Via Carnival of the Mobilists, some thoughts on what's likely to happen as people access the Internet more and more via mobile phones. I'm not certain that the stats say what the author professes they say, but it's an interesting article nonetheless:
So returning to my question. What happens when the majority of internet access is done with a mobile phone? It will not take long for the Amazons, Ebays, Googles, AOLs and Yahoos to discover that their users are more accessing via mobile phone than via PC. They will adjust their content to work on the phone and optimize for the small screen rather than for the PC screen.
Sound implausible? Think again. Only 14 years ago the majority of internet access devices were mainframe computers. At that time the web content standard was something called "Gopher". Today nobody formats for Gopher because the internet PC browsers (first was Mosaic, then Netscape, now Microsoft's Internet Explorer) became the predominant access devices.
That is bound to change. The trends are irreversible. The sooner you understand this coming change, the more you can capitalize on this transition both personally, and professionally. Spot the trends now, and be one of the early visionaries to this inevitable future.
Oh, and if you work for a content provider, consider these facts: There are three times as many mobile phones as PCs. Twice as many people use SMS text messaging as use e-mail. Users on the traditional PC based internet expect content to be free, but mobile phone users expect mobile content to be paid-for. Collecting money on the traditional fixed wireline internet is very cumbersome. Collecting money on the mobile internet is built-in. The world's biggest internet company by revenues is not one of the internet darlings - Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon or AOL. It is Japanese mobile operator NTT DoCoMo's domestic mobile internet arm, i-Mode. And i-Mode alone makes bigger profits than the five internet darlings combined. Where will you put your best content? On the mobile internet of course.
Here's a report that says 'maybe':
Electromagnetic radiation from your mobile phone may impair your ability to make snap decisions, such as when driving a car, an Australian study shows.
The study, which will be published in the journal Neuropsychologia found evidence of slowed reactions, on both simple reactions and more complex reactions, such as choosing a response when there is more than one alternative.
The researchers found these effects after people were exposed to electromagnetic radiation equivalent to spending 30 minutes on the phone.
...via Smart Mobs
This post ( How University Administrators Should Approach the Facebook: Ten Rules) has been around awhile, but it has some pretty good discussion of what Facebook is, why students use it and why in one form or another it will always be around:
1. The Facebook isn't going away. While Facebook.com may not last forever, a service like the Facebook will always be present and useful on a college campus. The logic to this is quite simple: students are forced to renegotiate their social networks every semester. The Facebook supports and answers the student's information needs. Put simply, our students are curious; they want to know anything and everything about the students around them. If you had the Facebook when you were an undergrad, wouldn't you have wanted the same?
...
3. Students are not being cautious regarding their private information in the Facebook. I found that less than 5% of UNC Freshmen on the Facebook protect their accounts from strangers. In a previous study (An Evaluation.., Stutzman, 2005), I asked students their opinions on privacy in Social Networking Communities (Facebook, Friendster, MySpace). I found very mixed results. Students believe they should protect their privacy, but they aren't actually doing it.
4. Students may do stupid things on the Facebook. Really stupid things. However, aren't mistakes something we all make? The critical difference I concede is that anything they say or do can be copied from the Facebook and rebroadcast elsewhere. I've had numerous conversations with reporters who tell me they do background work with the Facebook. Everyone from the campus police to the Secret Service is looking at the Facebook. The problem is twofold: students may do stupid things, but we don't want those stupid things to haunt them for the rest of their lives. Criminal records can be expunged; search engine caches may not. We need to create a mindfulness of this possibility.
From Reuters, evidence that the digital divide is shrinking:
The digital divide is narrowing as citizens in emerging markets get online via computers and mobile phones, with some regions now on a par with developed nations, a ranking of Web-savvy nations showed on Wednesday.
"Encouraging is the apparent narrowing of the digital divide," said the annual study published by U.S. computer company International Business Machines Corp. and the intelligence unit of The Economist.
"This is particularly evident in basic connectivity: emerging markets are providing the vast majority of the world's new phone and Internet connections," the study found.
The Stingy Scholar has a Google maps mashup of universities offering podcasts, webcasts and Open CourseWare. It's not complete (ISU Extension's podcasts aren't on there, for example), but there's a lot of links and it does have a way to add more links to the map.
Feedburner reports on the rising use of podcasting:
Podcast listenership may have a long way to go before catching up to the U.S. radio audience, but while radio audience is declining, podcast circulation is consistently growing nearly 20% per month. Today, there are more than 1.6 million aggregate subscribers to FeedBurner-managed podcasts, and this number has more than doubled in the past six months. Since we recently started tracking podcast downloads within feeds, we've also seen the ratio of downloads to subscribers average 2:1, suggesting a significant secondary market for podcast listenership beyond just the feed's subscribers. (For more on this, see "Uncommon Uses" below.)
Audience size runs the gamut. Some podcasts have a very large audience, like NPR's On The Media from WNYC, New York Public Radio, with more than 16,000 loyal subscribers (and as many as 40,000 who download media right from the Web site). Others are more personal podcasts created to keep friends and family up to date. While iTunes is the clear favorite for podcast subscribers, a healthy 43% of the market listens (or watches) their favorite podcasts using other applications. That said, the two most significant jumps in podcast circulation in the past 18 months can both be tied to iTunes: In July, when iTunes 4.9 launched with podcasting support, and the end of last year, when millions of people unwrapped an iPod (Apple sold 14 million iPods in Q4 last year).
Kevin Gamble is talking about the James Surowiecki book, The Wisdom of Crowds, which discusses how large independent crowds are nearly always smarter than one or two people. Very much related to that discussion is this call Smart Swarms to help solve tough security issues:
The idea is to get lots of people focused on a security issue, or even a programming problem, and then have them chisel away at the code and examine how those pieces interact and work with all the total software. Instead of looking at programming as just lines of code, these swarms of people examine how each piece interrelates and works within a network.
"The key to robust security is network thinking," said W. David Stephenson, principal at Stephenson Strategies, a company that works closely with the Department of Homeland Security to develop defenses against terrorist attacks on computer networks. He is also an expert in the emerging science of social networks. This means he spends a lot of time looking at the behavior patterns in ant hills and beehives and applying them to networks and network design.
...via Digg
According to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project 45% of internet users say that the internet helped them make important decisions. They also indicated a marked increase over a report asking similar questions in 2002:
Alex Bosworth talks about the collaborative process of Wikipedia and why it works. Collaborators come in different shapes and sizes, he says. Some of them work on one project that they know a great deal about, some of them love to edit, some of them drop in and contribute a little, some of them contribute a lot. That Wikipedia allows for all these different users and has ways to reward the high level contributors adds a great deal to its success:
The core mechanic for Wikipedia is both the thrill of editing a grand project collaboratively, and the more basic reward of having the power to be the expert in a subject that is near and dear. Wikipedia self-selects for people who are obsessive about various subjects or just editing in general, as in every case the person or set of people willing to hammer their edits obsessively will win power over the page, and thus the reward of participation. For controversial subjects where two groups are equally obsessive, this will work itself out in a compromise where only the most obviously provable details remain, such as seen in the common Controversy sections: "Among many, there exists a school of thought that Hitler was really just misunderstood". This compromise is otherwise known in the sometimes cryptic Wikipedia shorthand as of WP:NPOV, or Neutral Point of View.
In terms of the high level goal of Wikipedia being the sum of human knowledge, edit wars may be sub-optimal as some useful information provided by domain experts is overwritten. In optimizing for the most prolific editors, Wikipedia does not select for the most expert editor to win, or offer a reward for the most expert edit, instead the most widely acceptable edits among the mostly non-experts will win. This mechanic does however succeed in creating an environment where thousands of people are willing to make thousands of edits, creating a very wide and useful resource for many types of information, such as facts, basic details of concepts and controversial topics phrased in neutral tones.
...via Smart Mobs
Here:
There are seventy four books on the desk about evolutionary theory. A laptop is open on the desk.
> look laptop
There seems to be a dissertation chapter on the laptop.
> read chapter
It is long-winded and boring. You do not want to read it.
> read chapter
It is obnoxious. You hate it.
> read book
Read. There is a book underneath it that concerns a related topic.
> read book
Read. There is a book underneath it that concerns a related topic.
> work on dissertation
You spend two hours searching the OED for the usage history of the word devolve.
> work on dissertation
You spend three hours reading five articles which have nothing to do with the dissertation.
> work on dissertation
You spend twenty minutes online reading about baseball.
> tear out hair
Taken. You find the Elvish sword.
> in my hair?
I don't understand that.
> work on dissertation
You spend five minutes playing online poker.
From Wikipedia, a list of all Google's services and tools, including:
...and plenty more
A Newsweek column on continuous partial attention:
But there's a problem in the workplace when the interruptions intrude on tasks that require real concentration or quiet reflection. And there's an even bigger problem when our bubble of connectedness stretches to ensnare us no matter where we are. A live BlackBerry or even a switched-on mobile phone is an admission that your commitment to your current activity is as fickle as Renée Zellweger's wedding vows. Your world turns into a never-ending cocktail party where you're always looking over your virtual shoulder for a better conversation partner. The anxiety is contagious: anyone who winds up talking to a person infected with CPA feels like he or she is accepting an Oscar, and at any moment the music might stop the speech.
In her talk, Stone was careful to acknowledge the benefits of perpetual contact. But her message is that the balance has tilted way too far toward distraction, creating a sense of constant crisis. "We're not ever in a place where we can make a commitment to anything," she explained to me when I called her a few days later. "Constantly being accessible makes you inaccessible." All so true. But during our conversation, some auditory clues led me to ask her one more question. "Linda," I asked, "are you taking this interview while driving your car?" She admitted that she was. But as long as she didn't have to slam the brakes or dodge a pedestrian, I had her continuous partial attention.
By special request I'm moving the Eagle cam up to the top of the page. I'm also posting the link on the left so it's easy to find.
If you haven't visited, check it out.
From Google Maps Mania, a list of resources for creating Google maps
...in broadband penetration:
The U.S. ranked 12th among industrialized nations, with 16.8 broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants, as of December, the OECD said. Iceland overtook longtime leader South Korea for the top spot. Countries in Northern Europe filled seven of the top 10 spots, underscoring how the region is leading the way in taking up this pillar of modern infrastructure.
....
As recently as December 2001, the U.S. came in fourth in the OECD rankings, but since then it has fallen in terms of per-capita broadband penetration. The tumble has become the focus of debate in Washington tech-policy circles, as Congress recently considered amendments to communications laws. When the U.S. released its own broadband data in early April, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin wrote an editorial in the London-based Financial Times saying that the OECD rankings do “not tell the full story.”
...via Digg
An InformationWeek article which says that half of current corporate PCs probably wouldn't be able to run Vista, Microsoft's new operating system, if it were released today:
Assuming Microsoft does not suffer another delay, the cutoff point would be computers bought in 2006 or earlier. Gartner advises companies to replace notebooks every three years and desktops every four years. Given that most companies will take at least 18 months from the time Vista ships for planning and testing, by the time those organizations are ready to deploy the new OS, the useful life left on 2006 PCs would be about 17 percent on laptops and 37.5 percent on notebooks.
Among the major requirements of Vista, compared with Windows XP or 2000, is a graphics card that supports Vista's user interface and visual enhancements, which include translucent window frames and task bar, real-time thumbnail previews and task switching, enhanced transitional effects and animations. While these features within Aero won't be important for many companies, other improvements in the UI will, such as better window stability, smoother screen drawing and interface scaling.
In addition, computers will need at least 1GB of RAM to run Vista, and an additional 512MB if companies plan to use PC virtualization during the migration to run an older OS and Vista simultaneously, Gartner said, just upgrading RAM on a PC costs from $100 to $200 per machine for many companies.
This finding doesn't surprise me all that much considering that as of a year ago, many corporations appeared to still be running Windows 2000 on a lot of machines.
...via Digg
The Korea Times reports that courts in Korea will be experimenting with trials conducted on the Internet. The issue is not just convenience, but also education--the information will be open for anyone to view:
Although the court has not yet decided on a detailed framework, it plans to allow the parties in lawsuits to submit their list of evidence, legal documents and other data on Weblogs or Internet message boards to be operated by the court. The court decisions will also be announced online.
The court also plans to allow people to buy court documents and other requirements in preparing for their lawsuits through the Internet by credit card or mobile-phone payments.
Korea has one of the largest Internet populations in the world, with the penetration rate reaching over 70 percent.
``If the courts are able to develop a way to handle some of the court trials entirely through the Internet, we believe it will save a significant amount of time and also reduce costs in legal procedures in areas such as document deliveries,’’ said Judge Kim Sang-jun of the Seoul Administration Court.
OpenCourseWare is the MIT project to make their class materials available on the web to everyone. Five years ago--on April 4th--MIT announced the OpenCourseWare project:
There are now 1,285 sets of course material available on the OCW web site at http://ocw.mit.edu. There have been nearly 20 million unique visits to MIT OCW content since Oct. 1, 2003. In February alone, there were an average of more than 36,000 visits to the site daily.
"We're getting traffic from virtually every country on earth. From a very simple but profound idea, OCW has grown into a global movement" now used daily by thousands of people worldwide, according to Jon Paul Potts, communications manager for OCW.
Visitors include educators elsewhere (17 percent), students everywhere (32 percent) and a huge audience defined as "self learners" (49 percent).
...via elearningpost
Rather than telling people where the information they want belongs in a set list of categories and subcategories, tagging lets users say--this is where I think this goes. Tagging has been used extensively in places like Flickr and del.icio.us and is a large part of what makes these services so useful to people. Now corporations are looking at what tagging can do for them:
Given their information density, Rosenfeld thinks intranets will be a prime testing ground for tagging at the corporate level. One company that has seen encouraging results using tags is IBM. "Tagging makes it easier for you to go back and find something," says Maria Arbusto, IBM's director for user experience who is responsible for how IBM presents its internal information, websites and applications to employees.
Arbusto says IBM is "still in the early days" of using the terms employees provide to improve discoverability. She says it has worked well in a pilot involving ThinkPlace, the intranet application IBM uses as an internal suggestion box for ideas the company should consider commercializing or developing and deploying to employees. In the system, employees can comment on the ideas and rate whether they should be pursued.
ThinkPlace originally classified ideas using terms from IBM's official taxonomies for content such as industry and products. But "we observed the users and saw that the terms they used didn't always match" the formal taxonomy, she says. So IBM created a way for users to enter keywords, or tags, that would be appended to the suggested terms from the formal taxonomy and thereby improve their ability to find relevant ideas. The results have been promising, says Arbusto. "You can see what your colleagues are interested in," she says. "From a collaboration and knowledge-sharing perspective, that's what's neat about folksonomies."
...via elearningpost
In BusinessWeek online, an article on how Steve Jobs makes dynamic presentations :
Practice, Practice, and Practice Some More
Jobs takes nothing for granted during product launches. He reviews and rehearses his material. According to a Business Week article on February 6, 2006, "Jobs unveils Apple's latest products as if he were a particularly hip and plugged-in friend showing off inventions in your living room. Truth is, the sense of informality comes only after grueling hours of practice." The article goes on to say that it's not unusual for Jobs to prepare for four hours as he reviews every slide and demonstration (see BW, 2/6/06, "Steve Jobs' Magic Kingdom").
Keep It Visual
Speaking of slides, there are very few bullet points in a Jobs presentation. Each slide is highly visual. If he's discussing the new chip inside a computer, a slide in the background will show a colorful image of the chip itself alongside the product. That's it. Simple and visual.
How long it takes to crack your password depending on how many possible characters (lower case only, upper and lower case, numbers and letters, etc.)
For example:
Password: darren (created from 10 possible characters)
Possible combinations: 308.9 Million
Time to crack at 10,000 passwords/se: 8½ Hours
Time to crack at 1,000,000 passwords/sec: Instant
Password: Land3rz (created from 62 possible characters)
Possible combinations: 3.5 Trillion
Time to crack at 10,000 passwords/sec: 11 Years
Time to crack at 1,000,000 passwords/sec: 58 Mins
Password: B33r&Mug (created from 96 possible characters)
Possible combinations: 7.2 Quadrillion
Time to crack at 10,000 passwords/sec: 22,875 Years
Time to crack at 1,000,000 passwords/sec: 83½ Days
Part 1: Preparing the content
Create a script. Unless you’re an experienced talk show host, then you’d need a script or at least an outline to guide your show. Otherwise, you’d have ten minutes of umms, ahhs, and errs which will surely annoy your audience. Some prefer podcasts that are spontaneous, while others prefer clear-cut 'casts with a definite message. But I think it's best if you have at least an outline or a summary of the flow of what you would be discussing.
Here’s a rule of thumb you can follow in creating a ten-minute podcast:
From the Washington Post:
While growth is slowing at most top Internet sites, it is skyrocketing at sites focused on social networking, blogging and local information.
The dramatic success of those Internet categories is apparent from a recent online-traffic analysis provided by market research firm ComScore Media Metrix, which examined visitor growth rates among the 50 top Web sites over the past year.
...Smart Mobs
From CNN--How I Work: Bill Gates
The screen on the left has my list of e-mails. On the center screen is usually the specific e-mail I'm reading and responding to. And my browser is on the right-hand screen. This setup gives me the ability to glance and see what new has come in while I'm working on something, and to bring up a link that's related to an e-mail and look at it while the e-mail is still in front of me.
At Microsoft, e-mail is the medium of choice, more than phone calls, documents, blogs, bulletin boards, or even meetings (voicemails and faxes are actually integrated into our e-mail in-boxes).
I get about 100 e-mails a day. We apply filtering to keep it to that level—e-mail comes straight to me from anyone I've ever corresponded with, anyone from Microsoft, Intel, HP, and all the other partner companies, and anyone I know. And I always see a write-up from my assistant of any other e-mail, from companies that aren't on my permission list or individuals I don't know. That way I know what people are praising us for, what they are complaining about, and what they are asking.
...via Digg
Did you know that someone has registered DIDYOUKNOWTHATYOUCANONLYHAVESIXTY-THREECHARACTERSINADOMAIN-NAME.com?
This and other interesting facts about .COM domain names can be found here. Including:
...via BoingBoing
Wired has an article on the best accidental discoveries, including X-rays, penicillin, and Silly Putty:
X-rays
Several 19th-century scientists toyed with the penetrating rays emitted when electrons strike a metal target. But the x-ray wasn't discovered until 1895, when German egghead Wilhelm Röntgen tried sticking various objects in front of the radiation - and saw the bones of his hand projected on a wall.
Penicillin
Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming was researching the flu in 1928 when he noticed that a blue-green mold had infected one of his petri dishes - and killed the staphylococcus bacteria growing in it. All hail sloppy lab work!
Silly Putty
In the early 1940s, General Electric scientist James Wright was working on artificial rubber for the war effort when he mixed boric acid and silicon oil. V-J Day didn't come any sooner, but comic strip image-stretching practically became a national pastime.
...via elearningpost
Market Share shows Firefox at 10% of the browser market and Internet Explorer at 85%
Cameron Olthuis lists 75 web design resources on his blog that he uses every day.
...via Digg
A report in the Sydney Morning Herald on phishing and why it fools so many people:
The study conducted by Harvard University and Berkeley tested the responses of 22 participants to a range of websites, some fraudulent and some genuine. It found that a general lack of knowledge about security technologies made it easy to fool a large number of people.
"In our study, the best phishing site was able to fool more than 90 per cent of participants. Indicators that are designed to signal trustworthiness were not understood (or even noticed) by many participants," the report said.
Pop-up warnings about fraudulent certificates proved ineffective with 15 out of 22 participants proceeding to the website without hesitation, while other basic security measures such as checking SSL certificates and inspecting the validity of the URL were overlooked altogether by 23 per cent of participants. Their key approach was to analyse the content of a webpage to determine legitimacy, leading them to make incorrect decisions 40 per cent of the time.
...via Digg