This will be just a quick post since I should get some sleep.

A little while ago Thomas L. Friedman posted an article in the IHT named Doha and Dalian. Doha and Dalian are an Arabic and Chinese city that are relatively unheard of to most Americans. The article then goes to explain how much energy they use and that all of the energy saving done by model Christian American families is just a waste since these cities 'eat those savings for breakfast'.

I really wonder to what extend we should react to the whole global warming issue. On the one hand there is always this stuck in my mind:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” - George Bernard Shaw

But if you witness the gigantic boom of Chinese sky-skrapers and smog-pipes it's easy to give up. We just can't beat this. Also, the Singularity -a predicted moment in time where we transcend biology - can be used as an easy justification for a passivist attitude.

Interestingly, I ban into this article by Vernor Vinge about possible non-Singularity scenarios. Two of these three scenario's are scenario's where we screw up:

This is the scenario where we nuke or nanobot ourselves and slowly die off after our population get's reduced to 80% in one 'afternoon'.

This is the scenario where we try to reach the singularity but fail over and over again, by astroids, nukes and what have you.

Like some people commented the latter scenario is less likely to happen, since we will drain out all our oil and natural resources before the second try.

This means we have only one shot. We will either horribly fail or succeed. 1 or 0

This dude explains it much better by worrying about the extinction of guacomole:

"For the love of God/Allah/Ganesha/et al., save the guaco-taco dammit! Otherwise, we can go ahead and stop talking about colonizing mars or communicating with dolphins because this planet is going to be a major drag."

Every once in a while you need to have a great out-of-reality experience. Labyrinth - a Japanese psychedelic trance festival - is an annual opportunity to do this. Labyrinth is a four day event organized by the Mindgames organization and my colleague, the Monk, is it's founder. It is held in the town of Kawaba in the mountains north of Tokyo in the Gunma province. The nearest train station is about 30 minutes by car. (By the way, Kawaba has nice local products, especially their wine)

I have been to psychedelic trance parties in Amsterdam in the past, but none of them were as great as this one. The mix of forest, mountains an oriental country is a great experience. I can only imagine how the parties in the middle of the Moroccan desert would be like.

Another thing that's really nice about these events in Japan is the people. Most people are Japanese and they are very well mannered. Also, the atmosphere is more bohemian since it's a safe camping environment so many people bring their children.

The best thing about these parties is that they are an escape from your normal life. A break from reality even.

As the Singularity can be found anywhere, it can also be found at Labyrinth. Going out there in the nature, far away from technology packed Tokyo. What do we bring? Some blankets, candles, incense and clothing. But we also bring: Huge speakers, electrical spots and chemicals. What do we do?

We unite with nature.

A lot of people might see it as distorting nature, like two opposites. But as a singularitarian, I truly believe that all this techno distortion is part of biology and evolution.

More importantly, it's an awesome experience!

Most of you might have heard about the latest trend: twitter.com. At first I thought the idea was really stupid and could only be used for egocentric people (like me):

• twitter is a blog that allows you to write posts with a maximum of about 250 characters
• these one-liners can be 'watched' by your friends or you can watch your friends

"I'm at the backery", "Britney spears is so cool!" are examples of these so-called 'tweets'. But these examples are bad. Like blogging, people can write really really useless things. Blogs are also most often abused by people who write about 'how depressed they are' or how shallow they are.

But some blogs, a small number, provide real high quality content. Some of them even get printed to books (The book I'm reading now by Seth Godin appears to be a printout of his blog).

If I'm right, blog posts are micro-content (and my semantic web obsessed colleague can correct me if I'm wrong). Quality blog posts are on average the size of magazine articles and they provide the same information. Blog posts have the extra advantage of being interconnected in the blogosphere.

Twitter on the other hand is nano-content, and it has obviously other uses. People are not quite clear yet about these uses. An example of high quality tweets are: "stranded in Korea because of typhoon" and "Harry Potter dies in the end". These provide quick communications to the people that are subscribed to your messages.

Another use would be to use twitter as a thought notebook, where you can write little ideas like "hey, what about yocto-content" or "KFC is booming here, buy KFC China stocks". An advantage that these tweets have is that they can be written quickly which allows you to have a very active messaging stream. This is one of the main abstract uses of twitter: displaying activity. My colleage had an interesting suggestion that just like corporate blogs, there might be a use for corporate twitter-like applications.

As a wannabe entrepreneur, I think there are 2 big opportunities here:

Twitter without the hype

There are many tools that make twittering more easy, like twittermail (mail2twitter). But there is one obvious thing always painfully stuck in our eyes: the big ugly twitter logo on our profiles. On your twitter page (like http://twitter.com/dominiek) you can only customize the layout for a bit, but it will always look like this.

Therefore, it would be great to have a service that allows you to simply have a list of latest-thoughts or latest-communiques. Also allowing geeks to put in their own markup code and to attach their own domains (like thoughts.dominiek.com). But more importantly to allow corporations to make use their own brand. So this service should be transparent and brandless (conforms with Seth's statement that branding is a dying industry, sorry Russ Meyer).

Yocto-content

If twitter is nano content, would something even smaller also work? Let's check wikipedia for a name:

So what would this yocto-content look like? Probably one word or a hyphened word. You can have a stream of simple keywords to 'tag your life' in a way. For example: work, container, work, work, namkee, heineken, back-to-work, vacation, china, work, holland, bureaucracy, fly, korean You could then visualize this stream (over time) like a tagcloud. Also you can compare it to the cloud of other people and detect similar lives or interests. Other uses are still to be explored.. ;]