JoelFoner.com

Are We Engineering the Species that will Replace Us?

Please join us for a discussion every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, Feb 9nd, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

This Week’s Topic

NOTE: Since we’ll be watching some of the videos linked below at the start of the session, We Are The Network is scheduled for 90 minutes rather than an hour this week, to allow enough discussion time for a topic that will no doubt be … large.

Are We Engineering the Species that will Replace Us?

“It’s just science fiction!” We tell ourselves this little white lie about the movies we flock to. We think “wow, that’s cool, and pretty scary, but that could never happen.” The science fiction of the future is starting to happen closer and closer to home, and there are now some surprising signs that we may already have reached milestones on the road to engineering a cyborg (part human, part computer) species that will ultimately replace us.

You may think this is random paranoia, and feel free to say so on the way in, but I challenge you to say absolutely that we’re not on the path by the end… I’ve found it pretty hard to avoid the uncomfortable conclusion that “we will be Borg” sooner than any of us had expected.

In this session we’ll review some real working examples of technologies that would have seemed unbelievable five or ten years ago, and a compelling TED talk that maps out a potential roadmap for our future.

What does this mean for us? How will we get ready for these changes? Where will this head as it unfolds, and what will it mean for our society and humanity in general?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon!

Three things to consider:

1) A science fiction movie trailer, one that we all probably presume is “way” in the future, and a quick explanation of a plot element of another related science fiction movie.

2) Real working engineering results, with proof videos that demonstrate significant pieces of functionality from the movie trailer

3) A compelling TED talk that ties the threads together in a way that will likely make you stop and think.

It’s a fun ride… ready? Here are the links: Read more…

It is getting harder and harder, as a parent, to even pretend that I have visibility into the Internet use of my children. Back in “the good old days of the Internet”, computers were computers. Only things that were obviously computers could browse the Internet. Parents got comfortable with guidance such as “make sure that the only way to get on the Internet is in a common space in the house.” This popular strategy was designed to discourage children from visiting places on the ‘net that were inappropriate, since at any point someone (a parent type in particular) could wander in and see what is happening. Today’s personal communications tools obliterate the utility of that advice, making the computer protection approach ineffective. Pervasive txt messaging and smartphones like the iPhone, Blackberry and now Android OS based mobile communicators radically change the landscape for kids and parents. Read more…

I thought I’d write a post explaining some of the oddities of WiFi, why your wireless Internet performance can go from great to miserable in a matter of moments, and what you can do to improve the situation when your router decides to be “decidedly unhelpful.” Wireless connections can be an invisible and frustrating part of Internet connectivity, especially when you are running online voice, video and high bandwidth video games. This post explains some of the reasons for wireless system behavior, and how to improve the behavior and reliability of your wireless system.

Could Your Router Be Working Against You, Without You Noticing? Read more…

“How Will Google’s Personalization, Real-Time and Visual Search Announcements Change the World?”

Please join us for a discussion every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, Dec 8th, we will be at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

This Week’s Topic

How Will Google’s Personalization, Real-Time and Visual Search Announcements Change the World?

When I saw this cluster of announcements in the last 48 hours, I decided to write a brief thought piece about them. The three new announcements, search results that will be personalized even when you are not logged in, real-time search results and visual search, it seemed to me that these create a new ecosystem for thinking about search, potentially new search optimization automation options (read new companies or services) and potentially some changes to the way we think about advertising, marketing, person to person communication, and even how we think about ourselves.

How will these new features change the world? Will they change the way we socialize, the way we think about each other and the way we interact with each other? Where do we think these features are headed? They are early releases of capabilities – what would we guess are the next steps along each path?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon! Read more…

The Way Things Were Yesterday

In the land we’ve known, you could do static search engine optimization (SEO) of on-page elements on your web site or blog, consider strategy for offsite, tinker with it for a while, check the results, and have some confidence that the results you just saw reflected what your potential searchers would see 10 minutes later. Although people with personalization turned on may see different results, the issue of search consistency across users seems to not have been a strong focus for search engine optimization strategies to date.

This Is Today

The world of yesterday is about to vaporize, due to the confluence of three Google announcements.

Personalized Search Without Login

First, the announcement that Google will present personalized search results even if you are not logged in to a Google account. This means that if you do not stay logged in to Google, your laptop search results will likely not match your desktop at work, and will likely not match your home computer, because their search history will all be different.

Now extend this to other people on the web. Their search history will likewise be different, and their work Google login may not match their personal login, if they log in at all.

All of a sudden the simplistic “one set of search results per search query” assumption is completely gone, even for users who are not logged in to a Google account.

Real-Time Search Results

Delivery of real-time search results changes the game in obvious and subtle ways. Real-time search results provision leads us even farther down the path of creating, and needing to create, time-sensitive SEO strategies.

Real-time search results for all leads to the possibility of “Just In Time SEO” (to use a phrase from the manufacturing industry). Just In Time SEO changes content in real-time in order to reposition search results dynamically, potentially just before some event or strategic initiative where you would want highly placed results.

Another side effect of real-time search results might be a drive the creation of more real-time search engine optimization monitoring services.

Will we see disruptive corporate marketing strategies that at the surface are similar to denial of service attacks? Perhaps a competitor would create a content strategy that would “lie in wait” for the hour before a major event and the dynamically disrupt the SEO positioning of your firm just in time to intercept your positioning for the event, and then disappear from view after the fact? How many other ways could dynamic repositioning be used, for good and worse?

Visual Search

Google also announced visual search, in particular on the Android phones, with the idea that you can take a picture of something, Google will analyze it and deliver search results. The “something” might be a store front, or text from a book, or other objects around you. While it is clear that this technology is at the very start of its development cycle, the implications are immense.

Do you now have to generate an SEO strategy for pages in books, or screen captures, or for your brick and mortar stores? Do you have to watch out for signage in your stores, or perhaps parts of your web site, that if captured by a camera might lead to search results pointing to your competitor’s products and services? Will we see print advertising with custom graphics designed to link to specific search results?

The area of visual search raises the concept of “Visual Search Engine Optimization”, leading us to choose graphics and video with an eye (pun only sort of not intended) to whether these images help or hinder visual search optimization.

The potential privacy and policy issues generated by extensions of this technology are extensive, not to mention some potentially wild changes to societal expectations. For instance, what if by pointing a cell camera at a person, and not even taking their picture, you could have their latest blog posts, public profile, Tweets, comments by others about them, all show up on your mobile – without even knowing their name a-priori? This would not be possible with the first release. However it is not a long stretch to mash up the current face-tagging technology with this sort of search to enable such a feature.

This will be interesting.

Joel Foner 2009-12-06
* Added the “How To Make Your Viewer Run Even Faster (when you really need the most you can get!)” section

Joel Foner 2009-12-08
* Added “Stay Plugged In” (thanks to Ignatius Onomatopoea for this tip)

Introduction

Second Life™ provides a 3D visualization of virtual environments, dynamically rendered so that you can make changes and any other avatar within sight sees those changes in almost real time. The technologies underpinning these capabilities are complex and place serious demands on the CPU and 3D graphics accelerator on your local computer.

The good news is that all of this is possible. The bad news is that there are a lot of moving parts and it uses a lot of computing and graphics horsepower to get the job done. The performance you see depends on many things. There are many factors that determine the performance you see, including the speed of your computer’s 3D graphics processor, the main processor (CPU), your hard disk speed, how much RAM (memory) your computer has, network stability, network speed, how many avatars are in view, how many avatars are on the region that your avatar is standing on, other load factors on the region, as well as specific characteristics of how the scene is built.

This article shows how to improve the operating speed of the viewer on low performance computer hardware. These steps will only cover optimization of your computer, and will not include addressing other potential sources of performance problems.

Please note that this article assumes you have some Second Life™ experience, and that you are comfortable with opening menus and making settings changes in the Preferences pages in the viewer.

But I Just Bought A Machine. How Could It Be Low Performance?

You may have bought a computer pretty recently, and assumed “this machine is pretty new, so of course its 3D graphics performance must be good”. You could be in for a surprise. In this age of Read more…

Final edit updated Nov 28, 2009 22:40

Random Connections

Some days I’ll be thinking about a topic, and suddenly an unexpected connection appears. That just happened as I was reading two posts, one about potential changes to PageRank and another about a new protocol that Google is pitching to speed up web page loads. The PageRank discussion seemed to be completely about the marketing impact of this change on search engine optimization strategies, while the protocol discussions were centered on technology and global standards issues. It seems that these two apparently separate things may be very tightly coupled indeed.

PageRank, Page Speed And Marketing Effects

PageRank is supposed to measure the authority of a page, to determine whether
it is “the best” trusted and primary resource to answer the user’s search query. It is hard to fathom how response speed has anything to do with authenticity, authority, correctness of data or trustworthiness. It seems to be much more strongly linked to the cash position of the person or organization who authored the page, and how much they have invested in having the right page design, hardware and network infrastructure (either their own or hosted) to provide fast response.

One quasi-altruistic reason for adding or emphasizing page load in the PageRank calculations may be to nudge the web community to think more about page load speed when designing sites. However Read more…

Today at the MassDOT Developer Conference we got to talking about the goal of changing the image of buses and other mass transit to be the solution of choice for a wider spectrum of people.  Lost time is sometimes the reason that people will drive instead of taking public transportation.  It often takes longer to get to your goal using mass transit, and while en-route, you often can’t get much done, other than people watching or reading.

Then this little idea appeared…

Read more…

Virtual world event management is, in the large, similar to real life event management. You’ve got to make sure that guests and performers are lined up, that marketing and advertising is effective, and if it is a broadcast event, that the technical and support staff logistics have been completed. Security is a bit different in virtual world settings, and requires special handling in order to avoid enabling disruptions at your event. This post focuses on some specifics for Second Life™ security management; however, the principles are similar for other virtual world platforms.

Event Disruption Categories

• Purposeful region crashes (exploiting a bug to cause the region to crash “on demand”)
• Littering (leaving objects in inconvenient places, placing them out during an event, or moving them around in the way of the event)
• Pollution (planting a particle generator that creates a spray of smoke, fog or distasteful imagery)
• Disruptive chat or voice participation

Must-Do Security Checks

Read more…

Please join us for a discussion every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, November 10, we will be at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™
Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

This Week’s Topic

“Is Google Destined To Become Evil?”

In Google’s 2004 SEC registration statement was this statement from the founders of Google, explaining the new pact that Google would make with the world, in order to ease concerns about privacy, control and security related to the services that were being constructed, as well as others to come later on. This statement has been widely referred to as Google’s goal to “Don’t Be Evil”:

“DON’T BE EVIL

Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company. Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating. We also display advertising, which we work hard to make relevant, and we label it clearly. This is similar to a well-run newspaper, where the advertisements are clear and the articles are not influenced by the advertisers’ payments. We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to the information people pay for you to see.

MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE

We aspire to make Google an institution that makes the world a better place. In pursuing this goal, we will always be mindful of our responsibilities to our shareholders, employees, customers and business partners. With our products, Google connects people and information all around the world for free. We are adding other powerful services such as Gmail, which provides an efficient one gigabyte Gmail account for free. We know that some people have raised privacy concerns, primarily over Gmail’s targeted ads, which could lead to negative perceptions about Google. However, we believe Gmail protects a user’s privacy. By releasing services, such as Gmail, for free, we hope to help bridge the digital divide. AdWords connects users and advertisers efficiently, helping both. AdSense helps fund a huge variety of online web sites and enables authors who could not otherwise publish. Last year we created Google Grants—a growing program in which hundreds of non-profits addressing issues, including the environment, poverty and human rights, receive free advertising. And now, we are in the process of establishing the Google Foundation. We intend to contribute significant resources to the foundation, including employee time and approximately 1% of Google’s equity and profits in some form. We hope someday this institution may eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

Google is not a conventional company. Eric, Sergey and I intend to operate Google differently, applying the values it has developed as a private company to its future as a public company. Our mission and business description are available in the rest of this prospectus; we encourage you to carefully read this information. We will optimize for the long term rather than trying to produce smooth earnings for each quarter. We will support selected high-risk, high-reward projects and manage our portfolio of projects. We will run the company collaboratively with Eric, our CEO, as a team of three. We are conscious of our duty as fiduciaries for our shareholders, and we will fulfill those responsibilities. We will continue to strive to attract creative, committed new employees, and we will welcome support from new shareholders. We will live up to our “don’t be evil” principle by keeping user trust and not accepting payment for search results. We have a dual class structure that is biased toward stability and independence and that requires investors to bet on the team, especially Sergey and me.”

As Google has grown, it has accumulated and centralized a previously unknown level of personal information, made it eminently searchable in seconds, and provided numerous services that are focused on accomplishing these goals. At the same time, the willingness of people to freely share personal information (often in return for services that have the appearance of being free to the individual) is based on a generalized belief that Google will forever hold to its mantra of “do no evil”.  Is this a reasonable assumption?  What if that assumption, that millions of us have taken as a reasonable risk, turns out to be false?

A phrase that appears as part and parcel of corporate and political governance discussions is “Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely”.  Is Google on the path to absolute power (or perhaps has reached it already?), and if so, what would stop this long known maxim from exerting itself over time?

In this session we will discuss the meaning of absolute power in the Internet age, how Google fits into the picture of privacy, security and trust, and discuss some possible scenarios, both good and bad, for how Google’s continued expansion might play out.

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon!

Read more…