27 February 2005

Attention Please! Your Metadata Is Showing!

From Ester Dyson's Release 1.0, Steve Gilmor recognizes an important emerging concept since blogs became prevelant as information delivery channels in our world of communications. Links - and the metadata about them - allow the spontaneous emergence of structure.

Tools have emerged in order to capture, document and track those tags and links, forming new structures of identity and meaning.

The emergence of "attention-based ecosystems on proprietary platforms, while others are attempting to broaden the use and interoperability of attention metadata so that communities and other attention-defined structures can emerge on the open Web."

Social Tagging, and Networking through Weblogs

Great posting - Social Tagging, and Networking through Weblogs - on Gerry Heidenreich's blog.

A topic that has had my gears spinning for weeks now... the “tagging“ phenomenon is introducing us in real-time to a new set of technologies that, without a doubt, will revolutionize the way we work with the web. Tagging weblogs a powerful concept.

Land The Dutch Connection Brand - Part 2.

Yesterday in my Amsterdam studio, 6 of us gathered to finish landing The Dutch Connection brand.

What became very clear to us was that what makes us exceptional is our creativity in being able to strategically create opportunites for business - not only a material level, but a social and conceptual level as well - and to visualize these opportunities so that everyone in the business can really understand their meaning and impact.

This is big. This is unique. This positions us very differently than consultants.

I feel privileged to have found myself in the companies of these talented people.

Over the next few weeks, we're going to pull all of our resources together to go for that first collective client. I have a feeling that we're going to have a lot of fun creating business for our clients.

Odeo & Podcasting

Odeo is the new podcasting brand from Noah Glass and Evan Williams, the creators of Blogger and AudiobBlogger.

Read and get up to speed. If their past performance is an indicator, Odeo will shape podcasting.

How Odeo Happened
Article about impact Odeo could have.
Odeo Blog
Sign up for Odeo

Looks like Podcasting is here to stay if you read the statistics of iPod penetration and tools like the iPod as channels. So, what will the new business model be? It certainly won't follow the old braodcast model.

25 February 2005

Firefox 1.0.1 released today

Firefox 1.0.1 released today!

Here's what's new in Firefox 1.0.1:
-- Improved stability
-- International Domain Names are now displayed as punycode. (To show International Domain Names in Unicode, set the "network.IDN_show_punycode" preference to false.)
-- Several security fixes.

22 February 2005

Landing The Dutch Connection brand

Several of us founded The Dutch Connection - a business development group focused on collaboration, creativity and culture - almost one year ago. We come from all different kinds of cultures and disciplines. We've been meeting and sharing ideas and thoughts about a "think-and-do tank" in Pow-Wows.


Last Saturday, in The Tube Gallery in Amsterdam, 10 of us got together to contribute our human content to explore what that could mean for us working together and still maintaining our individuality, our sense of independence, and our other commitments. The day was an expedition into a possibility, a potential and a shared vision of the future.

We struggled, we explored, we discovered - and we found out that there was a common belief that this could be something. We are entrepreneurial, which sets us apart from consultants - we like to develop concepts and bring them to life.

We have a wiki space where we collaborate, so we've been posting the content we generated there. It's taking shape and beginning to look like something we can use to profile and postition ourselves very uniquely in the marketplace here in The Netherlands.

We're having a second round of Landing the Brand, so that we can try and build a new kind of business model that will capture this dynamic network of individuals, skills, talents, interests, disciplines, experience and all of our networks. We just might become an evolving showcase for the new business model for the future.

I'll keep you posted.

FutureMail

Wow - you can send an email to yourself in the future with FutureMail. You can even subscribe to your future RSS feed.

Hmm-mm...I think I'm going to play with the idea of sending myself an email several years from now. What should I tell myself that's important to remember then about now?

17 February 2005

Catch a Wave from Space - Einstein@Home

To celebrate the World Year of Physics 2005, join the project group Einstein@Home, and you just might catch a wave from space.

"Albert Einstein suggested long ago that we are adrift in a universe filled with waves from space. Colliding black holes, collapsing stars, and spinning compact celestial objects such as pulsars create ripples in the fabric of space and time that subtly distort the world around us. These gravitational waves have eluded scientists for nearly a century.

Exciting new experiments may let them catch the waves in action and open a whole new window on the universe - but they need your help to do it!'


Einstein@Home is one, small part of the LSC scientific program. It is being set up as a distributed computing project, which means that it relies on computer time donated by private computer users like you to search for gravity wave-emitting compact stars.

Einstein@Home will rely on private owners of PCs, like you, to donate computer time to the analysis of LIGO data. All you'll have to do is install a small, screen saver program to your computer.

Sign up for Einstein@home and take part in discovering the future.

This is very cool.

16 February 2005

Creative Capital Conference - Amsterdam

The Creative Capital Conference - will take place 17 and 18 March 2005 in Amsterdam at the Felix Meritis building on the Keizersgracht.

It is an international conference on the hot topic of Creative Capital focusing on Culture, Innovation and the Public Domain in the Knowledge Economy

What are the real issues for a creative public domain? Join the conversation about the meaning of Creative Capital, cultural propositions and social platforms during this conference.

Register here.

See you there!

Tribute to Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller's death has raised discussions that cross borders and engage us all in thinking very close to our hearts. When you consider the social media that is enabling us to transform business models, think about how we also are taking this opportunity to transform ourselves as a society. The cultural creatives, as Richard Florida calls us, are leading the way with social entrepreurship. Arthur Miller would be proud.

I read Bob Herbert's column - Meanwhile - in the International Herald Tribune this morning. He quotes Charles Isherwood from the New York Times. "Arthur Miller's concerns were with the moral corruption brought on by bonding one's ideals with society's dictates, buying into the values of the group when they conflict with the voice of personal conscience."

We are at a place in time where we have to balance our needs as citizens against our desires as consumers. This has more to do with having a personal strategy for self-sustainability than with buying power. We live in a society that demands not only our attention, but it requires us to engage as active citizens.

This requires collaboration, creativity, consciousness and attention to culture.

Read The Crucible again. Arthur Miller demonstrated that we can make things right. We just have to make the commitment to what our hearts believe in community.

14 February 2005

Google Maps

Google Labs had added another project that is very handy - Google Maps. Unfortunately, if you want to access maps for anywhere besides the USA and Canada, you're out of luck.


Looking forward to when they add the rest of this wonderful world.

13 February 2005

AV Blogger

Ton Zijlstra just turned me onto the AV Blogger.


You can make video clip and then post it to your blog or site. EZ-PZ.

12 February 2005

Us.ef.ul - Beginner's Guide to del.icio.us

John at beelerspace has written a comprehensive and linked guide to del.icio.us. Enlighten yourself and have a read through Us.ef.ul - A Beginner's Guide to the Next Big Thing.

For those not in the know, del.icio.us is primarily a great way to track, tag and aggregate your bookmarks. You can also read what other sites people are currently reading and posting...and - this is the best - discover what others are tagging by linking through the meta-tags.

Having trouble finding yourself?

Judith Meskill's blog posting on the Social Software Weblog from 9 February - Having trouble ‘finding’ yourself? caught my fancy.

She highlighted Crunkie, ”...a revolutionary new location-based mobile blog virtual community service that allows users to find friends and post location-tagged messages, pictures and other media instantly retrievable by friends and other Crunkie users…”


Lost? Need to find yourself? Might be just the trick!

Create a Soundtrack for your Life's Moments

Tiny Mix Tapes has an extraordinary offer:
"Here's the deal: You send us a style, genre, word, phrase, emotion, or whatever else, and if one of our mix tape robots fancies your suggestion, that crazy set of circuits might just make a mix tape out of it -- well, at least a tracklisting for a mix tape out of it."

Just reading the archives is worth the visit. Chewing gum for the eyes.

Can't wait for my soundtrack.


6 February 2005

thought experiments lain: serial experiments lain

This is cool ...thought experiments lain: a serial experiments lain information site ... and it has an annoted glossary that prickles your thinking as it brings you up to speed with what's going on.

"The creators of lain have made a progressive cyberpunk anime which is highly informed and operative on multiple layers, both figuratively and literally. No single explanation or speech or essay can hope to encompass all that is serial experiments lain. As such, lain will always be open to interpretation and always encourage us to do our own research, our own experiments, which is why I call this document thought experiments lain."

The Human Body Project

The Erotic Museum has started The Human Body Project. "The Erotic Museum is conducting an ongoing research project intent on recording the full breadth of natural and altered human physiology. By creating a massive image database of everyday people of every race, age and size we hope to provide the public with an enduring image of mankind's actual appearance in all of it's natural and unnatural forms."

We were all on that train - Madrid 3/11

There is a new documentary about the Madrid train bombing. We Were All On That Train - or in Spanish Todos ibamos en ese tren.

Docus Madrid - a Spanish production company - has released their 24 short films in a documentary about the terrorist attack in the Madrid train station on March 11, 2004. The website is in Spanish, though you can download an English PR release. If you get a chance to see it, please attend because the proceeds from ticket sales go to the victims' families.

The Darwinian Interlude

Enlightening article - The Darwinian Interlude - from Feeman Dyson in MIT's TechnologyReview.com. The Darwinian era is over, after 3 billion years.

"Cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence that we call globalization."

Dive into the article because it goes deep into the explanation of why Darwinian evolution ended - now that we are one human species dominating and reorganizing the biosphere.

According to Dyson, the availability of biotechnology and genetic engineering in the hands of the general public will create an explosion of diversity as people play with this technology like an art form.

2 February 2005

Blog University

After the discussions during the Summit for the Future, we begin to realize that the time has come for events like Blog University produced by The New Communications Forum 2005.

I belong to a group pf people - The Dutch Connection - who are playing with the cutting edge of human communication practices and using them for creating and collaborating on business development in new ways.

What we realized during the Summit was that people, in general, need invitation into participation. Like the internet 12 years ago, it's time for another evolution. Blogs and wikis are tools for people to publish, share, co-author. This connects us in ways that move us from simply sharing common interests into sharing a practice that grows from that hub of interest.

Social cause is driving this, as well as our human need to live a more integral, conscious life. "Let me do it my way." + "Let me make a difference" People want to define their lives with meaningful purpose.

Events like Blog University createt he space for people to participate and learn and share.