A TV remote control that can display XML-based widgets? Whatever next?

People have been talking about things like fridges with flat panel displays for just about an eternity now, but I’ve never really seen the point. To-do lists are great, for sure, but I think most families would prefer to buy a $10 whiteboard than a $1000 smart fridge. But what if the kinds of widgets we’ve seen popping up on the Mac OS Dashboard and the upcoming Windows Vista Desktop could be taken with you? So for example, a businessman might want to keep track of his stock, and a widget for that could be carried around and displayed on the devices nearest to him – the fridge, the TV remote, the dashboard of his car, his cellphone, his computer desktop. Pardon me while I disappear into speculateville for a minute or two.

You see, I think this might be an acceptable use for the dreaded RFID, or something similar – and personal profiles in the user-centric Elgg model. Imagine if you carried around a personal profile with you, but every item of data on it was access restricted. So for example, using some kind of affordable computer interface, you could assign some information to be readable by your business partners, others to be readable by your spouse and children, some to be readable by all. And then sensors in the environment – sort of like the ones in new Japanese cigarette vending machines – picked out the information you made available to them and altered their functions accordingly.

So far this isn’t far from what people are discussing already. But let’s add an extra level to this: what if there were lightweight, standards-based software tools embedded in the tag as well? So as you walked from place to place, your stock quotes or assignments tracker followed you around, possibly sensing your location and reacting accordingly (you might want to make your IM widget available in your bedroom, but not the boardroom; you might want a flight arrivals tracker to display on your cell for a certain amount of time only). Similarly, you might have made some of your personal preferences available in your eportfolio, and the environment might adapt to suit them, sort of like Bill Gates’s house does at the moment. Alternatively, you might be able to perform a search, to find out who in the room has an interest in ecology, for example, and perhaps trade some papers you’ve written. The key, of course, is that you control the access to each of these items; in this kind of setting you’d probably want strong encryption on everything else. But imagine the possibilities.

However, at this precise moment in time I would give up this whole read-write web shebang for a cure for the common cold. I hereby ask for your favourite cold remedy while I sip at yet another mug of lemsip.

Not to say I told you so, but This is only the beginning – ajax (and, I’m sure, other technologies that will peek out from around the corner before we know it) is on the up.

I really don’t think it’ll be long before the browser is everything we need to get most tasks done, and that’s no bad thing. What it does do is push commercial software into an entirely new age of revenue; open source applications are likely to be less able to keep up a centralised server-based environment, whereas suddenly commercial software vendors can charge a monthly fee to access their product. I’m sure open source software can engage in a more distributed set of hosting – in other words, there might be seventy different places to use a particular open source wordprocessor – but it’s more than likely that 99% of them will be supported with fees or advertising. And to be honest, as people get used to text ads I suspect their price is going to go through the floor, as banner ads did six years ago.

Nonetheless, the implications for universities and public organisations are huge – can you imagine if you could just pick up an open source app and stick it on a central application server? No more license fees, no more compatibility headaches, no more calls to Microsoft Support at $foolish a call …

Nature “cooked” its article on Wikipedia, the Encyclopaedia Britannica has claimed. It’s worth noting that The Register, which hosts the linked article, isn’t a bastion of balanced journalism (and often contains anti-web 2.0 invective), but it certainly sounds like something fishy may have been going on. At the end of page 2 there’s the full text of Britannica’s original complaint, which may help you decide.

Personally, I’ll tell you the truth: I’m not that fond of public wikis. They certainly have their uses in intranets and small groups (I actually think a fully-featured wiki can serve as a useful intranet all on its own), but when you invite the general public to edit a site you’re letting yourself in for a world of hurt. Or at least, a world of spam, ego-boosting, competition-eliminating and dodginess.

Although the theory of public editing is sound for articles that lots of people know something about, factual accuracy diminishes for more obscure topics, purely because if something is wrong it’s likely to take longer

Sorry for the slow updates – as you can see, we’re on the road again. We’ve had some very interesting discussions; it’s been great to meet the team here at MIT. Thanks to David Wiley for flying us over.

Nintendo DS to get VoIP soon. The Nintendo DS is a handheld games console in the vein of the old Gameboy – but with the addition of a touch-sensitive screen and wifi capabilities. Just as the Playstation 2 brought DVDs into a lot of people’s homes, this has the capability to bring VoIP into the mainstream.

Where the Playstation 2 and the DS differ, of course, is the latter’s portability; any kid can bring a DS into school, and because the manufacturer makes back money on games, the units themselves are very cheap. (The DS retails for $129.99 at Best Buy; a wifi enabled Palm, meanwhile, runs at $299.) Although you’d have a pretty tough time getting this past any kind of school board – games consoles for educational use?! – there’s a flavour of the Opera browser avaliable for it, which in collaboration with services like Writely, Num Sum, DabbleDB and Thumbstacks, make it a pretty affordable PDA in wireless-enabled zones.

(Via evhead.)

http://www.joga.com/GLogin.aspx?done=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.joga.com%2F

A Google-Nike social networking joint venture. It appears to run on the Orkut platform, which has interesting implications for the future …

Curverider is running a conference!

We’re organising an informal one day event in Edinburgh on September 4th, where we’ll be talking about web technologies, learning landscapes, distributed environments and more. We’ve already lined up some interesting speakers and have plans for quite a controversial panel – it’s six months away but I’m really looking forward to it!

Entry is free, but you’ll need to register; we’re also actively looking for interesting conference papers and discussion panel participants. See here for further information, and stay tuned for further updates …

http://www.baekdal.com/articles/Technology/microsoft-ie-activex-update/

Plugins are about to be crippled in IE due to a patent dispute. No autorunning Flash could actually be a blessing, I think.

This post has nothing to do with e-learning – or does it?

This Michael Crichton op-ed in the New York Times caught my eye this morning. Normally I’m not so much of a Crichton fan – I loved his books when I was younger, but his recent anti-environmentalist rants kind of got my back up. However, this time he’s right on the money.

Metabolite Labs, Inc – a company that sounds like something out of one of Crichton’s novels – has patented the scientific fact that elevated homocysteine is linked to B-12 deficiency. By stating that fact I’m in violation of intellectual property law, which is clearly disastrous; the fact that this example is already in the field of human medicine removes the need for any kind of analogy. Basically, we’re at the point where we can’t tell the truth without paying a license – money is valued over human life in the most obvious way.

I’m reminded of medieval medicine, when doctors couldn’t dissect humans without approval from the church; Galen, for example, was forced to base his famous studies of the human body on pigs. This has massive implications for human knowledge, and therefore learning. The supreme court is in the process of deciding whether Metabolite is allowed this ridiculous patent; let’s all hope the answer is “no”. The alternative is a world where, before too long, we might not be allowed to teach – or publish, or say – all kinds of things. Or at least, not without paying a fee.

Meanwhile, the US government has started to publish captured Iraqi documents on the web in an attempt to engage the public in an open source translation exercise.

Now, as much as I think open source is the future for a lot of things, I’m not sure military intelligence is one of them. Surely all it takes is for an individual or group of people to maliciously provide an incorrect translation, and problems will arise? Nonetheless, it’s an interesting approach, particularly for a government that’s been notoriously closed since taking power. I would like to see it used in more peaceful contexts; imagine putting up a draft local law, for example, and allowing people to post comments, suggestions and edits. I think Oxford City Council would rather gnaw off their arms than attempt such a thing, but it’d be a breath of fresh air. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting we throw all our laws up on a wiki and let the public do its work (although I’d be fascinated to see that happen somewhere far away from where I live) – but the technologies available to us provide a unique opportunity to open up what were previously closed and elitist social processes.

They say that 2006 is going to be the year of the filter; the ways in which we’ll search for things – and in which information will be delivered to us – will become more sophisticated and powerful. I think that’s the point where the web comes into its own, traditional media processes begin to be truly subverted and all this starts to really change what’s happening in the real world.

I am hopelessly addicted to Babble. I’ve always been a bit of a Boggle fan, but having a single puzzle every day that I can log into from any web browser and keep open in the background as I do my work is enough to keep me coming back. (Sudoku players, of which I am not one, have their own version over at Iron Sudoku.)

I guess this is the problem with a browser-based computing experience – all the little time wasting applications that have developed over the years for our desktop operating systems are beginning to make the transition. That could be disastrous for productivity, because whereas previously you actually had to install games at an office workstation to play them, now you can just wander off to the website. No content filter will be able to cope with that – and nor should it, because if your students or workers are slinking off to play games, your problem is mostly with the culture of your organisation rather than their computing habits.

What it does illustrate is how things are changing. We’ve already more or less got web office suites; I give it until the end of the year before we have a proper massively multiplayer RPG that runs in a browser window; it might be a top-down Zelda kind of game rather than a 3D World of Warcraft / Second Life experience, but you’ll be able to interact with a virtual world without installing any software. It’ll likely even have an advertising-based option, allowing you to log in for free.

After that, it’s only a matter of time before someone creates distributed offline game playing system. Much as eJamming allows distributed musicians to play together, someone could write a distributed system to allow roleplaying geeks to play Dungeons & Dragons from anywhere in the world. Or nomic, if you were so inclined. The possibilities for timewasting behind your boss’s back are endless …