Author Archives: Scott C. Lemon

About Scott C. Lemon

I'm a techno futurist, interested in all aspects of humanity, sociology, community, identity, and technology. While we are all approaching the Singularity, I'm just having fun effecting the outcomes of the future!

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It’s really not about Instant Messaging …
I just wanted to rant a little here about the big talk about Instant Messaging … it’s not about Instant Messaging! IMHO, it’s about communications, and people wanting to communicate effectivly and efficiently. Remember folks … this is all about meme transfers and replication! All of this relates to our personal identity, and the fact that our identity is created by the conversations that we are a part of. If we evaluate the roots of personal identity, identity becomes the attributes of ourselves that we accumulate to describe ourselves, to ourselves and others. So there are several steps in personal identity which layer on top of each other.

The first of these is the accumulation of our personal identity. This accumulation then includes the people that we have in our lives … our families, friends, co-workers, and other ‘buddies’. This list of ‘contacts’ or ‘buddies’ then becomes our ‘address book’ … the list of people that we converse with. What’s powerful about AIM and ICQ is that we have this list, and also have their ‘presence’ information … or their availability. This presence and availability is what really drives Instant Messaging. I could be launching e-mail, video conferencing, or any form of communication once I have located the ‘presence’ of the other person … Instant Messaging is just one of these forms of communciations. Heck, Instant Messaging isn’t much different from what SMTP mail protocols used to be!

I am a huge fan of Jabber … it is a leading contenter in my mind, and provides a very flexible architecture for presence and communciations … including Instant Messaging. This is a good article and Jabber continues to gain ground …

Jabber As The Coming IM Standard? [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

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The BabySmasher meme …
Ok … some people might think this is a sick idea, but it is a powerful meme! These guys are putting out a sticker that can be placed on the “baby changing stations” that are seen in airports and various public places. They’ve created a potentially funny web site, and they are even offering rewards for photos being sent to them of where these are stickers are placed. Some might think this is sick, but I suspect that we’ll see these popping up elsewhere. I wonder what other common and well known signs will be “hacked” like this?

BabySmasher.com tells you the truth about baby changing stations. [Memepool]

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Cool DVD links …
I finally decided that I would see about playing DVDs on my Dell Laptop. Of course, I had to go and do some research about the status of DVDs, ripping, encoding, etc. I have to say that the DVD/CD drive power draw on the Dell is what makes me want to play movies off of my hard disk. I’ve got dual 18GB drives in the Dell for DV Video editing, so storage is not a problem. (Plus, I’m not going to have a permanent DVD drive on my wearable!) In looking around, I found two very cool sites:

VideoLAN is a project of students from the École Centrale Paris. They are developing some very cool Open Source tools …

InfoMatrix, or InMatrix, has a lot of information and tools for examining your DVD drive, setting Region Codes, and even new firmware that will add new functionality to your DVD drive!

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Very good post on privacy and identity in the digital world …
In our work on digitalme, we have done considerable research into digital identity, centralized storage, and various tracking techniques. This is a really good article which discusses some cool points. Mr. Smith has got it right … must making people aware of the possibilities …

digitalMASS: Preserving privacy. Data privacy has always been a topic that left me completely cold. Honestly, I just couldn’t get my bile riled over the notion that someone was tracking what I do online, where I buy gas with my Mobil Speedpass, or what I listen to with my RealNetworks software. Then I met Richard M. Smith. [Tomalak’s Realm]

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Two XDrive articles in one week …

Windows XP is going to use XDrive …
It appears from this ZDNet article that Windows XP is going to be offering XDrive on the desktop … or advertising a partnership on the desktop. I’m wondering if this is being done with closed, proprietary protocols, or with any WebDAV (or other?) standard protocol and solution.

Another failure being designed before our eyes?
I am always amazed when these types of adventures begin. IMHO, I believe that they are doomed to fail.

First, their storage costs are *so* expensive … why would I pay ~$70/GB/Month for storage, when I can buy a 30GB harddrive at Costco for ~$140?

Second, their main costs are not involved in the storage … it’s the backbone network costs. They are having to pay for the bandwidth for user to send and retrieve data across the backbone of the Internet … to their centralized location.

The way that I believe that this is going to be solved is when every ISP get’s into the storage and caching market … they’ll realize that they can offer their users storage and backup services for very agressive prices … and they already own the bandwidth of the last mile to their users.

Xdrive Sees Outage, Shelves Free Storage for Fee System. The Santa Monica, Calif. provider of storage for end users experiences a brief outage and gives up on giving out free storage for a subscription-driven model geared toward businesses. [internetnews.com: Product News]

Who is going to pay these centralized guys these rates? If people do, I don’t think it will last … I think they are dead already. I’m looking at how this will relate to, and effect, our Novell iFolder solution? We are putting any corproation or ISP into this business. So if an ISP installs iFolder for their customers, they could be getting a chunk of this revenue …

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Putting WYSIWYG into your web page …
There were a whole string of very useful HTML editing tools that were presented this day … and this is a very good article showing some cool stuff that can be done for editing and rendering HTML in a web page editor … check it out.

Need to add a WYSIWYG HTML editor to your Web-page? Try this “InsideDHTML” article out. Or use this product from Ektron. Or this Java applet from RealObjects. [scobleizer]

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Way cool … an “XML Cooktop” for FREE!
This was a really good post that I found which points to a powerful tool for XML hackers. Our DirXML technology uses a variety of XML and XSLT related technologies, and this appears to be a really cool tool for editing these files. And as he says … best of all it’s free!

Are you building XML-centric sites? Check out the XML Cooktop which is a development environment for writing and testing XSLT style sheets, XML documents, DTDs, and XPATHs. Best of all it’s free! [scobleizer]

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GeoLocation service … maybe a good fit for our 802.11b project …
It seems that an important aspect of the mobile Internet, and wearable computers, is relating physical world resources to our current location, or desired locations. There are a number of projects that I have found that provide, what I call, GeoLocation or GeoSpatial applications. This is a very impressive solution to address the location of physical world resources … and one that I might want to use!

Let’s say a user visits your product-centric Web site and then she wants to visit the store closest to her to buy it. How can you tell her where to go? You visit Know-Where.com and use their service. [scobleizer]