Questions and answers: Tim Berners-Lee (creator of the web)

Questions and answers: Tim Berners-Lee (creator of the web)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7300434.stm

The creator of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, answers questions about the future of the web, social networking and personal privacy online.

Q. Lots of people are putting lots of information about themselves on sites like Facebook and Myspace. What would you say to those young people?

Imagine that everything you are typing is being read by the person you are applying to for your first job. Imagine that it's all going to be seen by your parents and your grandparents and your grandchildren as well.

The danger is when you put something into a public space in order to share it with a few friends and in fact you've forgotten that it's actually a public space or that the list of friends is huge or that some of them can't be trusted not to be put it somewhere else.

Q. Are you too old for things like MySpace and Facebook?

I've seen no evidence - either from my point of view or anybody else - that social networking and generally using the net to interact with other people is something that's restricted to young people.

In fact it's very popular with older people. Young people can get on their bikes and visit each other, older people can't.

It may turn out to be more important for seniors than for young people.

Q. A lot of companies are now trying to get a lot of data about their users which they can then market on to advertisers. Do you have a view?

Different people have different attitudes. I myself feel that it is very important that my ISP supplies internet to my house like the water company supplies water to my house.

It supplies connectivity with no strings attached. My ISP doesn't control which websites I go to, it doesn't monitor which websites I go to.

Q. What would you feel if it wanted to do that?

I would want to use an ISP that doesn't. I personally want to feel free. I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that's not going to get to my insurance company and I'm going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they've figured I'm looking at those books.

Q. What about your clickstream?

It's mine - you can't have it. If you want to use it for something then you have to negotiate with me, I have to agree; I have to understand what I'm getting in return.

Q. Three major British internet providers are considering introducing a scheme which will in some way track people's web history. What would you say to those companies.

I'd say if that was an option I wouldn't take it. If it wasn't an option, I would look for another ISP.

My personal feeling about an ISP is that I want it to be a transparent connection. I don't want to have to think about the secondary implications of going to a site.

Q There is a choice between opt in and opt out - are you saying you'd prefer opt-in?

My personal feeling is that it should be opt-in, yes.

Q. Because otherwise it can go by default?

I think consumers rights in this are very important. We haven't seen the results of these systems being used.

My own personal preference is that the consumer, the individual person should be protected because individual people and the difference between individual people and the diversity we have between people on the planet is so important.

Streaming Rules And Imeem Rules Streaming

Streaming Rules And Imeem Rules Streaming

http://hypebot.typepad.com/hypebot/2008/05/streaming-rules.html

Streaming far surpasses any other music related activity on the web and imeem has jumped past Yahoo to become the top choice for listeners, according to a data released this week from Compete. Based on a survey of 1000 music sites:

Def Leppard release single exclusively via Guitar Hero

Def Leppard release single exclusively via Guitar Hero

Nine Lives will be made available to download through the game a week in advance of the singles retail and online release, the first time a band has released a single exclusively through a video game.
The song is the first from their forthcoming album Songs From The Sparkle Lounge and will be available April 24 as part of a three- track Def Leppard song pack.

Nine Lives will be playable exclusively on Xbox 360 consoles a week ahead of its debut in stores and through online music distribution services. It will then be made available through Playstation 3 May 08. The pack will include Nine Lives and classic Leppard tracks Rock Of Ages and Photograph.

Owners of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 will be able to download the Def Leppard track pack. It is the first time ever a band or artist has released a new single ahead of its traditional launch through a videogame.

Def Leppard lead singer Joe Elliott says, Being involved with Guitar Hero is very exciting for us and adds a whole new layer of appreciation.

I know from personal experience how much more you get into the music by playing the game which is why we were keen to explore this opportunity. Guitar Hero is extremely popular with all kinds of music heads, which includes a lot of our fans and we think releasing Nine Lives this way first is just fantastic."

Goodbye, BitTorrent. Hello, Streaming.

Goodbye, BitTorrent. Hello, Streaming.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/29/goodbye-bittorrent-hello-streaming/#comments

Comcasts decision to cap monthy broadband usage at 250GB is being decried as the end of the Internet as we know it. Maybe so, but it can also be seen as the dawn of the Streaming Era. As the Olympics drew to a close with big numbers - 75.5 million streams (NBCOlympics.com), 40 million (BBC), another 130 million from the European Broadcasting Union, and 100 million Chinese viewers - the networks were already moving on by serving the Democratic National Convention in HD. CBS offered an after-convention netcast with Katie Couric, and CNN promoted full and complete streaming coverage of all speeches.

The Comcast move seems more focused on the politics of the FCC decision to rule out Comcasts filtering of P2P traffic. But BitTorrent and other such traffic is all about downloading, not streaming, and the advent of new look-ahead streaming capabilities in Silverlight suggest that streaming can accommodate DVR-like functionality that makes the value proposition of owning the data on a local drive much less important.

It used to be that having physical control of entertainment and other software was critical to the user experience. Record and film companies kept accelerating the quality levels of their products to stay ahead of the pirates and the growing ability of consumers to capture and archive content off the radio and television networks. But as broadband became more available as competition between telcos, cable, and satellite increased, sharing of MP3s and DVR time-shifting had an oddly counter-intuitive impact.

First, the Netflix strategy made renting movies a less onerous process, with no late fees and a large catalogue to choose from. When Blockbuster and Hollywood Video adopted similar MVP programs, the cable and satellite companies were forced to counter-attack with on- demand offerings that were even easier to acquire and in fact were spooled from servers rather than downloaded to home machines.

This, of course, is the same shift software has undergone from shrinkwrap to service, from Outlook to Gmail, Office to Google Apps, and from the hard drive to the cloud. In effect, productivity apps are now streamed to and the data from the user. With the data stored redundantly in the cloud, we are more comfortable with a streaming situation than with the former illusion that we owned our data locally.

Illegal Downloading; Right or Wrong???

Anybody who is interested in another view on downloading (both legally as illegally) read 'The Long Tail' by Chris Anderson. Brilliant new view on advantages of this changing market.

My thoughts about innovation

I've been looking into some things about innovation and change managements, and 1 thing I have learnt this evening: Americans are either complete idiots or terribly smart that they can sell this Bull Sjit!
Watching mainly Youtube the thing that most compelled to me was told by a
Mr. Patrick Dixon; Change management is not about models and showing people how to change, it's about passion!

What we are learning now is all very interesting, all these theories about innovation and different models to research and/or implement innovation. But innovation lately is coming from those guys sitting in their student dorms creating youtube or last.fm, these are the real interesting innovators! Not from comapnies that hire a twat like Tom Peters (excuse my french).

So with all the new things that come to us during this minor, always keep in check that real innovation comes from within. Like I mentioned in a prior blog Daydreaming is fundamental for a creative mind.
As long as we follow our own passions the creativity and innovations will come!

Like the legend Marvin Gaye once sang; 'A Change is gonna come'

Just to conclude, a link to how IBM thinks about innovating:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MudaxA80eI4

Giant kites could power 100,000 homes

Wednesday, 06 August 2008

While pondering how to capture wind energy, scientists from the Netherlands went out and flew a giant kite. The 10-sq-meter kite was tethered to a generator and managed to produce 10 kW. With the success of this kite, they’re planning to test a 50 kW version of the kite, dubbed Laddermill, and if that succeeds, they’re proposing a multi-kite version that could get as much as 100 MW - enough for 100,000 homes.

The kite generates energy by pulling on its string on the way up. When it gets to the end of the string, it’s pulled back down and then sent back up for another flight. The amount of energy captured is maximized by flying the kite in figure eights, and bringing it down in a fall like a glider plane.

If you’re thinking, “Now, this I gotta see,” then you can watch this video. It really is pretty cool. And considering how easily the kite takes off in the strong wind – no running, jumping, or Peter-Pan-wishful-thinking involved – I can imagine that a whole lot of power could be generated. Google thinks so too, having invested $10 million in a US kite project last year. Actually, we know of a lot of people are working on generating wind power from kites – or like-flying objects – even on a commercial scale.

Wind higher than about a kilometer above the ground carries about 100 times more energy than wind at tower level, so finding a cheap way to harness it – like kite flying – could be a big breakthrough for wind power. Countries like the UK, Netherlands, and Denmark are perfect for this type of wind power generation, being located next to the high-speed jet stream.

The Netherlands scientists believe they could generate power comparable to the price of coal, and 50% cheaper than wind turbines. Now, like most all renewable energy endeavors, all these various researchers simply need the funding to back the projects. Hopefully investors will look at Google and pull a monkey-see-monkey-do.

Source: http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1972/86/ (& The Guardian)