The world we "live" in...

This time it is more optimistic and less realistic:


Thanks to Erik for the link. The original is at http://www.xkcd.com/

Troubles in the virtual world

There is an article telling a story of FBI going into SecondLife to investigate gambling taking place inthe virtual world. While it may be entertaining to imagine FBI agents walking around as animated creatures of opposite sex and with wings, I think it rises an interesting question about the relationship between the virtual and and the physical.

As far as i understand this, US is trying to regulate online gambling through controlling financial transactions with online casinos. But things are different for SecondLife because people there are gambling with Lindens (L$), which is the virtual money used in this world. But the issue is getting more complex since there is an entire economy associated with SeconLife and L$ are actually having a market based exchange rate with real money (L$266 = US$1 as of yesterday). So the virtual is actually real, or the other way around.

I am not sure i have enough knowledge about the phenomenon, but i think this is really fascinating. How exactly and are we going to apply regulation from the physical world to the virtual one? Not only we had to deal with concepts of identities, nationalities and geographical boundaries in virtual reality, but now we also have to address the virtual economy and its relation to the real world... Just writing this post and picking at all the statistics of economic activity there amazed me a lot. And there is much more going on there in other virtual worlds, such as WoW and other. This is simply very interesting and even fascinating.

We are on the map!!!

Did you ever hear about the Nigerian fraud? So, here is an Israeli version of it. I think it is rather funny:

Private Ward 6,
Rambam Medical Center,
P O Box 151, Beer Sheba 84101
Tel Aviv.
Israel.
Email: jaron.abbas@inmail24.com

Hello,
I am very sorry to embarrass you with this email as I did not mean to intrude in your privacy if not for the peculiar situation I have found myself. As you read this, don't feel sorry for me, because it is the destiny of everyman to die someday. I am Jaron Abbas an Israeli by birth and a business merchant based in Tel Aviv. I have been diagnosed with esophageal cancer.
It has defiled all forms of medical treatment, and right now I have only about a few months to live, according to medical experts. I regret that I have not particularly lived my life so well, as I never really cared for anyone (not even myself), but my trade. Though I am very well to do, I was never open handed; I was always hostile to people and regarded them like they never had hopes of becoming as successful as myself. Now I know that there is a lot more to life than just prosperity.
I believe that when I am given a second chance to come to this world, I would live my life a different way from how I have lived it. Now that death is imminent, I have willed and given most of my belongings to immediate and extended family members, as well as a few close friends. I want Allah to be merciful to me and accept my soul. Hence I have decided to support charity work; this is what I want to be remembered for. So far, I have been able to reach out to a few charity organizations in the Singapore, Algeria and Malaysia. Now that my health has deteriorated so badly, I cannot do this myself anymore.
I once asked members of my family to aid me in giving of alms to those organizations catering for the less privileged in Bulgaria and Pakistan; they refused and kept the resources to themselves. Hence, I do not trust them anymore, as they seem not to be contempt with what I have left for them.
The last of my belonging which no one knows of, is the huge deposit of $2.5 Million US dollars that I have in a safe keeping company abroad, which I will want you to secure and bestow to charity organizations.
I have set aside a tenth of this for you.
If interested to help me use this funds to charity organizations please contact me on: jaron.abbas@inmail24.com for more details.
Allah is with you.
Jaron Abbas

We are on the map!

Shut down day

This is basically a free advertisement for an initiative promoting a day-long abstention from computers. Unfortunately, the organizers do not provide any explanations for why they suggest shutting the computers down for a day. This, and the negative tone of the call for action, may be the reason behind quite a sound opposition to this initiative.

However, i would suggest examining it with a calm head and thinking about this day as a day of re-examining the priorities and proportions in our lives. When i say proportion, i mean proportions of both the great contribution of technology to our lives and at the same time, our growing dependency on it. I will write more on the subject and suggest a little bit different way to approach this issue soon, but in the meantime, please mark you calendars and try making it. You will be surprised to discover that it can be actually nice.

So, here is the date: Saturday, 24 March 2007.
Event's website

And here is a funny video for you to watch, just before you use the "turn off" button:

Firfox profile

I think it's been over half a year since i completely switched to Firefox and, frankly, do not have any desire of getting back to IE (except for the rare occasions when the site doesn't come up right). Particularly i like it because of all the add-ons. I got this small weather bar at the bottom of the window, which is extremely helpful in the erratic Ithaca weather. I love BugMeNot plug-in and DownThemAll is also very handy. I am checking out a citation add-on from Zotero and am about to switch to del.ish.us as the main favorites manager. And there are more which i don't have the time to look up. I can feel the program getting more and more customized to my needs and it nice.

But there is also a concern. I am still using windows. So eventually i will have to re-install the computer. What will happen to all the personalization i have done to Firefix when i re-install it? The beauty of these add-ons is that they become so "transparent" that you just use them without thinking: "here i am going to use DownThemAll", or "i am checking weather with Forecastfox" (I actually had to look up the name of the add-on, to write about it here). You simply use it.

So here is the idea, and my guts' feeling is that it has been implemented already, but if not, i hope someone with enough coding skills will pick the challenge up. What if we could save a profile of our Firefox? Kind of an image that we could put at a newly installed machine, and it would have all the features we got used to? Such an image could be stored at a third party server, or you could just make it locally and back it up. But the main pint is that you personalized configuration of Firefox would be backed up.

What do you think?

So much for the innovation...

Skype founders create online television service

Skype founders are Joost in time for online TV plan

Skype founders take TV to Net

Global Internet TV Service by Skype

Right now Google.news shows 278 articles (and counting) with these and similar headlines. All of them are dealing with the recent announcement of Skype founders, Niklas Zennstrm and Janus Friis, that they are going to lunch an internet based TV service they call "Joost". From my reading of a few news articles, what they are offering is to replace your TV screen with a computer screen and your decoder box provided by the cable company by software on their servers. The business model is based on advertisement (means you pay nothing exept for your time and privacy) until they offer a pay-per-view option, and they also promise the service to be piracy-proof (well, that one we'll have to wait and see).

As much as i love Skype and think it was breaking through idea at the time, right now i fail to see the great promise of Joost. Why would people like watching their TV on a computer screen? Does it mean they need to upgrade their computers to have at least 29 inch screen and a decent sound system? Does it mean the computer is moving from the office to the living room? What is the relative advantage of watching commercial based content online, vs. paying a relatively low fee and gaining full control over the content and the settings where one can view it? Today you can buy most of the content that Joost is going to offer on DVD or VoD and it doesn't cost that much (that is assuming you follow the legal way, otherwise it is even less) and you can choose where and when to watch it. One place where watching something in real time worth the effort is sports, but then again comes the question if the computer screen experience worth the $10 for the sports channel on cable? The cable companies start offering bundles of services including TV, phone and internet, so the relative part of paying for the content is probably diminishing even though it is hard to determine. Will people be willing to jeopardize their privacy even more and let also "Joost" follow what they are watching and where they are surfing? Well, the notions of privacy seems to be changing, so maybe the last question has a more obvious answer.

If Joost does go big however, one possible positive outcome from a consumers' point of view may be decrease in pricing of cable TV services. At the same, i think Microsoft's attempt to turn the x-box into a media center by connecting it to the web and actually offering the content, bares the similar, if not greater potential. Anyway, both of them are aiming at the Western, developed countries, which raises a series of additional questions about digital inclusion (divide), but that is for another post.

Even if i am mistaken in my skepticism, and Joost is going to be the next big thing (i.e. people value their privacy, time and limited ability to choose less than few dozens dollars or shekels), i still cannot get rid of the feeling that Joost is the same old thing we all know, just the cover is different (similar to the recent Google-Orange partenership). Unlike Skype that presented an innovative thinking about the technology and people's needs, Joost seems to replicate the old package and just shifting the platform. So much for the innovation...


------------------------
Update, 13:00 - Apparently i am not the only one asking these questions. Take a look here for example (and she has probably different incentives thinking about this things than i do).

Interests

A few days ago, when Saddam Husein was executed i looked what were the top topics in various online environments (it just seemed to be the only thing in most mainstream US media).

So, the top story in google.news was about Husein, as well as the top tag at technorati's web page. However, when i checked out digg.com, there was no trace of Saddam Husein's execution on the entire first page. Top stories dealt with gadgets and video games. For those who don't know, digg is a website that allows users to rate the relevance/importance of news items. Some view it as the next step in organizing the huge amounts of information we are exposed to.

Frankly, i was surprised. I just wanted to see what were the different versions of coverage of the execution, but i did not expect to find no coverage at all.

So, looking at the surprising results at digg, i thought. Is it an indication of the true priorities of web users in terms of news content? Or it is a unique feature of digg users?Or it is simply that social classification of news doesn't work?

Any thoughts?