Future

(Prospective) Use real world detective against spammers

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A nice example of overlap between the virtual world and our physical world is this story told by the NYT: the use of real world detective to find virtual world spam.

Sterling McBride spends a lot of time waiting for spammers to make a mistake. (...) When he hunted down escaped prisoners for the United States Marshals Service, Mr. McBride learned the value of lying low until fugitives trip up, leaving small clues on their whereabouts. Now, as an investigator for Microsoft, Mr. McBride watches carefully for tidbits of data that link some of the two billion pieces of junk e-mail that Microsoft's Hotmail service receives each day with the people who send them.

Once he finds an electronic key to the spammer's identity - a real name, address or phone number - Mr. McBride uses all the tools of a regular detective: trailing suspects, subpoenaing their bank records and looking for disgruntled former associates to become informers. But first he must lift the cloak of anonymity provided by the Internet.

(Prospective) Sterling about malicious spam bot

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Via zdnet:

In your novel "Distraction," you wrote about a maliciously programmed spam bot driving unstable people to commit crimes. Is that a prediction? That's just a cool notion. That's just science fiction. It's a cool thing. It's interesting to think about. I never saw it actually done. It actually would be pretty destabilizing. But one of the points about distractions is that everything that they do is destabilizing. My hero keeps coming up with these elaborately justified schemes. He's delusional. He does redouble his efforts when he loses sight of his aims.

But he never really solves the problems. Political people don't solve stuff--not really. Political people are like guys in pop music. Saying you have a political solution is like saying you can write a pop song that's going to stay at the top of the list forever. I don't have many illusions about this, but I'm not cynical about it.

(Research) Impacts of Location Awareness

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William Mitchell in the feature:

Mitchell: The implications of location-awareness are far from obvious. The technology enables you to reconsider things as fundamental as, say, signage in a city. For example, we traditionally think of a stop sign as part of the fixed infrastructure of the city. But if you have a location-aware automobile, you can shift the stop sign to the dashboard so it pops up when you approach an intersection. If you have whole networks of location aware vehicles, the system becomes more elaborate. Perhaps the stop sign only pops up when there's another car coming from the opposite direction. You could even have elaborate intersection priority schemes.

Most location-enhanced applications connect people with information or each other. But you seem to be focused on ways that the car and the city can communicate?

Mitchell: Take something as simple as knowing where the potholes in the city. Every automobile could have a sensor and wireless device that pings out a signal every time it hits a pothole. That in itself may sound trivial, but extrapolate from there. Once you have location awareness combined with sensing, all of the automobiles in a city can operate as part of a giant distributed scanner that builds a real-time model of the city and keeps it updated.

[Prospective] Cooperation and gift

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The Economist about why workers who do favours are more productive.

IS GENEROSITY good for you? At work, at least, the answer may be yes. There, says a recent article in the Academy of Management Journal, productivity rises when workers help each other more. Francis Flynn, of Columbia University's business school, studied 161 engineers working for a telecoms firm near San Francisco. Mr Flynn asked each employee to report how often they swapped help with each member of the team—help such as technical advice or taking a second look at a recommended solution—and who, in each case, had given relatively more in their exchanges. Thus, he looked separately at the frequency with which individual workers made such swaps and at how one-sidedly generous they were. He also asked employees to rate how highly they regarded one another.

Mr Flynn correlated the answers he got with information from the firm on employees' productivity. He found that generous employees who get little in exchange are well-regarded by colleagues. Employees who helped colleagues generously but did not receive help in exchange were less productive. Those who receive as well as give were relatively more productive, particularly those who helped each other most often. A pattern of frequent giving and receiving boosted both productivity and social standing.

Why should productivity rise when employees frequently swap help? Mr Flynn has two explanations. First, as employees learn more about the resources they can offer each other, they develop a more efficient pattern of requesting and giving help. Second, helpful employees learn to trust each other more, and so become willing to do bigger favours because they feel more sure about the likelihood of reciprocation. And, of course, it is nicer to work with helpful people than with the other sort.

I definitely believe in this gift relationship.

(Prospective) SMS-TV Interactivity

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Via McKinsley Quaterly:

Technological pitfalls and disputes with mobile carriers have dampened the enthusiasm of TV broadcasters for programming that invites viewers to interact with it through text messages over their mobile phones. But some broadcasters have underestimated the strengths of SMS-TV, an effective direct-marketing tool that also boosts ratings. Well-executed SMS-TV interactivity significantly increases the viewers' loyalty to programs and can increase viewership by 20 percent for mass-market shows and by up to 100 percent for niche programs on pay channels.

The take-away Broadcasters must invest in technology and arrange effective partnerships with mobile carriers to achieve these impressive results. Those who hesitate will miss out not only on revenue but also on an important first lesson in what many believe is the future of television programming: interaction with viewers.

(Prospective) Bruce Sterling Talk at MS

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Transcript of Bruce Sterling's talk at Microsoft. This talk is about his last book: The Zenith Angle

it is a book about computer security among other things. It's basically about a...it's a Mr. Smith goes to Washington story about a techie that decides to join federal service after 9/11 because his family has a long history of technical service to the United States government and complications ensue. It's got a villain and a superweapon. It's a technothriller and technothrillers kind of require villains and superweapons because otherwise there is no reason to keep turning pages. But although it is a great superweapon and I stole it from the best guys in the business, I really put some intellectual effort into it and I thought it was a nifty keen kind of weapon o' mass destruction style nifty technothriller superweapon, absolutely nobody is interested in it.

(Blogging) Blogging and Gilles Deleuze

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I already talked about the fact that I do not believe in social software (link) and I do prefer using each other's blogroll as the actual networking tool. I explained that it is because I am more interested into what people do (directly explicit in weblogs) than what people are. Last week end, while watching "L'Abécédaire" by Gilles Deleuze, I was amazed by the fact that he claims something close to that statement: he said that he prefer going to the movies, art exhibition than going to symposium or conference. He said this because he is more interested into "meeting" artefacts made by people than just meeting people. Each of these artefacts are of interest because they could foster new ideas and help him to modify his thinking. I think it's the same with weblogs: they are an explicit description of what people do, that everybody can read, watch and be aware of.

[Prospective] William Gibson, streets and tools

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I do agree with William Gibson about the fact that "The street finds its own uses for things" as mentioned by Gareth Branwyn in his book "Jamming The Media".

La spirale: I noticed that you quote William Gibson's sentence "The street finds its own uses for things" in Jamming The Media. Was he a big influence in your work ? Did this sentence give you the idea to create Street Tech?

Gareth Branwyn: Yes, the idea for Street Tech, and my interest in the DIY aspects of technology, were partially inspired by Gibson. I thought the basic idea of cyberpunk -- that high technology intended for military-industrial use could be put to unintended cultural/political purposes -- was revelatory.

Of course, this idea threads throughout the DIY ethos of the last 30 or 40 years, from things like the Whole Earth Catalog to punk labels to the copy culture of the '80s, and so forth.

What cyberpunk and hacker culture did was offer up the idea that in a globally-interconnected computerized society, a small group of people (or even an individual) could wield a disproportionate amount of power against the status quo (in the way that a practitioner of Aikido uses his/her opponent's force against them). This is, of course, both a good and a bad thing.

The Street Tech website is not quite so noble a "fight the power" effort. It's a commercial effort (my day job, in essence) aimed at providing high-tech consumers with honest, no-bullshit evaluations of computer hardware and other electronics. As the site grows, we do plan on doing more DIY pieces. One guy associated with the site is planning a pirate radio station and will chronicle his efforts, another is building an MP3 system for his car, another person is building a PC from scratch. That sort of thing.

(Prospective) Video Game and Territories

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It's funny to see how different countries (and hence market) specialized their focus on different video games infrastructures. Government by massively investing into the field could leverage this. Two critical examples:- Korea, who focuses on multi-user internet games, especially through the game infinity. - Sweden, who focuses on mobile games, especially through an "archipelago of research labs specialising in digital media," as stated by the guardian today.

[Prospective] e-learning is still shitty

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I was reading some stuff about e-learning and m-learning (a buzzword for mobile learning). It seems that the authors does not really understand what is learning:

Imagine a pharmaceutical sales representative preparing to meet with a client. While he waits for his meeting to start, he uses his personal digital assistant for communications and e-learning. With the information accessible to him, not only does he stay up-to-date on the market issues essential to his position, but he also receives regular notification from message boards, news portals and his employer. (...) The PDA buzzes in his pocket. This time, the notification tells him his competitor just released a new pain medicine that will compete with the drug he is selling. (...) He can receive "just in time" information, such as a notification the moment his company gets governmental approval for one of the new drugs he is trying to sell. (...) This is the future of learning(...)The situation outlined above is based on a capability called "profiled notification.

Come on guys you call "learning" receiving information on your pda ! It seems that nobody learnt from e-learning errors. Of course the paper gives some crazy IDC crap numbers (billions on something).

(Prospective) A9: the search engine from Amazon

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A9 is the new search engine made by Amazon. A critic by John Battelle's Searchblog:

After all, A9 uses Google' search results and displays at least two paid AdWord listings per result (I've requested comment from Google, you can imagine I'm not the only one...). But I have to wonder: What business is Google in, after all? Is it still in the business of just search - as it was back when it was cutting search provisioning deals right and left, with Yahoo (already ended), AOL (arguable imperiled due to Gmail and other trends), Ask, and Amazon? Is it really still in the business of being an OEM to others, a strategy which allowed it to steal those portals' customers? Or...has it evolved, to a business where it owns a large customer base, one it must now position itself to defend? (...) One could argue that A9 is a pure commerce play, not a search portal. After all, that's what the folks at Amazon insisted when they founded the company and located it in the heart of Google/YahooLand (ie, Palo Alto). But that argument is disingenuous. First off, take a look at the A9 interface. Where's the commerce? (Answer, it's there, but it's hidden, more on that later when I post on the service itself). And second, I'd argue that you can't really be in the commerce business without having at least a strategy for owning search. The reverse also hold true. It's two ends toward the middle, and by the way, that middle ground is getting damn crowded - AOL, Yahoo, MSN, eBay, IAC, Amazon, Google... (...) What makes this particularly noteworthy is that A9 is built quite literally on top of Google. In short, Amazon has taken the best of Google, and made it, to my mind, a lot better. Sound familiar? Yup, it's what Google did to Yahoo, Yahoo to Netscape...you get the picture.

[Prospective] USA/EU: Why George W. Bush takes orders from Pascal Lamy

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Interesting paper by Nicholas Kulish in the Washington Monthly about EU/USA relationships. The authors explains the recent fact that the US are ore and more dependent on Brussels' decision (for instance GE's did not merge with Honeywell because of this). The authors explains why (EU building, Maastricht Treaty, birth of Euro that becomes the world's premier currency...) and then move to the future...

The degree to which Europe may soon be dictating economic terms to America has not yet dawned on most of official Washington, but it will soon, and it will come as a shock. Why, politicians will ask, should the decisions of a bunch of bureaucrats in Brussels force our companies to raise fuel standards, rewrite food labels, or strengthen software privacy protections? Think tanks will host conferences to denounce the high regulatory costs of complying with Europe's standards. Newspaper columnists will demand that the president show some backbone and fight for American economic freedom. After much heated rhetoric, it will dawn on Washington that we face a choice: stand forthrightly behind our principles of independence, or sell our products and services abroad. In the end, we will decide that in economics, as in foreign affairs, it is more in our interests to work with the Europeans than against them. For a proud and powerful nation like ours, it will not be easy. But as Dennis Hastert said, we'll just have to do it.

(Prospective) Media Online: Be Linkable or Die

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I defintely agree with Dan Gillmor and Mary Hodder that news organizations should think many times before they "protect" their content with Digital Restrictions Management technology. "You're nothing online if you're not linkable," she says.

Users, if they have trouble opening the article, sending it to friends and family or saving it indefinitely, all of which is annoying, will abandon the information because using it doesn't reflect the social norms they understand with fair usage of news content. (...) Who links to the Wall Street Journal? In Technorati, they have 354 links compared with the NYTimes at 39,412 and the Washington Post at 21,319. Who do you think has more authority online? The paper with premiere content in it's niche and 600,000 online subscribers, and a lovely firewall? Or the paper of record. Now imagine losing that authority with the DRM you wrap around your articles.

You're nothing online if you're not linkable.

That's why I think technorati is the future.

(Tech) Automated Trend Discovery for Weblogs

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BlogPulse allow you to watch key phrases or key people as well as links mined on over 750,000 weblogs using machine learning algorithms and natural language processing techniques

BlogPulse mines for bursty phrases and person names instead of for the most popular ones. The most popular phrases and names change very slowly over time. The burstiest phrases and names are those whose frequency of occurrence has increased significantly over the past two weeks, often dramatically.

(Prospective) Mesh Networks as the next big thing

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It's maybe time to find, design and imagine mesh networks scenarios of use. Start to get rid of empty social network and focus on proximity. What can we do with mesh/ad-hoc networks ? Kevin Werbach asks the question in the feature. So we have bluetoth, NFC, WiFi, nokia phones, j2mee, what do we need ? data description? we already have rdf files full of stuff (foaf, location shit...). Let's brainstorm about it :)

[VideoGame] Cross PLatform Game: UI concerns

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Interesting topic at the Game Design Conference in San José: "Cross-Platform User Interface Development".

Rob Caminos and Tim Stellmach take you on a tour of the pitfalls of designing a cross-platform game UI--as in one that will work on both computer screens and the severe limits imposed by the main console displays--the home television set.

The part The Design of Everyday User Interface is also important in terms of ergonomics (reference to Donal Norman's book 'The Design of Everyday Things').