Living Through the Future

Here comes Web 3.0: The Semantic Web

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0500

How t deal with the deluge of information we are confronted with day to day? How to separate the wheat from the chaff? Enter Twine, one of the first automated tools for determining the semantic nature of information you seek. According to Wired magazine “Twine applies a set of natural-language and semantic tools to any text you feed it- Web page Word document, email” and then searches for information connected to that based on your interests for your perusal. Read more about it in the May issue of Wired magazine. (Content not yet online)

The only downside? Twine is still an invitation only beta although you can add your name to the list in the hope of participating. (No reply for me yet. LOL)

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus: A Must Read Article

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Anyone who has ever wondered where to find the time to interact in this information heavy environment, and what role new technology plays in transforming society owes it to themselves to read this partial transcript of a speech given by Clay Shirky, author of the new book Here Comes Everything: A Book About Organizing Without Organization, an examination of how Web 2.0 technologies are transforming a once passive relationship with media to a dynamic one.

If you have a slightly larger social surplus you may want to view this video of a speech he gave at the Berkman Center For Internet & Society at Harvard University. His insights into current societal trends and upheavals that are resulting from current technological changes are truly impressive.

Internet Resources: Choices and Rationale

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0500

This entry is to fulfill a mandated requirement of the course CEDU534 which ask that we attach external resources to our blog and provide an rationale for their choice as well explanation of their utility to the reader of the blog. The three resources I have chosen to include are images stored on Flickr, my collection of del.icio.us bookmarks, and my Blogline feed of material that I read on a daily basis.

Whenever I select an internet resource to use I have two basic criteria in mind. One is utility, by which I mean how transparent and painless the process of accumulating and posting the information I’ve collected is. This is fairly easy to evaluate. The second criteria is a bit more difficult to quantify. It is the sustainability of the platform and resources stored there. Here, given the fast changing and nascent state of many of the technologies, choosing can be hard to justify and is more akin to gazing into a crystal ball. There is nothing more frustrating than investing effort into a resource that may become obsolete, extinct, or swallowed by a larger competitor with a different vision for the service.

I chose Flickr primarily based on the utility of its uploader software which made batch processing and tagging of the images I uploaded relatively easy. Tagged image sharing has revolutionized access to graphic information. As an educator, an artist, or a graphic designer, this opens up a wealth information that would have been previously unavailable or difficult to find. Tagging images is a collaborative web 2.0 function at its finest. If I had chosen strictly on a philosophical basis my choice would have been 23, a less cluttered site targeted to a more “serious” audience. I don’t like the fact that Yahoo controls Flickr, and Microsoft could potentially control Yahoo. In my mind this leaves the future of the site open to a variety of unknown and undesirable eventualities.

Both del.icio.us and Bloglines easily pass the utility test. They both offer convenient browser toolbar buttons that make it easy to post a link or subscribe to a feed. Looked at through the lens of sustainability I am fairly confident of del.icio.us as a stable platform based on its commanding lead in the social bookmarking field. Bloglines has a slightly murkier future as the number of competing aggregators has yet to settle out, but it has already proven its worth to me on a day to day basis.

Why share these resources? I already share links on my school web page that are guides to material on topics we are covering in class. The bookmarks and feeds I’ve chosen to share inform the reader as to what makes me tick. After all, you are what you read.

Seeing the Future Through Fiction

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0500

One of my favorite and far seeing authors is Cory Doctorow, who is also an important contributor to one of my favorite blogs Boing Boing. His fiction extrapolates present trends towards an all too realistic future. His latest book to be released later this month is his first to be aimed at a teen audience and promises “ a rousing tale of techno-geek rebellion” against government surveillance and interference in an all too near future environment.

If you are unfamiliar with his work you owe it to yourself to check it out. Click here for the Amazon link to the book.

Are You Listening HAL? : Speech Recognition and the Future of Machine and Human Interaction

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:37:01 -0500

I suppose my imaginings of the future had been colored by books I've read and movies I've seen. One of the consistent images has always been of the dialogue between man and machine. In this imagined future, that dialogue has always been one of words, spoken aloud rather than typed tediously by hand.

Over the years I've tried to find my way to that imagined future without success. I have experimented with speech recognition software for as long as it has been available. Most of those experiments have ended in failure. The tangled words on the page bore no resemblance to what I'd spoken. However the experiments continue.

This blog entry has been dictated in its entirety using voice recognition software. Perhaps for the first time, the words that appear on my screen actually bear some semblance to the thoughts in my head. Are there still glitches? Of course! But for the first time, the process is actually faster than my fumbled typing.

When speech recognition crosses over and becomes a main stream technology, one of the last barriers to machine mediated communication will have been breached. Then perhaps I will wait for the day when my computer answers and we begin a conversation.

Just a late footnote: The software I am using is MacSpeech Dictate (Added April 24, 2008)