Global Hypertwitter

Before the days of twitter, people had to make do with technology that was a little more physical. Take Global Hypercolor as a brilliant idea. You wear clothes that change colour according to your body temperature, therefore giving a generation of kids a great excuse to grope each other in the name of science. Touch and learn kids.

The easy bit of course is that you could literally see the affect, something which technology these days seems to lack. What is the affect of twitter? Where is it how can I see it other than seeing iPhone users constant sweeping their screens with their fingers. Wouldn't it be great if you could see Twitter in action, maybe by people's messages being displayed on the back of their phone whilst they are holding it up, or even projecting it out onto a nearby wall.

Or, even more simply, a phone that changes colour as you talk, sensing your mood or listening out for particular words or intonation that tells people whether or not you are open to be interrupted or even groped around the waist, just for the sake of creating body heat.

Living Forever..... what are the chances

It's almost accepted these days that everyone has some kind of online presence, even if it's just a facebook page. But as we hop from myspace to facebook to twitter to chat roulette, what kind of legacy do we leave behind. What happens to all the images on flikr, on countless pages across the web? As the year's pass they seem to dissipate and become less relevant as the latest fad takes over.

In a way it seems like a bit of a shame. Why should all these things be lost and fade away like our memories, is it just a product of human nature that things should becoming increasingly difficult to recall or fuzzy around the edges. Either way, the web is starting to move away from broken links and missing pages to a place with a defined core. Imagine a web with no broken links where everything was linked to everything else in a meaningful way, the same way people are linked to us in our lives - our photos are the traces of our lives and our interactions online the building blocks of a digital future that persists.



What kind of legacy does this leave, 20, 30, 50 years down the line for our family and friends? What would it look like when our lives are documented and recorded. It's certainly a lot harder to lose people these days, indeed we're far more likely to hear about someone online than we are to bump into them or hear about them second hand. It's important to make sure as we move into a world where our world is increasingly online that we are able to make choices about what is stored and how that information is used. Having more open controls over that on a global scale (i.e. I control the information about me) is going to be critical if people are going to be able to learn to trust the internet of the future. I would like to see more transparency, even a website that allows me to control what there is of me out there. Copyright and ownership issues aside - If my digital life is going to live on forever, I'd like to at least be able to write my digital grave stone.. i.e. "I thought it was just a virus"..

Tomorrow's world

Today. I really wish this show still existed. It not only inspired a generation that became the technocrati of today but somehow managed to capture the excitement that comes from doing something never been done before.

Dragon's den has got it's place on TV for inventions as has the gadget show, but none really go into the research and science that lead to the innovation nor do they embrace the profession of the inventor. Bring back tomorrow's world, please...!

Technology has let me down

This is still far too difficult to be easy. I'm surprised.

Wearable technology - here and now?

One thing that's always fascinated me is invisible technology. A solution that is so neat that you don't even have to watch it do it's stuff... it just works. MIT came up with a concept a while back called 'air', not so original you say, but this was a bit - it was the idea that technology was like air - you can't see it. Similarly, they launched a concept called pollen - the idea that information was spread from person to person without needing a network backbone.
This has been adopted in Haiti and disaster areas where the wired infrastructure has literally collapsed. Networks have been built by person-to-person contact through mobile phones, transmitting information over short distances that needs to cover great distances. Yes it's slow, but it gets there. Like everyone is your own personal carrier pigeon.

So, the technology moves on and you end up wearing it and it's everywhere rather than being in your hand. Cute technologies produce fabrics that achieve this.. You can hug someone from a distance by sending them a text. Sensors in the material respond when the message is given to make you feel like you're being hugged. And yes... it's ok to text yourself.

Text to speechless

Hands up if you're fed up of fighting with touch screen text messaging?... Damn it's painful. There has to be a better way.

Well there is. The answer is text to speech. Imagine talking to your phone to do something. This goes way beyond 'phone my mum'.

The idea is that you don't need to fiddle about your phone writing a text messsage. You just dictate it to you phone and tell it who you want to send it to. Easy. Which is the point. Publish please.....

Huh?

If this works, then it is the future.

If Obama can get it, why can't the internet?

It seems fantastic to believe that the internet might receive the nobel peace prize, but then after Obama's surprise win maybe it just might be possible.

But even then it seemed the prize was given in anticipation of what Obama would do in the future... after receiving it, how could he not live up to the promise of the award in his actions that followed?

All this aside, I can't help but be distracted by who would represent the internet and accept the prize? Maybe Sir Tim Berner's Lee or maybe a grid server on a trolley? Maybe Microsoft could bring the paperclip out of retirement, I know he's been vacationing around the internet since he stepped out of the limelight.

I know he's not the greatest example of the face of the internet, but then what or who is? If there's no-one to receive it, what's the purpose in giving it?

But that is to misunderstand what the internet is.. It's no longer just a load of information and applications, but it's the interconnections between people across the world. The internet is one of the best representations of the whole world working together.

And if it wins the internet collective will receive it, far and wide, all over it's front pages and across it's global network of sites, congratulating humanity for having created something that has changed the world for the better, united the world for a greater good.

I, for one, would vote for the internet and when we won I would hope that, like Obama, our actions to follow would demonstrate why it was the right choice.

See internet for peace for more

So long and thanks for all the Google

Seems weird to think that Google can 'opt out' from a country, or vice versa, but it seems that the world's largest online and the world's largest offline communities have split for good. On paper, there's something subtley communist about Google's policy of egalitarian ownership of the web, but there's nothing similar about their political views on freedom of information.

It's a tough one, trying to determine when censorship becomes restriction of people's freedom. My min tracks back to when we tried to place a keyword based adult filter on blueyonder.co.uk's search engine, which at the time was powered in part by Google's back-fill. Myself and Guy Spivack sifted through about 10,000 potentially 'adult' words to decide which ones were acceptable and which ones weren't. I have no idea what gave us the authority at the time to make that decision, but at the time we felt like we had no choice but to try and do something to stop kids from being able to see adult content on the web. Surely it's only like putting a gate at the top or bottom of the stairs, to protect kids from their own curiosity.

Is it so different from the Chinese government's perspective to want to control the political content of what people search for. Does the analogy hold? Is it just protecting people for what they believe is their own good? I can't help but doubt that altruism is their core motive, but what's for sure is that once you start to control one piece of what people see you are on a slippery slope to having to make decisions about everything they see.

Either way, the dominant search engine in China, Baidu, seems happier to oblige and so they would. Alexa recently ranked Baidu the 8th biggest site in the world. No doubt, with Google off their back, Baidu's use will only increase further. Particularly if everyone starts typing 'Google' into Baidu.

Chat Roulette

Just when you thought you were safe to stay at home some bright spark comes up with chat roulette. It's webcam roulette - you become one of the random people in the tombola that turns every time you, or the person at the other end clicks 'next'.

You can text chat whilst you watch their webcam until it's time to move on. This can be seconds or minutes, you just don't know. Try it out - it's quite intense - though don't be surprised if you see a bit more than you'd want to, or if you get rejected a few times.... by people who have more than chat on their minds.

http://www.chatroulette.com/

Back to the future

1.21 gigawatts? 1.21 gigawatts? Great Scott! Even Scott wouldn't have figured that we could build a machine 3,000 times greater than a time machine. But that's what the geniuses at the Large Hadron Collider have done.

As of today the official figures - 3.48 trillion electron volts was achieved when charging particles in the largest of the world's particle accelerators. All of which is gearing up to smashing sub-atomic particles together in order to discover whether or not the previously untestable theories of particle physics are correct.

We really are at a point where our view of the universe could change dramatically. It's incredible that, 14 billion years since the universe began we could be at a point where it's secrets will be revealed.

For more, visit the CERN site

Meta-morphosis from web2.0 to web 3.0

I'm a name, not a number said the internet. Not so, said the community of people that created it and the community that now formed it's web 2.0 core. You shall be 3.0 and you will understand the meaning of sentences, questions and narrative just like this. Does that mean I can tell that you're being condescending. Not yet said the community. That's web 4.0.

It seems that not only can we publish standardised text such as html documents to the web, but now we are becoming part of the semantic web, a web that understands that documents are linked over the web, over time and therefore their relationship. It's a web where people can essentially digitise their lives, in fact, become inseperable from their digital self.



A whole heap of questions arise from this, like what happens to my digital self if I die, does it live on? Who owns my digital self - do I write a digital will? In a world where we increasingly create gigabytes of data about ourselves what happens to all this information? Where is it stored? What value does it have and how does it all relate?

All this is the next evolution of the web and ultimately the goal of web scientists - to evolve the internet to the next stage where it is our friend, or ultimately an extension to ourselves. Let's be honest, it's not a million miles away now for some, but it's fair to say the existing interface has a long way to go.

Wendy Hall believes standardisation is the way forward. Taking the existing model that formed the internet - html and creating documents and data structures that mimic the complex needs of different and distributed types of information. The new format? The Rdf.

So, some 15 years after it's inception the internet is going to start to become smarter and more human. It's about time. Now, will it be able to answer the ultimate question facing humanity... where do the all the odd socks go? Only time will tell.

What flavour was the primordial soup?

I can't imagine it would take off as a flavour, but somehow it was the taste of early life. I don't suppose they were that choosy, but I wouldn't know. Someone is trying to work it out though by creating the world's largest simulation model - of how life began.

The project's aim is to create a model of the evolution of life from simple basic chemicals by modelling them at an atomic level, slowly scaling the interactions up to create virtual organisms, that can then be turned into real biological simulations. Maybe one day we'll all be able to try the soup out too, with a loaf of crusty bread...

http://www.evogrid.org/index.php/Main_Page

Tried watching the movie, scared me a little bit though.

And so it began.

In times like these (whatever that really means), it’s important to consolidate. Like eating plenty of fibre in your diet.

I suppose i’ve needed more fibre for sometime, so this is it. Futurish. It’s not new, far from it, it’s been around forever, but this is the first time that it has taken this particular form.

So, you cry, what are you talking about? Well it’s simple is about the future, but I’m not arrogant enough to assume that I know what the future is so it’s kinda ish. Most of what I want to talk about is happening now, but is emerging or new, something that hasn’t yet become normal or mass produced or pastish. That didn’t really work did it, I’m just trying things out. I wont use it in future.

It’s also about us – why were here – using our grey matter to predict the future is why we have brains, why we think and why we talk so that we can talk about what’s going to happen and make sure it’s mutually beneficial. Hence futurish.

I can’t guarantee I’m going to get this right first time, in fact I can guarantee that I wont, but I hope that, in the future, futurish will form a compelling shape.