Dominiek.com

Vandaag het tweede treinongeluk in twee dagen, na meerdere ontsporingen bij Amsterdam CS, in hetzelfde jaar. Ik schaam me regelmatig om een Nederlander te zijn. Deze schaamte loopt veelal gelijk met mijn gebruik van het Openbaar Vervoer. En dan heb ik het niet eens over die levensgevaarlijke mensensmokkel bus die mij naar mijn dorpje brengt. Nee, ik heb het over het openbaar vervoer dat steeds minder Nederlanders willen gebruiken. Vind je het gek dat iedereen een auto wilt? Op het OV kan je niet vertrouwen, het is onprettig en onmenselijk.

Meer wegen dan maar? Zoiets als de A9/A6 wat over mijn dorpje gebouwd zou worden. Meer auto’s, we hebben toch allemaal hybride-SUV’s straks toch? Waarschijnlijk nog veiliger dan de NS ook. Weg met die spoorwegen, gore metro’s en ongure busbedrijven. Auto’s, brommers, motors, RONK RONK RONK.

Als je een ontwikkelingsland wilt zijn, doe het dan goed.

As you might notice, I added a tagcloud to the top of this page. This tagcloud is a ‘cloud’ that contains all keywords assigned to resources on this blog. On first sight it looks like a standard tagcloud, like the one seen on del.icio.us.

This tagcloud is different however! I gave it something special: awareness of ‘the collective’, the blogosphere.

I spend a few hours today connecting this cloud to the web’s central bookmarking website: del.icio.us. This funny named website has an instant stream of new tagged resources every minute. The tagcloud above will highlight any tag the moment one has been added into the collective.

Note: it’s still a little buggy, since del.icio.us doesn’t allow too much RSS traffic, I will need to optimize that.

Publishing

The past 3 days I had a small tech/art/media conference on The Internet of Things’ (by Mediamatic). This event showed me that media-people can think very different then technologists. Apart from dressing very fashionable and using Mac’s, they also care a lot about digital appearance. I noticed most people I met had a Blog and had it well-connected to Flickr. My Blog is sort of isolated from the internet and I don’t spend so much time on managing my ‘second life’. In the workshop one of the speakers, Julian Bleecker, said he advises his students to publish every failed idea they had. In this way, people who try that again can learn from the published mistakes. I agree and I think more people should take the effort to work towards ‘the collective’.

Interconnecting

John Battelle, in his book about search explained his view on immortality in the epilogue of the book. Battelle explained that the internet allows more people to become immortal in a way, as long as information is kept alive into the indexes of Google. I think this is incomplete. The Library of Alexandria has been destroyed numerous times by man, resulting in the death of many ‘immortals’. ‘Immortality’ of information can never be guaranteed, but the chances of long survival get more when the information spread is more wide. Therefore, the Google index is not enough (My old websites are deleted from the index anyway). It’s important to spread the information, using trackbacks, references, quotations, alternative blogspheres like Technorati.

Tagging

Tagging, assigning a keyword to a virtual object. I’m still a little puzzled about the importance of it. At this moment I really think it’s important to take a good effort to tag all your resources, especially visual material. Resources are found much better if you have accurate keywords assigned tot them. In the future this will be replaced by either generating these keywords from the resources itself or actually understanding the resources itself. I can imagine that this is will take longer with pictures and videos (more complex).

My 2nd life

I think a lot of people agree (at least in the workshop) that the virtual world and the physical world will merge inevitably. It might take some time, although I think thing’s will go quite fast once Nanotechnology takes shape. Anyway, I think it’s important to start taking your own 2nd life into account since it will be a big part of your 1st life.

My resolutions:

• Publishing more
• Interconnecting more: Making my blog known at technorati.
• Interconnecting more: Linking more to others.
• Interconnecting more: Moving my pictures to Flickr.com.
• Interconnecting more: Tagging better.

Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t run on Linux. This is one of the reasons why I decided to install WindowsXP. My additional motive was using Adobe Flash and my webcam.

During the installation, I was playing with my new iPod nano, amazed by the advances they made since the iPod-mini. A few days earlier I ordered the device from the online Apple store. Here, I could customize my design by engraving some text, which I think is a nice Apple-strategy to eliminate the expensive costs of retailing (like Dell does). I was amused by the marketing setup on the Apple store website:

As you can see they shaped their color, capacity and pricing model to the customers. It’s a trick, but I’m OK with that, I think it’s social. And it works! My dad came back from a business vacation this morning. He incidentally bought one as well, which made my little sister complain that everyone has an iPod except her. This shows the broad market range they cover.

After installing Windows, I installed the iTunes, downloaded some tunes and played with my iPod. Every time I play with it, listen to it and even look at it I think: Yes, I bought a nice product!. But during my playing I noticed an irritating warning message popping up every once in a while, so I clicked it:

A little side note about computer viruses: A computer-virus is a viral-spreading algorithm to exploit faults in a software system. It does not compare to a biological-virus. This means, the software vendor is responsible for preventing them. After clicking on recommendations you will be send to a page that tries to sell you anti-virus products. I didn’t know that this could be legal, it’s like selling medicine for a disease you’re creating yourself!

It’s pretty obvious who’s trying to make money in what way, this is just the beginning: my next operating system will be MacOS.