Lifesized

Slight update: Lifesized blog and site

2007-04-19T14:47:00.000+02:00

If you have not already found my new work residence online including a new blog, go and check it out at Lifesized.net. It was time to move business operations out of Google's hands (bless their souls for all the free goodies, hope they have earned a bob or two from me). At the link above you will find me writing on more serious design matters (although still from my POV naturally). I'm also writing over at the Roomwareproject's Blog. This place i will keep for posts of a more personal and frivolous nature!

Woke up at 7.30 a.m. to the sound of a sledgehammer pounding down a wall

2007-04-19T14:38:00.000+02:00

And then i found this letter posted though the mailbox.

It says that a building project started in the house next door will continue from now for the next 12 weeks! Leuk, Shit,F*(^$@A*H&@#*L^*....
...
On second thoughts, breaking down walls doesn't take that long. I just need to hold out till the time they start sanding down and painting. In the meantime, better go and get some Ohropax.

Human Beatbox is living large in China

2007-03-16T17:25:00.000+01:00

Funky fresh. I used to human beatbox...back in the days...an even thought at one moment while i was making and producing music to do an album with all the beats done with my mouth over a concept album with "a day in life of" format. Well this was something i picked up from the Shanghaist

"So a certain Liu Feng, a multi-talented video editor from Beijing working at W+K Shanghai, traveled up to northern China over CNY to discover the secret behind a popular web video featuring a Chinese beat-boxing virtuoso.

What he found is hinted at in the trailer above. Yanji, a city of just over 400,000 people located near the border to North Korea, is a virtual breeding ground for fledgling Chinese beat-boxers. Taking elements from popular Korean, Chinese and American culture, Yanji's b-boys and b-girls are carving out a style all their own."

Lecture of finding material correlates to spiritual states continued

2007-02-04T13:09:00.000+01:00

"Where do our beliefs come from, and why do we hold on to some of them even if there is evidence to the contrary? Why, for example, do we continue to be fascinated by God, religion, haunted houses, UFOs, conspiracy theories, and miracle cures, even when science can dispute many of these claims? Is it because we are uneducated, or are our brains designed to interpret and seek out such possibilities in the world? Simply put: Why do we believe what we believe? "

These are the words of Andrew Newberg. I have asked similar questions in one form or another many times myself.

This is totally my kind of thing. And to answer the question whether i am a hard/soft materialist ...the answer is clearly no. I am fascinated by belief. It still astounds me how looking at the history of religious traditions, so-called enlightenment is an incredibly rare and unevenly distributed occurence. If i look at current spiritual methods, i can only see that they are in need of an incredible update. Sitting for hours meditating is a huge amount of work. From my personal perspective it is simply a matter of poor design and lack of understanding of how people/the universe works. So you can then understand why i favor further inquiry into such subjects as neurotheology.

(thanks to C4Chaos for the linkage)

Got tagged

2006-12-25T17:46:00.000+01:00

Chain letters are not my thing usually either, but as it's the end of the year and coming from friends i thought might as well join the party. Not sure who i could pass this onto as most those people already got tagged!

1. I used to play a lot of fantasy games, dungeons and dragons-like stuff, runequest and games through the mail. Once i went for an IRL(in real life) fantasy experience in some hollowed out limestone caves in the south of England where groups of adventurers would dress up and go on dungeoning adventures inside the caves. I sat for 15 minutes inside a coffin, awaiting one such unlucky group of adventurers. I was an annoying unkillable vampire, dealing quad-damage per hit in a weird mirrored room, me being behind on of the teleportation mirrors. The poor adventurers could choose between getting ripped apart by my vampiric powers or bludgeoned by a group of undead orcs in another room. Fun.
2. When i was 16 i got into a 1950s dinner jacket, shawadeewaddy kind of look, although the jackets were always black(not light blue).
3. I was once banned from an airline because when i was a teenager and had to travel alone to meet my separating parents, children at that time needed to travel with an escort. This was usually a stewardess. I guess it was the teenage hormones/ rebelliousness coming through. I must have been a real pain in the ass to these ladies to get banned. (rescinded now i'm a little more mature)
4. I miss cooking in a theatrical context. My life has gone too digital. The balance needs to be re-dressed. Hoping to throw some events in 2007 to bring the physical back into my life. Here's a new year's resolution built into a tagged admission.

Happy New Year all,
2006 was amazing on a personal level although a disaster from a global political perspective. Here's to 2007.

roomware devhouse2 was great

2006-10-31T19:29:00.000+01:00

Once again, we assembled at Peter's place in Amsterdam this time for a weekender of conjecture, coding and testing. Quite a few new faces arrived as well as a core number of people from the first dev house. What did we achieve? Well, we now have a running roomware server with blue tooth module and were able to build an application. It scans for bluetooth devices, and upon finding them pulls the name of the device. It then calls the flickr api and displays the profile icons of people in the rooms and makes a photo-slide show of the first 10 images of each of the people detected. I was NOT amazed we got so far as the team is pretty damn good. We also had discussions on the language needed to define and describe a roomware application. Now to take care of security, stability of the server. Ubi and Valerie started work on a very lightweight client.

I have spent the last weeks slowly being opened up to the "internet of things". After many chats with Ben and Tijs and Robert, i realize we really are coming at this whole space from a very different angle. The roomware project is building walls and floors on an open source license for others to then add furniture and build in features.
One of the great side effects of this project is that i seem to suddenly have made a lot of new friends!

This one keeps coming back and won't go away

2006-10-23T15:51:00.000+02:00

(click on the link to view video if you can't already see it from within your feedreader)

"Oil, Smoke and Mirrors" is an independent 50 minute documentary on peak oil, 9/11 and the war on terror." Interesting beginning although a third of the way through it veers off into all sorts of links to "the war of terror" that i'm not supporting wholeheartedly.

Dim Mak - art of the Death Blow

2006-10-21T21:45:00.000+02:00

(click on link to view the video here if you are reading about this via a feed reader that does not embed video)

I used to be fascinated by martial arts, and the discussion around pressure points and the supposed death-blow dark art was part of schoolboy mythology. Great to see this episode show some warrior acupuncture applications into the uses of Chi!

Anyone for some bag cheese?

2006-10-10T18:24:00.000+02:00

Discovered at a traditional Dutch restaurant near the Leidseplain in Amsterdam, somehow i think this translation is a bit off target:) (Hang-op is yoghurt hung in muslin so the water drips out of it. This is then mixed with whipped cream, vanilla and powder sugar and good with something crunchy and fruit salady)

The Executive Suitcase Coloring Book

2006-10-08T23:41:00.000+02:00

"Subversive, legendary, and long out of print... Ad to the Bone presents a special 2006 edition of The Executive Coloring Book."

via business innovation insider

Earth Album

2006-10-05T18:50:00.000+02:00

Earth Album had me clicking all over the world, especially as it integrated youTube and Flickr. The video linkage just shows a taste of how the geographic navigational metaphor is so easy and fun to use, and thus powerful. I found myself clicking on African countries and peering onto their culture through uploaded music videos. A love song sung in Swahili, where the young singer is gangster'd out in the latest American sportwear gear. Maps mashups keep getting sweeter.

A wee interview with Michel about P2P

2006-10-03T15:58:00.000+02:00

Ok, so it is not technically perfect, some err's and umm's, a rushed filming as we only realized we had a small window to find a camera and shoot something (for Robin Good) before he had to go to Denmark. I managed to get Michel to answer some questions that relate to the "ordinary person" (where possible) rather than sticking to terms and phrases that only social scientists/politicians/geeks understand. Still, there's a lot of juicy inspirational stuff in here.

Small aside
P2P Foundation blog in French will launch beginning November, led by Remi Sussan author of "Utopies Posthumaines" and journalist/writer at large.

Tricking humans into doing some of the heavy lifting

2006-10-02T22:09:00.000+02:00

"Abstract tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs. This talk introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to solving such problems focus on improving software. I advocate a novel approach: constructively channel human brainpower using computer games. For example, the ESP Game, described in this talk, is an enjoyable online game -- many people play over 40 hours a week -- and when people play, they help label images on the Web with descriptive keywords. These keywords can be used to significantly improve the accuracy of image search. People play the game not because they want to help, but because they enjoy it."

by Lecture by Luis von Ahn: Assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University

Roomware Workshop, you are invited!

2006-09-11T19:58:00.000+02:00

We had a great discussion on the idea of RoomWare a few geek dinners ago and it was repeated in a further dinner, so we now decided we would host an event based on the theme of RoomWare.

"At RoomWareDevHouse we intend to investigate possible applications, host discussion and do some hacking while enjoying a tasty beverage. The event is free and anyone interested can attend as long as you intend to participate.

Loosely styled after SuperHappyDevHouse we hope to talk about and even build some of the applications that we will display at a later RoomWare event. Furthermore we intend to start development on an open source RoomWare platform that anyone can build on to provide RoomWare applications at their own event or location.."

Sign up on the wiki to join.

"Roomware are software applications running in a defined space. The people in a RoomWare enabled space can use the services running on a local server through their mobile phone (Bluetooth), laptop (Wifi) or other means (RFID). Possible services range from live interaction with the music or video screens to introducing parts of an online profile into the local space."

(from the Roomwareproject site)

Parkour

2006-08-25T23:21:00.000+02:00

"To some people (particularly non-practitioners), parkour is an extreme sport, to others a discipline more comparable to martial arts.

According to founder David Belle, the spirit of parkour is guided in part by the notions of "escape" and "reach", that is, the idea of using physical agility and quick thinking to get out of difficult situations, and to be able to go anywhere that one desires."
wikipedia

Revisiting the theatrical

2006-08-17T13:55:00.000+02:00

It was a pleasure to discover a play that uses digital techniques taken to the next level. Actors are still present off-screen, although they cross-over into the screen and have all sorts of data superimposed over themselves. I love seeing relationship maps vizualized alongside real-time/skin-touching emotions. Supervision created by the cross-over talent of The Builder's Association and dbox.

"SUPER VISION tells three stories drawn from the datasphere:
1. As he crosses successive borders, a solitary traveler gradually is forced to reveal all of his personal information, until his identity becomes transparent, with no part of his life left outside the bounds of dataveillance.

2. A young woman, addicted to the white noise of constant connection, maintains a long-distance relationship with her Grandmother. As she makes efforts to digitally archive her Grandmother's past, the grandmother slips into senility. The young woman is left to discover what remains of her Grandmother's life and her own outside the realm of data.

3. A father covertly exploits his young son's personal data to meet the demands of the family's lifestyle. This ploy escalates beyond the father's control, until he is compelled to disappear. His wife and son are left with a starkly diminished data portrait, and his escape is shadowed by the long reach of the datasphere."

This kind of brings two parts of me together, the performing side (in real time) and the weird tech-enhanced world. Builderassociation, pretty please, come and perform Supervision in Amsterdam. We have got plenty of screens here for you too.

My first (kind-of) award

2006-08-15T18:38:00.000+02:00

I was kind of taken aback when i received an email from a personal friend and collaborator, that we had been listed in Time magazines 50 coolest sites for our Yu-Gi-Oh collaboration! We had done this with our micro-site for kids. The content uses stop-frame animation in a clever way. My role was some animation work and coding the whole thing together in Flash. Alma/blank tweaked the coding in LA for site optimization.

Here's the blurb:
"Time.com has selected the Yu-Gi-Oh! GXGroove Room as one of its Top 50 Coolest Sites for 2006 placing it alongside the likes of YouTube, Meebo, Pandora and MySpace among others. You can click on the link here for the full story (see excerpt below link):

http://www.time.com/time/2006/50coolest/index.html

MONSTER MASH
Yu-Gi-Oh Groove
Here's one for the kids: a site that features characters from the popular anime world of Yu-Gi-Oh, doing something they don't ordinarily do: dance. It's silly and fun — you mix and match the music and moves. Developer Timothy Harris photographed the actual toys in various poses to create the stop-motion animations. Best feature: though sponsored by Mattel, there's not an ad or corporate logo in sight.

You'll find Yu-Gi-Oh! Groove Room in the Time Wasters section....a fun feature for kids and potential guilty pleasure for adults!!"

Most of all I'm happy for Tim. I coded in Amsterdam, while Tim designed in LA. He visited Amsterdam once, mainly because he was moving the rest of his stuff out of the city. He did some animation work here. We used Skype (voice and file transfer) to stay in touch. He came up with the total concept and did all the graphic design and stop frame animation work.

We had a big laugh messing around with Yu-Gi-Oh robot parts. This included Tim buying material for the backdrop for his Robot disco. I'm curious how the kids actually responded. Before this project i had vaguely heard of Mattel.

Define your collaborative project using some tools from Involve

2006-08-15T12:20:00.000+02:00

A UK group called Involve do some great work on collaboration, the highlight being their publication of "People and Participation". This publically funded UK think-tank and research center, is another wonderful example of some of the good work coming out of Europe in this area. I used a lot of the concepts from within their document for a project i have been working on. It translated easily from a government focus to other sectors. Of particular strength was the unification of concepts with case studies in the field of participatory practise/ collaboration.

"People & Participation is the first publication of Involve, a new organisation focused on the practical issues of making public participation work. There have been many books and pamphlets about democratic reform. What is unusual about this publication is that it provides much needed practical detail, drawing on the experiences of over a hundred practitioners who have used new methods to involve the public in issues ranging from local planning to nanotechnology. Its starting point is that deepening and strengthening democracy depends on success in learning lessons about why some kinds of participation lead to better and more legitimate decisions, while others do not. The book shows that greater public involvement can greatly help in addressing some of our most pressing problems and countering the risks of distrust and alienation. But it also warns that too much participation today is superficial, an exercise in ticking boxes as opposed to good democratic governance, or is used to to justify decisions that have already been made. Participation works best when people feel that they can make a difference, when they have the time to fully engage with the issues and when there is a healthy relationship of mutual respect with elected representatives. It works worst when it is rushed, ill-informed and vague about the links to formal decision-making, or when it allows the loudest voices to dominate. There are no simple formulae or ‘off the shelf’ solutions to improving participation. Nor is participation a panacea – turning government into a permanent public meeting can get in the way of making difficult decisions. But in general, wider involvement is good for public organisations, improves their relationships with the public and reduces the risk of bad mistakes. As the book shows, there are some clear lessons to be learned about the methods that are more or less likely to work in different circumstances, and we are lucky in the UK in that there are now very many people with the experience and the enthusiasm to make participation work. It is rarely easy or natural for big institutions to open themselves up. But a more educated and demanding public is no longer willing to sit on the sidelines watching passively while the big decisions affecting their lives are made by politicians, experts and officials. We live in a democracy where political authority still resides, rightly, with elected politicians. But any democratic vision which stops at that point, and allows parties and politicians to monopolise discussion and decision making, is unlikely to be very legitimate – or very robust when the going gets tough. To their credit, hundreds of public agencies have taken the lead in trying to involve the public more actively. The priority now is to build on that experience and to build confidence that public involvement can lead to better, and more legitimate, decisions." "Too often, discussion of participation begins and ends with identifying methods. One-off events or individual methods are an important element of participatory processes, but they are only one part. Methods have probably become the main focus for people’s participatory working because they are the front-line for interaction, the ‘set piece’ in which institutions come face to face with those they seek to involve. But as with all front lines, their effectiveness is determined almost wholly by the quality of the planning that precedes such action, especially the planning of how to handle the results from that interaction (the products and wider outcomes), and how to link the initiative with wider decision-making processes and systems, particularly in democratic institutions such as local government. Specific methods thus form just one part of the overall participatory process, which will also need to take into account purpose and context. In summary, the key factors in participatory working are:

Purpose + Context + Process = Outcome

Purpose: It is essential to be clear what a participatory process aims to achieve. Ideally, the purpose will be explicitly agreed among all participants (“this is what we are trying to do”). Some participatory exercises may have a primary purpose (for example, to influence a particular policy decision), and a secondary purpose (such as to build relationships). The nature of the purpose contributes to the choice of methods.

Context: Every situation is unique, shaped by the issues, the people, history, location, structures of organisations and institutions taking part, wider decision-making processes and systems, and so on. These factors will fundamentally affect what can and cannot be done – and which methods will or will not work. Participatory working always needs to be understood in relation to the wider systems within which it takes place (such as organisational structures and policy priorities), especially external and internal decision-making systems. The nature of the context affects the choice of methods.

Process: The design of the participatory process is about planning how the purpose will be achieved (including which methods should be used and when).
The design of the process should always follow
agreement on purpose
– ‘form follows function’
– and understanding of the context (including how any eventual decisions will be made).
The choice of individual methods is affected by the nature and stage of the overall process.

In summary, therefore, the choice of participation methods has to be made within an overall design for effective participatory processes (however short or long term, specific or comprehensive) and will depend on an understanding of the context, and an understanding of what participation may be able to achieve so that the purpose of any single exercise (or comprehensive approach) can be clear and realistic.

The document has three main sections:
Introducing participation: Some of the issues affecting participation in the UK today (section 2).

Planning for participation: The key steps for ensuring that participation works (section 3).

Methods for participation: The characteristics, advantages and disadvantages of different participation methods (section 4).
This guidance places participation methods in their proper place in participatory working – which is as part of a coherent design with a clear purpose. The overall design will always be different depending on the particular context."

I especially enjoyed discovering the concepts of outcomes, outputs and their relationship to purpose.

PussyCatLounge04/SoftwareSocial at Katie and Paul's

2006-08-10T13:43:00.000+02:00

What Tijs and I started 5 months ago has now become a steady, monthly event. We were looking for a way to bring interesting people of all persuasions together for a dinner once a month in Amsterdam. It was meant to primarily support freelancers with a focus on software and startups, thus by default throwing us into the category of geek dinner.
Katie wanted to do something similar too, so we teamed up at her place for a larger bbq. Thanks go to Hugh Macleod, Sam Brown and the Stormhoek team for sending us such a generous wine contribution. For those of you that don't know about Stormhoek, let me just say that as Kristal is to hip-hop, Stormhoek is to geek. It's a South African wine producer reaching out to consumers rather than wasting lots of advertising dollar on large billboards. Well, maybe billboards are not redundant, it's just which delivers more leverage for the cost. At our recent bbq we were happy to have Robert from Blue Ace, Peter from Instant Interfaces, people from Hives, katie and Paul of TreasureMyText and more. We are hooking up with Blue Ace to do some bigger events in the future (to be defined). This will lead us to producing 3 different kinds of events.
1. A small 6-8 person invite only dinner
2. A larger 15-25 person event
3. Largest type, 50-??? .

We are also adding more structure to events to balance: focused discussion time on interesting subject matter Vs Mindless hanging out blather, joking around, networking while eating and drinking great stuff.

Oh and i should lastly plug the p2pfoundation where i have been working with Michel,Brice, Remi, Jeff, while recently with - Sam Rose and Adrian Chan for the last 8 months..Listen to the podcast on what this work is about as its important theoretical stuff - like Lessig, Benkler.

Tears of sadness for the people in Iraq

2006-05-21T10:10:00.000+02:00

I opened up my rss reader this morning and went over to my news feeds. For quite a while they consist of blogs rather than news sites to get a more honest and first-hand account of what is going on out there in the world. This morning Global Voices Online posted a roundup of the Iraqi blogosphere. It made me so sad, and feel so helpless. I am still wandering how i can help support the ordinary citizens there get by in their daily hell of a life often in high temperatures, being shot at, kidnapped, ransomed, tortured, murdered, without refrigeration to keep food and drinks cold, without air conditioning, with radicals issuing new and behavior conditioning rules that come from the time of the Middle Ages, random bullets from scared US soldiers, criminals preying on all, where homosexuals now have a fatwa against them, and so on and so forth.

Even with the new government having just formed, the reality of what you read below seems to nullify any possible impact of them doing any good in the context of such a chaotic country way, way, way out of control. I hope to be proved wrong.

"Flying over the Iraqi Blogodrome…
Middle East & North Africa, Iraq, Weblog, Governance, Human Rights, LGBT, War & Conflict
…almost literally (I’m plane-blogging again).

I thought about this again and again and there is no other way to describe what passes for government in Iraq. Today I give you some snapshots of a failed state. And this is the subject that dominates the Iraqi blogs.

If you read only one blog this week read this

Brian has been getting emails from Qasem in Ramadi. He description of life for ordinary people caught in a battle between US troops and the people he calls ‘fighters’ is both compelling and shocking:

At 9:30 in the morning, the US troops tried to install more snipers by occupying more houses close to the core of the city, some fighters attacked them and tough fighting continued for 3 hours… US bullets damaged many houses because of their random shooting, this way hurt many families inside their houses and my family was harmed also when many bullets sparked fire in the kids room.. I heard their screams while 2 of my nephews run away from their burning bedroom. My brother and I ran upstairs to find out what kind of hurt we will find this time… my mind was full with images of a kid killed with sniper bullet in head or burned dead body of one of my nephews. I was scared too much and I lost control of my steps on the stairs. I found my brother broke down the door and crashed the window with his hands to get out the heavy smoke and he carried out his 5 year-old son Mustafa who was startled, to get him out of the burned room. The fire started to burn some blankets, I found my way to bring water and started extinguishing the fire. It was small fire cased by the bullets …this kind of bullets used by US troops is very harmful gun for human beings or the materials-it contains lead that will be like a hot liquid inside the bullet…if the bullet get inside the body will explode and crash the body from inside and melt bones & flesh ….and if the bullet attacked a car or furniture or wood, it will burn and melt it.
The streets were empty and the fighters succeeded to disapear as usual …but the US soldiers keep there machine guns working and pointing to our houses….

I know that US soldiers want to keep themselves alive till they see their families but we also need to be alive to take care our suffering families in our poor hard life in Iraq.

On top of this there is no electricity,no water, no phones and no security. But given all this trouble where would he rather be?

Now, IF I have the choice to live in Baghdad or Ramadi or Fallujah …I will choose the 2 last choices because the dangerous side is clear but in Baghda every thing is Dangerous even Police check points can arrest and kill the people for money or some thing else …….

Beyond Blogodrome

A new blog was spotted by Fayrouz on an important subject: Gay Rights in Iraq. The need is urgent:

An anti gay pogrom is taking place in Iraq. Gratuitous killings of gays are permitted under Iraqi law, and it is a fact that George W. Bush approved the wording of the Iraqi constitution that makes it so… That Bush-approved language for the Iraqi constitution making the indiscriminate killing of gays a legal activity is galling beyond all measure and beneath contempt.
And they have had some success:

Following two weeks of negotiations with Iraqi LGBT – UK, Sistani’s office agreed to remove the fatwa calling for the murder of gay men, but has curiously refused to remove the fatwa urging punishment for lesbianism.
Riot Starter of the blog Thought Riot has got her marketing right - go to every blogger and leave a little comment. Its subtle and it works. So I will let Zappy do the recommending for me…

I don’t seem to know where she’s blogging from, but who cares anyway, as long as its a good blog, she’s taking politics to seriously.
I wish her the best.

Snapshots of a Failed State

There is a common theme flowing like a whisper through the Iraqi blogs. In a phrase: “Where is the government?”

Iraq The Model reports that Iraq’s largest power station was forced to shut down because gunmen forced the employees and their families to leave. “I wonder how the government failed to protect those families who live in a relatively easy-to-protect isolated area around the station!” Mohammed writes.

“Where is the government?”

Meemo is feeling the strain these days: “even I know nothing is going fine, everything goin as bad as it can, even the the weather …, the situation over here is kinda unbairable, ’cause everything is forbidden right nowI […] they killed three young guys becasue they were wearing the pagan short pants ..”

“Where is the government?”

Even mobile phones can be a weapon used by criminals. Iraqi Screen describes how: “you might get threats of unknown persons warning you if you do not pay a ransom you will be kidnapped and cut in pieces, beside informing you to quit your job.” And she asks ” Who is the real government? … I asked a high rank official in Baghdad police about legal procedures regarding such threats, he told me that police directorate had a huge pile of them but always impossible to verify and waste of time to follow up.”

“Where is the government?”

Zappy gets leaflets dropped in his street from the “Honorable Resistance” AKA “Zarqawi’s (sic):

Men are not allowed to grow goatees
Men are not allowed to wear Jeans
Men are not allowed to remove their facial hair
Woman are required to wear a “Juba” some kind of black gown that looks like a sack
Woman are not allowed to drive
Women are not allowed to leave their homes without a chaperon
Any one not obeying these rules will be shot. On that same day a young boy coming back from school was shot at the “Amal al Shabi” street.

One Question to the people responsible for providing security to that neighborhood “The Iraqi National Guards”, why are you not doing your F***ing Job!

“Where is the government?”

Ishtar’s phone keeps ringing from friends asking what to do. Because two women were shot for driving a car and another three for wearing trousers. She laments, “it is really unbelievable, how the reconstruction campaign falls apart whenever it starts in Iraq while violence reconstruction campaign builds up in such a rapid speed and systematic way to maintain every body everywhere.”

“Where is the government?”

Mama treats a 10 year old boy for a decayed tooth but first she needs his parents approval..

He stepped from the chair in an attempt to leave, with his eyes full of tears, and said nothing.
-”Are you coming back with someone later? I asked.
-”no, I have no one”.
-”With whom do you live?”.
-”With my younger brother, he is Mongolian”.
-I grip his shaky hands … and asked him if he knew any one?
Few minutes later he pointed to a man, he was one of the servants” H”.
I sent for” H”, and told him that I need some one of Salih’ relatives … He said “I am his fathers’ cousin, I can stay with him because he has no One close…his older brother who was taking care of him was murdered 3 days ago”…
-why?
- He was a policeman…
-”Are you hungry, did you have your breakfast honey?” I asked Salih trying so hard to hold my tears.
- ” no I did not , the neighbors did not bring us any”. he said.
Just then I could not hold my tears any more, I took his little hands and took him to buy him something to eat. “let us buy something to eat, I am hungry too” ..
-” no, I will go home” said Salih pointing to a far cottage..
- I will take him to my place, bring him something to eat, and be right back”…said” H”.
But the boy ran away….
I sat in my room, wondering how could these children survive. How could they live alone, what do they do in the darkness every day? Where is our government, are they aware about that policeman’s family….

“Where is the government?”

Neurotic Wife shouts the question out loud. She hears 6 or 7 big explosions outside the Green Zone and a bullet lands just under her room. Next day her colleague tells her she lost a cousin when gun men broke into his office and shot everyone inside; an uncle who rushed to the scene lost a leg in a car bomb explosion, another colleague gets a phone call from her daughter in Amiriya saying militias are shaving the heads of women found outside without a headscarf She writes:

And where is the darn government??? The government is deciding who takes the Defense ministry and who takes the Interior one….Wowwww!!!! People are getting killed left center and right all under the eyes of the government!!!
She asks you to imagine what it is like to be in a lawless country and a gang kidnaps your wife and daughter for ransom…

You get the money…you give it to them…and then you wait…a day…2 days…3….a week….2 bodies are found shot in the head in the garbage…Its your lovely wife and beautiful daughter…..Youve lost your family….Youve lost your hope…..

More and more stories like this happen everyday….More and more killings…More and more kidnappings…This is the plight of the Iraqis…But no one hears them.. […]

This current government is hopeless…As long as there are fanatic religeous people governing and having great popularity then forget it….As long as there are bin laden loyalists…Zarqawi criminals…Militias…so called mujahideen….There will no longer be Iraq….this place has literally become a hell hole….

“WHERE IS THE GOVERNMENT?”

But remember Iraqis are not helpless victims waiting to be killed. Meemo explains:

becareful all dudes dont show your hairy legs ‘casue that would send you to your death, its bullshit people I’m wearing now the shortest pants I have, its almost undrepants and I’m in the internet cafe right now, you know if I’m gonna die by a bullet its better than the how weather, i’ve been wearing short since I was a kid these motherf***ers wanna come now and control ma life, you are dreaming no one can control me no not even ____,

And finally

Asterism (thats me) picks up on a classic quote from Michael Rubin, a former American administration official in Iraq:

‘The reconstruction obviously hasn’t gone that well, but we have put together a lot of PowerPoint presentations about the problem.’

(via STLtoday)

With Powerpoint we will conquer the world!"

via Global Voices Online (Berkman)

Global Human Referendum's voting machine test approaches

2006-05-05T09:33:00.000+02:00

I came across the GLOBAL HUMAN REFERENDUM group and their site WorldVoteNow via the social software weblog. They want to set up a global direct democracy voting infrastructure. Initial test is to take place May 15. I will take part and see what they have to say and how they are doing this. What is so surprising is the depth of attention and how many hours of work that appear to have been sunk into this project. There are numerous downloads (.pdf) sprinkled over their site.
To put this global voting initiative in context. Yes, we are in a process, quite a rapid one, which is reconfiguring politics, power and communication channels. Building any global system that lets people vote on important issues, INDEPENDENTLY of nation states is a step in the right direction to bringing a more embedded global culture that addresses issues from a global perspective and connects directly with people. Is that what they are attempting to reach? I don't have the time now as i write this post to dig into their material but will do so soon.
From what i can see from this brief encounter of their site, there are no discussion functionalities proposed in their voting equipment. Anyway i will report back in the post, after the voting.

Also via Knowprose: KnowProse

Secure citizen format

2006-04-28T23:53:00.000+02:00

Just found this old picture in an old folder on my hard drive. Funny how it's still quite pertinent today.

Google Updates Maps for Europe

2006-04-25T14:53:00.000+02:00

I have been waiting for this for a while. Here is the test case for Amsterdam.
Just see the difference between this...(old map and satellite view only)

and this....(satellite view updated)

and street maps!...

and if that is not enough, then go cruise using google earth.
here is an area of the city where i often meet up with fellow
ifccc members

Here is the URL so you can go see for yourself

Secular slap down

2006-03-02T12:31:00.000+01:00

"Dr. Wafa Sultan is an Arab-American psychologist. On February 21 she confronted a radical Islamist cleric on al-Jazeera television."
Excerpt:
The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations, It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century."
via Jawa Report

link to movie here...it's really worth seeing folks! and use IE

Museum of modern beta's

2006-02-23T17:35:00.000+01:00

This is a bit too del.icio.us-y for a post, but a recent gem of a discovery if you are interesting in new web applications. The Museum of modern beta's is like techCrunch without the filters.

Collective intelligence 2.0

2006-01-25T13:15:00.000+01:00

Nova Spinack,calls us to arms on improving the 'global supermind'.

I really liked the depth of his post and here are a few overlapping thoughts. We have already got a lot of the basic building blocks in place and there's plenty of bandwidth and exchange. What we need next is to crawl up the abstraction level and build more and better logic systems. We can then recontextualize our collective histories, reflecting through more sophisticated filters and argument frames. There is a need for new tools we need in this area. Perhaps a morals and perspectives toolkit to be added to blog post and identities that track history, are updateable and flexible. We need to be able to track our own questions and "directions" on a personal level and see how those reflect in the collective at multiple scales.

Go check his post here:
"I have often thought that the Web is growing into the nervous system of our species. This will in turn enable the human species to function increasingly as an intelligent superorganism, for example, like a beehive, or an ant colony. As the planetary supermind becomes more aware of its environment, its own state, and its own actions and plans, it will naturally evolve higher levels of collective intelligence. This evolutionary leap is of unimaginable importance to the future of our species."
link

Oh and Nova if this post somehow tracksbacks to your(still can't work trackback...) i can bring design skills, and tools to table(developed concepts, interface designs)

New low security prison in Netherlands with new electronic bracelet type technology

2006-01-20T11:56:00.000+01:00

"The hi-tech jail in the central city of Lelystad opens, and locks, its doors to low-risk inmates this week.

Electronic bracelets track their moves while emotion recognition software monitors tempers - with good behaviour rewarded with privileges.

The justice ministry says the concept is a new form of detention."
via bbc

I would like to get a closer look at these bracelets. They could be useful as a self-awareness tool for non-prisoners, ie citizens living outside of prisons...
Specifically interested in their emotion recognition technology. Are they just monitoring heart beat rates or do they have something more sophisticated in place?

More advanced avatar systems developed for use with IM

2006-01-19T15:17:00.000+01:00

IMSTAR hails itself as the next generation of instant messaging.
It's approach is to complement traditional IM with customizable 3d avatars and a currency system. Now that's a refeshing new apporach, and i'm beginning to think, "The Sims" influence is reaching out into other domains.

IMSTARS differs in approach to other avatar supplying companies like weeworld as it is doing 2 things instead of one, although you could argue 3. It provides IM, it proviudes an avatar for each user and a virtual world with a simple currency system to enable and stimulate transactions, both emotional and purchase oreintated. Weeworld has stayed with focusing on the avatars themselves while integrating their system into other communities and platforms, eg friendsreunited.co.uk, integrated onto mobile phones and email. I think their is plenty of room for them both. On the horizon expect to see google/yahoo/microsoft want to enter this arena as let's face it. We all have multiple identities and it's nice to have a richer visual of that beyond the classic "upload .jpg, 50 pixels x 50 pixels, no alrger than 50kb".

So here's a brief list of things i noticed (forgive me for the self-evident:
- integration with AIM instant messaging platform
- standalone program (looks like its flash-based)
- 3-dimensional characters (female characters only as far as i could see which is a bit weird, there's now a girl called james9)
- editable characteristics - "edit my face", "edit my body","look in my closet"
- characters get a currency to buy/sell and trade (excellent idea)
- character can perform actions, you drag an action onto your character,
for instance("smile", or "raggamuffin" = dance to your favorite music. also you can access this by typeing *raga* in your chat window. this is cool.
- clothing items have shelf life ie they wear out, so you need to pay to repair them.
- buddy list instant messaging functionalities including, "add a buddy", start/stop chat", "shareimstar".
- view items in a variety of ways
- sell clothes back to shop

other observations:
- It has a unique interface and visual design. (i'm not sure about the bright green although that's a personal preference.
- You can manipulate your character in 3D!, although I couldn't touch my ass.
- I really like the way you can easily try on all your clothes and execute acitons.
It's intuitive drag and drop. eg drag dress onto your body, or an action and character responds
- Had no buddies online to test chatting so i cna't comment here.
- Offline clothing manufacturers are experimenting. I was able to try on Babyphat clothes for 20 minutes. Fantastic cross-over idea and daring that a clothing line repurposes their clothes for virtual worlds. They have apparently made a whole babyfat line available for avatars.
- Target audience must be young women, but what about men? did i do something wrong here or is this only available in female avatar form?
- Interoperability: AIM (please get that on Skype and Jabber,etc).
- They are moving into MySpace...wonder what the uptake will be?

How to Podcast made easy by FrenchMaid TV

2006-01-14T10:27:00.000+01:00

Learning how to podcast may be hard and technical for so many of you out there, which is why FrenchMaidTV has made life easy for us all with a handy tutorial...Enjooooy!

Bathroom mirror/screen combo

2006-01-06T11:07:00.000+01:00

I really like this cool idea of combining a screen and mirror at first glance. Notice the Yahoo Confabulator tools visible in the screen below including:
-To Do list/Calendar(i Cal or yahoo calendar),
-Clock, Weather
-News feeds
-A picture of the day (you can hook this up to flickr or your own photos)
Not sure if in the end i would want all of this, might like to hear music in the shower, or while i am brushing my teeth, perhaps listen to voicemail.

This a from CES 2006, a Philips concept/product.

IFCCC in different flavors

2005-12-22T12:44:00.000+01:00

I was playing around with a known google hack, offering the ifccc blog in different languages, using google translation services.

Here you can see the blog in Italian. Yum!

(*italian)

(*french)

(*german)

(*chinese - using a different method)

(*japanese- using a different method)

Search, find and call

2005-12-15T13:21:00.000+01:00

I recently upgraded my Skype (yet again!) to latest 2.0 beta. Also in this section i noticed another little tool for Firefox; Skype integration. The next time i came online i saw all the telephone numbers on my web searches being parsed by the skype widget,

so that on mouse over, this happened....

Internet transport system updated

2005-11-22T10:56:00.000+01:00

What is the Simple Sharing Extensions specification?

"Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) is a specification that extends RSS from unidirectional to bidirectional information flows.

SSE defines the minimum extensions necessary to enable loosely cooperating applications to use RSS as the basis for item sharing—that is, the bidirectional, asynchronous replication of new and changed items among two or more cross-subscribed feeds.

For example, SSE could be used to share your work calendar with yourspouse. If your calendar were published to an SSE feed, changes to yourwork calendar could be replicated to your spouse's calendar, and viceversa. As a result, your spouse could see your work schedule and addnew appointments, such as a parent-teacher meeting at the school, or adoctor's appointment.

SSE allows you to replicate any set of independent items (forexample, calendar entries, lists of contacts, list of favorites,blogrolls) using simple RSS semantics. If you can publish your data asan RSS feed, the simple addition of SSE will allow you to replicateyour data to any other application that implements the SSEspecification."

link to FAQ
(via Steve Rubel - Micro Persuasion)

Kuchen

2005-11-15T16:50:00.000+01:00

had a brief trip to Germany with my lady friend, who was on the jury for a yearly media art prize awarded in Kassel. (This is also where the world famous Documenta art festival is held every 5 years). We got to see a lot of documentary films too, including "Germany: the great depression", by a Michael Moore-inspired director, and plenty of wonderful other shorts. Met lots of great new people. Doug showed up, and we ate lots of mashed potato and saurkraut with meat washed down with tasty german half-litre beers. Sorry folks back in Holland but German beer is far superior. We then headed to Gottingen and as you can see above, indulged in the some cake and coffee while visiting more friends. View flikr stream here for visuals on this trip.

Barcamp Amsterdam__

2005-10-22T17:46:00.000+02:00

Was over a couple of times to visit the people at Barcamp. Decided to test Flock as there were many Flock team there presenting. This is my first blogpost from within Flock. Love the Flickr coordination and delicious. It is just so intuitive. There were a presentations on : Jabber protocol, Flock, Drupal, Plazes amongst other things. Met some cool people working on Bryght and from Civic Space. Colby, Ton and Johnathon also showed up. I came with Tijs and Peter Kaptein both coders with open minds here from the Netherlands.Later on ended up dancing downstairs at W139.

China tries to keep control

2005-09-26T10:20:00.000+02:00

New York Times article today on China going a step further in its censorship of the internet.

"The rules .. state that private individuals or groups must register as "news organizations" before they can operate e-mail distribution lists that spread news or commentary. Few individuals or private organizations are likely to be allowed to register as news organizations, meaning they can no longer legally distribute information by e-mail....
.....The foremost responsibility of news sites on the Internet is to serve the people, serve socialism, guide public opinion in the right direction, and uphold the interests of the country and the public good, the regulations state."

Digital media is easy to hack and with 1.3 billion people, it only takes a few smart individuals to get round these censors. Still it won't be easy. How many more decades will China take before the Communist party crumbles or radically transforms. China is a mysterious country to watch. I fear the government of China as much as I welcome its people. It was humiiated so much in the 20th Century, which reminds me of Germany before WW1 and 2. Chip on its shoulder? Definately. How it wants to repay the world? Not sure.

Here comes Rita

2005-09-22T13:30:00.000+02:00

This has been a terrible year for hurricanes and their brethren in the Pacific. Katrina hit New Orleans while i was still holed up in Florida. Last year i was caught there by one of the 3 big hurricanes that did extensive damage to Florida. Google Earth, bulletin board has some KML files you can upload if you have an installed copy of the latest software, to track RITA. Warning: This is a picture of imminent death and destruction however cool and customizable the GoogleEarth User Interface and application is!

In the Big Apple

2005-09-07T01:11:00.000+02:00

Last post was entitled American Pie, so i thought i might as well stay with that theme. I just pulled into Manhatten after a wonderful time in Rockland County with my brother and his lady Kathy and their menagerie of pets. They have a new puppy called Twiler who i keep calling Tyler. The Aerosmith mismatch was enjoyed although not something that was going to stick. He's named after an Indian Elder of the same name and part abbreviation for twilight. Half Boxer/Half Labrador. (see puppy here)

I love being in Manhatten. The energy, nervousness, the diversity. I adore this city as a tourist. Never lived here, but am sure i would fit right in. Can't help but compare it to the dreamy, small, provincial town i live in/have lived in for last 13 years called Amsterdam. Gerry, whose place i am staying in tells me he would love to be joining me on the plane back to Holland. He's been here for 20 years.

Ready for a big change in roles from day to day designing which i am beginnning to tire of more and more, especially when it is only selling shit! often in bullshitty ways (depends what and how) ---
to - designing social software tools that can really support people through to building and testing/refining.
- cross-disciplinary creative team building to share knowledge and solve problems across domains. (like a job with more time communicating with people/less time behind computer trying to understand programming...Better as an evangelist, bridge builder and intuit than coder/production artist).

Together with so many of you out there, i have been writing, thinking, designing and collaborating over the last year to get to this place. Reality still dictates more work of the traditional sort for a while. It's gonna be a wonderful day (if not wishful) day should i get into that place where i get back more energy from what i am doing then expending because it stimulates and does not rob you of energy.

So this is a bit of a prayer post.

America Pie

2005-08-26T13:43:00.000+02:00

First of all, I am realizing that I have been posting at an almost snail's pace for the last 4 months. Reason. Well there are two reasons, one is being too occupied with work and the other is having a tough time on realizing what to do with my writing. Is this a category blog, or an identity blog or both? This has been the largest bone of contention. So now i'll let myself do both and see where things lead.

I am in Daytona, Florida, helping out a friend with his business. He lives on the beach on a highrise, so from the 12th Floor, i'm only a elevator ride and hop/skip and jump from walking on the beach which is amazing! At the same time, working with Americans here could not be further mode away from the way goes back in Amsterdam, Holland. Suffice to say that the CEO of the company who i have close contact with here, is a big motivator and Jack Welch type leader slowly moving towards the frontier of new business practises, (probably kicking and screaming). What is interesting is the way the company is not so bothered here about making mistakes. If some marketing material here does not look perfect, it is used everywhere and to the max anyway. In Europe, due to safety concerns, businesses wait for perfection before pushing off from the side of the swimmming pool. Of course, this depends on the size of the company involved. People work far harder here in the US. And it is more performance oreintated. Fortunately i work with some Americans back in Amsterdam too. Unfortunately we have to operate within a culture that is "safety fixated". Try trying to run(or even walk) in treacle!

I feel schizophrenic about returning to Europe. Reality check is that i don't have green card so will have to deal with it! The best thing about what has happened in my life in the last year has been to meet up with like minds. This time last year, I was so frustrated with my life. So many great ideas, noone to share them with(and nonone who would understand their potential to solve real problems). Now, the thought of returning is to meet with new friends and connections who more or less seem to be on the same path. What a difference! Plus my lady arrives tommorrow:)

Summer has arrived here in Amsterdam

2005-07-16T11:19:00.000+02:00

It's been a great week here in Amsterdam. I been very happy and mainly because i have met such a wonderful new companion. Dominique. How often do we meet someone that resonates with us on multiple levels at the same time? I can't describe in words how i feel except: blessed and happy. Today is our 3 week anniversary and time for a picnic to celebrate. Hope the weather gets better as its warm but a bit overcast today. The rest of Europe is suffering from extreme temperatures. Saw images of thousands of dead fish in Portugal due to lack of rain and lakes and rivers drying up.

Opening up government. P2P legislation.

2005-07-03T13:02:00.000+02:00

John Bell of Digital Influence passed on some interesting signals. Open sourcing government(link) in the United States.

Art Kleiner writes,
"What if we had "open-source legislation in all states and in the federal government, where bills in progress are posted on the Web and anyone can mark them up?"". John Bell says that acknowledging and profiling the role of organizations in American politics will create transparency and show their real influence in government. Interesting movement and i will be tracking it.

Michel Bouwens over at the Peer to Peer Foundation which releases a weekly newsletter and where you can read his seminal paper,"Peer to Peer and Human Evolution" here, places this in a bigger perpective. Peer 2 Peer is rapidly asserting itself as an alternative paradigm. It's fascinating to see peer to peer, commons-based approaches often being wholly independent of technology(video from creative capital conference 2005). Charles Leadbeater discusses how people are finding new ways to organize themselves which is deeply connected to creativity and sharing.

Free 3D interface to the planet. Google Earth now available!

2005-06-29T13:12:00.000+02:00

Following my last post, i am overexcited to inform you that Google Earth is available for public release and is a free download.

Here is a screenshot of the world with my first search. Amsterdam has pretty lousy satellite coverage at this point. What i loved about using the interface was how you could move from looking straight down to viewing the earth from an angle.

My advice is you have a broadband connection is to go out and install this straight away. I feel as if i am one step closer to God. This is a big step forward for ordinary people. Why? Putting the military folks in check as they were the only ones with eyes on the world and their interpretation is pretty one-sided. Giving some new views on possible environmental sitautions in different places around the world. Creating a sense of shared space. This tool helps us scale between our traditional nation-state focus to a more global perspective. Google and Keyhole team, chapeaux.

Google Factory Tour previews Google Earth!

2005-05-19T23:50:00.000+02:00

Google just previewed a mind blowing new application that opens up a NASA collected high-res map of the world to the public. It allows you to zoom from above the earth all the way down to a very close resolution world-wide. In the demonstration we went from the Grand Canyon to Bermuda to Santiago, Chile. And what's better is that it integrates with Google Maps!

Day of dialogue, but where's the action?

2005-05-15T09:35:00.000+02:00

In December, 2004, the Amsterdam mayor, Job Cohen, green-lighted a city-wide, town hall meeting style event, called the "dag van dialoog"(day of dialogue).

Reason for public consultation: Theo van Gogh, liberal vitalist, insultant, murdered by extremist
calling into question the policies of the city and country regarding living together under the philosophy of multiculturalism.

Where was it held? Mosques, coffeeshops, police stations, cafes, and more.

Format? 6 people per table, with one moderator. Questions introduced and passed round table. Once it did a round and some discussion had taken place the next question passed round. We were all asked to make suggestions for providing solutions for the city. Each groups's commments and solutions were passed on to the mayor's office.

Analysis of Results
Suggestions put forward by the people were presented to the Mayor. 3 ideas were chosen in Jan 2005 as winners by the local government. I was randomly enough a member of one of these groups. A young 13 year old activist from a local high school came up with our winning idea. So we went to a ceremony where awards were given out, hands shaken and photographs shot for the local news. A big success. Right? Wrong.

It's now May. We have not received any email/telephone communication from the city about this project. We were supposed to coordinate and organize to execute the project together. So what happened? Well it's that classic government failure: bureaucracy and good intentions backed up by a poor response time. If i pay for a product or service i usually get some service. Why is is that parts of the government are still so lost in red tape, and screw up their own success with a lousy response time? It's only 10,000 euro for 3 teams. We pay our government a shit load of tax euro/dollars and where is the delivery?

So I left the project.........

I can do more good for my local community alone than with any good-intentioned government process. I also resent the fact that the decision making team is the government and not open-source to the citizens. It is sad to say that every experience i have had with government recently has been well-intentioned but somehow out-of-step with how to really unlock people power. So here's me signing off and going back to designing my own version of Democracy 2.0 , a little more jaded.Why should I have to lower my expectations just because i'm dealing with government? I resent the mindset that says "cut the government some slack as they are government".
That's just "doe maar gewoon" (i.e. not striving for excellence). As we speak there is another day of dialogue up and coming. My advice would be to open source the selection of the winners and execute as soon as possible.We had so much energy and it went to waste.....

Queen's Night

2005-04-30T08:24:00.000+02:00

It's a special Queen's Day today because it's the 25th anniversary of Queen's day. In Brazil you have carnival, here we have Queen's day. Here in Holland we have a odd and fun phenomena each year where people can sell their junk on the street without a license. Had a blast last night with friends across the city, and maybe a few too many glasses of ye old amber nectar.

Democracy innovation
It's no new news that democracies across the western industrialized countries have been in decline. People have steadily lost interest in voting, in listening to what politicians have to say, and the disconnect has been painful. Ouch! I was very happy to find a juicy link to this bumper report in my inbox by Power: An independent inquiry into Britain's democracy. It is entitled, Beyond the Ballot: 57 Democratic innovations from around the world, which you can view here (pdf). You can also listen to a brief podcast between with Helena Kennedy and Sam Giddy about 'experiments in democracy' on BBC Radio 4. (Real audio file) Also let me point to this link which shows how my individual frustration led me to a ("toungue-in-cheek") personal redesign of some taxation forms for the Netherlands a couple years back. I am bot sure now that personalized tax would be efficient although it is certainly an equalizer. Would love to talk to the dutch government and other parties to explore this thread further.

Local initiatives of interest
Check out 10 new voices. "A pioneering program to seed innovative community news ventures in the United States. Through 2006, New Voices will help fund the start-up of 10 micro-local news projects with $12,000 grants; support them with an educational Web site, and help foster their sustainability through $5,000 second-year matching grants."
And a local community blog called Northfield .

Measuring hearts and minds

I previewed what Microsoft was up to with their MyLifeBits software last month. That was a scary and powerful new software tool integrating all your communication devices and recording "everything"from phone calls to your walk through the park (as plotted over a map using the GPS in your phone). So those smart ladies and gents over at MIT now have released some of the data they have been gathering in their research project called Reality Mining .
"The Reality Mining experiment is one of the largest academic mobile phone projects in the US. Our research agenda takes advantage of the increasingly widespread use of mobile phones to provide insight into the dynamics of both individual and group behavior. By leveraging recent advances in machine learning we are building generative models that can be used to predict what a single user will do next, as well as model behavior of large organizations."
Found via Information Aesthetics and Boing Boing

....and last but not least (trying to answer the value proposition of this blog), a ....

Mind Reading Machine that knows your thoughts before you do!

REMOTE measurements of a person's brain activity can show what they are thinking - even when they are not aware of it themselves.

So far, the technique has only been used to identify visual patterns. But it may eventually be possible to probe awareness, focus of attention, memory and even someone's intentions. In the meantime, it could help detect whether people who appear to be in a coma are in fact conscious.

In previous studies, scientists have trained monkeys to move robotic arms with the power of thought. Others have managed to recreate scenes moving in front of cats by recording information direct from the animals' neurons (New Scientist, 2 October 1999, p 17). Both these experiments required electrodes to be inserted into creatures' brains though.

Looking down from above

2005-04-28T09:06:00.000+02:00

I came across this interesting new social geographic visualization company Social Explorer. Of course, their site is "still in BETA..." as it is very much a work in progress. They are using Flash as the front-end interface and splicing the data with the huge vats of information from the USGS (United States Geological Survey) . This is really an exciting development.

Here is where i zoomed in to a portion of the map of USA
to look at people living above and below the poverty line, 1999-2001 data.

"Social Explorer is dedicated to providing demographic information in an easily understood format,data maps. We serve hundreds of interactive data maps of United States.

Here, you can visually analyze and understand the demography of the U.S., explore your neighborhood and learn about the people that live around you.

Social Explorer is an organization based in New York City. Our objective is to help Visually Analyze and Understand the Demography of the U.S. through the use of Interactive Maps. Our primary functions include Demographic Data Analysis, Interactive Map Design and Software Development.

One of our main goals is to show demographic change that's occured in the U.S. since 1870 till present. We maintain a collection of interactive maps that visually show some of the available Census Data running back to 1870s.

We have over 60 years of combined experince in data analysis. With Dr. Beveridge at helm, we have produced statistical information and themathic maps to Prudential Financial Services, New York Times, Time Warner, and many other entities."

Citizens are gaining more "god's eye/satellite/military intelligence" vision. We can peer down at the people living next to us and further away. Google Maps is amazing at this too. Hopefully this will help to increase awareness and acceptance. But as we know, it all depends on the way that people are perceiving this information. These maps can go a long way in altering our perception to be more inclusive. Inshallah!

Thanks to Netimperative for alerting me on this news. Go read what they post on this subject here
On the theme of the present, LondonConnect launched April 25th, a city portal for locals and visitors to the capital organized in a simple, user-friendly way. It is intended to be upgraded in phases and is here to stay. Wonderful new addition to help us navigate through the unwieldly complications that huge cities present. Go take a test drive and report back to Lifesized to let me know what you thought.

And finally a interesting podcast by Benjamin Walke r on Philip K. Dick

The future of the future of the future

2005-04-26T09:16:00.000+02:00

Ok. An original post this may be not. But passing on high value information it is. And this is all thanks to the smart ol group at paidContent who supply me with a steady stream of interesting links.

Here are links to 3 .pdf files entitled:
1. The Age of Engagement by Morgan Stanley read the article (pdf)
2. Television Networks in the 21st Century Deloitte read the article (pdf)
3. Synpase: The Future of News Media Center read the article (pdf)

Other news. Yesterday, i had the pleasure of interviewing Irene van der Schleij, who is the mother of a good friend of mine, and also a cultural worker here in the Netherlands. She gave me her opinions on living in Holland. She has lived here all here life and has two kids now in the 30s. She gave me a fantastic book by Hans Kaldenbach called "Doe maar gewoon" 99 tips to get on with Dutch people, a book written for "alloctone" which means foreigners, mainly of Turkish, Marrocan, and South American, Antilles background. It is a fantastic list of how some Dutch people are.

tip 12: Genieten lijkt wel een zonde (enjoyment seems like an exception. Dutch people seem to have inbuilt brakes that stop them from fully enjoying themselves. They say it has something to do with Calvinism....)
tip 18: Leuk: brutale kinderen (it's good if dutch kids make rude comments = kids that can be rude become self-confident and wise(not sure about that one!))
tip 72: Voor de echte straf eerst een waarschuwing (For a real punnishment, first a warning)
tip 88: Het uiten van gevoelens (expression of feelings. Dutch people are not allowed to get really angry. Crying has to stay really short only after a death or separation. They talk about their emotions more than express them. In a conflict, Dutch people have to stay 'netjes'(clean). You cannot get emotional which leads to people staying angry for a long time after a conflict.

I now want to see an international grid of this book. We all come from somewhere. And i believe each country imprints a psychology which we take for granted as being "Indian, American, Chinese,etc". I'm up for questioning our deeply held country identities. Is this racist? Only stupid people will think that. Isn't it about time that we collected a big 'ol list of the good, the bad, the ugly and beautiful sides of where we come from to understand each other better and help each other get closer. De-indentify to re-identify.

Dropped in at Blognomics conference in Amsterdam

2005-04-23T08:52:00.000+02:00

This morning i received an email from Johnathon Marks alerting me to an NRC Handelsblad (a dutch newspaper) article on blogging in a business/political and social contexts. This was a half day gathering of mainly more corporate bloggers, some journalists and curious business people (half the room raised their hands when asked if they blogged). I was there with some others including Colby Stuart, Ton Zijlstra, Elmine and Nev .

What really was amazing was to hear about the fast uptake of blogging as a political/economic and social tool in France. Nev has covered this before as has Wired just recently. It's great to see a surge forward outside of this Anglo-centric world. We have such a lot to learn from each other across language barriers. So follow the links above to read on which newspapers in France have adpoted blogging wholeheartedly and also you can visit Loic Le Meur's site, the French alpha blogger and VP exec for Six Apart in Europe. He delivered the news to us at Blognomics and is also hosting Les Blogs early next week in Paris.

So how can I make this post that little bit diffferent from just repeating the same old news and making it more relevant in the context of Lifesized, the blog reporting on new social software tools that specifically address how to measure our ideas, beliefs and emotions. And related tools that help support the creation of the space needed for this exchange to occur. The bloggosphere is rising fast. It reminds me of an old Woody Allen movie called Sleeper, where Woodie Allen wakes up in the future after a routine operation goes drastically wrong, returning as a freedom fighter disguised as a household robot. He has to prepare canapes for a dinner party. Finds a box of instant desert mix, adds water, and the result is an overflowing creation that does not stop growing! Even though he tries to hit the pudding with a stick, it keeps growing - the bloggosphere is here to stay!.

Ilse Media presented a new widget on their site, although i could not find it while visiting, which is a very basic measurer of sentiment. It poses a question and lets you answer from a drop down list of emotions. This is supposed to be a thermometer of the nation's pulse. I need to perhaps go and talk with them as my PeopleStats application is exactly in this area, although, far more powerful, not wanting to blow my own trumpet too much. If you hear of any other polling applications out there please send them my way. The most interesting release for me in the upcoming period has to be opinion exchange. This might be a big one.

Copying Human Life Ways

2005-04-22T09:15:00.000+02:00

It's amazing how you can be sensing stuff and then it arrives within 24 hours in some virtual/physical form, the news passed down through the bloggosphere.
Our applications mirror our normal behaviours. If you want to be a smart web entrepreneur this is all you need to, follow nature. This is a Lifesized golden rule. Everything we do naturally we will try to solve digitally. It comes from a design feature deficiency of being human and a hunger to recreate the world through our own hands. Computers enable us to get over our design specs. Remember, most humans don't have:

a) a photographic memory
b) telepathy
c) illumimated spectral vision!!!!

So piece by piece we augment our modus operandi with digital tools that harness the new infrastructure which is our new alternative and extended nervous system.(Inspired by the one from inside the human body).

Here are a few notable new social soft. tools for today:

Trumba - An online calendar for (.individuals.friends/family.biz)
Why is this important? We all make appointments everyday. Figure out a easy way to do this
and its cash in the bank. Expect this to be snapped up, if done well, by Yahoo's and Google's.
I have a nice UI in development for precisely this area. I want better UI for a personal journal, a personal blog. I like draggable timeline interfaces, next to the list format.

Insider Pages - How do people find someone to fix their plumbing, hair dressers and other services if they don;t know someone already to do the job? They ask their friends. It's so simple because we already do it!

In loving memory of Sonia Peterson

2005-04-03T10:44:00.000+02:00

I wanted to post about the death of friend. She passed last year in early 2004, in her 5os.

Sonia was a true web trailblazer who i got to know while i was still a chef busy with serving a true NYCity brunch for Amsterdammers about 5 years ago. Back then i was known as James Brownies as i also owned a bakery supplying my intense chocolate incarnations to the locals.
Sonia aside from being a member of the Black Panthers and roll-skating instructor got into hairdressing when she turned 35. She helped develop a novel technique called "dread-perming" allowing even people with the straightest hair to have dreadlocks(even oriental hair, and that's straight!). She got into the internet very early on and used it as a platform to reach her niche group of clients that wanted hair that was off-the-beaten track. She had a steady clientele counting amongst her regulars, George Clinton from Funkadelic, Paul Boothe, tatoo-meister extraordinaire and numerous extravagant divas, rock mums, metal girlz and boys from all walks of life. She was the first person i knew who described herself as having gone "off-planet". She started Hair Police Salon in Minneapolis and opened a further shop in Amsterdam. Later she tired of staying in one place and "went on tour" through America and Europe, managing her clients using Yahoo Groups, her website and email to tell her clients where she would be, at which date, to enable booking an appointment. I once had her staying at a my royal home in Amsterdam on the Egelantiersgracht, where people would just ring on the bell and come and get their cuts at the place i was living in at that time (A huge 3 storey building with confession booths and catholic chapel). She was in my eyes a true innovator and example to us all that, you can change career at any age, and live your passion in the way you decide. God bless you Sonia and rest in peace.
j

Avatars, Identity, flickr fun and a new podcast

2005-04-01T08:01:00.000+02:00

It just keeps on coming and is most covered on the Web by those that be in the US.
A bunch of new services and VC payouts seem to be happening weekly in this areaSpace.
Avatars seem to have come back after a small vacation. Expect to see more offerings here,
as identity companies move to combine the emotional and rational (encrypted identity) to create simpler cross-platform payment systems and authentication services(email, IM). What separates these kinds of new identity players will be that people will finally own their data, rather than let a company store this information on their servers.

The rise and rise of tagging can be traced in this Business Week article with some scant predictions on where it is leading. I just commissioned a programmer to integrate Flickr images into my old flash website. The plan is to activate a timeline which correlates to the category "history". It will target tags based on time and history and then load images onto my site along with user comments and the date. So imagine you move my history slider to the right: result: 1066AD battle of Agincourt, "Whoa, this was a fierce battle in the middle ages between the Norman conquerers and English. The Normans won the day, and you can see their celebration in the Bayeaux Tapestry - Steve". Anyway, i have to wait a few weeks for the programmer to have the time and also get Fickr to move me out of NIPDA (not in public domain) as somehow i'm not in there.

Podcast/webcasts
I heard an amazing podcast yesterday and placed it inside a bunch of video files taken at the Creative Capital Conference in March 17, 2005 in Amsterdam. These have been Webjayed, so click on the link and select which one you would like to hear. The first podcast covers Bush's potential plan to launch an airstrike on Iran in 2005 as part of his wish to "clean up the Middle East". This audio was NOT part of the conference, so forgive me for the mismatch. The other links are video files of some really outstanding speakers.

Going local
The craigification continues. A host of companies : have been heading towards the VCs for that $7-10 million handshake to ramp up things. The numbers sound normal for the US. I would love to hear of any local European stories on startup money. What is happening? Are we still pouting on our lovely theoretical European soapboxes with lots of good ideas but no execution or risk-taking? Send in any news you have of success stories.

j

Micropayments add to people power

2005-03-28T09:10:00.000+02:00

I guess this trend is now clear to me from behind my radar here at Lifesized. Two posts this week hammered home an important fact. People are starting to gain control over their income and how they spend it in new ways. Micropayments being now more and more accessible allows for people to buy in to new services they feel are worth the cost and also send money to friends. Here is a post from OhMyNews English edition on micropayments.

1. Rapid growth of micropayments. Although micropayments have met with skepticism in the past, much of that criticism was directed at paying for content, not services. Even in Korea, efforts to sell content haven't met with much success: It's services and products (even if only virtual) that people are willing to spend their hard-earned dimes on. A recent survey by Peppercoin and Ipsos-Insight revealed that from October 2003 to September 2004, the number of Americans who bought something online for $2 or less grew from 4 million to 14 million-figures that indicate Americans are growing more comfortable with micropayments. Expect this slice of the U.S. online market to explode well beyond iTunes.

........and a recent dutch development.

2. "Bill" (dutch) created by Dutch SNS bank with Microsoft, LogicaCMG and payments specialist, Ogone, is to allow micropayments between people of up to 500 euro from MSN messenger accounts. They charge 3 euro per transaction. The plan is to sign up webshops for businesses to this new environment. It is also a "buddybanking" solution where people can easily send each other money. This targets the roughly 4,7 million dutch MSN account holders. This system is not really so much anything to do with micropaytments on second view. If each transactions costs 3 euro then it is beyond the micropayment threshold. I think more than anything it is a new format of money which we will be tracking to see how it evolves.

In the US there are a number of players working in this field, most notably Bitpass. One of my buddies, Gerry of PixelJump, based in NYC, is working on the mobile version for this service. Not sure where it is as right now. If any of you read anything on this subject please post in the comments as i am interested in getting a total refresh on where micropaytments are at, globally.

3. And then there is zopa equalizing the playing field. Click to hear a podcast with Zopa founders

Spending money on the right things

2005-03-24T10:17:00.000+01:00

Been reading Marianne Williamson's "The Gift of Change". Had to quote some parts of what she says as it resonated so deeply.

I was once interviewed on a TV talk show, and the interviewer introduced me by making some snide comment about how I was a pacifist and thought there should be no army. I looked at him, stunned, and asked him where in the world he got that idea. "Well, I just assumed it!: he said." You think love is the answer to everything, so I figured you think a military would be a bad thing!".....To go from "She thinks love is the answer" to "She thinks we shouldn't have a military" is to trivialize the most profound philosophical and spiritual truth ever expressed on earth....There are some people at work within the U.S. military today who have more enlightened thoughts regarding the future possibilities for [the U.S] armed forces than one might think.
Perhaps the military will manifest, in our lifetime, the ultimate fulfillment of the notion of "armed forces." They will be armed with psychological, spiritual and emotional skills at building social and political relationships, as much as they are now armed with military hardware.
On the level of a true solution, love is the answer no matter what the category of human experience. According to Ghandi, love can heal all social and political as well as personal relationships. We've only scratched the surface of love's power and when we dig deeply, we will find it to be more explosive than a nuclear bomb. We need an integrative approach to world affairs in which the emotional, psychological and spiritual realms are given their place at the table of power.

I'm a little more sceptical about the US military, at this exact point in time, under this administration, than she is, but won't deny there is always present the possibility for what she describes. I wholeheartedly believe we need to invest massively in psychological, spiritual and emotional tools, processes and research to help people emerge out of their patterns and as she puts it " ..move the world from an unhappy dream to a happy dream before we can awaken from it". Also investing massively to me does not only mean economic spending.

Creative Capital Conference, Amsterdam

2005-03-23T11:27:00.000+01:00

I went to the Creative Capital Conference in Amsterdam, 17th March.
The conference brings together innovation experts, economists, urbanists, social innovators, cultural entrepreneurs, policy makers and politicians. During the conference, we will chart the state of the innovation debate and re-draw the public agenda for a creative public domain that supports a strong knowledge economy.

Great speakers included Charles Leadbeater, Jo Ichi Ito, Geoff Mulgan. The building where it was staged used to be the old Communist headquarters in Amsterdam. It has had a refit since then and is beautiful and huge. Great to meet such a variety of stimulating people. We were also involved in smaller breakout sessions which were led through a host. Many people complained about the low intelligence used in staging discussions following smaller presentations. You can see what Ton Zijlstra has to say, as well as Colby Stuart and Johnathon Marks .
There is an art to designing human interactions. Even with a time limit there are ways to include and engage an audience where the voice of the group can be heard. It does not serve your purpose well by cutting people up mid-sentence which happened time and again. Fortunately there was space in some of these sessions for the discussion to flow. Key is having a moderator that has just that right sense of balance between letting the crowd flow the discussion through their individual and group intuition and experience and redirecting or dousing the fire. This of course is a whole subject area that deserves another post somewhere later as we can consider experience designing and processes.

Back to the conference. I was privy to a breakout group with Geoff Mulgan who is the brilliant policy advisor for the Labor party in UK and is way ahead in his thinking on the future of cross-over organizational structures and the future of cities. He presented us with some startling counter-intuitive facts like:
Investing in under-3s children is the best single way to ensure that unemployment will drop and people create positive and fertile job/lifeskills for themselves when they become adults.

The group was asked to come up with 3 ideas for Amsterdam to help it innovate to be included in a policy recommendation to the government. If you ask me for ideas, then usually i jump straight in. I started thinking about the idea of Creative Commons in relation to organizations. One of the themes of the conference has been that we live in a society of "silos" where people are specialists in a knowledge domain and are often unnable to do a Walt Disney and enter other domains and roles to discover new ideas and perspectives. Exactly how to do this was one of the conferences central questions, as we have identified that innovation arises more often in cross-over spaces (television meets university = Open University). So i raised my hand and outlined an idea based on the Creative Commons - Common Organizational Spaces. This is where each organization creates a space (if they are open enough) to have passengers passing through, like work experience, except the passengers are essentially experts from other fields. This would then provide a sort of landing zone to facilitate cross-organizational learning. Geoff replied spontaneously that he was about the launch a series of initiatives based around similar ideas in the UK. Following this interchange the group discussed the need for a cross-organizational body within the Dutch government to help move this along.

We talked about how 40,000 dutch nationals have left Holland for other countries, the largest emmigration since World War 2. Rick van de Ploeg talked about why Dutch universities are failing their students , a very non-Dutch, Dutch guy! Also we discussed the cultural memes that each person comes pre-packaged with resulting in certain consequences. This is a very big important area. Each of us whether we like it or not are subject to evolutionary randomness in where and to who and in which country we are born. Some might relate to this in religious terms too. The point is that we should teach young people about the values they are programmed with and encourage them to question them. Whether this process happens while living in your country of origin or not, it is important to get over your Dutchness, Britishness, Americaness and Frenchness. One way to do this is to leave where you live and go and work in another country. The point is that our cultural identities are too rigid and in the case of Holland, represent values and beliefs that originated in the Industrial Age and before. Continutation of core beliefs like safety and being the same as other people cannot lead to prosperity in Culture, economic wealth and Spirit in our present dynamically networked world.

New Fruit

2005-03-14T16:57:00.000+01:00

Today brings with it a bunch of different news. Most interesting new development is zopa.
Following on from the success stories of peer-to-peer exchanges such as Betfair and eBay, Zopa aims to do the same thing in the world of personal finance, by giving users the chance to lend or borrow money within the network.

The European Union is now announcing research proposals via video web casts. A big improvement on long, dull documents. Now they just need to talk using more normal human language.

Also noticed this local news regarding Holland/Europe. Forum 2020 which aims to mobilize the ‘post-baby boom’ generation to take an active part in the debate on Europe in general and the European Union in specific. It seeks to engage and inform its ‘members’ through workshops and by providing tailored in depth information on selected topics of European policy. This information will be accompanied by multidisciplinary expert commentary to enhance the participants’ understanding of the scope and context of the issues under discussion. The forum’s ambition is to challenge its participants to come up with a series of policy recommendations to the policy makers of the EU and in member state’s governments. The forum consists of 100 members selected to represent a broad range of backgrounds, ranging from business, civil service, politics, arts and culture, to media and sports.

It sounds like a wonderful initiative. Hope it just does not turn into an information silo.

What is real learning?

2005-03-11T13:14:00.000+01:00

This was an important find today, The Experience Designer Network: How do we learn the things we value most? Resonating deep within me. It structures so many thoughts and feelings i have had into a coherent series of chapters laying out a much deeper vision of what education really means. What i loved about this discovery was the light it sheds on education as merely learning information, which is how most of us have experienced our years in school.

Also of note was the discovery of the work of Chris Corrigan and Michael Herman . They both have refined their facilitation practises with groups, .org and one-to-one, to using the four practices of Open Space.

1. practice of opening. it's about willingness. willingness to see, to know, to open. it's personal and reflective, but can be felt physically in body and charted in organizations.

2. practice of inviting. it's about goodness. finding benefits TO others, as in what's in it for them, and also benefits IN others, as in recognizing what they can add to the process of achieving what is desired personally in the first practice. it makes that first practice social, collective, organizational, and cultural, but also documented in invitation emails, letters, posters.

3. practice of holding. it's about supporting movement and change. providing space and time, structures that support without making decisions for people, giving attention, carrying in awareness or carrying forward, holding in one's heart or home or conference room. it creates room for others to expand, explore, experiment... to bring new things out in the world. it is simultaneously logistical, mental, and emotional.

4. practice of practicing. it's about sustaining, returning, realizing, and making real. this is action, taking a stand, making progress, going somewhere, documenting results. this implies the continuation and diffusion of the above. standing ground, staying the course, seeing things through. it is the personal and individual (I, me, my) pursuit of the good that WE invite, in the space that WE provide. It can look simply mechanical and become deeply meditative, as we go round again, starting with Opening. (note... this might also be called the practice of 'participating,' perhaps 'making,' or simply 'doing' or 'changing.' stay tuned"

I use parts of this intuitively in how i work with people so this scheme is useful to reflect on my own patterns. Very cool.

P2P and Human Evolution

2005-03-11T10:05:00.000+01:00

This wonderful article written by Michael Bouwens is essential reading. It Places Peer to Peer Theory in an Integral Framework.

Inkblot Europe

2005-03-10T16:57:00.000+01:00

What does Europe look like folded over itself? Here's a dark and psychological thriller I conjured up while playing around with maps!

Microsoft MyLifeBits

2005-03-10T12:14:00.000+01:00

A videocast takes us into Microsoft Research to preview Mylifebits. It promises to be nothing short of mind-blowing! Imagine being able to capture everything in your life. Well maybe you would rather not.

Postcard from Myanmar

2005-03-09T17:40:00.000+01:00

It great to hear from my father who disappears annually to escape the hustle and bustle of urban life. He goes to S.E. Asia each year. The heat is good for his body and the lack of post coming in though the door and distractions from the busy urban life, minimized. Not heard from him for a while before this postcard arrived from Myanmar!

He writes "The people are so warm and friendly and the landscapes just amazing. Been trekking for 5 days to villages where it's like time stopped long, long ago."

This reminded me on a short lecture i heard by John Thakara yesterday on development here in the Tropical Museum in Amsterdam. He questioned all our assumptions about what undeveloped versus developed socieites are.
We often think:Development = growth and productivity, development = infrastructure and that well-being = owning shit. So called "undeveloped countries" often have far higher social capital, like my father's experience in the lost villages of Myanmar. Development often destroys social capital. The challenge is how can we address the loss of social capital in Western indust./informationized societies using all the creativity and longing at our disposal

Digital Lifestyle Aggregators

2005-03-09T16:59:00.000+01:00

BROADBAND MECHANICS 2005: "DLAS ARE “WEB 2.0”
posted on BM site....
"DLAs are the next generation portal. Yahoo and AOL did such a great job at defining portals, that their domination virtually destroyed all innovation in the sector. For a decade, companies have simply copied the AOL or Yahoo model, by mimicking their plain HTML front-end and aggregated content approach. DLAs pick up where portals left off, and take it up a level to “Web 2.0.”

Everyone’s going to do it: media companies, consumer electronics makers, portals, ISPs, wireless services… Can you really afford to miss out?

The DLA bandwagon is unstoppable because the power of DLAs comes from combining these five essentials: social networking, personal publishing, communications, media and device management, and mobility. We’ve enjoyed each of these for ages but, until now, no-one has combined them all into a DLA powerhouse.

DLAs give our clients the means to provide differentiated services, content, and capabilities because with the right architecture, Digital Lifestyle Aggregators become a revenue machine for our clients, serving their increasingly happy customers, all the while reducing costs.

See how each of these fundamental capabilities is essential… and learn why DLAs are greater than the sum of these parts." .....end of post from site

The open-standards on their site pointed in interesting new directions. I share a future vision of the Internet where the consumer/citizen/god-head is in control of their own data (more or less). I would love to integrate FOAF with a beautiful customizable animated identity symbol for myself. Not sure exactly where they are with their open dialogue standards. You can see where i am headed if you just read the tagline to this blog:))

Jeff Bezos at Web 2.0 on "What are the unique assets you have that others can enjoy?".

2005-03-07T21:36:00.000+01:00

Just listened to Jeff Bezos discuss his ideas on what Web 2.0 means. He tells us that if Web 1.0 was making the user interface of the Internet better for humans than Web 2.0 is making the Internet useful for computers. Amazon's webservices don't show up on the Amazon site at all. 65,000 registered developers are using Amazon web services. It was started 2 years ago. Use of their APIs gives developers access to every piece of content in the catalogue of Amazon.com, customer reviews, product images, sales rank, product attributes. They don't charge for this use, they have a business model that allows them to pay developers for their use. See some experiments: www.musicplasma.com, www.scoutpal.com.
Further he discusses: A9, Search-Inside-The-Book, One-Click, multiple category search, the need to find business models for these services.

Craig of Craigllist talks about loss of trust in US news providers

2005-03-06T11:52:00.000+01:00

Craig of Craigslist discusses this with Internet News while being asked about his own classified advertising empire. You can also hear an him talk about his background and his service Craigslist.

Tagwebs, Flickr, and the Human Brain

2005-03-05T13:03:00.000+01:00

Jakob Lodwick writes about Tagwebs and the expected growth of each individuals unique way of tagging their world. He also describes how we will tag tags, linking our unique ways of labelling artifacts (photographs, memories, links, people) to collective tagging emergence/rules. And of course he is challenged by counter arguments to his argument and discovery. To be found on the Flickr bulletin board.

Customized tax forms

2005-03-04T20:44:00.000+01:00

"There are only two certainties in life: death and taxes" -Benjamin Franklin
I made these 2 tax forms a couple years ago. Now that i'm blogging, it seems appropriate to post them as they relate to all our discussions of peoplepower. They are theoretical and of course not possible (yet) in any practical application. Still they should prove interesting to discuss. They are forbingers of a trend towards new citizen/government interfaces.

Tax report and Tax choice help build transparency between citizens and government/society. Visibility is key. By seeing where you are in a system, you remember you are a part of that system. By giving people the choice to participate in that system you dare to give some power back to the people again and thus build trust.

The downside to this is that you depend on the intelligence(moral and intellectual) of ordinary people. This can be rich or poor. We will need a robust system to get over the petty fighting of opposing positions that may arise. (every solution creates a new problem...). Another point to bear in mind is that there are other ways to build trust beyond giving citizens control over taxation.

Kaos Pilots 10 year anniversary!

2005-03-04T20:06:00.000+01:00

The KaosPilots are my spiritual family. I have been thinking like this my whole life. They have been doing this for 10 years. So i want to tip my hat in their general direction. Bravo!

post from VOX POP on their site. one student's answer to questions addressed to them all

Katrin Rumenapp, 3rd year student, German, Team 8

1) What were you doing just before you started studying at the KaosPilots? I started connecting Danish words and wrote a thesis about public relations.

2) What's the most challenging and intense learning experience you've had during your education so far? Writing a book together with 50 students.

3) What and who do you want to work with after graduation? The organization of cultural adventures.

4) In what areas can other schools be inspired by the KaosPilots? Creative learning: how to think differently and implement it in all kinds of contexts.

5) What's the most inspiring thing happening in Europe right now? Glasgow clubbing, real art fairs and a graveyard with a city view.

6) If you were to give President Bush three pieces of good - and serious - advice, what would they be? Take time out.Enjoy a vacation and Stop wearing the same crocodile-leather shoes as Saddam (they both use the same Italian shoe designer :-)).

The alphabet affects our feelings, doings and being

2005-02-27T12:43:00.000+01:00

More from the incredible and underutilized conference "Digital Future" organized by CSPAN and the Library of Congress.
de Kerkhove has studied how the alphabet affects our logic, our feelings and thus our sense of being. As this is true, so the effects of using The Internet and its new logic, and processes reorganizes these three categories again. And following this some more news of the arrival of the bloggosphere.

Listen to Monday, November 2004, lecture

WebJay

2005-02-27T01:13:00.000+01:00

my current audio/video playlist

What to tell you.
Well, the Dutch Connection is alive and well.
Amazed today with WebJay, which sounds lame although its kinda grown on me. Bloglines and WebJay created a totally new internet, de-geeking the web so we can create playlists on topic areas so we can share feelings and positions (video/audio and links), scan(news faster and more of it) to inform our interests.

CSPAN Digital Future

2005-01-23T19:10:00.000+01:00

If you have the time, go check out CSPAN's latest series on digital futures. It will be adding a new discussion video stream each month. The first online now is David Weinberger discussing "blogging".

Lifesized, the personal blog of James Burke

2005-01-08T13:08:00.000+01:00

Hi myself and all those that get to read this new blog. It's a small step for Jameskind and a practical step in disseminating what this sentient being finds relevant. From design explorations like Celebrity Philosopher Stand Off to new tools and processes for organizations, business and government.

vs

You might not want to hear the truth. Neither did Oedipus!
On the other hand Socrates...

Here at Lifesized expect to find information on social software developments, discussions on issues arising from the transition to "bottom up" networked structures of cooperation and resistance, and some other odd stuff that's probably irrelevant to all of you but me.