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The Man Who Makes the Future: Wired Icon Marc Andreessen | Epicenter. A post-industrial A to Z digital battledore. New times demand new words, because the old words don't help us see the world differently. Along the way, I've invented a few, and it occurs to me that sometimes I use them as if you know what I'm talking about. Here, with plenty of links, are 26 of my favorite neologisms (the longest post of the year, probably): A is for Artist: An artist is someone who brings humanity to a problem, who changes someone else for the better, who does work that can't be written down in a manual. Art is not about oil painting, it's about bringing creativity and insight to work, instead of choosing to be a compliant cog. (from Linchpin). B is for Bootstrapper: A bootstrapper is someone who starts a business with no money and funds growth through growth.

C is for Choice: I didn't coin the term the Long Tail, but I wish I had. D is for Darwin: Things evolve. E is for Edgecraft: Brainstorming doesn't work so well, because most people are bad at it. I is for Ideavirus: A decade ago a wrote a book that was free. Agencies As Incubators. Does it make sense for an ad agency to launch an incubator for tech start-ups? You could (and many no doubt would) say that this was merely a distraction from the day job. An unnecessary aberration from what agencies are meant to be doing. Personally, I think it makes a bunch of sense. Here's why. This year's Cannes Lions seemed to be a marker in the sand of how the tech and ad worlds are increasingly colliding (or 'marrying on the beach', as Mel eloquently put it).

But as Olivier Blanchard points out, whilst agencies don’t need to become technology innovation engines, there undoubtedly is a need for ongoing collaboration with technology pioneers, for staffers to become tech savvy, and just for them to keep up: "Technical innovation can increase agency capabilities, cut costs, accelerate the campaign development process, and blow everyone’s socks off (consumers and clients). Who wants to turn that down? Image courtesy. The Top Ten Things We Can't Believe Eric Schmidt Ever Said. The FBI stole an Instapaper server in an unrelated raid. The FBI stole an Instapaper server in an unrelated raid UPDATE: The server has been returned.

Please read. One of Instapaper’s five leased servers was hosted at DigitalOne, a Swiss hosting company leasing blade servers from a Virginia datacenter. Early Tuesday morning, the FBI raided the datacenter to seize servers used by another DigitalOne customer for fraudulent “scareware” distribution, according to the FBI’s press release, but they seemingly took a lot more servers that happened to be physically near the server(s) they were looking for. There’s very little information on this, but The New York Times has the most complete coverage in Tuesday’s Bits post: The LA Times also has good coverage: "FBI was interested in one of our clients and in his servers, but they took besides target servers tens of not related servers of other customers," [Ostroumow] said.

The server was used as a MySQL replication slave, handling read-only queries to speed up the site. What the FBI stole from Instapaper. Schmidt, Google & Privacy. Le baratin de Jeff Jarvis | Digital-In. Jeff Jarvis a tout pour plaire aux journalistes. Sa taille d’acteur américain, sa disponibilité permanente, son sens de la formule, complètent avantageusement généreux sourires et auto-dérision permanente d’où ne sont pas exclues les contradictions avouées. Il présentait hier à La Cantine son dernier ouvrage Nu sur le web devant une assemblée jeune et pleine de respect pour un auteur venu développer une vision résolument positive et optimiste des évolutions du web, et s’est attellé avec passion à démontrer que les individus, entreprises, organisations et États ont tout à gagner à une généralisation de la transparence.

Ses arguments sont ceux d’un apologiste qui a “plus confiance en Facebook et Google que dans les banques” et qui milite ardemment pour l’abandon de préjugés contre l’introduction massive de nouvelles technologies dans nos vies de tous les jours. Internet addiction' linked to depression. There is a strong link between heavy internet use and depression, UK psychologists have said. The study, reported in the journal Psychopathology, found 1.2% of people surveyed were "internet addicts", and many of these were depressed. The Leeds University team stressed they could not say one necessarily caused the other, and that most internet users did not suffer mental health problems. The conclusions were based on 1,319 responses to an on-line questionnaire. Recruitment was via links on social networking sites. People were asked how much they used the internet and for what purposes.

They were also asked a series of questions to assess whether they suffered from depression. The respondents were aged 16 to 51, with an average age of 21. The authors found that a small number of users had developed a compulsive internet habit, replacing real life social interaction with online chat rooms and social networking sites. They classed 18 respondents - 1.2% of the total - as "internet addicts". Your Brain on Computers - Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime. How the Internet Gets Inside Us. When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997, it was just a year before the universal search engine Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger, that charming grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library and spends hours and hours working her way through the stacks, finding out what a basilisk is or how to make a love potion.

The idea that a wizard in training might have, instead, a magic pad where she could inscribe a name and in half a second have an avalanche of news stories, scholarly articles, books, and images (including images she shouldn’t be looking at) was a Quidditch broom too far. Now, having been stuck with the library shtick, she has to go on working the stacks in the Harry Potter movies, while the kids who have since come of age nudge their parents. “Why is she doing that?” They whisper. The scale of the transformation is such that an ever-expanding literature has emerged to censure or celebrate it. Even later, full-fledged totalitarian societies didn’t burn books.

New Rules for the New Internet Bubble. Carpe Diem We’re now in the second Internet bubble. The signals are loud and clear: seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. The rules for making money are different in a bubble than in normal times. What are they, how do they differ and what can a startup do to take advantage of them? First, to understand where we’re going, it’s important to know where we’ve been.

Paths to Liquidity: a quick history of the four waves of startup investing. (If you can’t see the slide presentation above, click here.) If you “saw the movie” or know your startup history, and want to skip ahead click here. 1970 – 1995: The Golden AgeVC’s worked with entrepreneurs to build profitable and scalable businesses, with increasing revenue and consistent profitability – quarter after quarter. Startups needed millions of dollars of funding just to get their first product out the door to customers. Lessons Learned. Google Takes On Facebook With New Social Network Google+ Suspended Google+ accounts. The other day I posted a call for people who have had their accounts suspended by Google for name-related reasons to fill in this form.

I’ve received over a hundred responses so far (N=119), so it’s time to start talking about the results. Firstly, 74% of respondents are using the name that most people know them by. Specifically, 18% say that the name they are using on Google+ is the one they are known by “exclusively” and 56% say that “a majority of people know me by this”. However, only 13% of respondents say that it’s the name that appears on their government-issued ID.

No surprise whatsoever: many people are known by names other than what’s on their ID. What types of names are causing suspensions? Many names that seem “normal” even by the fairly limited standards Google seems to be employing: george meagles, Winter Seale, b. pepper, Jacqueline L., Laurence Simon, etc. Most telling are the reasons people give for their choice of name: Google+ pseudonym wars escalate – is it the new being 'banned from the ranch'? For a company that gave itself a traditionally mis-spelt web-style pseudonym to make it stand out online, Google is handling the issue of monikers rather badly when it comes to Google+. The list of blocked users is what is now being referred to as the NymWars extends to some fairly influential users.

Most embarrassingly for Google, the latest is Blake Ross, co-founder of Firefox, who was inexplicably blocked from the service on Wednesday night. He trumps even William Shatner. Photo by birgerking on Flickr. Some rights reserved Blocked users are told: "After reviewing your profile, we determined that the name you provided violates our Community Standards. " But online identity is more nuanced than that. Just who is being banned? Kirrily "Skud" Robert has been collecting cases studies of users with suspended accounts.

While some users might not want their real name to appear at all, others, like Documentally, would prefer an extra name field to allow for monikers too. Augmented Reality Kills The QR Code Star. Augmented reality leader Layar just took its system to a whole new level by installing a real-world object recognition protocol that's a little like Google's Goggles. In one swoop it may have turned AR apps from intriguing, inspiring, and occasionally useful toys into serious tools for information discovery and, of course, advertising. Let's call it hacking the real world. AR was a tech that really grabbed the headlines over the last couple of years, propelled by increasing ubiquity of smartphones with always-on Net connections, sensors, and high-quality rear-facing cameras. This tech trinity allowed clever apps to work out where the phone was in the world, what direction it was looking at and then deliver useful information to the phone user, such as where the nearest Metro station was, and how to get there.

Instantly there's the power of this system, laid bare. Layar developers really can "hack reality" now. But the utility of this kind of trick can't be overlooked. The Decline of the Online Message Board. It took my husband and me eight months to conceive our first child. Much of that time was passed in bored agitation, like a long wait at a Verizon Wireless store. To pass the time, swap information, and quiet my mind, I turned to an online message board for women who are Trying to Conceive — TTC, one of the first message-board acronyms I learned.

Then, rapidly, I learned the rest of the lingo known to the voluble and surprisingly large community of women who turn to the Internet to ask intensely personal questions: TWW (two-week wait), BFN (“big fat negative”) and OPK (ovulator prediction kit). That was in 2004. The message board was corny, but also a revelation. The voices on it were provocative, frequently ingenious and charged with emotion (and emoticons).

Practical tips (and scientific reports) were exchanged, and subject to critique. Not to get too misty, but the board format itself might deserve a nostalgic embrace. These are serious signs of the digital times. The internet is over. If my grandchildren ever ask me where I was when I realised the internet was over – they won't, of course, because they'll be too busy playing with the teleportation console – I'll be able to be quite specific: I was in a Mexican restaurant opposite a cemetery in Austin, Texas, halfway through eating a taco.

It was the end of day two of South by Southwest Interactive, the world's highest-profile gathering of geeks and the venture capitalists who love them, and I'd been pursuing a policy of asking those I met, perhaps a little too aggressively, what it was exactly that they did. What is "user experience", really? What the hell is "the gamification of healthcare"? Or "geofencing"? Or "design thinking"? Or "open source government"? What is "content strategy"? The content strategist across the table took a sip of his orange-coloured cocktail. This, for outsiders, is the fundamental obstacle to understanding where technology culture is heading: increasingly, it's about everything. Web 3.0. What's Wrong With 'X Is Dead' Technologies die violent deaths less often than we think. This is the basic problem with the Chris Anderson-anchored Wired cover story, "The Web is Dead. " If you think about technology as a series of waves, each displacing the last, perhaps the rise of mobile apps would lead you to conclude that the browser-based web is a goner.

But the browser-based web is not a goner. It's still experiencing substantial growth -- as BoingBoing's Rob Beschizza showed with his excellent recasting of Wired's data -- and that should be one big clue that the technological worldview that says, "The new inevitably destroys the old," is fundamentally flawed. My objection is not to the idea that the web could become of relatively lesser importance at some point in the future. The problem is Anderson's assumption about the way technology works. Edgerton has the same flair for the flashy stat that Anderson does. But that's not how Anderson presents technology in this article. "This was all inevitable.

Publicity and the Culture of Celebritization. In this month’s “Rolling Stone,” the magazine published an article called “Kiki Kannibal: The Girl Who Played With Fire”. The article tells the story of a 14-year-old teen in Florida who used MySpace to create a digital persona that attracted a lot of attention. An insecure and awkward teenager, Kirsten used MySpace to perform a confident, sexy persona named Kiki, sharing artistic photos that reveal a lot of skin. Not surprisingly, her sexy digital persona attracts a lot of attention – good, bad, and ugly. On one hand, she loves the validation; on the other, the stalking and personal attacks get increasingly severe and scary. This article raises all sorts of issues, in addition to those concerning attention, including sexual victimization (by a mentally unstable 18-year-old that she was dating), parental engagement (her parents encouraged her online participation as a depression-reducing strategy), and exploitation (by websites who profit off of drama).

Part 2: The Toxicity of Fame. Lawrence Lessig: Re-examining the remix. Watch : Everything Is a Remix. We Are All Thieves: The Truth About Ideas And Originality. Transmédia : La convergence des contenus. On a longtemps pensé la convergence numérique comme la « fusion » d’appareils jusque-là très différents : le téléphone, la télévision, l’ordinateur et la chaîne hi-fi ne faisant plus qu’un, fédérés par l’internet. Même si, au final, on a plus souvent constaté une divergence qu’une convergence : la multiplicité des terminaux induisant une multiplicité d’usages. La connexion de tout avec tout conduit plutôt à une complexification qu’à une rationalisation, expliquait déjà Daniel Kaplan en 2006. La convergence des outils et des technologies conduit-elle à la convergence des contenus ou à leur divergence ? C’est peut-être ainsi qu’on pourrait résumer l’enjeu qui sous-tend la question du transmédia, sujet coeur des Masterclass internationales du Transmédia qui se tenaient à Marseille la semaine dernière.

Trans-, multi-, pluri- médias : concevoir pour tous les écrans Pour Eric Viennot, auteur de jeux et directeur de Lexis Numérique, le transmédia, « c’est un film dont vous êtes le héros ». Transmedia Design for 3 Screens - Make That 5. Le mythe de la courbe l'adoption des technologies. “Internet est une révolution de la consultation plus que de la production” La sérendipité est-elle un mythe ?