This little sampling duet is cool!
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Every so often these warnings come out, and it’s probably worth paying heed. Using WiFi in public places can endanger your computer (especially if you use windows). Internet News reported today that Windows-based computers with wireless capabilities are vulnerable for certain types of exploitation–even if you are not accessing the Internet. So be careful in public places and make sure you’re secure.
Celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Pet Sounds with your very own portable Brian Wilson! Woof! That’s a hoot, and I’m sure a collector’s item. I don’t know if I’m ready for a little Brian Wilson hanging around the house, but I do like his 37 year late album Smile: a true work of genius.
Every week I sign up for a new social networking site just to explore their features and see what’s out there. With so many socialnet sites, I lose track of what I’ve joined, and I usually never do much with many of them. I signed up with Flixster on Wednesday and wasn’t sure if I’d use it much or not. Flixster may turn out to be a useful site. It is definitely like Netflix’s Friends feature combined with MySpace. The nice thing is that users can simply rate movies; they don’t have to sign up for a rental plan. This makes it easy to build a larger friends database and connect with a variety of people who like movies. And for someone like me who prefers to hear movie recommendations from other people, I find this very appealing.
If Netflix was smart, they’d follow Flixster lead and offer an expanded version of the Friends feature with no requirement to join. Of course, once people enter into a network and come to visit their movie page, it would be easier to encourage them to sign up for a plan, download a film or buy a film.
For multiple world, our modern/postmodern world has forced many of us to split our lives and now even our identities into multiple slots such as work and home, public and private, inner and outer. Now many thinkers even suggest there is no real person behind the roles we play. I don’t have time to respond to that here, but I disagree.
The nature of personhood is more complex and interconnected than modernism may have realized and the Church Fathers offered a far more nuanced view of the person than the modern idea of the individual. This tendency to create separate identities between home, office, house of faith, hobbies, friends, and the multivarious online social computing personas is dis-integrating. It does tend to make us think there is really no me to me: just another face, another mask. This potentially could lead to many negative and even dangerous manifestations.
Since I believe the person is real, I believe that integration of these various worlds and identities are important. Thus my values at home are the same at work are the same among my friends are the same in the online world. I try to be the same person everywhere (inner and outer).
Thus this blog does not section off technology away from faith away from art or other interests, and that’s why I put the Pope Benedict XVI quote earlier. It captures some of the essence I think the word
Now enough from me. I’ll have to spend more time on this on my Floydville blog sometime. If anyone disagrees, feel free to let me know. 🙂
Reporting on the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Michael Calore suggests that “the theme of the summit is ‘disruption and opportunity,’ and it could be argued that it’s also the mantra of the entire Web 2.0 movement.”
Totally. Breaking down the walls between the giants and the dwarfs, the air of Web 2.0 seems intoxicating. With open source, startups, the culture of generosity, the innovation explosion, Web 2.0 is about expanding horizons and connecting people on more and more levels in multiple venues. This seems to be springtime of possibility. Will it last? Doubtfully but for now, the surge of creative juices and dripping like a giant coconut rolling around on the beaches virtual beaches bordering the ocean of Eureka.
Some of the cool developments Calore mentions include a music mentoring site called In the Chair, 3B (that allows you to put websites and photos into a personalized 3D space), Turn (a target advertising portal that uses data analysis to create perfect matches – sounds like the business version of EHarmony), and more. All of the developments continue to focus on the growing importance of a social computing model.
Of course, the Web 2.0 Summit wasn’t all about geeking out. Lou Reed showed up to brighten everyone’s day.
I’ve been thinking a lot about integration vs dis-integration. And then I saw this quote from Pope Benedict that explores this theme in relation to objective vs subjective knowledge:
“At the roots of being a Christian, there is no ethical decision or lofty idea, … but a meeting with the person of Jesus Christ,” said Benedict XVI. “The fruitfulness of this meeting is apparent … also in today’s human and cultural context,” he added, using the example of mathematics, a human creation in which the “correlation between its structures and the structures of the universe … excites our admiration and poses a great question. It implies that the universe itself is structured in an intelligent fashion, in such a way that there exists a profound correspondence between our subjective reason and the objective reason of nature. It is, then, inevitable that we should ask ourselves if there is not a single original intelligence that is the common source of both the one and the other….This overturns the tendency to grant primacy to the irrational, chance and necessity.”
Why did Google spend over a billion dollars to buy YouTube? To avoid competition with Google Video? To tap into YouTube content? To utilize YouTube technology? It appears Google bought YouTube for the information they could learn about user habits.
Eric Schmidt spoke at the Web 2.0 Conference the other day and he shed light on a little of their strategy. According to Steve Bryant, YouTube’s “huge user base will allow Google’s servers to better understand what users want on the Web.”
“The underlying draw is to see what users are doing and have computers suggest related or adjacent content. It is a whole new paradigm and important to users,” Schmidt said.
So this data from the collective habits of YouTube users will help Google refine their ad-serving engines. And he’s betting that is worth a bunch more.
Interesting.
You may have seen this but I finally saw it today. Wow! Powerful. Hope you enjoy!
