Charlie Rose' by Samuel Beckett

This is famously reclipped Charlie Rose video by Andrew Fillipone, Jr, in which Rose appears to be interviewing himself with little success about the future of the internet.
Source PSFK

Add-Art: The Entire Web as Art Gallery

Add-Art is a free FireFox add-on that transforms website advertising into a curated art show featuring rotating works by emerging artists that are selected from a submissions database. The open source project was developed by artist Steve Lambert with support from Eyebeam and Rhizome. The idea emerged from the popularity of existing “adblockers” that merely replace ads with blank space, providing clutter-free surfing. Lambert felt they could take this service a step further and offer a richer experience to users in the process, by simply converting browsers into virtual art galleries instead.

Introduction to Add-Art from Steve Lambert on Vimeo.
Read more here Source PSFK

An Animated History of the Internet

We came across this eight minute animated documentary titled “The History of the Internet” by Mehil Bilgil that touches on the innovations that have made our interconnected online lives possible.  The video uses voiceover accompanied by PICOL icons, a pictorial communication language created by Bilgil for his university thesis.  The project is in the early stages of developing a simplistic and universal sign system to enable easier electronic communication that is free from the constraints of written language.  While the current library of icons available for download is small, the open source system invites more designers to get involved.  We’ll be interested to see if it will grow into the more sophisticated sibling of the emoticon or remain a niche form of discourse for a select few.

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

Source PICOL

YouTube to Create Global Orchestra Online

YouTube’s latest venture is a good example of new approaches to collaboration: an endeavor to engage musicians from all over the world and create the first global symphony orchestra in the process.  Although grand in scope, the concept’s success relies on individual participation. To that end, musicians of all types are asked to record themselves playing any classical selection of their choosing, along with a piece written specifically for this project by composer Tan Dun entitled “The Internet Symphony”.  All videos of the original composition will then be rolled into one collective performance to generate the global event. Contributors are given the opportunity to download sheet music and rehearse with a conductor online. As an added incentive, the best entrants (as voted on by the larger community) will be invited to a 3-day summit that culminates in a live concert held at Carnegie Hall. Submissions are being accepted through January 28.  Details and tutorials are available on YouTube’s microsite.

Source ReadWriteWeb

В новом отчете Центра цифровых технологий будущего говорится, что в ряде стран мира доступ к интернету уже имеют около 100% детей от 12 до 14 лет.

Центр цифровых технологий будущего (Center for the Digital Future) опубликовал результаты нового опроса молодых людей в возрасте от 12 до 14 лет из 13 стран мира о доступе в интернет. По доступности интернета для молодежи лидирует Великобритания - там Сетью пользуются 100% опрошенных. На втором месте Израиль - 98%. Далее идут Чехия и Макао (по 96%), а также Канада (95%). США оказались только на шестом месте - 88% респондентов заявили, что имеют доступ к Сети.

В рамках данного исследования, сотрудники университета Южной Калифорнии опросили более 25 тыс. молодых людей в странах Азии, Северной и Южной Америки, Европы и Австралии и период с начала 2007 г. по 2008 г.

Среди пользователей старше 18 лет, по доступности интернета лидируют Швеция, Новая Зеландия, Канада и США, передает CNews.

Также в отчете говорится, что мобильные телефоны для доступа в Сеть 

использует очень малое количество опрошенных во всех странах, за исключением Британии. Многие аналитики прогнозируют быстрый рост популярности мобильного интернета среди пользователей. Особенно он будет заметен в Юго-Восточной Азии и Африке.

Source BYBANNER.COM & Center for the Digital Future

WEB GIANTS LAUNCH HUMAN RIGHTS CODE FOR DESPOT NATIONS

WASHINGTON, DC: Following sustained criticism of their craven compliance with personal information demands by totalitarian regimes, the planet's dominant web trio –Google, Yahoo and Microsoft – have  adopted a new code of conduct drafted by a group that includes human rights organizations 

Members of Congress and democratic rights organizations worldwide have condemned the companies for supplying personal information to authoritarian governments.

Yahoo, in particular, faced questioning by Congress last year for surrendering emails that led to the imprisonment of Chinese dissidents. 

The new code, titled the Global Network Initiative, comprises a set of principles drafted over the past two years. They undertake to . . . 

• Protect the personal information of their users wherever they do business; 
  
• "Narrowly interpret and implement government demands that compromise privacy," as defined by the code; 
  
• Scrutinize a country's track record of jeopardizing personal information and freedom of expression before launching new businesses in that country; 
  
• Discuss all such risks widely with executives and board members of a signatory company.

Says Google's director of corporate and policy communications Robert Boorstin: "Common action by these diverse groups is more likely to bring about change in government policy than the efforts of any one company or group acting alone." 

While Yahoo ceo Jerry Yang [in what might be a valedictory message] hailed the new principles as "a valuable roadmap that will help ensure that technology and the internet continue to help improve people's lives". 

But dissenting voices say the code does not go far enough. "More serious questions have to be asked about [a participating]  company's legal obligations," argues Morton Sklar, US executive director of theWorld Organization for Human Rights. 

Sklar wants the code to address whether internet companies are violating US or international laws by complying with requests from certain governments.

Data sourced by WARC from Wall Street Journal Online; additional content by WARC staff, 29 October 2008

Our Old Language

Our behaviour and the technologies we use change faster than the language we use (I'm still "spinning" when I'm DJ'ing, even though the only thing spinning these days is my hard drive).

Similarily, old models trap us into using outdated mental constructs to make sense of a world that no longer really fits those models. I'm fascinated by this, and the process by which we collectively abandon those old models.

Journalism and the "news" is a perfect example. Matt over at the Newsless.org has written a series of brilliant posts over the past couple of months that explore new ways of thinking about journalism. An emerging theme is the assertion that the article is no longer the basic unit of the news

On the Web, the lowly, essentially static article often proves an insufficient instrument with which to present stories, yet the basic unit of today’s news site is still the article. For this reason, we still find it difficult to tell our most complex stories well on the Web.

From what I can tell, we inherited this state of affairs from our printed predecessors. When we started news sites, there was just no other plainly obvious way to present news stories, and most of those stories were coming from the newspaper at any rate. So we presented them on the Web the same way we do in print — discrete, self-contained compositions, including whatever context could fit into a paragraph or two, ornamented with photos and graphics.

Parallels to how marketers and brands think about media and communication are pretty clear. For the most part, the discret, self-contained composition has the "creative idea" (or, the television advertisement). Mostly because, well, that's the way it has been, technology packaged it like that, and so on.

Matt has some brilliant thoughts on what the future looks like, starting with the understanding that "every news event represents a data point to another story", and that a richer understanding of the broader topic might generate further interest in that topic. Many of the other data points might not be known to us right away, but it will be the job of journalism to provide that context by using powers of pattern recognition to connect the dots (planners pick up your pencils and get to work, because in marketing that will be you doing the lion's share of pattern recognition).

So, rather than think of articles as compact pieces limited by the physical space they once occupied (in print for instance), and aimed at a target audience of people who knew what the story was all about in the first place because where would you have the luxury to spell out the context?, the job now is to expand our understanding by building richer stories, more layers and a stronger context for the interconnected pieces.

That last point is crucial, especially when thinking about brands and media, since we'll need to make sure that we don't confuse the article (the advertising) from the story (the context, the interconnected ecosystem of nodes that "bubble up" to a something much bigger). For, as Matt says, somewhat echoing a transmedia vision of what the future might look like.

We’ve been wedging our stories into articles for so long, it can be difficult to separate the two. But a big part of the opportunity before us is to start telling grand, complex and unending stories with tools fit for the task.

Further info here IQblog: Predicting the next 5000 days of the web

Source Chroma: Our Old Language