The conversation thing

First of all, I have to say that I do not believe in the conspiracy theory. Anyone who has read Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum”, knows why.

Now this being said, today I will share my thoughts on the limitations of privacy policies through internet.

We all know what spam is, right? Someone has stolen your e-mail address (or you have given it to a certain company that sold it to a third party without your consent), and all of a sudden you get all sorts of unsolicited e-mails, like the many ones I receive that try to make me believe my d*ck is not that satisfying to the ladies well, he better not be satisfying some other ladies or else …

Oddly enough, I am not bothered by this type of spam. I mean you get my address, (more…)

That, and his viral last day at Microsoft video

While we’re at Channel 4 let’s take a look. It’s a gorgeously simple website. British like hell : perfectly balanced, colorfull, yet stylish and easy to read. Kinda old fashioned as I compare it to the new bbc beta face, but then again, channel 4 is more about entertainment than news, and even if it weren’t so, I would’ve still liked it.

Speaking of BBC, this personalised type of interface is going to mark a huge step for the mass-media. The news will no longer be delivered, but channeled while end-users will have different perspectives on the same amount of events the site provides. Normally, there will be a gaussian distribution in the users preferences, but still, 2 different users will access two different bbc homepages. This will bring a shift in media sociology: the provider of the news will no longer controll the way information is received. Maybe online ads will reflect your preferences, but a puzzling question is how will the user choices influence the posted information? TV works on ratings, but internet provides a more specific way of quantification… so will the change be major, what is your take?

Hurraaaaaaaaaaaay !!!!

Stephen Hawking will host his own TV show on Channel 4 about how the universe works. Well, more precisely, it will be about how different physicists believe or predict it works … Looking forward to finding the show on some torrent …

I have read today one of the most impressive article on universe and physics. I don’t recall having such a great intuition over the theory of everyting and the superstrings as the one today. It’s really impressive to me to have such an all-of-a-sudden crisp-clear understanding… by just using a metaphore.

I would say that definitely black holes are ripples of the outer dimensions, but for light and gravity I would have to think through…

The succes of Second life (haven’t tried it yet - Ruxi, you should be ashamed of yourself) has taken industry leaders into creating avatars that can access all virtual worlds and use universal tools. Yesterday and today at Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo the top of this industry discuss the future of media and communication/

The challenge IBM and Linden Lab has put themselves to is to how to make avatars transcende from one world to another. Am I talking kantian phylosophy already ?

While I think virtual worlds are one very powerfull trend right now, I, personally, am not that interested. I mean, I would be very interested if I started to play a little, buuut knowing that I would give up my personal life just to play the virtual one, I have to say pass from the beginning.

I have experienced this while playing sims ™ about 6 or 7 years ago when I realized that my own character behaves exactly like me: always tired, needing to sleep, over stressed, with little time to do anything for himself …. so I said … why take (more…)

I’ve just read the iht.com article on Muriel Cooper and have discovered a great mind. Never knew where the MIT logo came from and that it was her idea.

She was one of the visionaries that forseen design as interactive and driven by simplicity. In the 60s when tehnology was only in its infancy, people tended to see it as a big monster capable of changing social realities but unflexible.

Cooper has reinforced the idea that on-screen design can be better than just linecodes …. Almost 40 years after we’ve come to Microsoft surface and Apple’s iPhone. Muriel Cooper sure was right!

A couple of days ago at Ars Electronica took place a super interesting conference of Lev Manovich on the theme of “The Infinite Expansion”

An extras from the AEC website: “Lev Manovich will present a brief cultural history of how a computer was gradually turned into a machine for media simulation and new media invention between early 1960s and late 1970s (Sutherland, Nelson, Engelbart, Kay, Negroponte, and others). He will argue that today we are dealing with unforeseen result of this transformation: that is, the constant invention of new media by designers, programmers, computer scientists, and artists has replaced creation of content. Thus, media is finally indeed became the message. More precisely: constantly changing and expanding media possibilities became more culturally important than content.”

I wish I was there…. eeeh

Lev Manovich, Negroponte and Meyrowitz were my influences a couple of years ago. Little by little I redescover the people behind the books and the way they evolve in time. Some people just manage to stay agile and alert.

BBC again with a very good interview with Vinton Cerf

Antonio Altamirano, Internet Marketing Consultant at Accenture posted a key question yesterday on LinkedIn on what will the next three years bring to us technology wise …

Someone talked about changing the country global internet infrastructure, so that services will go to another level, another answer was that innovation on interfaces is probably already signaled by the launching of Nintendo Wii, iPhone and Microsoft Surface. Virtual world technology, like Second Life, was also mentioned, WiMax and Ubiqutous Computing.

What I think will be the necessary move in the next 2 or 3 years is the tag based file organization. The folder style for data storage on computers is so last century. Even my mom needs to associate text files to different folders, or associate different type of files to photos, and searching through one year of normal vacations photos in my computer becomes impossible. I actually feel the need to organize my files tag-based. Microsoft and Mac OS XI I am counting on you on this one !