The End of Cyberspace

links for 2008-01-01

• Most Literate U.S. Cities: Minneapolis and Seattle - Yahoo! News
  "Residents of Minneapolis and Seattle are the most bookish and well-read, according to results from a new survey released today of the most literate American cities. The survey focused on 69 U.S. cities with populations of 250,000 or above."
  (tags: library culture reading)
• Natural catastrophes will grow with climate change: re-insurer - Yahoo! News
  "Natural catastrophes in 2007 were more frequent and costlier than a year earlier and climate change will make them more expensive still, the world's second-biggest re-insurer, Munich Re, said Thursday."
  (tags: climate insurance)
• The Forecast in the Streets | Beyond the Beyond from Wired.com
  "A new report called The Age of Consequences, just released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security, tries to bring the social sciences... into the forecast of climate change in the coming century."
  (tags: climate sociology)
• "We want to confer life and intelligence on everything. We want to see fairies under trees." - washingtonpost.com
  "as the New Year approaches, we wonder what our objects of desire will be in a year or five. For answers, we turn to Paul Saffo, a veteran Silicon Valley forecaster who explores long-term technological change and its... impact on business and society."
  (tags: future)
• Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use - washingtonpost.com
  Latest innovation from thw music industry: "the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer."
  (tags: business copyright music riaa law)

Cyborg cat

Mon 12/31/2007 16:19 12312007556

They usually sleep ON my books.

links for 2007-12-31

• Does the Future Need a Legal Guardian? - Dot Earth - Climate Change and Sustainability - New York Times Blog
  (tags: future)
• Feature: The 20 Best iPod Utilities
  (tags: ipod itunes software)

links for 2007-12-30

• David Crow: Reconsidering the command line
  "Command languages are emerging as effective way to interact with applications. The are appearing at the edges, where efficiency is incredibly important. Whether that’s through texting performance, or with expert users of web browsers."
  (tags: interface interaction_design command_line)
• Don Norman's jnd.org / UI Breakthrough-Command Line Interfaces
  "[T]he next UI breakthroughs will be... 1. Command line languages; 2. Physicality: the return to physical devices, where we control things by physical body movement, by turning, moving, and manipulating appropriate mechanical devices."
  (tags: interface interaction_design endofcyberspace haptics command_line future gui)
• Don Norman's jnd.org / UI Breakthroughs-2-Physicality
  On the revival of physicality in UI. "We are analog beings in an artificial world of digital devices, devices that abstract what is powerful and good from the physical world and turn it into information spaces, usually in arbitrary ways."
  (tags: interface design interaction_design endofcyberspace digital-physical)
• Zusch Login » Blog Archive » Delivery Spectrum
  "Some observers here, there, and yonder are predicting the come-back of the Command style, and it must be admitted that the accelerators employed in GUIs are a poor stub of once powerful command line languages."
  (tags: command_line gui interface interaction_design)
• The Return of Command Line Interfaces
  Dan Saffer argues, "Where I think we'll see a lot of use from command lines is in mobile devices, where screen real estate and entering full URLs is a real issue."
  (tags: interface interaction_design command_line gui mobility)

The decline of the graphical user interface (2): Rise of the command line

One of the arguments I'm trying to develop is that despite the wonderful growth of graphics capabilities in all kinds of places-- my Nokia N95 has nicer graphics than the Mac I had a few years ago-- the graphical user interface is slowly and surprisingly becoming less important in our lives. The interface on my iPod is a bunch of text menus; my cell phone alternates between menus and icons; and I use Quicksilver and Spotlight to find things much more often than I use folders.

Gina Trapani argued a year ago that while the

advent of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) forever revolutionized personal computing... the command line is making a comeback in modern web and desktop applications.

But I don't use the command line, you say. Oh but you do! Let's take a closer look at this surprising "circle of life" right back to the trusty old command line with some examples of CLI in modern personal computing.

I define a command line interface as a single input box that can execute complex operations based on what you type there. The command line isn't only used by Unix beards, Terminal freaks and Cygwin experts; you use it every day, probably several times a day. Case in point: the Google search box....

Application launchers like Windows' Launchy - and what I'd argue is the truest next-generation CLI available, Quicksilver for the Mac - are also leading the charge towards a command line interface.

Gina's is but one of a number of pieces that discuss the revival of command lines-- but also chart some ways in which the modern use of command lines differs from those in old interfaces.

Technorati Tags: command line, end of cyberspace, future, GUI, interface

End of an era

Via Wired:

Tom Drapeau, AOL's director of the Netscape brand, announced in a blog post Friday that AOL will cease development on all Netscape web browsers on February 1, 2008.

Technorati Tags: internet

links for 2007-12-29

• Pathable
  "Pathable leverages all the sophistication of online social networking tools while at the same time seamlessly integrating into face to face interactions."
  (tags: socialsoftware web2.0 conferences)
• A Threat So Big, Academics Try Collaboration - New York Times
  "The political landscape of academia, combined with the fight for grant money, has always fostered competition far more than collaboration. But the threat of global warming may just change all that."
  (tags: academia collaboration university climate)
• 3rd Global Knowledge Conference
  "Gathering over 1,700 global visionaries, innovators, practitioners and policy makers... GK3 successfully engaged participants in intensive discussions on how the threads of emerging people, markets and technologies will intertwine to deliver the future."
  (tags: conference knowledge development future)

The complex relationships between media

From Marc Andreesen's blog, quoting the New Yorker, July 14, 1951:

The most encouraging word we have so far had about television came from a grade-school principal we encountered the other afternoon.

"They say it's going to bring back vaudeville," he said, "but I think it's going to bring back the book."

Before television, he told us, his pupils never read; that is, they knew how to read and could do it in school, but their reading ended there. Their entertainment was predominantly pictorial and auditory -- movies, comic books, radio.

Now, the principal said, news summaries are typed out and displayed on the television screen to the accompaniment of soothing music, the opening pages of dramatized novels are shown, words are written on blackboards in quiz and panel programs, commercials are spelled out in letters made up of dancing cigarettes, and even the packages of cleansers and breakfast foods and the announcers exhibit for identification bear printed messages.

It's only a question of time, our principal felt, before the new literacy of the television audience reaches the point where whole books can be held up to the screen and all their pages slowly turned.

Okay, leave aside the point that watching books on TV would be only a little more boring than golf. But anyone who watches an hour of cable news is probably exposed to more words and numbers-- in the form of headlines, crawls, stock tickers, etc.-- than their grandparents saw in a day; likewise when browsing the Web. Of course, that's a total guess. But as I mentioned a little while ago, my son is keen to start reading more on his own so he can play more advanced video games. The bottom line is, the relationship between new media and old skills is always more complicated than we think.

Technorati Tags: reading, technology, television

The de-privatization of reading

Commenting on recent court cases over whether bookstores need to turn over records of book purchases to law enforcement authorities, Peter Brantley at O'Reilly Radar makes and interesting point:

[R]eading is tuning into a series of digital transactions, transitioning from a private matter of solitary, silent reading into an inherently social act suitable for data mining. Indeed, the fascinating historical work of Paul Saenger demonstrates how the revolutionary change wrought in the early Medieval Ages by the Arabs and the Irish of separating words with spaces and punctuation to ease the understanding of translated Latin texts enabled silent reading, which in turn created modern expectations for privacy in the matter of what we read and think....

So we all must then inquire of publishers building online digital text libraries, and Microsoft and Google with their online books corpora: what happens when the police and courts of the state come to you? : Are you prepared to respect and reassert in a digital age -- an age in which the act of reading is inherently recordable -- the individual's control of privacy that has been maintained over the last 700 years? The alternative is to begin a retreat to the sunken expectations for the disclosure of our thoughts and writing that echo with eerie fidelity the cloistered labyrinths of the oral culture of 1200 AD -- a world far more inimical to free expression.

[To the tune of The Church, "Under the Milky Way," from the album "Starfish".]

Technorati Tags: books, end of cyberspace, law, privacy, reading

links for 2007-12-25

• Human evolution is speeding up
  On the rapid evolution of new social networks.
  (tags: socialsoftware web2.0 culture)