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POPSWeb 2.0: Opening up, or dumbing down? The aggregated "wisdom of the crowd," epitomized by Google and Wikipedia, is rife with opinion, misinformation, and lies because Web 2.0 creates an "environment where anyone can say anything," Keen argued. And that's "a bad thing for the cultural producers, the creative class,"
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POPSThe Bottom is Not Enough I call myself an editor first, and author second. I think the top-down function of editors -- to select, prune, guide, solicit, shape, and guide the results from the crowd -- is essential to excellence... It's taken a while but I think we've learned that while top-down is needed, not much of it is needed. Editorship and expertise are like vitamins. You don't need much of them, just a trace even for a large body, and too much will be toxic, or just pissed away. But the proper dosage of intelligent control will vitalize the dumb hive mind.
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POPSThe Coming Ad Revolution This approach (called behavioral targeting and already in service by ad networks that track users through so-called tracking cookies) undercuts traditional online publishers, who employ content to lure users and to sell adjacent ads. Now, the ISPs can sell advertisers direct access to the same users.
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POPSTwitter, Google, Facebook Join Hands Make the World a Better Place My dream for InSTEDD is to fulfill the much-needed role of an independent agent,” said Dr. Larry Brilliant, who first conceived of the idea, “bringing the technological, medical, and organizational skills necessary to help the humanitarian aid community accomplish (early detection of public health threats and disasters), and ultimately help them to make the world a safer place." One of the applications that this project will focus around is the ability that Twitter has to work between the internet and mobile phones.
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POPSCreating a Web of Worlds Koster envisions users coming to a Metaplace world by clicking on a link in a Web page. That link launches a page where the user finds herself inside a world, perhaps using a default avatar, but no log-in or registration is immediately required.
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POPSThe Terrifying Future of Computing Q&A: Author Nicholas Carr -- Carr: The scariest thing about Stanley Kubrick's vision wasn't that computers started to act like people but that people had started to act like computers. We're beginning to process information as if we're nodes; it's all about the speed of locating and reading data. We're transferring our intelligence into the machine, and the machine is transferring its way of thinking into us.
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POPS'Yo' is the word when 'he' or 'she' won't do The lack of gender-neutral substitutes for "he"/"she" and "his"/"her" has bothered people for at least two centuries, and "zie" and "hir" are just two of many invented words, including "ter", "ip" and "thon". If such words are not familiar, it is because they - like all attempts to coin a gender-neutral personal pronoun - have failed miserably.
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POPSBlended Realities, Blended Lives As part of our continued research on human-futures interaction, we will take a people-centric approach. We will start with the human experience and ask questions about how we'll navigate a future where we have multiple personas, play games to solve serious problems, and how the interaction between individuals, groups, and machines is creating new kind of knowledge.
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POPSThe World Becomes the Web It's already a reality in Japan through the KDDI network there, using software from GeoVector Corp. in San Francisco. Pamela Kerwin, GeoVector's vice president of strategic development, explained that LBS requires that the phone has GPS circuitry, so it knows where it is. Additionally, it needs to have a compass so it knows where it is pointed.
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POPSThe Generational Divide in Copyright Morality I don’t pretend to know what the solution to the file-sharing issue is. (Although I’m increasingly convinced that copy protection isn’t it.) I do know, though, that the TV, movie and record companies’ problems have only just begun. Right now, the customers who can’t even *see* why file sharing might be wrong are still young. But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?