I am subscribed to TedTalks on iTunes and I’d like to share with your two videos. The first one almost made me cry (eyes were getting watery but I was just ordering pizza 
) happily, and the next one just made me smile. I love those talks!
First Aimee Mullins and her 12 pair of legs:
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
And then Dan Dennett: Cute, sexy, sweet, funny
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
Monthly Archives: March 2009
How TedTalks can make you cry and smile in the matter of minutes
Please not all become one and the same
Ok, this is starting to get on my nerves. Venturebeat is reporting that you can now choose to have parts of your items within Facebook public, aka visible for everybody. Facebook themselves go into a bit more detail:
Just go to your privacy page and change the settings you want to the new “Everyone” option. You can opt to make one or all of the following profile elements more open: Profile, Status Updates, Links, Wall Posts, Basic Info, Personal Info, Education Info, Work Info, Photos of You and Videos of You.
Yehaa! Another public profile. Another bit of status updates. Another place to copy more of the same. Can all you people really start deciding what it is going to be? Xing is for my professional life really, and I am very happy that they are sticking with that focus. Facebook was for my general social graph / friend connections that is beyond just business. I really like it to be more private because it can be, as it has my friend connections. I am putting a lot of stuff into Facebook, which I am also putting into thylmann.net by the way, so it is very similar to FriendFeed there for me (Oooops, another one there. ). I am slowly not able to keep track anymore people!!! It would be no problem if they were all copy cats to start out with but they were freaking different!!! Grrrrr….!
At least they should all give me the option to keep everything out of the SE indizes even if it is public. And this again pushes the importance of something that is portable and really mine, e.g. my own Noserub install at thylmann.net. Because you know what? My ID, My Everything, My Life is freaking MINE. And that means that I need to be in full control and need to be able to decide what people are pointed to and move it, with all the content.
So I want a few things:
- Give me the option to lock out Search Engines
- Give me a full data export of my data in XML
- Somebody build the perfect life aggregator… I think Noserub is a good start
Because you know what? These things are slowly not anymore about connecting me with my friend but to keep a log of my life, and that is something completely different and something that needs to be extremely more portable.
The Death of the Newspaper
From time to time a great post by somebody comes up and this time I even only read at the end that this one is from Clay Shirky who is not unknown in our echo chamber circles. The article is called: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable and it came to me through friends sharing it through the new Facebook Homepage. I’ll just let you read the article because in all honestly you need to if you have anything to do with print. If you can’t decide, here are some quotes, which I am adding to my quotes list while we are at it
“When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” – Gordy Thompson (cited in an article about the death of print)
There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke. – Clay Shirky
It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem. – Clay Shirky
That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. – Clay Shirky
When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work. – Clay Shirky
Now go read damn it!
Wolfram Alpha not for average joe
There is lots of rage currently about Wolfram’s new Venture Wolfram Alpha. A lot about it can be learned from this article on Techcrunch. I wanted to add a few thoughts though.
First of all, how can 100 people working on a knowledge engine go undetected for years??!?!? Then again, it proves again we are in a deep echo chamber and it already points us to the second thing. This is something that fits very well with Wolfram’s previous work. Mathematica is something I still remember from my Physics studies and it is an amazing tool to say the least. It’s something the scientific world has been using for ages and this is Wolfram’s world. The second step in Wolfram’s quest to leave a lasting mark in science was A new Kind of Science, for which he took a bit of time of and which he wrote during the night if I remember correctly. It’s a highly discussed book to say the least.
Now comes Wolfram Alpha (does that guy have a god complex by the way naming all his companies after himself ? ) and he again tries to prove, I feel, to the science world that he is the man. It is very likely that he succeeds I have to say. But what needs to be remembered is that this tool is really a science tool and not something for the guy next door. Depending on the knowledge catalogue they have added to the system you will be able to ask things like “What’s the best time to climb Mount Everest?” or “What is the best age to get married and what are other influencing factors to stay together forever?” or “What molecule structures should I emphasize for curing Aids?” (made the last one up ).
It will be interesting to see where this goes. Looking forward to the launch.
