Kevin Kelly on the Next 5,000 Days of the Internet-TED, 2007:

Kevin Kelly gave this talk at TED in 2007.  It’s worth watching.  

He touches on a number of things ranging from history of the Internet and Moore’s Law to the future ubiquity of Cloud Computing and Kurzweil’s “Sigularity.“ 

He covers concepts like the Semantic Web, and the give-and-take between privacy and participation with relatively light language that any lay person should be able to understand.  This is an interesting and entertaining little presentation.  Thought I’d share.

Dr. Douglas Lenat, CEO Cycorp, Natural Language Processing, AI company

This is really interesting work that they’re doing over at Cycorp… Actually, they’ve been working on this for 20 years or more… Crazy.

Scott Westerfeld, DJ Spooky & More on TTBOOK This Week

In case you missed it and you probably did if you’re the type of folk that will read this, I wanted to steer you toward the last episode of the PRI show, To The Best Of Our Knowledge.

Their Podcast is broken down by segment and can be found here (itunes store url).

Part one, is about apocalyptic settings in fiction… I really thought the last part was interesting. An author named Jonathan Lethem Scott Westerfeld wrote a novel, apparently for teens, about a scenario in the future where Social Currency via the Web is everything (or something to that effect) - a sort of Social Software Hell. The interview touches on some ideas about privacy and technology and also why Teens may relate so well to dystopian settings. All very interesting to me.

The other segment is about plagiarism and there is various anecdotal fuel for discussion there too.

It’s amusing to me that I would find it strange that both of these topics, Intellectual Property and Privacy, be touched on by a radio program in the context of being completely unrelated. I’m so used to thinking about these two topics as parts of the big can of worms that is the Digital Age we’re just starting to come to grips with.

Exclusive Deals and Walled Gardens of Data

The Age of Irreversible Statements?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while.
Practically everything we do online is not only not private…

But Also…

Practically everything we do online is potentially permanent.

The stuff that we post to the Web using Standards like HTML can be cached. And the items we upload to a company’s server are, well, on their server, so we really don’t have control over what happens to them.

I imagine a scenario in which a presidental candidate is asked by a member of the press:
“Isn’t it true that when you were 20 years old, you did a strip tease to a Britney Spears song in your bedroom, recorded it with a video camera, and posted it to the Web?”

Next time you’re poking around on the Web, and you find yourself peering into someone’s bedroom, or reading a very personal blog entry written by some young stranger, think to yourself:
How could this effect this individual’s standing in the future world? What information is this individual giving away that he or she might regret later?

BETTER YET,

Ask yourself:
How will our culture be effected by behavior like this? How will our expectations of one another change once all this publicizing of traditionally more intimate behavior makes its mark on us?

“Andrew, didn’t you write, back in 2007, a blog entry about something you were calling ‘The Age of Irreversible Statements’ and in that blog entry, didn’t you talk about a hypothetical strip tease, and link to a real one?”

Yes. And I can’t take it back. Even if I delete this post, it’s not necessarily gone. It’s out of my control.

This isn’t an ‘Orwellian’ vision. It’s not ‘Orwellian’ because this isn’t about top-down surveillence. It’s about what we call ‘Public’ growing in new ways, just as what we call ‘Ourselves’ or ‘Our Community’ is growing in new ways. And it’s not a vision, because it’s already happened. It’s continuing to happen right now.

more soon.

MySpace going OpenSocial. The plot thickens.

MySpace and Google Join Forces to Launch Open Platform for Social Application Development
RELEASE

I’m hoping that the move toward this common-API approach will put the various companies at ease a little with the idea of not having a monopoly on the users’ time and eyeballs. I’d like to think that we’re headed toward a world in which some of the useful data about end-users, that these services normally keep locked away, will start to become more available to everyone. I wonder why that sounds like such an outrageous idea.

Anyhoo, slightly open is better than totally closed. Halfway open is great compared to what we’ve had. OK. So where’s the MySpace widgets for WordPress. Let me know. I’ll be waiting.

Some companies on-board with OpenSocial:
Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

I wonder how English Professors feel about all these things.
“What’s your MySpace? Thanks for the add! [and so on]“

Watch Wikipedia Get Edited in Realtime?

“Wikipedia Vision”
Go and watch. Pretty spooky. I love it.

Lawrence Lessig talks about “Read/Write Culture” & “Read-Only Culture”

This is a good presentation that he gives. About an hour long. It really changed how I think about creativity culture and ownership(intellectual property etc). Lawrence Lessig is the founder of of Creative Commons. This is important subject matter. It touches everyone.

The Machine Is Us/ing Us

This is so good. Makes me wish more people realized they could be using RSS/feeds. I am!! Like crazy.

By Mike Wesch

Information R/evolution

The next video from Mike Wesch, is a sort of re-mix of the ideas from his earlier video, but now also incorporating the theme of “Everything Is Miscellaneous”

Beautiful. An explosion indeed. Reader, don’t even bring up Big Brother.