STEVEN JOHNSON & KEVIN KELLY in conversation with Robert Krulwich In a world of rapidly accelerating change, from iPads to eBooks to genetic mapping to MagLev trains, we can't help but wonder if technology is our servant or our master, and whether it is taking us in a healthy direction as a society. What forces drive the steady march of innovation?How can we build environments in our schools, our businesses, and in our private lives that encourage the creation of new ideas--ideas that build on the new technology platforms in socially responsible ways? Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson will look at where technology is taking us. STEVEN JOHNSON is the author of The Ghost Map, Everything Bad Is Good for You, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Cities, Software and Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate and The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. KEVIN KELLY is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine.
The End of the Web? Don’t Bet on It. Here’s Why Fred Wilson recently posted a great video on his blog with the CEO of Forrester Research, George Colony. The money slide is the graphic below. The chart shows three scarce resources and their improvements over time. The top line is available storage (S), the middle line represents processing power (following Moore’s law) or (P) and the bottom line is the Network (N). In it he asserts that the web is dying and in its ashes will see the rise of the “App Internet.” He’s right about this. Colony’s presentation is intriguing (and worth a watch if you have a few minutes) because I love to see when informed people make arguments that are different than you ordinarily hear (and different from my own views). In the end, Seth Godin’s comments on Fred’s blog post said it best: In other words, nobody can really assert authoritatively what the future of tech or the Internet will hold. George’s Arguments 1. 2. 3. In this era the computing model known as “client / server computing” was popularized. 1.
The Rise of the Toilet Texter We know where some of you are reading this. A recently released survey of the mobile phone habits of Americans, going where few other surveys care to go, has found that 75 percent of the populace have used their mobile devices while on the toilet. Among those aged 28 to 35, the figure is 91 percent. The survey of 1,000 people by the marketing agency 11mark found that private contemplation has given way to toilet-time talking, texting, shopping, using apps, or just surfing the Web, by both sexes and most ages. Among those 65 and older, however, only 47 percent have used their mobile devices on the toilet. Chip Litherland for The New York TimesTexting, though, is fine. It gets weirder. Hope you are sitting down for this: 20 percent of males have at one time joined a conference call from the toilet. This is, in a sense, a testimony to our collective passion for communication and contact over all other needs, and a lesson in how quickly ideas of decorum adjust to the times.
URLs Matter — Paul Robert Lloyd The humble URL has been on my mind a lot recently. Through a series of developments, this simple means of addressing the wonders of the web has been obfuscated and abused, to the point that it’s now seen as difficult to use and an affront to users. Shortened There has long been a need for URLs to be shortened, be that in e-mails or within the pages of a magazine, and for a number of years the service TinyURL did a fairly respectable job of performing this task. However the onset of Twitter and its 140 character limit has meant its 18 character URL is now considered too long, with users opting to use newer shorteners made up from just 13, 12 or even 11 characters. Whilst there are many worrying aspects of these services (not least certain providers wrapping content within their own interfaces), what struck me most was the disintegration of the ccTLD naming system. Sentenced becomes the more readable:
Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA, DFBCS (born 8 June 1955),[1] also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989,[2] and he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet sometime around mid-November of that same year.[3][4][5][6][7] Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web's continued development. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior researcher and holder of the Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).[8] He is a director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI),[9] and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.[10][11] Early life Career Current work Awards and honours Personal life
Google, Twitter, WordPress & Facebook: Publish/Subscribe Matrix A storm of news points to a future of frictionless publishing and subscription, across platforms. Google just announced that its FeedBurner RSS publishing service now supports automatic publishing to a Twitter account. If you're among the many people who use the service Twitterfeed (like CNN, the WhiteHouse, ReadWriteWeb, etc.) then you may very well find that startup expendable starting now. That's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this and a series of related announcements over the past few days. The new feature looks relatively sophisticated and will use a new URL shortener, goo.gl. FeedBurner has not proven the most reliable service in recent years and is now part of the ad network AdSense, but the little startup Twitterfeed isn't always reliable either. The Twitter/FeedBurner integration uses secure OAuth authorization, so you don't have to give Google your Twitter password. The next step? Publish once and your content is everywhere, immediately.
The Filter Bubble: How the Web Gives Us What We Want, and That's Not a Good Thing by Maria Popova How the web gives us what we want to see, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. Most of us are aware that our web experience is somewhat customized by our browsing history, social graph and other factors. But this sort of information-tailoring takes place on a much more sophisticated, deeper and far-reaching level than we dare suspect. I met Eli in March at TED, where he introduced the concepts from the book in one of this year’s best TED talks. The primary purpose of an editor [is] to extend the horizon of what people are interested in and what people know. What, exactly, is “the filter bubble”? EP: Your filter bubble is the personal universe of information that you live in online — unique and constructed just for you by the array of personalized filters that now power the web. How did you first get the idea of investigating this? EP: I came across a Google blog post declaring that search was personalized for everyone, and it blew my mind. Donating = Loving
La guerre du Web, par Tim O'Reilly Un article majeur de l’un des gourous de la Toile, qui met le doigt là où ça peut faire bientôt très mal. Hubert Guillaud, nous le présente ainsi sur l’agrégateur Aaaliens : « Tim O’Reilly revient sur la guerre du Web : entre Facebook qui ne transforme par les liens en hyperliens, Apple qui rejette certaines applications menaçant son coeur de métier… Tim O’reilly répète depuis longtemps qu’il y a deux modèles de systèmes d’exploitation de l’Internet : celui de « l’anneau pour les gouverner tous » et celui des « petites pièces jointes de manières lâche », le modèle Microsoft et le modèle Linux. Allons-nous vers le prolongement du modèle du Web interopérable ? Ou nous dirigeons-nous vers une guerre pour le contrôle du Web ? Une guerre des plateformes (Google, Apple, Facebook…) ? La guerre du Web aura-t-elle lieu ? La réponse dépend aussi de la capacité qu’aura « la communauté du Libre » à diffuser et défendre ses valeurs et ses idées. La guerre du Web The War For the Web
Be Like Mark: 8 Ways To Emulate Facebook's Zuckerberg, The Unlikely Leader Whether you love him, hate him, or are just a little jealous of his newly minted multi-billionaire status, you have to admit that Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, has made some visionary leadership moves. In less than 10 years, Zuckerberg’s taken an idea for an online social network from his Harvard dorm room and delivered it into the homes, offices, pockets, and purses (via mobile phones) of 845 million users around the world. Last year, more than half of Facebook’s users logged in every single day, spending a whopping 4 hours and 35 minutes posting, reading updates, and “liking” more than 2 billion posts a day. And how many CEOs anywhere in the world can say the company they founded before they were old enough to drink generated a net income of $1 billion in 2011 on revenue of $3.7 billion, up from $606 million on revenues of $1.97 billion in 2010? Zuckerberg’s had his share of growing pains, too, but he’s held fast to Facebook’s helm as well as its stock.