The conversation thing

I’ve got mail! not e-mail, dearest beloved, but regular mail. From whom? Ars Electronica.

Last year, Ars Electronica was about privacy, and how it is slowly but completely dissapearing from our universe… This year the festival is about the new cultural economy and its new limits on intellectual property.

Internet and technology has made copyrighted information become inadequate. The costs of its production gets lower and lower… things that used to cost a few years ago, are now plain free, but other businesses emerge, so the final user is not the one charged, but by his actions, he actually makes money for the business that gives him the free goods.

The commerce is nowadays a threesome .. it used to be a couple before that - you gave me something, I gave you the money for it. Today, you give me something, I spend some time on your website, advertisers get their commercials seen by me, you get paid by them heheee …

Curator - Joichi Ito

I don’t know about you, but I have Ymess since 1998. So that makes approximately 10 years … OMG, until I wrote these words, I did not even realize so much time passed by …

As time went by, I became more and more flooded with people in my messenger list… people that i did not know how to classify anymore… Business, friends, different work places, university … sometimes I have personal friends that I do business with and have done university with … that is a challenge

I know some people have the guts to just delete from their list anyone they have not spoken with in 3 months … I could not do that … so right now I have in my Ymess list 329 ids, categorized into 12 groups. The most relevant groups are only 4, with a total of 56 people…

Hey, Yahoo messenger Project Manager guy … if you are interested in what the consumer would need, please take into considerations these things:

first, groups should have the possibility to include other groups as well

secondly, any contact should have something like tags associated. So when I want to see all business partners, I could see them no matter of what group I’ve listed them in (that would happen, of course, if I correctly and completely tagged my contacts in the Yahoo Messenger list)

Anyway, I do not know how things were possible before, when there was no IMessagging … my entire professional life was accompanied by YM … so I still remember how I was 1 meter away from my colleague, yet, instead of turning to him to tell him something, I would just write on messenger … life is beautiful

Well, after announcing the instant messaging service for Facebook users a few days ago, now this worldwide community website makes a new move on globalizing its messages into all possible languages on Earth by involving its users into translating the interface …

Aren’t we transforming ourselves into a folklore society … where everything has no particular author, just vast groups of people making the final message in a process of collective work? Yes, I think a new middle ages awaits us ..

This is an old thought of mine, that we are now like the Romans were back in 200 BC … having all resources at hand, properly using all information to gain societal, economical and cultural outcomes. But in a slow motion development, after 500 years, all of a sudden, the individual voice was no longer important, collective works became the most relevant for further development… and I can see this trend of collective (read “community”) based information and outcomes going to the new middle ages era. What do you think of that?

ETech conference took place in Sun Diego there days (3 - 6 March). Hot topics and brightest brains in the online business gathered to discuss and brainstorm on emerging technologies.

See the keynote speakers in a presentation by Wired.com

Here is Chris Anderson, Wired’s Editor in Chief, in a video about businesses and services becoming free over the internet. I do agree, things become free for the user, but they will most definitely stay payable for the entrepreneur. I mean, yeah, Google gives free services for the end-user… but google advertisement is payed by the ones that want to be advertised.

So digital means free, but not in the sense that services all of a sudden have no value and can be produced without any cent being invested/charged. Digitising means changing the cathegory of people you charge for your services. The revenue stays the same, otherwise the whole economy will suffer a true change. And we’re not yey prepared, since we still have to eat …

As I’ve said earlier in my posts, this page will make history. Pretty soon we’ll experience new ways of interaction with mass-media. The name will change as well .

I was talking to a friend today about web crawlers and he told me that when google was indexing the server, all employees at his former work place were looking anxiously to huge raise in sales .

Everyone receives Google these days with lots and lots of love, but will there be a time, when things will be the other way around? When one or some very powerful spiders may be regarded as the sentinels in the Matrix? Is China in this situation already? I know that internet is being censored there, and I reckon censorship might me applied by means of active surveillance over published material on the internet within a certain geoarea.

Internet is here for over 15 years now, right? What is 15 years to humankind history? Piece of cake! Will technology change so Continue reading »

Talking to some friends today about this issue, it hit me that there is a potential need for online “swiss banking accounts” for online processed personal data. You place the sensitive information in the black box, and the end-program that needs authentification takes from there the criptic info, not the real data (real person identification).

Second life is about a virtual world. How about inventing a virtual Switzerland?

the saga continues

What do you think is the first thing I do when entering my blog’s admin panel? The very first thing is to go to the counterize section to see what IP’s have visited me, who is online now and what pages were most visited today… of course, I also get all sorts of statistics from google analytics.

For instance, since the last post, I have received visits from Seattle, Los Angeles and area, New York, Florida, London, Frankfurt, Lebanon, France and Romania. As you can imagine, while most people that visit my blog use automatic ips, they are anonymous to me. But, for some of them, their real identity is obvious from their IP’s. So, this Continue reading »