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November 28, 2004
Ten Technologies That Are Going To Change The Way We Learn
Robin Good: "here are the ten key technologies I see making the major difference in how we will be learning in the future:"
1. Search technologies
2. Data visualization tools
3. Blogs - Direct publishing and content aggregation tools
4. Audio and video - increased use of audio and video as communication channels for small publishers
5. RSS - content syndication, aggregation, re-use
6. P2P - private and public file sharing networks
7. Unlimited storage - on the desktop and online
8. Unlimited bandwidth - Wifi - WiMax
9. Real Time Collaboration Tools
10. Collective and Collaborative Filtering - human spontaneous cooperative technology like del.icio.us and FURL.net
Posted by Xiao at 09:26 AM | TrackBack
November 27, 2004
Fractal Democracy
This is from the worldchanging blog: "People must vote everyday over issues and solutions, instead of every five years for one undependable individual whose moods, whims and vicissitudes define five years of policy and action."
You found this link through the Extreme Democracy.
Posted by Xiao at 10:28 AM | TrackBack
November 21, 2004
Getting Even Better Search Results
"What can you do to enhance the results you get on your research? Google Scholar (see yesterday's item) might be an answer, but a lot of competitors have come up with new strategies, as the current print edition of New Scientist reports.
A look at patents on search technology can help to spot emerging trends and potentially new competitors to the existing major Web search players. Searchenginewatch.com has published an interesting article on this topic. But if you need information right now and you just can't find it on the Web, the solution might be -- help (...)
Entry continued... "From: [Poynter E-Media Tidbits]
Posted by Xiao at 10:21 PM | Comments (0)
November 15, 2004
The Future of Digital Media
"The Future of Digital Media is a two-month series, sponsored by Orb, that explores how the empowerment of the consumer over his or her media experience, coupled with the technological innovation that's broadly democratizing media creation, is leading to a revolution in the way people access, consume, share and remake content.
Through interviews with leading commentators and cutting edge practioners, The Future of Digital Media examines the social, legal and economic impacts of this disruptive and revolutionary change. "
See here.
"So now anyone can control, create, market, distribute, find, and interact with anything they want. The barrier to entry to media is demolished. Media, always a one-way pipe, now becomes an open pool. And, most important, the centralization of media -- the marketplace, the network, the monopoly -- is replaced by a decentralized universe. This changes everything. It changes the relationships. It changes the economics. It changes the power."
Posted by Xiao at 10:45 PM | TrackBack
November 13, 2004
Curley: 'The franchise is the content'
Associated Press President and CEO Tom Curley welcomed the 2004 Online News Association conference attendees with a keynote address that stressed the importance of news aggregators and community interaction. He called the shift "Web 2.0," describing the next phase as a network where users and machines are "always on."
The value of news content will outweigh the broadcast, print and even online "containers," that the industry produced during the first phase of the new media revolution.
"That's a big shift for old media to come to grips with," he said. "Killer (applications), such as search, RSS and video-capture software such as TiVo -- to name just a few -- have begun to unlock the content from any vessel we try to put it in."
"The franchise is not the newspaper; it's not the broadcast; it's not even the Web site," Curley said. "The franchise is the content itself."
The media's business franchise will be based on content because users can now control when and how their news is delivered. Competition for "eyeballs" is fierce, and the industry has yet to understand all its implications -- "...like how to free our content from those expensive containers we've created -- the newspaper, the broadcast and the Web site -- and tagging our news for delivery in discrete places, on demand. And keeping control of our intellectual property."
Posted by Xiao at 09:25 AM | TrackBack
RSS's potential in Mobil phones
This is from Sony Ericsson position paper - Mobile Web Initiative Workshop
"Push services are on the rise on the Internet, based on the de facto standard RSS. We believe that RSS has a great potential in mobile phones, as a technology to automatically provide updated content to users - accessing the Web without browsing ."
There are many ways of using the Web, in addition to browsing. Here are some examples of use cases, within two major trends.
* Music - In the next few years, music-phones will be as common as camera-phones are today. Music distribution services targeted at mobile phones will increase. The mobile Web can become an important platform for building over-the-air music download services, as well as various services for spreading information about new music.
Over-the-air download
Personal radio (streaming)
* Imaging - In 2005 virtually all phones have a camera, including cheap low-end phones which do not have so much memory. We also see a rise in the number of photo services on the Internet, where users can upload pictures to share with friends or order prints. These two things taken together - low-end phones with camera but small memory and the rise of online photo services - suggests there will be a need for mobile photo services.
Photo services
Photo album
The above cases have in common that the Web is viewed as an application-oriented platform instead of a document-oriented information network .
Posted by Xiao at 08:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 08, 2004
How Do You Use del.icio.us?
From Smart Mobs: Many of you already know and use del.icio.us, this free social software web service for sharing web bookmarks launched a few months ago by Joshua Schachter, and already mentioned in Del.icio.us Smartmobs.
Here is a quick reminder of what del.icio.us is about. It allows you to bookmark a web page you find interesting, to organize these pages by categories, using tags of your choice, and to share your discoveries with other curious minds. But you can do much more.
When Jon Udell, currently with InfoWorld, published a series of articles about del.icio.us on his blog, this gave me an idea: categorize all the entries posted on my blog in the last thirty months. Instead of using a search engine to check if or when I already wrote about something, I'm now using my del.icio.us archive and I click on a tag. Remarkably fast and useful!
And you, how are you using this service? Have you discovered other tricks easing your online life? Please post your comments below. And many thanks to Joshua Schachter. Read this column to see in more detail how I'm using del.icio.us before posting your own tricks.
Posted by Xiao at 12:52 PM | Comments (0)
November 07, 2004
Steve Johnson on Blogs and Google
旧文重读，作者还是说中了一些重要之处。
“The true revolution promised by the rise of bloggerdom is not about journalism. It's about information management. ”
“The beautiful thing about most information captured by the bloggers is that it has an extensive shelf life. The problem is that it's being featured on a rotating shelf. ”
There are almost as many potential ways to manage that new flow of information as there are bloggers providing it. But to open up these new avenues, the bloggers are going to have to shed their dependence on the traditional journalistic models: Instead of going to today's blog the way you pick up today's paper, the bloggers should follow us around, providing context and commentary, supplementing our libraries and our memory
Posted by Xiao at 11:45 AM | TrackBack
David Kirkpatrick on blog and media
This is from Fortune last week.
“As RSS and related software get better and better, is why readers will ever want to go to a media company's own website if they can craft their own out of the information feeds that they know are of most interest to them? Expect to see the very definition of the commercial media website evolve radically in the years ahead. "
But blogs are not only mere repositories of words, they are the presenters of links. Each blog includes links to other web resources. And here is another way that blogs are having a major impact on the commercial press: the articles with the biggest buzz will increasingly be the ones that bloggers point to most. Blogs aren't merely an alternative to the press or a critical commentary on it. They are symbiotic with it. And the software that enables blogging is getting so simple to use that almost anybody can use it. That's why the power of this medium will grow over time.
Posted by Xiao at 10:42 AM | TrackBack
Shirky on the Design of Social Software
克雷的清晰思路是一种鼓舞。
Once you regard the group mind as part of the environment in which the software runs, though, a universe of un-tried experimentation opens up. A social inventory of even relatively ancient tools like mailing lists reveals a wealth of untested models. There is no guarantee that any given experiment will prove effective, of course. The feedback loops of social life always produce unpredictable effects. Anyone seduced by the idea of social perfectibility or total control will be sorely disappointed, because users regularly reject attempts to affect or alter their behavior, whether by gaming the system or abandoning it.
But given the breadth and simplicity of potential experiments, the ease of collecting user feedback, and most importantly the importance users place on social software, even a few successful improvements, simple and iterative though they may be, can create disproportionate value, as they have done with Craigslist and Slashdot, and as they doubtless will with other such experiments.
Posted by Xiao at 10:18 AM | TrackBack
November 06, 2004
阳光
与世界不分离
把生命置于阳光之中，一生就不会一事无成。
不管处在何种境地，遇到何种不幸与失望，
我的所有努力便是重新去寻找接触。
在我亲身体验到的这种悲哀之中，
爱，
是难以表达的意愿。
即使看到的仅仅是夜幕中的一座丘陵，
那又是何等陶醉的感觉。
—— Albert Camus
Posted by Xiao at 08:36 PM | Comments (0)
November 05, 2004
U Penn - Berkeley
U Penn的讲话使你认识了Suzanne。
前天给Nadav电话。
今天看完了Berkeley in Sixties。
Posted by Xiao at 11:26 PM | TrackBack
Web of Influence
这期 外交政策上的文章, 作者的理解比较到位。
Most bloggers desire a wide readership, and conventional wisdom suggests that the most reliable way to gain Web traffic is through a link on another weblog. A blog that is linked to by multiple other sites will accumulate an ever increasing readership as more bloggers discover the site and create hyperlinks on their respective Web pages. Thus, in the blogosphere, the rich (measured in the number of links) get richer, while the poor remain poor.
This dynamic creates a skewed distribution where there are a very few highly ranked blogs with many incoming links, followed by a steep falloff and a very long list of medium- to low-ranked bloggers with few or no incoming links. One study by Clay Shirky, an associate professor at New York University, found that the Internet’s top dozen bloggers (less than 3 percent of the total examined) accounted for approximately 20 percent of the incoming links. Some link-deprived blogs may become rich over time as top bloggers link to them, which helps explain why new bloggers are not discouraged.