Think of it as a digital solution to an analog problem. Segway's P.U.M.A. (Personal Urban Mobility & Accessibility) prototype represents the shift that's needed for the future of transportation. It values less over more; taking up less space, using less energy, produced more efficiently with fewer parts, creating fewer emissions during production and operation, all while offering more enjoyment, productivity, and connectivity.
Me, writing today at TMV, after struggling to get the Hope Bus video uploaded:
Despite any of the talk about Net Neutrality, networks are right now enforcing a tiered level of offerings that disadvantages production at all service levels. Where I live I can only get a 6 MB incoming line. Outgoing I'm limited to half the speed of a 1990s era 512k connection. They will not even sell me more if I am willing to pay extra!We have seen this happen before. Broadcasting itself started out as an open platform, built by innovators, nurtured by government and fostered by and for educators. Once it was developed industry moved in. Promising improvements they pushed every notion of citizen production aside. It required, we were told, trained industry professionals to do anything worthwhile.
Cable did the same thing. Begun in rural Pennsylvania as a means to deliver broadcast signals to rural homes, CATV (CoAxial cable TV) used the promise of localism through channels dedicated to educational and governmental services and Public Access TV, to take on the broadcast network monopoly. Once it had its toehold, it starved and marginalized those channels. That same thing is happening today with the Internet.
YouTube, we're told, is filled with marginal citizen-produced nonsense and gets most of its traffic through pirated programming. Remix culture -- citizen use of the mediasphere -- is criminalized as piracy. And every attempt to by you and me to upload quality versions of what we produce is literally slowed down (and deteriorated) through service tiers that won't permit fast uploads.Don't get me wrong, citizens reap great benefits from the Interent and we will see vast improvements over what we had before. We'll even be permitted to produce in the margins. But it's obvious to me that the days of the internet as citizens' media production haven are numbered.
I've been wanting to try Wesabe for a while, but Quicken has my records since 1988. I can upload them to Wesabe, even so transitioning is a chore. I've also been concerned that if I move everything there, what if it goes bust? ArsTechnica has a hands-on review.
Via Don Day at Lost Remote. He's got links.
John Battelle's calls it Blog 2.0 Realized:
If ever there was a better realization of what I meant when I wrote about "a new kind of blog publishing", I don't know where to find it. This post, series, and site is exactly what I meant. Sure, I've known about The Hype Machine for some time, but this series is a publishing masterpiece, part authorial intent, part crowdsourcing, and part the confluence of great tools, platforms, models, and policies (you can play the music! you can buy the music!).
A book with words that you touch and they become hyperlinks launched in the nearest digital device. Via ITConversations:
In this keynote presentation from the 2007 O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference, Manolis Kelaidis introduces and demonstrates bookLink (bLink), which illustrates his elegant ideas for next-generation books. Follow along as Kelaidis explains how he came to investigate the intersection of traditional book publishing and the new world of digital media. The challenge? While digital media offer new possibilities for interaction, the traditional book still has many advantages, perhaps most important of which is the comfort, convenience, and familiarity of the printed page. How can the benefits of both be combined?Within this presentation Kelaidis connects his background to his unique perspective on publishing that resulted in the creation of bLink. Through his research Keladis discovered that the basic design of books has not changed in over 2,000 years, yet he successfully took on the challenge of developing a new, more interactive interface.
Throughout the presentation Kelaidis explains the different potential uses for the bLink, including the controversial topic of including advertising in books. In addition, he covers the general design of the bLink and what would be the most likely way to manufacture bLink. His ultimate vision is to discover an invisible, paper based solution that would allow mass production of bLink books.
