Monday, January 1, 2007

ZON Dollars Where the Virtual & Real World Collides for Good in the World ZON DOLLARS CONCEPT-JAN 1, 2007 Dear Google Org, Amazon and Linden Labs People: I submit this idea for your consideration: It has been posted to the Internet via Google docs, its URL is: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dcjvvpr5_2frhqm6 ZON Dollars Where the Virtual & Real World Collides for Good in the World: The idea for ZON dollars has its roots in three things I read as the final moments of 2006 played out: 1. Allision H Fine's wonderful new book: "Momentum-igniting social change in the connected age.", which can be purchased at Amazon. 2. Amazon's new project that uses 37signals Ruby on Rails to build a new application called Unspun , which is based on an application Amazon has called the mechanical Turk. 3.An article called: "What is Second Life?" Of course, the reference to a virtual currency comes directly from Second Life's "The Linden dollar". I guess the challenge delivered by Allision Fine in her book: "Momentum" is how do we harness technology and the economy to do good? ZON dollars is my attempt at doing just that through the creation of a virtual currency that at its core involves both voluteerism and doing good throughout the world. ZON dollars can only be earned by: 1. individuals or corporations donating to recognized charities(those that can issues tax receipts) for conversion into ZON dollars, for the sole purpose of motivating people to do good. through the use of those ZON dollars. 2. doing virtual work through participating companies like Amazon's Mechanical Turk Service, a portion, determined by the worker goes to charities in the form of ZON dollars, while the remainder goes to the virtual worker, to be used as they see fit. 3. corporations who are so confident of the worth of their product that they openly invite comparision by consumers, donate ZON dollars to encourge concensus rankings of their product using Amazon's new Unspun service. People are encouraged to vote on the best products i in those categories, and the ZON dollars are distributed to the charity that the sponsoring corporation names when they open the community concensus on their product category. ZON dollars can be converted to: 1. real currency for use to purchase goods at Amazon.com or via Google's new ecommerce system. 2. they can be converted to Linden dollars for use in Second Life. So I guess those are my inititial thoughts related to the ZON dollar concept, I will now publish this, and also email the concept to the above named entities that could actually implement the concept, a. Google.org, Amazon's Unspun & Second Life. As Allision Fine's book title says, I wonder if this concept will: 'ignite social change in the connected age" Sincerely Gregers Ritzer-January 1, 2007 4:36:47 PM

Saturday, December 30, 2006

Top 10 Astronomy Images of 2006. The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomical observatories on the ground and in space return many terabytes of data every year. But which bytes are the best? I combed through thousands of pictures to find the Top 10 astronomy images of the year." [Slashdot] 10:18:15 AM     Oldies but goldies benefit in digital revamp of charts. Record industry agrees to shakeup of Top 75 listing as downloads give new lease of life to dinosaurs of rock. [Guardian Unlimited] 10:14:45 AM     GAO: Federal IT worker exchange draws little interest. A plan to swap federal IT workers with their private-sector counterparts to broaden IT skills has not resulted in one employee exchange, a government watchdog agency reports. [Computerworld IT in Government News] 10:12:24 AM     Hot picks: the best tech of 2006. Our panel of technology experts guide you through their top gadgets and devices of the last year. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition] 10:09:09 AM

Tuesday, May 2, 2006

Absolutely Fucking Right On Neil Young!Living With War     OK, so you gotta check out Neil Young's latest effort-LIVING WITH WAR 9:02:16 PM

Friday, December 2, 2005

Another concept poached from Udell-Screencasting, here is grounbreaking article: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/ Screencasting's one-year anniversary A screencast is a digital movie in which the setting is partly or wholly a computer screen, and in which audio narration describes the on-screen action. It's not a new idea. The screencaster's tools -- for video capture, editing, and production of compressed files -- have long been used to market software products, and to train people in the use of those products. What's new is the emergence of a genre of documentary filmmaking that tells stories about software-based cultures like Wikipedia, del.icio.us, and content remixing. These uses of the medium, along with a new breed of lightweight software demonstrations, inspired the collaborative coining of a new term, screencast. [Full story at O'Reilly Network] The O'Reilly Network asked me to define and explain screencasting for an article in its "What is...?" series. By a happy coincidence, it was published exactly one year1 after I chose the name screencast proposed separately by Joseph McDonald and Deeje Cooley, from among a wealth of delightful alternatives including dynavid, democast, and appflick. Last week a reporter interviewed me about screencasting and asked: "Is this the next big thing, like podcasting?" I don't think so. It's true that the word has entered the vernacular: 200 Google hits for screencast in April 2005, 60,000 in June, 325,000 in November. But I don't expect screencast ever to reach podcast's 65,900,000 because the scope of the medium is inherently more bounded. Encompassing both music and the spoken word, podcasting addresses a large swath of human experience. Screencasting addresses the much narrower slice of human experience that's mediated by computers, software, and networks. That slice is, of course, growing by leaps and bounds. The web is becoming part of the fabric of everyday life. In coffee shops, living rooms, and libraries, as well as in the workplace, our real experience of the world -- and of one another -- is increasingly augmented by virtual experience. Screencasting lives at the intersection of these worlds, I told the reporter. As virtual experience becomes part of everyday life, we'll want to document, describe, and share that experience for the same reasons we tell stories, sing songs, and show pictures. 10:28:43 PM     Stolen from Jon Udell's weblog: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/ Tuesday, November 29, 2005 Web 3.0: Peer-to-peer air travel and electric power Although the internet seems to touch every aspect of our lives, its network effects have yet to transform two major infrastructures: electric power and air travel. In earlier items -- The energy web and Peer-to-peer air travel -- I wrote about how we'll expose these infrastructures to the kinds of network effects that we now take for granted when we use services like craigslist and eBay. The visions are spelled out most clearly in the EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute) roadmap, a lucid prescription for an intelligent power grid, and in James Fallows' Free Flight, which chronicles the efforts of Eclipse Aviation and others to create air taxi services that leverage thousands of regional airports like mine. When I wrote those earlier essays in 2002 and 2004, I imagined two watershed scenarios. The first would involve networking my home appliances in order to itemize my electric bill, and to expose my electricity consumption to price-sensitive management both by me and by a management service. In the second scenario, I'd negotiate online for an air taxi that would take me and a handful of fellow travelers directly from my regional airport to its counterpart near my destination, bypassing both of the usual spokes as well as the Chicago hub. While neither scenario is imminent, both are now more clearly discernible on the horizon. The June 2005 issue of Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 mentions two companies working to make these visions real: GridPoint and DayJet. GridPoint has two products. GridPoint Protect combines generator-based backup power for homes and businesses with demand-management software that enables (retrofitted) appliances to be scheduled for off-peak operation. GridPoint Connect uses the same demand-management technology in the same ways, but also offers intelligent management of renewable sources such as solar power. Writes Esther Dyson: The idea is simple: to move beyond time-of-day utility pricing/consumption to something more granular, and to give users automated tools to control their usage in reaction to their own needs, to price/demand fluctuations of power supplies, and -- more novel --- demands of other users. DayJet wants to use the same kind of peer-network negotiation to optimize air travel. The company's CEO is Ed Iacobucci, who I first met in 1989 when he came to BYTE to show us the original OS/2-based version of Citrix which he'd left IBM to create. In 2006 DayJet plans to take delivery of a fleet of Eclipse 500 jets and launch an air taxi service. The CEO of Eclipse, incidentally, is Vern Raburn, another veteran of the software industry (Microsoft, Lotus, Symantec). In the Web 2.0 era, we're learning how to build and use software that enables us to collectively manage information resources. Those skills will serve us well in Web 3.0, when we expose other kinds of resources -- power, transportation -- to the same network effects. 10:03:08 PM

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Canada sets January 23 vote after government ousted (AFP). Yahoo! News: Top Stories] 8:32:44 PM     Mac Mini Kaleidoscope Project Leaked. Lately I've been researching ways to add a Mac Mini to my home theater set, and maybe even replace my second-generation TiVo in the process. Now it looks like I won't have to work very hard: Apple is set to unveil a new Mac Mini at MacWorld that includes Front Row 2.0, DVR functionality and an iPod dock. This project is dubbed Kaleidoscope and will be aimed at the living room, according to ThinkSecret. The Mini will have Intel inside, like lots of other machines being unveiled at the show (six months sooner than expected). Processor speed and other specs are unknown, although it's a safe bet that the hard drive will be larger. I hate to give up my TiVo—the remote control alone makes it a keeper. But TiVo Desktop has not panned out like I'd hoped, and I'm looking for a way to get my music library, photos and the DVR functionality on my living room set. So, what would you do—keep TiVo, wait for the Mini, or something else? Road to Expo: Reborn Mac mini set to take over the living room [ThinkSecret] [Gizmodo] 7:58:13 PM     Overhaul for Firefox web browser. A big marketing push is planned for the latest version of Firefox, the main rival to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition] 7:54:01 PM

Thursday, November 24, 2005

Many Went Online for Hurricane News (AP). AP - More than half of U.S. Internet users went online for news and information about Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the vast majority having visited the Web sites of traditional news organizations such as CNN and MSNBC, a study finds. [Yahoo! News: Technology News] 7:25:05 PM     EcoModo - The Best of Treehugger. This week at Treehugger: A Weapon of Mosquito Destruction: The Mosquito Magnet. A Hand-Powered Night Vision Monocular that allows you to see in the dark without batteries. Hewlett Packard decides that having toxic flame retardant on the outside of its laptop casings might not be such a good idea. Also, from the Crazy But Cool Department, a man builds a private island out of empty soda cans (can this be called a Do-It-Yourself island?), and finally, we have a look at how Google and PowerEscape fight runaway energy consumption. The person who invented this cross between a barbecue and a motorboat really hates mosquitoes! Lucky for us, he or she also had a dislike for insecticide and these glowing traps that vaporize insect dust in the air we breathe. The way this "biting insect trap" works is by emitting a fake "breath" of CO2 with a scent that is attractive to the little vampires (mosquitoes locate their victims primarily with exhaled carbon dioxide). The device then sucks in the bugs in a radius of up to 1.25 acres (around 5,000 square meters) and dehydrates them (and then turns them into MREs?). This device is a night vision scope, and quite fortuitously, it doesn't require any batteries. Instead, it's has a lever-activated power supply, so you can generate your own power ad hoc, and thereby see in the night, without fear of energy failure (that is, unless a sudden lassitude engulfs you). Hewlett Packard has announced that it will remove a bromated flame retardant (BFR) from the outer case parts of all new products released after December of 2006. BFRs have been associated with endocrine disruption and impairment of mental skills, and have been found in women’s breast milk. Bromated flame retardants in electronics can also make e-waste more hazardous. For something that is supposed to make the product safer, it sure seems dangerous. We couldn't make this stuff up: this man, Reishee Sowa of Puerto Aventuras, Mexico, apparently grew tired of trying to live self-sufficiently on dry land, and did what any of us would have done. He built his own island out of used pop bottles. 250,000 of them, plus some construction leftovers and bags of leaves, make up "his island," though he's quick to point out that it's technically not an island by traditional standards. "You see not even the president is allowed his own island in Mexico," he says, "but technically I don’t have an island, I have an eco space-creating ship." Google vice president of operations Urs Hoelzle told us in a TG Daily article a little about Google's energy efficiency problems and how it tries to solve them, and this post is about PowerEscape Insight, a way to optimize software so that the hardware it runs on requires less power. It can of course be applied to computers, but also certainly to all kinds of electronic that might run software that makes chips run hotter than they should. Treehugger’s EcoModo column appears every Tuesday on Gizmodo. [Gizmodo] 5:12:32 PM     Government of Canada provides over $1.3 million to help integrate skilled immigrants and internationally trained Canadians into the workforce. The Honourable Anne McLellan, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness and Member of Parliament for Edmonton Centre on behalf of Belinda Stronach, Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development and Minister responsible for Democratic Renewal, today announced over $1.3 million in funding, through Human Resources and Skills Development Canada's Foreign Credential Recognition (FCR) Program, for three projects being carried out by Alberta-based organizations that will help integrate immigrants and internationally trained Canadians into the workforce [Government of Canada News - Alberta] 5:01:13 PM     Murdoch predicts gloomy future for press. Media: Rupert Murdoch forecasts gloomy future for newspapers with the growth of the internet. [Guardian Unlimited] 4:38:57 PM     Freesound Reaches 10000 Files. Bram writes ""The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, -not songs-... released under the Creative Commons Sampling+ License. The Freesound Project provides new and interesting ways of accessing and browsing these samples." In less that 7 months we've grown to 30000 users and today we finally reached the first goal of the project: we've collected over 10000 samples, added by various people around the globe: only a slashdotting would be a suiting birthday cake. If you do visit Freesound, don't forget to have a look at the Geotagged Samples as they are well worth it." [Slashdot] 4:38:10 PM

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Library won't buy Sony CDs. Cory Doctorow: Edward Vielmetti reports that his local library system in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is declaring a moratorium on buying CDs from Sony: I've passed word on to our selectors not to buy any Sony/BMG copy-protected CDs for the forseeable future. Not only is this reprehensible, but we could get into some support nightmares if people try to remove the rootkit since it's gotten so much press. Link Sony Rootkit Roundup: Part I, Part II, Part III (Cool Sony CD image courtesy of Collapsibletank) [Boing Boing] 6:11:49 PM

© Copyright 2007 Ted Ritzer. Last update: 1/1/07; 7:39:44 PM.