Earlier this week there was the first successful teleport form Second Life’s Grid onto IBM’s Opengrid.

And today I learned google created Lively, a virtual 3d world that you can actually embed in your webpage. cool. the client apparently is windows only.

so far the media isn’t too impressed:

Lively feels more like a Google Talk-powered chat room with 3-D camera controls than an immersive environment like Second Life.

that’s from infromationweek, and you can find the article here.

The whole concept does seem a bit ripped off from IMVU, where you had a standard im client with pretty cartoon-ish avatars.

I doubt that the cartoonish avatars are the way to go, at least judging from the state of affairs in SecondLife, where avatars are more and more real-life every time you log on, not only when it comes to shapes and skins, but clothing and apparel. Folks with serious Poser and image manipulation skills are popping into SL making a profit and making everything look more real life pushing the platform forward. (or not! some dystopian sims like “the fissure” or sci-fi role play sims are anything but real-life, but the quality of avatars and environment is unprecedented)

(picture by nonzo, check the flickr page for awsome SL pics)

I admit, I have a “thing” for virutal 3D worlds…not for what they are today, but for the promiss they hold.

I’ll give lively a go when I get off work today and see what it’s really about.

I just answerd this question on linkedin, linkedin not being the perfect place to have a discussion over the issue I decided to post it here as well.

Is IPTV going to take off in way as todays cable TV or Sat TV? what will be the most common way of TV reception in household, five year down the line from now?

- Asim Mehmood

I believe it will (biased opinion I’m sure, as I work in the area).

But I think it’s important to take into account that there are new business models that are in dire need to be created for IPTV to reach it’s technological potential and serious profitability.

Acknowledging that the transport medium is important (FTTH as mentioned by Mike Coop earlier will very likely solve the problems associated with the instability of copper links and provide a stable platform for full HD delivery), it’s important to realize that IPTV is in strategic advantage when it comes to real time audience ratings and subsequent profits from selling much better targeted advertising and intelligence that can be delivered to TV producers. Seeing the ISP not only as transport for content but as a possible content creator or proxy for small / indie broadcasting company’s. Differentiating advertisement by identifying the customer and delivering different ads to different segments of your client base. Right now the IPTV service is almost in quarantine as a service, I believe meshing the TV with web services holds a huge potential.

I believe that services like Apple TV have the potential to open up to other content providers (why only buy from apple? why can’t Warner have it’s own service? or blockbuster, all compatible with the STB the client has at home, with marginal profit for the telco?)

These are just ideas, little concepts that need serious brainstorming and correct delivery. I believe telcos are selling PVR like it’s the holy grail when they should be spending less on that platform and profiting more with value added services.

so, in a nutshell: will it take off? yes, it’s impending. will it be the most common way of TV reception? from my point of view: yes, BUT it needs to be sold properly to the customer. (and I’m not throwing on the table any time constrains…since from my point of view IPTV’s success of failure depends not on the medium, but on the content with added for the customer and partners).

Later edit:

The conversation seems to have have spawned into Alcide’s wiki as well…check it out.

okay, since I struggled with this for a bit (and because I’m a warm hearted individual that wants everyone to be happy) here’s the gist of it:

you’ll want to download ext2fsx from http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/ make sure you download the latest development version (as of the date of this post: 1.4d4).

Install, reboot, after you are done you might notice that when you plugin your drive, it doesn’t mount automagically, even if you go to system settings where ExtFSManager lives and try to mount it there it could very well fail (especially if your drive wasn’t cleanly umounted the last time). So here’s what I did:

Open a terminal and fsck your harddrive (if you want to wild guess where it is osx in a very friendly way links the proper device to /dev/drive0,1, and so forth). This step is only required of course if you have the unclean umount issue.

Create a directory under /Volumes to mount your drive and then mount the drive with something like

sudo mount_ext2 -o rdonly -x /dev/disk1s1 /Volumes/linux

Now it could be that the device still doesn’t show on the desktop, under Finder just click on “Go” and then “go to folder” and type in the mount point of your drive (that would be that last part of the mount command).

et voilá. it’s on your desktop.

Should be easier? Yep, damn straight it should, and apple should really get the ext2/3 fs by default out of the box.

A few years ago we had our personal web pages, with everything from pictures of our cat(s) to our love for red wine, to pet projects we insisted on sharing with the world. We wore bold enough to put that address on our resumés, sure that no one would ever type it in (who would waste 14.4 baud dial up access doing that?), but if they would there it would be: a more immediate “you” in the form of a (maybe) weekly updated webpage.

Web 1.0 dead and buried now, with little but the waybackmachine to show for and the world, the web and sociability changed drastically within the medium. Newsgroups made way for forums, we became bloggers, authors of our anonymous life stories and sudden social beasts in a mashup world that now engulfs everything from your noisy desktop computer to twits on your cell phone. A word now about the concept of “immediate”: weekly updates are now substituted by 15 minute updates in a micro blogging platform, the concept of asynchronous communication remains unaltered but regardless of that you are living a fully synchronous life, surrounded with updates from a dozen services at the same time. Our access to information is instantaneous (or seems that way) with rss feeds, instant messaging from bots and email snippets every time a message drops on your inbox. Suddenly we need a productivity framework. it’s not we have more to do, it’s just we have more information to process. I’m sure that if you are reading this post you are the kind of person that can’t really make a clear line between what is personal from professional. We see opportunity everywhere, we all have an entrepreneurial spirit, even if your job is to comment some other guy’s code or load laptop images as a junior helpdesk. We took the red pill and we followed the white rabbit and suddenly our inside jokes are everyone’s jokes.

But I digress. This was supposed to be a post about identity. Identity version 2.0. We’re no longer our personal webpage. We’re a blog, a linkedin profile, a common alias on forums, twitter, last.fm… but above all things, now it’s not that the chances of someone loading your personal webpage are slim, it’s the exact opposite. A future employer will type your name in a search box, read your blog posts, see what you are up to in twitter and even know music preferences.

Even the concept of alias (nickname, moniker, username, whatever you wish) changed. I remember when it hid our true identities, because we were blueboxing or wardialing numbers to see if we could hit a private bbs or (if one was lucky as hell) a dial up access to some serious computing power. Now an alias is as important as our real name, as it identifies us to our social network every time we enroll in yet another service.

It’s a live organization of you, and you have little to no control over it. If I search my name on google I get my likedin profile first, then my blog, then my work with oxygen and then it’s random stuff…a photographer, a soccer player with the same name as me, and a few pages ahead there’s a guy with my name asking in a newsgroup about the purity of the arian race… I’d be very worried if this last one was the first hit in a search engine.

So there’s a balance here, between what you want the world to know about you and what the world can assume about you.

You can control the first part, by having a gateway in a service, a blog or a mashup like mugshot would do. linking everything you deem interesting and that you vouch for (your last.fm, twitter, flickr, etc). but what can be googled about you, or supposedly about you is much harder to harness.

I cursed linden labs for not allowing me to pick my last name on Second Life. My identity is my name, not my avatar, I know their business is to push in the opposite direction, but that’s just ignoring what the online world has become. I have several accounts on Second Life. Actually, most people who use the service do…and I believe that’s because Linden has failed to create a sense of identity in their avatars. People don’t create an emotional attachment to them. Avatars are ever changing, and even though you can pick any shape or clothing, you can’t pick a name. Second life is also an island… it’s detached from the rest of the online world. it doesn’t interact with any social services, pushing its own “group” system. People who are joining the service ask me who I am there…and that’s a question that shouldn’t make sense in this day and age. I have email, openid, a common alias… anything could be used to extend the existing social network onto Second Life.

To round it up, It seems that the only way to control your ever changing online identity is to actively mold it by being a constant part of it, the good news is that if this is something you worry about, in all probability you are already doing something about it.

This is actually a repost (and remake from a bit of knowledge learned from the comments on the original blog post and throughout the deployment of yet another corporate wiki) of something I wrote on Safira’s wiki (you can find the link on the side bar), it’s more of an experiment to post it here as well…

So how do we go about to implement a corporate wiki?

ok, let’s brain storm a bit here…

First and far most Mediawiki has some serious input problems. It somehow resembles the way you input stuff on Latex, but without the permanent brain damage, It drives less tech-savvy users away and a wiki should be able to be edited by everyone, not just the people who are inclined to learn it’s Dante-like markup language.

To-Do: install a proper wysiwyg on your wiki. TinyMCE and fckeditor are good choices. As a simple workaround (but not nearly as good as the previously mentioned) you have a very cool greasemonkey script you can painlessly install called wiked.

And if you don’t? well… people will still edit it, they won’t like it, but they will. Commitment will be slow and painful. Reminiscent of the “whippings will continue until moral improves” motto.

Then there’s the desert. We are used to waltz into wikipedia or KDE TechBase and have the wiki populated with articles, it thrives with an active community, discussions and trolls…your corporate wiki is as fruitful as a 70 year old lady with the hots.

To-Do: small task force to populate the wiki before the whole team/corporation/client even has a glimpse of it.

And if you don’t? be ready to answear “what for?” questions, low level of commits (and commitment) and desertion from the intended end user. And if you are planning a wiki for a team that already has fine documentation, you can rest assured your team will continue to use that documentation (because it’s there!) and be spiffy about the wiki.

Limbo syndrome. So we have wonderful documentation (gotta love those templates!) and we have over 50 task procedures, niched in a fetal position in those documents. And then there’s a wiki…it’s got 15 of those documents, and the new ones someone added to the wiki but didn’t bother to write the doc for it…(figures, you’ve been pushing the wiki pretty hard, right?) information is scattered, some are up-to-date on the wiki, some on the documentation, some doesn’t exist but should…damn.

To-Do: several ways to go about this: you can use the task force to migrate every single document to the wiki, churn on the documentation and go full blown wiki on everybody. it’s do-able. You can try and maintain both silos of information until you are ready to yourself commit to the wiki (I strongly advise you to have this well though out and planned. if you are feeling ground…well…don’t! wikis are about first impressions and you never have a second go at those.) Make a decision and stick with it…it’s either go or no go…there’s no middle ground.

And if you don’t? imagine if the 10 commandments were scattered around….hyea, that’s the deal. “what do you mean I can’t covet the other guy’s wife??? the version I checked doesn’t mention any of that!”

Ongoing task: keeping your user based interested. Because a wiki without continuity is simply casted away into oblivion.

To-Do: make another blog post about it.

And If I Don’t: I’m a wanker.

This is a very shy attempt to some common pitfalls in the bootstraping process of deployment of corporate wiki. Feel free to comment and add your experiences. I hope to eventually create a page for the subject alone, a silo of all things “corporate wiki”.

How to effectively kill the online music business.

A reminder to Apple on how not to do things

Forcing churn.

How to clearly tell your customers you’re not trust worthy

How some things never change.

How to tell your paying customers they are suckers.

How to hammer a big nail on the DRM coffin

All possible titles to an article on Ars Technica (and in al honestly, all better then the one chosen)

linky: http://smallr.net/1354

So it’s all over my rss feeds that Jon Miller (the same bloke who hacked the iphone) managed to hack a macbook air at the CanSecWest security conference (oh, and pardon my use of the term “hacking” and not “cracking“, but i’ve been around the block for a wile and to me crackers are tasteless cookies, the media can paint whatever picture they want, I was there).

The interesting bit (at least to me) about all this is that the first day of the competition was solely network based attacks, wile after the second day the attackers could ask the organizers to do some actions as a regular user would (open emails, webpages, launch apps). The Air, Vista and Ubuntu boxes all survived the attacks done over the network, it was only on the following part of the competition that the hackers had any success…

So the spin on this is that a computer out of the box (whatever flavor that might be) has some real level of security even with default configurations. The fact that social engineering and phishing are much more prone to render your computer hostage is in fact the line in the sand that signals the beginning of the much harder task of making users security aware. Stop blaming the OS’s and applications and start pointing fingers at the users.

You just send her an email in plain English stating what you want and she keeps track of stuff for you, sending you and email back whenever some appointment is creeping up in the horizon and a nifty email in the morning with your daily appointments.

So if I send Sandy an email saying “Remind me to attend Shift, october 15-17″ I’ll be getting and email, close to the event, giving me a head’s up about it.

Sandy can keep notes, contacts, bookmarks, lists and notes for you. She can also keep track of reoccurring events (because she understands tags, and anything tagged with @weekly, for example is a weekly event you only have to mail her once about for her to keep track of it)

Sandy can skim through your emails and try to figure out what event you are trying to schedule, so you can even just get her on cc. I play it safe and add something like “Sandy, remind me to do this at <date>/<time>” to the email’s body. she’ll send an email confirming the appointment if you wish (@reply tag)

She also provides a personal rss feed with your calendar, a Twitter account to keep track of things and if you live in the US there’s a good chance she can send you an SMS too.

Some things are just too brilliant not to blog about them.

Not the first time I mention this.

I’m now the proud owner of a Macbook Pro (as some of you might have followed in my twittering) , and although there isn’t a stellar difference from the old version of it the multi touch is…well…a nice touch.

So now that the technology Apple sought by acquiring Fingerworks (or their technology) is fully imbedded into the laptop’s trackpad, when are we getting all the power user features Fingerworks users were so keen on?

I do like the scroll and the back and forth gestures and the two finger right click, however, I want the copy, the move and all of that. Because it’s all application dependent now, and I’d really like to see it shine. (should I ask for a more efficient file manager for OS X, wile I’m at it? lol)

Apple knows best about usability, I would never argue with that, I have a feeling however that for newbie’s sake those features will never be enabled. Thus…will there be  a 3rd party developer picking up the ball? I’d appriciate it. :D 

See you in two weeks.