. Kaskade refers to the process as “mixing,” however, saying he believes that the term “editing” may sound labor-intensive to the amateur videographer. Previously, putting together a multishot video like Mr. Moore’s would have involved installing and learning to use a piece of software like iMovie from Apple, Adobe Premiere or Studio from Pinnacle Systems. Some of that software is packaged free with new computers or sold for about $100.

    The analyst firm Parks Associates estimated last year that only about four million people regularly use such software for video editing — far fewer than the number who capture video using camcorders, Webcams, digital still cameras and cellphones.

    But with more videos of soccer games, weddings and cruise vacations being posted online — and potentially being seen by people who have not been dragooned into the living room for a showing — editing gains in importance, Mr. Kaskade says, even if it involves trimming only the dizzying camera whirls at the beginning of a shot, or the inevitable question, “Are you taping right now?”

    The bandwidth implications of this are interesting. All of the sites, except Grouper, require that video clips be uploaded to their servers before they can be manipulated. That can take a long time, and there are limits to the size of the files that can be sent. (For Jumpcut, the limit is 50 megabytes per clip.)

    Grouper users have to download a free piece of Windows-only software that works in conjunction with the Web site. It permits users to trim and rearrange clips on their PC and upload only the finished product, in compressed form.

    Telecos pray for time when the Skype finally falls in

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    This morning’s Observer column…

    When many of the current crop of senior telecoms executives pass away, the word ‘Skype’ will be found engraved on their hearts. Skype, as every teenager knows, is a system for making free telephone calls over the internet.

    All you need is a computer and a broadband connection at either end. If you want to make calls from your computer to an ‘ordinary’ telephone, you can pay Skype a small ‘Skype-out’ fee. Now you can also sign up for a ‘Skype-in’ service, which allows folks with ordinary phones to call you on your PC.

    Since its inception in 2003, Skype’s subscriber numbers have followed the time-honoured exponential curve. The company now claims to be adding 150,000 registered new users a day. And yes, you read that correctly: 150,000 a day. For telecoms, these numbers are bad enough. But what’s worse is that Skype is adding all those new subscribers without investing a cent in plant and equipment….