nanotechnology and web 2.0 9:15 pm
Nanotechnology Island has been launched in SecondLife. Other SecondLife venues to launch soon include:
See screenshots and other stuff of Nanotechnology Island here. Looks cool. Too bad SecondLife entails prohibitively long loading times.
I was interviewed by George Dvorsky of Sentient Developments the other day. He interviewed me about the Lifeboat Foundation, existential risks, transhumanism, this blog, etc. Check it out.
Also, you can find this blog syndicated on LiveJournal, if you like that sort of thing.
While I’m on the subject of this blog, here are my favorite posts from last year, in case you missed ‘em:
Comments are working again, by the way.
transhumanism and web 2.0 6:12 am
The story of my virtual attendance at Transvision ’06 got picked up by a small, online alternative weekly called the NY Inquirer. Go check it out here. In other news: supposedly Ray Kurzweil was on the Daily Show just the other day, but I’m afraid to watch. I heard it was a PR disaster. Anyway, here is a clip of the Inquirer piece to provide you with titillation:
I was pleasantly surprised at how interconnected the Second Life conference was with the real world. In the virtual conference room, there were dozens of seats. What began with only a few people ballooned, at times, with almost twenty virtual attendees.
web 2.0 8:17 am
Do you read more than one blog on a regular basis? If so, you should be using an RSS reader. I discovered RSS readers about a year ago, after many millions of slick geeks had already started using them, but there are many millions of people who still need to adopt this wonderful technology. The basic idea is that you only need to visit one website to see all your blogs, instead of visiting many.
The RSS reader I recommend is Bloglines. It works perfectly. Many Mac users seem to prefer Newsfire, which is basically the same thing.
Here is a screenshot of me checking out one of my favorite sci/tech/future blogs, the Speculist, with my RSS reader:
The RSS reader automagically updates when there is a new post. So there is no need to constantly run around from blog to blog. With an RSS reader, there is barely any need to visit actual websites at all. In fact, I recommend against it. All modern sites offer RSS feeds to keep you up to date on all the latest haps, so you needn’t fret.
RSS feeders are crack for your mind on the same order of strength as Wikipedia.
I follow about 100 feeds personally, which is about average. Since the average blog post nowadays is only around one paragraph, and the average poster posts about twice per week, this only adds up to about an hour of extra time per day, half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the evening.
In Bloglines, click “add” and paste a URL to get your feed on. Here are some frequently-updated feeds I’m particularly fond of, to get you started:
Smart stuff:
Phil Bowermaster’s Speculist
Brian Wang’s Advanced Nanotechnology
Mike Treder’s Responsible Nanotechnology
Melanie Swan’s Broader Perspective
Reason’s Fight Aging!
Anne C.’s Existence is Wonderful
George Dvorsky’s Sentient Developments
Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution
Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
Nobel Intent
Damn Interesting
Webcomics:
Toothpaste for Dinner
Red Meat
Sinfest
Enjoy.
technology and web 2.0 7:38 pm
In the spirit of George Dvorsky’s recent blog post on the same topic, here’s a picture of me in Real Life a couple Christmases ago:
Followed by me in SecondLife:
Click on either for a larger version.
transhumanism and web 2.0 2:51 pm
Every year since 1998, a bunch of transhumanists from all over the world get together in one place, in a conference held by the World Transhumanist Association, called Transvision. This year, it is in Helsinki, Finland, but is also being held as a virtual event on Internet Relay Chat and the virtual world of SecondLife. I was wandering around the venue (uvvy island) from about 1AM-3AM my time, which would have been about 11AM – 1PM Helsinki’s time. There was a live video feed of the conference from inside SecondLife, but I couldn’t get it to work, so I checked out the feed using the old-fashioned browser method. Here are my screenshots of uvvy island:
That’s it for now. Some screenshots with the actual streams in view are located here. I would attend again tonight, but the conference just starts getting going at 1AM my time. I hope that video of the whole thing is recorded and uploaded to YouTube, in any case.
web 2.0 2:03 am
http://www.intention-cloud.net/
I love the site design. And the concept is great too. Look at clouds on your favorite subjects. See also Sphere.
By the way, are you reading this blog using an RSS feeder? You really should be. I use Bloglines, which takes less than a minute to register for. The list of blogs I read daily can be found here. There is a serious lack of Singularity blogs, I have to say.
transhumanism and web 2.0 6:53 am
Above is a screenshot of the Transhumanist Frappr I created recently. 126 members so far, which gives it a turnout better than the Frapprs created by some of the more popular blogs. There’s also a Singularity Institute Frappr for those so inclined. This is a great tool, and it’s quite disappointing that it was created only in 2005 rather than, say, 2000. If you identify as a transhumanist, please go ahead and add yourself!
web 2.0 12:48 pm
Recently I signed up for the location-mapping software, Plazes. I originally heard it mentioned at last month’s Accelerating Change conference. This service allows people to tag locations that are distinguished by Plazes using router information. People can add comments or pictures (via flickr) to the “plaze”, and you can permit others to locate which plaze you are currently logged on. You can even permit Plazes to track your trajectory through time, creating a record of one’s travels. Fascinating!
When I initially signed up with Plazes, the thing that surprised me the most was how few people and plazes currently existed. There were only 176 people logged on worldwide, and merely 11,810 plazes tagged so far. But it seems obvious that this service will become radically more popular in the years to come. I would expect perhaps a million plazes tagged by 2010, with tens of thousands of users logged on at any given time. Eventually this will develop to the point where someone will be able to casually walk down a street they’ve never been, but know basically what to expect just around the corner. And we’ll always be able to know roughly where our friends are located (if they allow us), and where they were last weekend (or even last year!)
Plazes is part of the emerging “Web 2.0″ family of applications and services, which make the most of collective intelligence, allowing us to create and receive useful information. Although the term is sometimes wielded lackadaisically, it does appear to refer to something genuinely real, something happening on the web right now, which has to do with the idea of turning the web from a static library into a collaborative “event stream”, and getting users involved in the creation and editing of information.
