Monthly Archives: May 2005
Flash: music box
Now that’s some cool flash: music box.
Thinking Machines
My brother has picked up an article on CNN.com about the idea that machines will be able to think, and be afraid and things, by 2050. In his comment he rightfully poses a question: Airplanes that are afraid of crashing?!?! Remind me to stop flying by 2050, I do not want to crash because some bird flies into an engine, the plane gets scared of crashing, panics and then actually DOES crash because it paniced! Awesome idea.
I can hear the plane now: “ATTENTION ATTENTION, A BIRD ATTACKED ME!!! THERE IS A 50.000001% likelyhood of it having an effect on the engine!!! I AM EMOTIONALLY DISTURBED AT THE MOMENT BUT WILL TRY TO GRAB ALL MY MARBLES AND MIGHT NOT SHUT MYSELF DOWN BECAUSE I AM TOO AFRAID IF YOU ALL THINK HAPPY THOUGHTS!!!” (end screaming airplane) 
Google AdSense Hijacked
Fun indeed. It seems that Google AdSense has been hijacked in the search engine results. More about this right on jensense.com: Google AdSense site hijacked in the Google serps… oh the irony – JenSense.com.
Update: Some updated info here. Seems like the guy on number 1 didn’t even try doing it. It was all just an accident.
Television Reloaded
I already had lots of talks about this with friends and now MSNBC wrote about it: Television Reloaded. The article is a must read to get an overview and it’s nice to see the big guns talk about it.
The ethos of New TV can be captured in a single sweeping mantra: anything you want to see, any time, on any device. "We are at a watershed moment in home entertainment," says Brian Roberts, CEO of the cable giant Comcast.
Now let that sink in. Anything you want to see, any time, on any device. The line between internet and tv will become blurry. I’ll tune in to CNN.com/sports/ on my TV or on the web site, with text and video interacting. I can automatically search over the meta data of the TV show to find the segment I want to watch, syncing the news from the previous night to my laptop for the commute to work based on meta data searches. Prime time will only be prime time if there is something that happens live in the real world behind it, like a football game.
Now that you’ve stored your show on a TiVo, it’s only logical to take
it with you on your laptop, hand-held viewer or PSP game player.
This is actually one reason I might really look into the PSP
"Already there is more data downloaded for video over the Internet than
there is for music," says Mike Ramsay, cofounder of TiVo. "What happens
when a 14-year-old creates a BitTorrent browser that’s easy to use and
plugs right into your TV? You go from 500 channels to 50 million
channels."
The only problem then becomes what to watch. Word of mouth will be key, as you will likely want to watch something that others watch to, just to be able to talk about it. Interesting things ahead.
Fletcher Comments on My Google
Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines, has written a good comments on Google Fusion entitled: Google Launches My Google, World Does Not End. It’s actually about my problem with Yahoo!’s RSS implementation as well. The thing is that they use it just as a tool to display information, but leave out the status part of this information. If I put an RSS feed on my MyYahoo! page, then I can just say how many headlines I want to see. That’s the number of last headlines I will see then, whether they are read or not, whether I already saw them or not. Mark Fletcher really didn’t do anything too amazing with Bloglines, I mean most RSS Readers for the Desktop work like Bloglines does, but now Google does Fusion and the headlines you can integrate again remain the top X of them. That just doesn’t work! I don’t want to see the top 3 articles from 150 Feeds I have in Bloglines! You need to aggregate them together, make them one, group them, only show new items, notify of updates, all those things. You actually just need to do anything that a machine can do that I would otherwise do. A machine can’t read for me (if I don’t want to listen), but other than that, there is a lot it can do.
Let’s see what the RSS implementation of Google will look like when it comes out.
Hallmackenreuther with free WiFi
Sitting in the Hallmackenreuther in Cologne (Plazes ID) and they have free WiFi. A nice place to sit, talk, have a drink … and work if you want or have to. How nice indeed. Thanks people of Hallmackenreuther… weird name.
Update: I now got the text you get when you log in the first time. Among others it reads:
Falls Du im Hallmackenreuther sitzt und jemand Wodka, Bier oder einen beliebigen anderen Drink über oder in Deinen Rechner kippt, sorge bitte dafür das Dein Rechner das verträgt! Weder das Hallmackenreuther oder sonst jemand wird Deinen Rechner und Dich bedauern oder sich gar um Dich oder Deinen Rechner kümmern, einen entsprechenden Vorfall irgendeiner Versicherung melden oder sonst irgend etwas unternehmen um Deinen Schaden gering zu halten. Du nutzt dieses WLAN auf eigene Gefahr für Leib, Leben und Rechner.
Coming Advertising Crsis
Were are we moving with advertising, spy ware, browser bars, accelerators, adsense and more? Some good questions raised here: TRANSPARENT BUNDLES by Seth Goldstein: Media Futures, Part 5/5: ARBITRAGE: II. Crisis.
And I think Google AdWords/AdSense is already 40% of the online advertising market. Just take a look at the numbers of what the market size is and the revenue of Google.
