Last week I had the privilege of meeting Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. It's one of my favorite books about the Internet of Things and is still ahead of the curve, even though it was written in 2005 and published in 2006. Greenfield was in my city Wellington for the week, so I sat down with him at a local cafe to get his views on the current state of Internet of Things and where it's headed.
If you're unsure what the world will be like when everything is connected to the Internet (hence the term 'everyware'), then read on for Greenfield's acute observations and examples of what's already happening. This will be a multi-part post, published over the course of this week.
I first became aware of Demand Media by reading this feature by Daniel Roth in the November 2009 issue of Wired [Ed: ReadWriteWeb wrote an article about it in August]. In fact, Roth alerted me by email that his piece was about to come online, because he thought I would find it interesting. He was dead on. I found it fascinating, and also scary.
Since then the discussion of these "content farms" (what ReadWriteWeb editor Richard MacManus called them recently) has picked up a lot intensity online. For a good round-up, see Jason Fry's recent post The Furor Over Content Farms. In the following interview with Demand Media founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, I explore this new online phenomenon.
An Interview With TweetDeck Founder Iain Dodsworth
A small startup company called InfoChimps released for sale yesterday three very large sets of data extracted from 500 million Twitter messages. Included in the offering are the senders and recipients of 1 billion @ messages, Retweets and Favorites. We wrote in-depth about the release late last night. This morning we interviewed Iain Dodsworth, creator of the most popular Twitter client, TweetDeck, about the value he might find in that data and the direction he's aiming to take TweetDeck in the future.
It's been a long and winding road for serial volunteer and social media philanthropist Sloane Berrent.
Since her unplanned departure from an L.A.-based startup in 2008, Berrent has traveled through eight countries, documenting and publicizing the struggles of those in developing areas through her blog posts, tweets, images, videos, and her own presence at events at home and abroad. From post-Katrina New Orleans to a trash dump in Manila to a monastery in Burma, read on for her story of trying to achieve social good through social media.
Tim O'Reilly is a publisher of technical books, the organizer of a series of conferences on diverse topics, an investor in web startup companies and smart electrical grid technologies. He's credited with shepharding the term Web 2.0 into public consciousness and he regularly uses his extensive influence to call on technologists to "do something worthy," especially in the face of ecological and political crisis. Now he's brokering meetings of Obama administration officials and bleeding-edge geeks.
In part 2 of my one-on-one interview with Tim Berners-Lee, we explore a variety of topics relating to Linked Data and the Semantic Web. If you missed it, in Part 1 of the interview we covered the emergence of Linked Data and how it is being used now even by governments.
In Part 2 we discuss: how previously reticent search engines like Google and Yahoo have begun to participate in the Semantic Web in 2009, user interfaces for browsing and using data, what Tim Berners-Lee thinks of new computational engine Wolfram Alpha, how e-commerce vendors are moving into the Linked Data world, and finally how the Internet of Things intersects with the Semantic Web.
During my recent trip to Boston, I had the opportunity to visit MIT. At the end of a long day of meetings with various MIT tech masterminds, I made my way to the funny shaped building (see photo right-below) where the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and its director Tim Berners-Lee work. Berners-Lee is of course the man who invented the World Wide Web 20 years ago.
This was my first meeting with the Web's creator, whose work and philosophy was a direct inspiration for me when I launched ReadWriteWeb back in 2003.1
Mathew Ingram is the Communities Editor at the Toronto-based Globe And Mail, Canada's biggest newspaper. He's a traditionally-trained reporter, but he's got years of experience blogging and using experimental new services, so he has one foot planted firmly in each world. We interviewed Mathew as part of our first premium report, The ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management, where you'll find interviews and gleaned wisdom from 40 top experts in the field. The following is an excerpt from that interview that we thought would be of general interest to readers; it's about online community, transitioning from traditional to social media and it's about Twitter (what isn't these days?). We hope you enjoy it.
This is historically important stuff. "The transition from one-way to two-way media is not something that newspapers are used to doing," Ingram told us. "It's a big change."
Pity the poor venture capitalist. Times were... well, so cushy. Money was flowing, deals were being done in record time, monetization was something one worried about later, and Silicon Valley was bursting at the seams. The sweet smell of wealth creation was everywhere. But suddenly, money got tight and the portfolio companies of many VC firms went on life support. So let's hear from a couple of well-known early-stage investors, each with close to a decade under his belt, who we learned are largely undaunted by the current melancholia.
In my recent visit to Silicon Valley, I got the chance to visit the Mozilla headquarters. Among others at the organization, I spoke to Chris Beard - Mozilla's Chief Innovation Officer and the person overseeing its efforts to bring new concepts to the browser, a.k.a. Mozilla Labs. We discussed where Firefox is heading and how it compares to Google Chrome in particular. We also talked about Mozilla's new mobile browser Fennec, the add-on platform, and how recent innovations by Mozilla - such as Weave and Ubiquity - fit into the big picture. In this post we'll focus on the near future of Firefox.
