Media moguls, embrace the new opportunities!

In the growing climate of “if you not with us you are criminal” I just want to clarify this:

• Is file sharing illegal? NO WAY! It is all about what files are shared.
• Do I defend illegal file sharing? Not at all! 

What follows is already said many times but it is needed to be repeated over and over again. The new IPRED law in Sweden is severely threatening our privacy. We are talking about breaking basic human rights. Media companies will have the right to enter my home and dig in my personal files without real evidence but in order to get evidence. This is against legal praxis in the western world.

This is obvious for every tax paying citizen. 

Enough about the IPRED law for now. More in the links below.

Instead I will give some advices for free. Listen up media CEO:s and other players! You are missing market shares while you are fighting and wasting resources on the wrong battlefield and other new players will take them before you.

We all have to embrace structural changes. Internet change the way that digital material can be distributed. That changes the conditions for what the current structures are based on. New players will find out better ways to do business. As usual the old players are trying to delay all these changes!

Come on! Don’t try to keep the old structures. You should know better. Look forward! We live in a new era. Look out the window! Big opportunities are waiting. You must change your way of doing business! Fight against progress and development and you will miss market shares. Forget about distributing CD’s once and for all! Start to deregulate this dying business.

Key to reducing piracy is increasing the legitimate ways that users can enjoy artists work online. This is so easy and you can’t do it by make your own customers to your enemies! 

Offer good quality. Guarantee virus- and spam-free material. Find the ways, others are already there and starting to cash in.

Finally, stop lobbying for the impossible…

I also have a good and free advice to our politicians: Continue like this and we will vote for someone else.  This is not about file sharing, it is about human rights. We will find out who are defending privacy and human rights and who is not.

Links:

icmpecho: IPRED, it’s not about file-sharing

Blog posts about IPRED

The Independent: Why Sweden rules the web

Wired: EFF Wonders: Did Obama Violate Copyright Law with iPod Gift?

Robots, Brain and Muscles

I surfed into two completely different links but they both give us a hint about what is waiting around the corner.

Honda connects brain thoughts with robotics

The first one is about robotics controlled by brain. From my perspective, robotics and humanoids is an area that is taking off the years to come. See also humanoids – the next generation.

Honda managed to interpret a mans brain pattern when he thought about lifting his right hand. They converted it to a command to the ASIMO humanoid, the robot that they developed during 25 year. ASIMO lifted the right arm when the man thought about lifting his own right arm. Does this mean that they can now read our thoughts? Not at all! This is of course not a developed technique yet and it will take many years to make it even near to robust. One day it will be more developed and useful for something. The question is for what? I am thinking of people who can not move an arm, for example. But is this something that is relevant after so many years that it will take? After so many years I think that Asimo or his “grandchildren” will understand what to do anyway. If not so, an artificial arm will do the job or maybe a new arm from genetic engineering. This is what the 2nd link below is about.

If it is possible to detect and interpret brain signals in the future, will also be possible to do the other way around – create and feed the brain with signals. Of course it is, reversed engineering so to say! So again we have this 2-edged sword to deal with (heaven or hell: future scenarios). I don’t even want to speculate about what could be possible to make us do or think with such techniques. It will take a long time before it is real, but it is coming sooner or later if nothing spectacular is happening with humanity before that.

Genetic engineering breakthrough

The other link is about how genetic scientists managed to turn stem cells into muscles in a living body. This seems to be much closer in time than the first news.

Again I was thinking about disabled people that, in some cases, obviously can be helped from this. What about the elderly? Has not their muscles started to decrease in volume and strength?

Another arena is sports with all its doping problems. Is growing new muscles doping? If we can built muscles and maybe even design them to the type we want, what sport result will we have? Should it be allowed? Can it be detected and stopped?

I have no idea, really!

How I combine Twitter, blog and RSS

I have used Twitter for about one month now and I have checked out most of the Twitter tools there are. A good source for tools is http://twitter.pbwiki.com and another one is http://justtweetit.com/tweeter-directory On the right side under the ads you will find a list of tools and other stuff for Twitter. I started this blog almost at the same time as Twitter. Now, the question is how to combine Twitter, my new blog, RSS-links and other links that I publish. It is a lot of saving, cutting and pasting just to get it out to Twitter and to get it to my blog. I will share with you what I learned so far. I welcome any comments about even better methods and tools!

Here are my tools:

1. Twitter
2. TweetDeck
3. Tweetburner (twurl)
4. Twitterfeed
5. Google Reader
6. Diigo and Delicious
7. My blog (this blog)

They are all free and work excellent together and I will tell you how!

The Twitter suit

In Twitter I mainly posts links to news or interesting stuff that I find during my surfing. Of course I also use links in my blog posts. The following tools are, among other things, for handling my links integrated with Twitter and my blog.

TweetDeck is the tool to use if you follow more than 50 people. It is almost impossible to use the standard interface and read all the tweets rolling down the list. In TweetDeck, I can arrange the people I follow in groups. I have the groups:

• Inner circle – my collegues and “physical friends”. 
• Fav’s – My favourites of the people I follow. Currently I have @mashable,  @patrickdixon,  @JamesRivers,  @the_gman and some more.
• TechWatch - people twittering stuff useful for my work. 
• I also use temporary groups. 
• A search can also be used in the same way as a group. For instance I have a search on “Location Based” that continuously is updated with tweets matching that.

Tweetburner is a service that shorten your web-address from its original long form to something shorter such as  http://twurl.nl/m4hh0z (this blog). In Tweetburner you can also see how many that clicked at your link. First set TweetDeck to use the right shortener. You will find it after the “Shorten URL” field. A long list of different services that can shorten your URL’s. Select twurl that is the one connected to Tweetburner.
Now, if you post a link in TweetDeck by first paste it into the “Shorten URL” field and press the Shorten button you will see the short form show up. Fill in your own text and press enter. After a while you can log in to http://Tweetburner.com and get the statistics of how many that clicked your link and when!

Twitterfeed is a tool that automatically can create Tweets from any RSS-feed. All news pages and blogs these days have a RSS-feed. Just take a look in http://alltop.com if you don’t have a clue where to find them!
You can let Twitterfeed use your favorite RSS-feed and put them out on Twitter. You can filter on certain words and you can set the frequency and Twitterfeed will work by itself.
I am not so found of just relaying out a RSS-feed and not knowing what will come. I want to control the feed by myself. This is where Google Reader, Diigo and Delicious comes in!

The RSS and Bookmarks suit

Google Reader is a RSS-reader (you can probably do the same with any RSS reader). I subscribe to the RSS feeds that I find interesting. Select from Alltop.com for instance. One neat function in Google Reader is that you can publish the items that you like just by clicking the Share-button when you read the RSS item. All the links that you share will be published on a webpage that is created for you. Click at the Share folder and you will see the link to the webpage with shared items. That page is also a RSS feed! Use that RSS-feed in Tweetfeeder.com

Diigo and Delicious are two different services to save your bookmarks on a server. They have numerous features, such as tagging and sharing with your friends, that I will not talk more about here. You don’t need to use both of them. I have my own reason to do that. See my previous blog-post Twine or Delicious? The answer is Diigo for more. Lets focus on Diigo for now. Install the add-on to Firefox for Diigo (other web browsers have similar features) From Diigo you can produce RSS-feeds for Twitterfeed as well. For instance when you save a bookmark you can fill in tags. You can use the tag publish or any tag you want for publishing. In Diigo this tag will have its own RSS-feed. Click on the tag in Diigo and you will get the RSS-feed. Just give it to Twitterfeed and it will be published the way you want. When you save a bookmark in Diigo you will get the option to send to Twitter. I normally don’t use this because I want the twurl shortener and not the one Diigo uses. You also have the option in Diigo to set comments and send it to your blog as a draft. This is very useful and can be the base for a future blog-post!

Finally, my blog – this blog. From the feature in Diigo that I mentioned above I will have a bunch of drafts with comments and a links. I can mix them as I like and get ideas to new blog-posts. Whenever I publish a new bog-post I also post a tweet in order to inform about it. Be careful to not only promote your own blog because your followers will eventually disappear. Tweet helpful links and other stuff and the tweets about your own blog will come natural.

I often post in Twitter manually with copy and paste to TweetDeck and that is no problem but with the methods mentioned above I get a continuous flow of tweets based on bookmarks that I think is interesting and would like to save anyway.

I hope that you can pick up something from all this and use it in a way that suites you. Please let me know if you have some other methods and tools!

Will e-Readers save the world?

I am the type of nerd that can’t handle papers. If I get papers I don’t know where to put it and finally I will forget that I ever had it or can’t find it when I need it. Sometimes however I print large volumes of paper for use in my work. Large volumes are not very convenient to read from the pc-monitor. Paper is much more relaxing for the eyes.

The world consumption of paper has increased 400% in the last 40 years. Close to 4 billion trees or 35% of the total trees cut around the world are used in paper industries globally.

An e-Reader is a device that is used to display documents. There are a bunch of e-Readers available such as Amazon Kindle,  Sony’s e-Reader and Fujitsu’s FLEPia. Currently they all suffers from either being too small or too expensive and of course the black-and-white displays, except for FLEPia which has color, are limiting as well. Another problem that some e-Readers have is a very low refresh rate of the display. You have to wait several seconds for the screen to turn page.

Amazon Kindle 2

In general, Kindle of today is just not good enough to replace paper. I know that many are using Kindle but they are in the first wave of users. The forgiving type: Wow! Look I can load documents and read it! Cool!
Kindle displays documents in black and white and the format is too small. The price, however,  is almost OK: ~$350.

FLEPia from Fuijitsu

The latest FLEPia has a color display, still a little bit too small and way too expensive! Most new e-Readers, including Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s e-Reader, use electronic-paper technology that is easier to read than conventional displays. But e-paper still suffers in comparison to conventional liquid crystal displays in terms of refresh speed and vividness of color. FLEPia is LCD-based and first in the industry with color display. FLEPia may still have a way to go.  1000€  is just too much. I think that people will hesitate to buy when the price is on the same level as a good laptop.

Plastic Logic

I expect new types of e-Readers to come soon with A4-format and really thin. One candidate is Plastic Logic that announced an e-Reader to be launched in the beginning of 2010. It is a black and white device. If the price is right, such as 200€, this will be a success and I am sure that it will be easy to get back the invested money, fairly quickly. I mean paper cost, ink cost, printer maintenance and other. E-Ink, the company behind Kindle, has announced development of a new e-Reader. The preliminary plan is  late 2010 and then it is a color display but the price tag is unknown.

Paper

The cost per printed paper is something between 20 cents to 1€ depending on how you calculate it. If the cost for an e-Reader is less than 200€ it is easy to get back the investment fairly quick. That should mean much less paper used worldwide. Even if it takes a while to change peoples mind there are some really good business cases not only in office environments. For instance within manufacturing of complicated products and products with many variants, all over the world loads of paper is used during the assembly. The assembly instructions are following the product along the assembly line.

The feeling of a real book have its own merits especially an old one. I regard this as an art form but for how long will that be the standard book? How long will we have newspapers on paper every morning? Will we have newspapers at all? BTW, I stopped reading morning papers a long time ago.

A lot of forests to save and of all trees used by man, it is the process of making paper that is the most environmentally unfriendly technology.

Eventually the e-Readers will give a reading experience as comfortable as paper with non-scattered displays and easy to use interfaces. Maybe e-Readers will not save the world but they sure will be a good help.

Delicious or Twine? The answer is Diigo!

Image via CrunchBase

I have for about a year now used delicious for two reasons:

1. The same bookmarks everywhere. I have the same bookmarks in every PC. At home, at work and anywhere else. When I go somewhere, I can walk right in to an Internet café and my bookmarks are there. Even when surfing with my mobile I have the same bookmarks.
2. Sharing bookmarks. I share bookmarks with my colleagues and friends. We never send url’s in emails any more. We use delicious to send bookmarks to each other and we can also look into each others bookmarks. BTW, anyone can see my bookmarks unless I tick “Unshare!

This is great and some of my friends and colleagues do the same so we can share bookmarks.  If you use the Firefox Delicious plug-in it is as easy as saving bookmarks locally. A bonus is the tagging. To set tags is soooo much better than save in folders.

Image via CrunchBase

There is another newer bookmark service called Twine.  You save and tag bookmarks similar to Delicious but Twine offers much more functionality. Things like automatic tags and search for people with certain interests. Sharing Twines (subjects) with both friends and people I don’t know is another function and in a Twine can we save bookmarks and documents. Fine, but I don’t want to administrate bookmarks in two different systems. No one wants that…   Actually I did use both! For a couple of months I have used both systems until a week ago. Twine offer a better way to arrange and maintain knowledge and not just bookmarks. Delicious is easier and faster and I have my network to share bookmarks with there.

A week ago I found Diigo, a beta that so far looks very nice. Diigo have a rich functionality not the same but at the same level as Twine. When I save bookmarks to Diigo I also save to Delicious and gets the same tags! Now I can use Delicious together with my friends and also use the more advanced Diigo by using the one and same save-button.

Diigo has another really unique feature. You can mark an area on the web page and make a comment to that area. You can also put floating sticky notes on the page.  If you use the Firefox plug-in and you open a web page that someone have bookmarked, you can see all the notes that they have put there. Really awesome! You can configure which notes you want to see.

I will mainly work with Diigo as my bookmark service but as long as my network and sharing is still in Delicious I must go in there now and then.

Hmm, how can I convince my colleagues and friends to move to Diigo? I need to set up a plan here…

www.Delicious.com
www.Twine.com
www.Diigo.com

The result from my poll

Here is the Poll result (Machine Translation, an experiment – a poll). I had 26 votes and only 2 was native English speakers. I would like to have some more of them…  Interesting is that the majority was so wrong!

The only article where I used Machine Translation is humanoids – the next generation. I don’t know if this means that I write better or worse than the Machine Translator does! It certainly means that this text was different from the others but the majority misconstrued the text to be mine!

I had some very funny translations. For instance when the Swedish sentence was:

“Visa gästerna till bordet, erbjuda kaffe och plocka bort efter dem“

which in English should be something like “Show the guests to the table, offering coffee and clean up after them“

The automatic translation said: “Show guests to the table, offering coffee and eliminate them“

The Terminator or what?

Machine Translation is not perfect in any way. If I didn’t change the text it would be very obvious which one that was Machine Translated. When will we have machine translations where you can not see if it is machine translated or not? My guess is that we will see an increase in quality during the coming years.

Quote from one of the comments to me previous blog post machine translation, an experiment: “I think that quality has two parts: fluency and accuracy. If the purpose of machine translation is to give information to people in their language, accuracy is more important than fluency. If a machine translation is correct, the fluency of the translation does not matter. For a small evaluation of the accuracy and the fluency of machine translation, see http://www.international-english.co.uk/mt-evaluation.html“, Mike Unwalla.

I couldn’t agree more. The accuracy will increasingly be very good within the 5-10 years to come, due to the new statistical techniques mentioned in the same blog post above. Fluency is a completely different matter. Translating a poem can normally not be correct because there is no correct translation. It can be more or less fluent and it can express the same message more or less similar to the original text. We are talking of maybe 15-20 years before computers will even be near human translators.

Computer aided translations started 1954 and at that time they believed that within a few years, machine translation would be solved.

History shows that we should never underestimate the problems with Machine Translation!

Image by adriaan bloem via Flickr

2 articles about Internet threats

I found two articles today, both dealing with Internet threats. The first is from Wired and is a good list of threats on the Internet.   Top Internet Threats: Censorship to Warrantless Surveillance

I must say that the Government Censorship is the most threatening threat of all.  One the examples in the article is about Australian government.

On Thursday, a secret blacklist surfaced detailing 2,395 webpages the Australian government is planning to filter from the internet.

The second article is about exactly that: Internet Censorship Heats Up: Australia and the Mormons

One “funny” observation: The article mention the Utah-based Mormon anti-porn crusaders toward the creation of a new “Cybersafety Constituency”. Take a look in this study about who is buying most porn online:
Porn in the USA: Conservatives are the biggest consumers

Image by gnuchris2 via Flickr

Utah is the state that buy most porn.  What we see here is an example of humans reaction on control.

All this is in line with my previous post monitoring, legislative changes and control

BTW, On Monday Tuesday I will give the right answer to the poll in my previous post. I have to force my friends to vote so I get some more voters first! In the meantime why not give your answer to the poll