Web 2.0 Expo 2008: Clay Shirky (blip.tv) – ‘A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken.’

Clay Shirky, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus:

“I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.”

Waxy, Internet Power, Volume 1: Flashback to the VHS-Era Web:

“Lately, I’ve started collecting old VHS tapes about the Internet from the early- to mid-1990s. While most of these are pretty corny — think Gabe and Max’s Internet Thing — they also inadvertently captured pieces of the web that don’t exist anywhere else. The Internet Archive’s earliest snapshots were in late 1996, so anything before that is extremely sparse. The videos, silly as they are, still represent valuable documentation of the early web.”

“Enabled by the miracle of abundance, digital economics has turned traditional economics upside down. Read your college textbook and it’s likely to define economics as “the social science of choice under scarcity.” The entire field is built on studying trade-offs and how they’re made. Milton Friedman himself reminded us time and time again that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

But Friedman was wrong in two ways. First, a free lunch doesn’t necessarily mean the food is being given away or that you’ll pay for it later — it could just mean someone else is picking up the tab. Second, in the digital realm, as we’ve seen, the main feedstocks of the information economy — storage, processing power, and bandwidth — are getting cheaper by the day. Two of the main scarcity functions of traditional economics — the marginal costs of manufacturing and distribution — are rushing headlong to zip. It’s as if the restaurant suddenly didn’t have to pay any food or labor costs for that lunch.

Surely economics has something to say about that?”

“Classical-music culture on the Internet is expanding at a sometimes alarming pace. When I started my blog, I had links to seven or eight like-minded sites. Now I find myself part of a jabbering community of several hundred blogs, operated by critics, composers, conductors, pianists, double-bassists, oboists (I count five), artistic administrators, and noted mezzo-sopranos (Joyce DiDonato writes under the moniker Yankee Diva). After a first night at the Met, opera bloggers chime in with opinions both expert and eccentric, recalling the days when critics from a dozen dailies, whether Communist or Republican or Greek, lined up to extoll Caruso. Beyond the blogs are the Internet radio stations; streaming broadcasts from opera houses, orchestras, new-music ensembles; and Web sites of individual artists. There is a new awareness of what is happening musically in every part of the world. A listener in Tucson or Tokyo can virtually attend opening night at the Bayreuth Festival and listen the following day to a première by a young British composer at the BBC Proms.”

The New Yorker: The Well-Tempered Web. The Internet may be killing the pop CD, but it’s helping classical music

Rondetijden meeschrijven anno 2007

Schaatsen op schaatsen.nos.nl, met ondermeer live de actuele rondetijden, tussentijden en standen in beeld. (via)

“Op vrijdag 21 september 2007 reikt Bits of Freedom voor de vijfde keer de Big Brother Awards uit. Met de Awards worden de persoon, het bedrijf of de overheidsinstelling te kijk gezet die zich het afgelopen jaar te buiten zijn gegaan aan het controleren van burgers en afbreken van hun privacy. Vanaf vandaag kan iedereen nominaties indienen.”

Big Brother Awards 2007 – Nominaties gezocht!

Zie ook XS4ALL’s Opinie: Big Brother Awards.

Achtergronden bij het artikel: What’s happened to innovation at the BBC?

Google Web History

Nial Kennedy: “Yahoo! released Yahoo! Pipes tonight, a visual editing interface for web feed manipulation and reconstruction.”

Tim O’Reilly: “Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.”

Anil Dash: “Is Pipes going to be a success? In many ways it already is.”