Over a month back on my Lifekludger blog I mentioned in a blog post titled “Mind control interface a near reality” the Epoc Headset, being developed by Emotiv.
The other day on the New Inventors on the ABC here in Australia my friend Mark Pesce gives a shoutoput to me. Ref 1min in.
See the snipped video below.
Was tracking Beth Kanter’s journey via Skype, Twitter Qik on her way to ConnectingUp 2008 Conference in Brisbane.
Followed a Twitter on Sat afternoon that she was streaming live on Qik - unfortunately she quickly experienced the bottleneck that exists to any serious entry of Australia participating the Information Economy - our network access.
Click here for full image of above.
Dave
Technorati Tags: beth kanter, cup08, network, cu08, connectingup
thisismyjam.com - a neat new mashup service to create a jam session.
Dave
Saw via twitter a friend of mine, who happens to sing beautifully, had found karaoke on My Space. So I went to listen.
Dave
Cross posted from Lifekludger blog
I read with interest my good mate, Hugo Ortega’s UberTablet blog. Hugo was the very first guest on our Extraordinary Everyday Lives podcast and, outside of my regular colleagues, has been the single biggest supporter of my Lifekludger endeavours, and indeed myself, in a substantial way - providing equipment to try with my mouthstick especially.
So as I read in his latest blog post about how he’s been snowed under with the things he’s been doing to promote all things Tablet in Australia I’m reminded of what Mike keeps telling me and what we’ve been trying to avoid with Lifekludger.
People Don’t Scale - Networks Do.
But it pays to remember I’m talking about people here when I refer to Networks. Maybe it’s better stated:
People Don’t Scale - People Networks Do.
Hugo has found that he’s become a bottle neck - we each only have 24 hours in our day. It’s a lesson we need to heed in this age of exponential growth in available information and rapidly advancing technological growth, if we are to somehow turn it into knowledge and practical outcomes that can benefit and grow us as people enriched by the age we live in rather than enslaved by it.
Just how we grow a network that can scale and how we can do that while keeping the true to the spirit of why the network exists is another matter. It’s an issue that seems to be evolving at the same time as the rest of the technical issues are that are underpinning it. Maybe why we are seeing such attention paid to social networks.
The answer though cannot lie back in the centralised past as centralisation creates bottlenecks. It can’t rest on one point of contact, a single node. The end goal might be node focused but that doesn’t have to mean node centred.
Maybe, like so many other things, the answer lays buried somewhere in the natural world, the small pieces [people] loosely joined [network], the strength of the geo-desic dome, in the triangle of abundant, heterogeneous, creative people - the ecosystem of humanity.
Connection and Openness.
An human ecosystem based on connection and openness [sharing], focused on a node. That’s the Lifekludger vision.
Dave
Reference (from Mike coming out of discussion with JP) :
ABUNDANCE: speaks to the post scarcity world of the internet - where the cost of storage and distribution approach zero, some very different rules kick in. Kinda crucial to the longtail and the jewels therein.
HETEROGENEOUS: at the edge things get a little crazy and that’s where the magic happens. Unlike the shallow end of the gene pool, there is lots of diversity which makes for good re-combination - fuelled by the laws of weak attraction.
CREATIVITY: coming up with new ways of doing stuff - sometimes just for the pure fun of it. Whether solving a problem or scratching an itch. Either way, leave your past solutions and old habits at the door. You are not a mindless, replaceable unit of production here!
I was awake at 3.30am to take part in the Second Life talk that’s part of this forum: (why do I do these things…)
Using Virtual Worlds and Emerging Technologies for People with Disabilities
This two-part, interactive event will take place in two locations online:
First, the live discussion in the virtual world of Second Life at 9am PST
The follow-up discussion will take place for the rest of the day, 10AM PST- 6PM PST, in TechSoup’s Accessible Technology & Public Computing forum at: <http://www.techsoup.org/go/accessibletechnology>
Event Schedule:9 AM PST in the Nonprofit Commons Amphitheater in Second Life.
Simon Stevens (aka Simon Walsh in Second Life) <http://www.simonstevens.com> will be speaking about his work in Second Life. Simon Walsh is chief executive of Enable Enterprises which manages the Wheelies nightclub for people with disabilities in Second Life and the Second Ability Second Life simulator. In real life, Simon has cerebral palsy and lives in Coventry, UK. He is a disability consultant and trainer working with many organizations large and small.
Simon will give a virtual talk via text chat in the Nonprofit Commons amphitheater, in the virtual world of Second Life
10AM PST- 6PM PST –the follow-on discussion will continue in an all-day, asynchronous (not-live) forum on TechSoup. This event will occur in a question and answer format in the TechSoup Accessible Technology & Public Computing forum <http://www.techsoup.org/go/accessibletechnology>
Online Event: Using Virtual Worlds and Emerging Technologies for People with Disabilities in this forum, Feb. 29th, all-day, asynchronous (not-live). No registration is needed; just show up here and post your questions!
Accessible Technology and Public Computing message board, TechSoup
Dave
Today I got in my delicious “for” bookmarks a link with a note that a site has appeared called Photodropper (purposely not linked to here) had appeared on the scene and is pushing a Wordpress plugin that aside from a few changed variable names appears is the exact code ripped off from a plugin called Flickr Manager which my colleague and programmer at the place I work wrote and released back in November 2007.
The Flickr Manager was released prior under a GNU General Public License. The Photodropper plugi has been released as Copyrighted. Even to my basic level of understandig this appears to contravene the GPL.
“The GPL is the most popular and well-known example of the type of strong copyleft license that requires derived works to be available under the same copyleft. Under this philosophy, the GPL is said to grant the recipients of a computer program the rights of the free software definition and uses copyleft to ensure the freedoms are preserved, even when the work is changed or added to.” (emphasis mine)
But as wrong as that might seem, this get’s me angry for reasons that transcend pure legality. Let me try to elaborate why.
My colleague Trent is a talented programmer, he’s also a fast learner and a mate. When I hired him last year to work for the place I work and be a part of the small IT team he was just finishing Uni. He’s now starting his Honours. He hadn’t heard of Wordpress much less participated in any wide open source endeavors or dipped his foot into the Web 2.0, read/write online world. His first task was when we had to rework a project that had been put together hurriedly prior to his starting that documents the History of Disability in SA. I had conceived and built that site using as many Web 2.0 and collaborative techniques I had absorbed in the prior year and the time and our budget could afford and done so with the emerging nature of online interaction in mind. I rapidly threw everything I had learnt about the emerging Web 2.0 technologies and the culture of cooperation, sharing, collaboration and openness I’d been immersed in. And Trent picked it up quick, very quick, soaking it in like a sponge then mixing in his own thoughts and ideas. Right there he embraced the re-mix culture of ideas.
In no time we quickly were exploring all kinds of ideas and rapidly developing tools and techniques focused around building a kick-ass back-end infrastructure on Wordpress that we could implement for our redevelopment of the History project and ensuring the things we built were suited to our longer term vision of redeveloping the centre’s information systems framework, which we had decided was, and is, to be based on wpmu.
One of the key tools Trent made was a plugin for Wordpress that could better handle the images we used on the History project site. You see, the project uses images on Flickr that we put there. It was planned that way - use tools already existing that do the job we need and build a site using data that is actually distributed. So we used Flickr as the centre’s and projects photo manager. To better allow staff to easily control the integration between the images and the other associated text (stored locally) Trent developed what became Flickr Manager plugin for Wordpress.
Encouraged by me he released it into the Wordpress community under a GPL license. And started a blog. Our desire to be part of the culture that we exist in - the Web 2.0 space online - and to support the Wordpress community was blossoming. The Flickr Manager plugin, released onto the Wordpress Extend plugin site got fast take up and rapidly Trent developed more features and made heaps of bug fixes. A lot of time went into getting it just right, aided by a lot of messages from users of the plugin and helping them when they had problems with it. The community was working. It turns oput that his Flickr Manager was the first Wordpress plugin to actually allow uploading to Flickr from the Wordpress dashboard, not just retrieval of images from Flickr..
I managed to convince the Director that getting Trent and myself to WordCamp in Melbourne was a good investment in the future - no mean feat in the climate of funding cutbacks and total upheaval we were in, are still in, trying to regroup the way we operate and fight for survival.
All this effort and passion that goes on behind what the end user, the world sees, is where the real heart of Web 2.0 anmd the collaborative, participative, sharing and caring nature of open source culture exists. It’s openness of people at their most human, fundamental level. People connecting with other people.
So to have some un-appreciative, un-creative leach come and claim something they ‘badge engineered’ as theirs is like introducing a vacuum back into culture. And it makes me sick. And if you love anything thats good about humans, culture and this online place we share - it should make you sick too.
It’s anathema to everything we are trying to achieve as a connected people.
Dave
I see JP pointed to Lifekludger here on a recent post of his about my testing Pointui in a post he titled ”
Freewheeling about visualisation and manipulation tools and support for diversity“.
He picked up on a Tweet I left ;
“dnwallace : tryin out Pointui on WM5 and liking it. Finally, ‘touch’ features without a finger - http://pointui.com/“
There’s too much to say than I have time right now, this is just to point you onto the lifekludger blog rather than here.
More to say on the subject later…over on Lifekludger.
Dave
Over on a post on Naked yak about what a FRIEND really means, Chris offers a comment that got me thinking:
It gets even weirder, because of the friends blurring with business colleagues.
Maybe the nature and title of the relationship needs to reside in the hands of the one making the connection, not an outside imposed technological ‘cubicle’ definition.
Relationship specification and definition should perhaps be inverted and opened up - individual centred relationship context - self configurable extendable fluid relationship matrixes. Just like cones of silence need to be. Supported by technology not defined by it.
It’s kinda like the personal social side of Docs VRM stuff.
Just a thought.
Dave
The latest EELS podcast is up. In it we welcome Kent as a new co-host.
EELS 32 - 24th August 2007 - Introducing kent
Interestingly, Chris Carfi, who we had on show #30, has posed a timely post on one of the topics we talk about on the latest show.
From his full post here :
quote from Debra Aho Williamson: “[Display advertising] is the ‘low-hanging fruit’ and the real potential of social networks has yet to be tapped.”
Dave
Technorati Tags: chris carfi, eels032, podcast, advertising
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