suck it, Bono

“Lawyers have presented their final arguments in the trial of Alan Ellis. The prosecution slammed the ex-OiNK admin, saying that the site was set up with dishonest and profiteering intentions right from the start. The defense tore into IFPI and countered by calling Ellis an innovator with talents to be nurtured. Today the jury returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty, and Ellis walked free.

…..

“University of London professor Birgitte Andersenok gave evidence earlier in the trial, stating that file-sharing didn’t hurt the music industry and led to more sales.

…..

“At the end of the two week trial the jury returned a unanimous verdict (12 to 0). Alan Ellis is not guilty of Conspiracy to Defraud the music industry. He walked out of Teesside Crown Court a free man today, his name cleared.”

—–

score one for the music sharing p2p activists. fuck you Bono.

fcc plans net neutrality

this is freaking some people out in the internet world, but it seems like a good thing to me?

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2009-09-19-internet-rules-fcc_N.htm

its a far cry form my idyllic anarchist world, but apparently we are not evolved enough to leave out regulating some seedy greedy mo fo’s…. i am all for keeping the big companies out of controlling the weblines and turning the interweb into cable television 2.0

most of the opposition to the new regulation is AT&T, comcast and other giants while most small businesses and silicon start-ups love the idea. that –to me– speaks volumes.

seeeee bots run

About ©Bots

“Copyrighted memes live in our minds, influence our thoughts, even shape our decisions. We are hosts for these memes, yet we have no say in their design, nor do we have the legal right to alter them. Like sacred icons they are controlled by corporate high priests and defended by armies of lawyers. To defile a corporate memetic property is a sacrilege that incurs harsh punishment in the form of legal action and exorbitant fines. Anyone caught tampering with a corporate meme must be frightened away lest they alter the meme pool living in the host population, with potentially damaging consequences for the corporate profit stream.

The internet gives unprecedented ability to track behavioral patterns, preferences and buying habits. Businesses are flooding to this medium to exploit the growing population of potential consumers. Corporations compete for your attention, for access to your memory, fertile ground where they can install their memes. Your mind is the most valuable real estate in cyberspace. Memes infiltrate and multiply in this real-estate, usually without the host even knowing. Squatting in mental territory, corporations pay no rent to the owner of that property.

We at ©Bots urge you to reclaim your mental real-estate. Evict the sponging memes by sending ©Bots in after them. With ©Bots you can spread your own counter-memes into our collective mental space. ©Bots are built from familiar pop-culture components, so they can be readily absorbed into memory, yet they combine those elements into surprising and contradictory new forms. Over time ©Bots disrupt and dislodge entrenched memes, raising them to the conscious level where the host can control the impact of the meme in their lives.”

jump to web

face-feed

who are you? who are we? how do we interact? why are we networking?

—–

“Facebook just bought the rights to nearly everything you do online. And it cost them only $47.5 million.

Facebook’s purchase of FriendFeed, an obscure social-media platform, is potentially momentous. To understand why, we must understand FriendFeed, a start-up that is ubiquitous among techies and unknown to everybody else. It’s a sleek application that acts as a clearinghouse for all of your social-media activities. Post something to Flickr? That will show up on your FriendFeed page. Digg something? FriendFeed will know. Post to Twitter from your phone? FriendFeed will syndicate your tweets. Once you initially tell it where to look, it will collect everything and tell it to the world…..

…….

……….If this happens, Facebook will be the one portal to rule them all. Other than Google, that is. Google long ago took over much of our Internet usage: Gmail, Google Docs, Google search, etc. Facebook and Twitter, for now, are the two holdouts, bastions of independence in an increasingly consolidated Internet. (To be more precise: the user-generated Internet.) And Twitter may already be too integrated to count because of the way Facebook pipes it in.

That leaves two mega-conglomerates that will compete to be the portal of everything we do on the Internet. Google has long tried to get into the social game, and Facebook surely wouldn’t mind expanding into some of Google’s territory. (Real-time search is the likely entry point.) It’s as classic an American struggle as Pepsi vs. Coke. Two companies, one market. Regardless of which side you choose, I’m sure Facebook will be happy to air your thoughts on the matter. Even if you write them on Blogspot, Google’s blogging network. After all, that’s why Facebook bought FriendFeed. So it could own you.”

——

full article via washington post

my questions are these:

are we co-evolving with this technology that is therefore benefiting both the consumer and the producer positively, or are they increasingly convincing us that this is important and real? are these online relationships healthy? what comes next?

Transition Colorado @ Ning

http://transitioncolorado.ning.com/

Evolution’s third replicator

“WE HUMANS have let loose something extraordinary on our planet – a third replicator – the consequences of which are unpredictable and possibly dangerous.

What do I mean by “third replicator”? The first replicator was the gene – the basis of biological evolution. The second was memes – the basis of cultural evolution. I believe that what we are now seeing, in a vast technological explosion, is the birth of a third evolutionary process. We are Earth’s Pandoran species, yet we are blissfully oblivious to what we have let out of the box…..

…..

Putting it that way makes the answer easier to see. Memes are a new kind of information – behaviours rather than DNA – copied by a new kind of machinery – brains rather than chemicals inside cells. This is a new evolutionary process because all of the three critical stages – copying, varying and selection – are done by those brains. So does the same apply to new technology?

There is a new kind of information: electronically processed binary information rather than memes. There is also a new kind of copying machinery: computers and servers rather than brains. But are all three critical stages carried out by that machinery?….”

full article via newscientist

Upgrade the Brain matter – Webmynd

WebMynd makes Google better by personalizing it with the information sources that you most value. You can embed different search tools, search your WebMynd browsing history and your most frequently visited sites. Some people call the WebMynd browsing history a DVR for the web – it saves and records the pages you see online so you can find what you have seen before faster:

I had just written a little note today on Facebook moments before I found this Firefox ext. Webmynd.

” Is there something didactic in the ways in which the internet exercises our minds, meaning – what is the benefit of having to skim through unlimited amounts of information while simultaneously having to make conscious decisions about truth and reality? My profile right now is a picture of the internet – yes like a graph – mapping out all the data points on the web that we know and illustrating their “physical” connection – yet we know that its is all in fact just streaming 1′ and 0′s (fuck him/her or don’t fuck him/her)

An interesting philosophical view presented by a physicist named Nassim Haramein says that the human organism is the link between the largest things in the universe and the smallest…and if we take this idea and say that we each are perceiving the field of reality – taking in its information, which is in fact all just light – and then translating it into ourselves, or minds, hearts, bodies and souls – then each of is it not in anyway insignificant in the big scope of things – that we are all in fact equal and all one.

But this isn’t to say people cannot be given kudos based on merit, because those who put forth the effort to take in more information, are in fact applying themselves much more to the universe.

In todays day and age, technology offers us some luxury…Right now I do not farm, or clean, or walk everywhere and i have the time to sit around on the computer every once in a while.

And when I do this, i just surf around a realm of manipulated light which offers information streaming directing from the minds of billions of human organisms around the world….Interestingly, this is somewhat of a illustration of telepathy via external technology. Multicontextual media is standard now on the internet, with links, and everything else. Anyone can create a small brain on a subject for others to understand or ignore.
The internet, then, is letting us feed the universe with entirely new sets of information collectively, amplifying – perhaps exponentially – our potential for new realities.”

Webmynd gives you on the side of your google shred, the search results of a whole other bunch of areas from Amazong to Wikipedia to Delicious and whatever.  Then down in the bottom right of Firefox you click the play button and it has a record of your recent webactivity graphically and lets you search the whole thing.

Certainly some privacy issues…but not much place to hide in surveilling society anyway. Peace

Neuromancer

Check out these websites over the weekend – I’m very impressed, and frankly dumbfounded.

http://www.oosah.com/

http://greensamuraiclan.com/

http://www.hplusmagazine.com/

And if you have never used something del.icio.us I highly recommend it.  Here’s another something cool.

This article is very helpful as well.

20 dope websites

This is the craziest shit tho.  SOUNDCLOUD and RADIOCLOUDS

Radioclouds is a programmed developed by someone for Soundcloud, meaning they’ll hook up the codes if you wanna help expand the capabilities of their tech.

“neuromancer, perfect blend of technology and magic – use my rappin so you all can see the hazards…plus entetainment where many are brainless, we cultivated the lost art of study – and I brought a buddy…automater harder slayer fascinating combinations cyber warloads are activatin abominations…arma nation with hatred? we ain’t with that! we high-tec archeologists searchin for knick knacks…composin musical stimpacks that impact that soul, crack that mode of what you think you’re rappin for – i used to be a mech soldier but i didn’t respect orders, i had to step forward tell em this aint for us, livin in a post-apocalyptic world morbid and horrid the secrets of the past THEY HOARDED…now we just boarded, on a futuristic space-craft – no mistakes black its our music we must take back” 303-

Wikinomics

“The ability to pool the knowledge of millions (if not billions) of users in a self-organizing fashion demonstrates how mass collaboration is turning the new Web into something not completely unlike a global brain…Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service where the simple activity of tagging and storing web links becomes the basis for learning new things and making connections to new people.  “The actual database”, he says, “represents crystallized attention – what people are looking at, and what they’re trying to remember”

“There was a period of time where cinema was a very technical art.  You practically had to be an engineer just to run a camera.”  As the art form evolved, directors stepped up to become story tellers who were less and less preoccupied with cinematic engineering and more concerned with crafting rich and engaging experiences.  “I think something like that is happening on the web today…”

“The Internet is becoming a giant computer that everyone can program, providing a global infrastructure for creativity, participation, sharing, and self-organization.” -Wikinomics

I highly recommend – if you’re becoming bogged down with research or things like that and having a hard time keeping track of it, getting equipped with Google Reader or ShareThis.  Sharethis is particularly dope cause you can just embedd it into Firefox.

This is important too – however.  This woman at Northwestern University is doing research on “link-literacy”.

Scholar Lokman Tsui comments on it as well here:

A lot of people just cannot seem to distinguish bad from good links – there is a gap in ‘link literacy’. Now if some people already have trouble using links, can you imagine them using social tagging or other more sophisticated tools? Tools by themselves are not enough to empower people. Left without education, literacy and expertise, the rich will only get richer and the poor only .. poorer.

On a different note.

MIT OpenCourseWare

GaiaOnline

You guys seriously gotta check this shit out.  This was in the Art arena…according to the artist, she’s an alien