Month: May 2005

Richard Florida has been getting a lot of props, even in the Museum, especially since his visit to Sydney in 2003. I guess he has an appeal to us similarly middle-class creatives. Of course it helps that he rates Sydney as one of the ‘creative’ cities. But here’s a debunking of Florida from the New Republic.

These myths are particularly problematic when they become the basis for policy. And in many cities, that is exactly what is happening. Policies based on these myths aren’t just a waste of time and resources. They are also distracting cities from the real work of securing their future. After all, if you are being told that you are coming back–riding the wave of demographics and intelligence to an inevitably positive outcome–why deal with the hard issues like public education, job training, promoting small companies, and transportation?

The American metropolis can be more than a way station for the wealthy young and part-time destination for the nomadic rich. It can be a place where average people live, thrive, and build communities across lines of race and class.

Forget Podcasting . . .

Roadcasting is the way to go . . .

What is podcasting? RSS dissemination of (URIs for) MP3 content. Neat.

Can’t find a podcast ? Try http://www.podcast.net/

[… and no, you don’t need to splash out on an iPod]

(JYBE seems to be no longer available – Oct 2007)

Maybe we could have a go at this sometime?

JYBE is a plug-in that enables people to surf the web and chat together all in real time. This is not a proxy service but turns your web browser into a de-facto IM client. Version 1.0 is the first but we anticipate putting out new releases so check back often.

JYBE was created to show how collaboration can be extended to the native internet browser because we wanted a new way to communicate with friends and family. Not only did we want to chat, we wanted to take our friends and family to neat websites and have an interactive surfing experience that was fun, fast and fee. The result was JYBE.

All we need is a valid email address and a user name. We use the email address to send you product update information. NOTE: We do not sell or distribute your email address or use it for any advertising at all. We protect your email addresses from all third parties and are committed to that policy.

Jybe adds a toolbar to Internet Explorer and Firefox. Using this toolbar, a JYBE session can be created and others can join in the browsing session. All traffic is routed through our servers and costs the users absolutely nothing.

http://www.benhanbury.com/freeculture/index.html

There are some interesting projects here.

Quite interesting analysis of donwloading TV shows and potential new markets for advertising.

http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html

Intersting article that builds on the ideas in the GoogleZon animation and analyses the potential impact of Google’s Web Accelerator.

“If Google adds power to its part of the Accelerator, you don’t have to add power to your end, meaning your old PC can last longer. Part of that has to come from Google assuming a larger role over time, taking responsibility for rendering Flash, for example. And they’ll do it. And we’ll let them. At some point, Google might even offer its own hardware device, optimized for the Accelerator. At that point, you’ll buy your PC from Google, use Google as your ISP, surf an Internet that is really the Google cache, be fed ads and sold content from Google servers. Its a GoogleWorld that requires no AOL, no Microsoft, no Intel, no HP or Dell — only Google, cable companies, telephone companies, users, and of course advertisers and web page producers.”

And this on the Net in Asia –

“But in Asia, the web is a minor part of the internet user’s activities, and once you deduct Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail usage, it’s almost negligible. A typical Asian internet user is online to play LAN games and do instant messaging. In cafes, you’ll see “internet” promoted as a separate item below “Games” and “Chat” – almost as if it’s an afterthought. A PC in the East is a rather more colorful Minitel that hosts multiplayer games. Fetishizing the web has blinded many in the West, and not just techno-utopians, to what people really want from computer networks, as successful “closed” computer networks from Minitel, and possibly GSM with its SMS service prove. So while Western experts lose their minds to utopian fantasies such as “the web is now nature”, the Asian mind looks for rather more practical uses for technology. And it’s Asia that will be the largest influence on the computer networks in the next decade, with a billion Chinese being urbanized over the next decade, pulling Indo-China along behind it, and half a billion newly affluent on the Indian sub-continent. Will these billions of users want to rely on a GoogleNet?”

Check it here.