A vulgar comment was made by a reader of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's website on Friday on an article about the strangest things you've ever eaten. The headline was practically asking for a juvenile response and, thanks to the anonymity of the internet, that's exactly what happened. In the comments section of the article, one user posted a single word response referring to a part of a woman's anatomy. Of course, the site's moderators quickly deleted the comment but it soon reappeared - obviously this juvenile was intent on having their say.

But this time, instead of just deleting the comment in question, the site's director of social media, Kurt Greenbaum, did a little sleuthing too. He found that the commenter's IP address was coming from a local school...and that's where this story starts to get interesting.

Greenbaum contacted the school and made them aware of the situation. In his defense, he probably thought he was simply tattle-telling on a naughty student who would learn a valuable lesson about internet anonymity and would have to sit through a week's detention or something of the like. Instead, he cost a school employee his job.

Yes, as it turns out, the commenter in question wasn't a juvenile after all, just someone with a juvenile mind. Greenbaum learned of the firing when the school phoned him back six hours later to report their findings. They had confronted the employee and he had resigned.

Crossing the Line? Or Justice Served?

The question being hotly debated now is did Greenbaum go too far? Or did the commenter get what they deserved?

Mathew Ingram, the blogger and communities editor for Toronto's The Globe and Mail, writes on his personal blog that his paper's site has seen hundreds or even thousands of comments, most of which are much worse than the one Greenbaum saw, but he would never - and has never - contacted someone's workplace about them. He calls Greenbaum's actions "over-the-top" and apparently, many commenters on STLtoday.com's website agree, calling out Greenbaum over this incident.

And yet Greenbaum seems to show no remorse, responding to one commenter who accused him of hating moderating so much that he decided to get someone fired by saying: "Yeah, you caught me! I made him log on to his computer at work, visit STLtoday.com's Talk of the Day, read the item, type a vulgarity and hit the 'submit' key."

Sixteen pages of comments now follow that initial interaction, and the majority of them seem to agree that Greenbaum crossed a line, save for the occasional concerned parent who didn't like the idea of this vulgarity-posting person hanging around their children instead of doing his job.

Lesson to Be Learned: Watch What You Say!

We can't blame Greenbaum for the sleuthing bit - any blogger will tell you they've been tempted to hunt down the identities of nasty commenters from time to time. But calling someone's work? That's just wrong.

Yet while Greenbaum may have been seriously misguided to do what he did, this should be another sobering reminder to anyone trolling the net that what you type may come back and haunt you one day. There's no such thing as true anonymity on the net these days, and thanks to new technologies like Facebook Connect, the days where you can hide behind a made-up web handle may be numbered. In fact, Facebook itself may even owe its success to how it forces users to post with their "real" name and identity notes blogger Kent Newsome. "With a name comes accountability, and there is a direct correlation between accountability and behavior," he writes.

That may be true, but the fact of the matter is that the STLtoday website allows anonymous comments. When you make that choice, then you have to expect that some of them will need moderation - it's just part of the job. Regardless of the site's policies about vulgarity, phoning the employer seems like an over-reaction to the incident. But that's just our opinion. What do you think?

Internet Use and Social Media

That's not to say that there aren't some technology addicts that aren't social isolated - around 6% of the adult online population would fit in this category, having no one with whom they can talk about those important matters and who say they don't have anyone "especially significant" in their life. However, this figure (the 6%) has not grown as access to technology has grown over the years - it has remained virtually unchanged since 1985. This points to the fact that perhaps those who are socially isolated individuals would be so anyway, regardless of what sorts of tools are provided to them, be those mobile phones, PCs with internet access, etc.

For the majority of the online population, technology - and especially social media - has led to more diverse networks than we've ever had before. The report notes that those who participate in social networking services such as Facebook for example, are more likely to interact with people from different backgrounds, different races, different political parties, etc. Specifically, blogging and general internet use was tied to having more racially diverse networks while online photo sharing was tied to having more diverse political discussion partners.

Those who use the internet tend to have 15% more network ties who aren't family members and those who use instant messaging services have 19% more non-kin members in their core networks.

Mobile Phone Use

Along these same lines, the ubiquity of mobile phones hasn't led to decreased face time with family and friends, but just the opposite. On average, a person spends 195 days of the year having mobile phone contact with others, but face-to-face interactions occur on about 210 days per year. In addition, mobile users have around 15% more family members with whom they can discuss important matters and tend to have 25% more core network members who are not family members. Overall, those who use mobile phones have core networks that are 12% larger than those who don't.

Despite all this good news about how technology leads to having larger, more diverse networks, the researchers also found that our networks' size has actually shrunk over the years. Since 1985, there has been a decrease of about 1/3 in their size. The researchers don't suggest any specific reasons for this shrinkage, but they do point out that they can now rule out one possibility for sure: technology.

This data comes from a new report put out by Arbor Networks, who has just completed a two-year study of 256 exabytes of Internet traffic data, the largest study of global traffic since the start of the commercial Internet in the mid-1990's.

The biggest trend to come out of Arbor Networks' report is clearly that of the Internet's consolidation. Today's Internet is "flatter" and "more densely connected" than ever before, reveals Arbor Networks' Chief Research Officer Danny McPherson. Not only is Google the largest traffic source, there are only 30 large companies in addition to Google and including sites like Facebook, Microsoft and YouTube which now account for a disproportionate 30% of all Internet traffic.

According to Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor Networks, this shift represents the Internet's move into a second phase where it's no longer "all about contacting websites." Rather, "over the past two years larger organizations have been buying up the smaller websites and by July 2009, 30 per cent of the internet was owned by a few large sites." The acquisitions, the result of billions of dollars spent by large companies snapping up smaller ones, has created a new Internet core of "hyper giants," a coin termed by the report.

The other companies making the list of Internet giants include names like Akamai, Limelight, BitGravity, Highwinds, and Gravity - hardly household names, and certainly not big telco providers. Instead, these content delivery networks (CDNs), are the new Internet backbone that help move large amounts of data across the web.

So Long P2P, Hello Streaming Media

Consolidation is not the only trend revealed by the new findings, however. The report also discovered a sharp decline in peer-to-peer traffic, which only two years prior peaked at 40% of all traffic worldwide. Today, while still a hefty number, P2P traffic has dropped down to 18%. Why the change? For the most part, the file-sharing that took place on networks like Limewire and Napster back in the late 90's and early 2000's, has now been largely replaced by streaming video thanks to to sites like YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix. Given easier and less technical ways of accessing media, consumers have begun to shift away from the headache of P2P to these new and often free or ad-supported sites. Today, as much as 20% of web traffic is video, Labovitz estimates.

As far as Internet traffic in general, more than half (52%) is web-based, up from 42% in 2007. The remaining traffic comes from email and private networks.

A "Dramatic" Shift?

"Saying the Internet has changed dramatically over the last five years is cliché - the Internet is always changing dramatically," notes Labovitz. "However, over the course of the last five years, we've witnessed the start of an equally dramatic shift in the fundamental business of the Internet." He adds, "as content is getting faster and better quality it will change the face of the internet."]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_accounts_for_6_of_all_internet_traffic.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_accounts_for_6_of_all_internet_traffic.php Google Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:38:11 -0800 Sarah Perez European researchers have been working for years on a system that allows developers to create internet applications that can manage and fix themselves. Called SELFMAN, the project aims to address the challenges inherent in large scale applications. According to Peter Van Roy, project coordinator, "The central challenge when you build big internet applications is how to keep them running without having to tweak and manage them all the time. We wanted to make big internet applications easy, so that all the management problems you normally have are handled by the system itself. It will take the internet to the next level."

Indeed it will.

Within the SELFMAN project, there are four key areas determined to be vital in order for a distributed application to have the ability to manage itself: self-configuring, self-tuning, self-healing, and self-protecting.

To configure itself, an application needs to track all of its components, update them when needed, and make sure that all the different pieces are able to communicate with each other. Within the SELFMAN system, an individual component can be queried for this information, such as its version number and which other components it interacts with. If the version number is out-of-date, it would be automatically updated.

The self-tuning piece of the system involves having the application automatically adjust to changing loads as well as changes taking place among the various nodes on the network. To do so, it uses a load-balancing algorithm that detects overloads, node crashes, and other disruptions.

What was more challenging for the researchers was the self defense aspect of the SELFMAN system. They discovered that the safest systems were not those in which nodes are directly linked, but those in which nodes can communicate with other nodes in just a few steps. Within these sorts of networks, dubbed "small world" networks, the SELFMAN security service can automatically detect abnormal behavior and eject bad nodes as needed.

Results So Far

Already the team has had promising results. For example, Scalaris, an open-source scalable transactional storage for Web 2.0 services won first prize in the IEEE International Scalable Computing Challenge 2008. Peer-to-peer video streaming application PeerTV uses SELFMAN to quickly test an evaluate new P2P components. There's also a demo of a distributed Wikipedia that can handle more queries than the current version and a graphics program that lets multiple users collaborate on a design.

Van Roy believes that SELFMAN represents the first step towards an internet filled with "unbreakable" applications. "Right now we're just scratching the surface," he says.

For more information about these applications, stay tuned to ICT Results, a European research tracking firm, which will soon highlight the various applications in more detail.

At the very least, the service represents a good first step in bringing the web to the TV without losing that essential "TV experience" which has more to do with passively holding a remote than it does with actively typing onto a keyboard. That psychological barrier between participation levels involved in surfing the net and watching TV is probably what led early internet-enabled TV experiences to fail...like "Web TV" for example. People just don't want keyboards in the living room. Verizon seems to understand our need for more passive interaction and has made nearly everything about their web-enabled TV service easy to perform with the Verizon FiOS remote control.

Hands-On: Facebook on the TV

First things first. Before you can have any fun with the Widget Bazaar, you have to configure a parental control password. This may seem a bit odd, but it's understandable given some of the Twitter hashtags we've seen become trending topics lately. To set up the parental control passcode, you have to delve into settings. It's not really that difficult and the process was complete in a matter of moments.

Now you can enter your new passcode to access the Facebook widget, but before you begin you still have to scroll through pages and pages of an end-user agreement and select "I agree" at the end.

Once you're past these initial setup configurations, you can proceed with logging into your Facebook account. The Facebook widget only appears on one half of your screen, so you can play around with it while still continuing to watch whatever program you have on.

On the next screen, you're presented with boxes to enter in your Facebook email address and password. There's a handy option to "Remember Me" so you don't have to re-enter your email each time. You're also prompted to set up an optional numeric passcode which you can use in the future in lieu of entering in your password. I recommend doing so - pushing numbers on your remote is a lot easier and faster than using that on-screen keyboard.

Once logged in, your new Facebook sidebar appears with your current program still playing to the right. There's an option at the top to "switch user" which will probably introduce a whole new way to fight over the remote control (it's my turn on Facebook!). The first option - the one to view your "Profile" - is actually quite boring. It just displays your current profile photo and status, two things you probably don't need to see. Unfortunately, there's no way to use the on-screen keyboard to post a custom status update from within this area.

Both the "Friends - Status Updates" and the "All Friends" section looked exactly the same to me. I thought the "All Friends" section would be more like the News Feed (so-and-so posted a photo, so-and-so requested help in Mafia Wars), but that didn't appear to be the case. It's possible that all my friends were just surprisingly inactive on Facebook at the time I launched this section, but I'm not so sure. In any event, both sections looked exactly the same: a list of friends and their status messages.

The "Albums" section was particularly fun and probably the most useful of all the options. Here, you can launch a list of your Facebook photo albums and then scroll through the pictures they contained in a slideshow-like format. Another tap on the "OK" button would launch the pictures full-screen.

Finally, the best part: updating your Facebook status. An option at the bottom allows you to update your status with a pre-configured message that says what show your watching. Although I still wish that I could customize my message, this simple, one-button post option is a great feature to have.

Hands-On: Twitter on the TV

Before you can start using the Twitter widget, you have to agree yet again to another Terms of Service. Besides the typical lawyerly stuff you'd expect to see, there was an interesting section that pointed you to www22.verizon.com/terms to read more about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for info on how to contact Verizon with claims. There was also a section that informed you how to report child pornography posted to Twitter. (I wasn't even aware that Twitter had that problem, but I guess Verizon's lawyers were just covering all their bases).

Unlike with Facebook, you don't configure your own Twitter account within this widget. That means you can't see your replies, direct messages or your friends' timeline. In other words, this widget isn't a Twitter client. That's disappointing because I'd like to be able to tweet from my TV...at the very least I think you should have the same option as in Facebook to tweet what you're watching. Sadly, that's not the case.

Instead, the Verizon Twitter widget provides more of a read-only experience. You can check out a list of the latest trends and see the related tweets, perform keyword-based searches, or even configure "favorite topics" for custom saved searches of your own. (Hint: set up a favorite search for your Twitter username to keep track of replies).

The interface to all these options looks the same: tweets on the right, TV show playing on the left - just like with the Facebook widget. The tweets don't update automatically, but you can press "OK" on your remote to refresh them. You can also scroll up and down through the list to see more.

The absolute coolest option within the Twitter widget is its ability to display tweets about the current show. In my case, I was watching "Pan's Labyrinth" on HBO (which is, by the way, an odd but interesting tale). Surprisingly, there were a few others tweeting about this movie, too. Of course, had I been watching something more common - like American Idol for instance - there surely would have been tons more tweets to see. The only problem with the way these tweets are displayed is the lack of a timestamp. I really don't know if these folks were watching Pan's Labyrinth with me right now or if they were watching it sometime in the past.

Conclusion

Overall, I'm thrilled to have this sort of functionality on my TV, but I'd like to see a few improvements. I'd like the option to make the Twitter widget more of a client so I can tweet an opinion about what I'm watching or at least that I'm watching something. Although the on-screen keyboard is cumbersome and slow, what better way to kill time in between commercials? I'd also like to type in custom Facebook status messages in the same way.

The only other major complaint was speed. There was a bit of a delay when scrolling through photos in my album, for example, and hitting the scroll button again and again only led to the selection moving way too far ahead of where I wanted to go. I should have known better than to keep mashing it, but with TVs, you expect instant reactions. Channel Up changes the channel immediately, for example, without any delay.

Also, when viewing tweets, scrolling up and down through the list did a weird refresh of the entire screen which was distracting. I didn't see the same type of refresh when scrolling through Facebook updates, so it seems like something is really off there. Perhaps the widget also doing a search to look for more current updates...I'm not sure. In any event, it needs to be fixed.

But at the end of the day, despite these issues, having Facebook and Twitter on my TV is truly incredible.

Oh, I should also mention that the Widget Bazaar introduces two other widgets: Sudoku and ESPN Fantasy Sports. More widgets will launch in the future. I've only included a selection of images in this post, for all the photos from my TV, you can visit the online album here.

Internet access in a time of democratized online publishing may be understood as a contemporary form of the right to self-expression. It could also be understood as part of basic access to public services in an increasingly online world. We do wonder what such a designation would mean for pricing policies and the internet economy.

Legal theory trailblazer Corey Doctorow wrote the following bold prediction in an article about homeless people and internet access last week:

Here's a prediction: in five years, a UN convention will enshrine network access as a human right (preemptive strike against naysayers: "Human rights" aren't only water, food and shelter, they include such "nonessentials" as free speech, education, and privacy). In ten years, we won't understand how anyone thought it wasn't a human right.

What do you think? Do you think internet access should be understood as a fundamental human right? Do you think that it's a frivolous distraction at a time when millions of people still don't have access to food, clean water and shelter?

France is a nation that decided earlier this year to give its citizens free one year subscriptions to a newspaper of choice on their 18th birthdays. Ostensibly to bail out the newspaper industry but also to foster a life-long habit of learning. That's pretty neat.

If you're interested in more details about this particular French ruling and can read French, check out our partner blog ReadWriteWeb France. If English is a requirement, Techdirt will no doubt have solid coverage of this and related issues.

Image: "PC bang", Seoul. By Flickr user tawalker

Because it can't. It does not understand. It has no access to most sources. It lacks the semantic understanding and common sense to build bridges between information.

It is critical that machines gain a new level of understanding. Instead of statistically computing how well a search term matches a document, a machine must literally be able to understand. Therefore, knowledge bases are needed to look things up. Examples of these knowledge bases include:

• an encyclopedia containing knowledge to look up the semantic meaning and context of a particular term (e.g. to understand that Berlin is a city, how many people live there, and where it is),
• Yellow Pages or a service pool to query often-changing and more complex information (e.g. a route from Berlin to Porto by car, or the current temperature of Porto in Celsius),
• a people database to look up profile information, with user permissions, which could improve personalization and recommendations.

The Web of Data

The idea of the Web of Data originated with the Semantic Web. People tried to solve the problem of the inherent inability of machines to understand web pages. Initially, the aim of the Semantic Web was to invisibly annotate web pages with a set of meta-attributes and categories to enable machines to interpret text and put it in some kind of context. This approach did not succeed because the annotation was too complicated for humans who had no technical background. Similar approaches, like microformats, simplify the markup process and thus help bootstrap this chicken-egg problem.

These approaches have in common the effort to improve the machine-accessibility of knowledge on web pages that were designed to be consumed by humans. Furthermore, these sites contain a lot of information that is irrelevant to machines and that needs to be filtered. What is needed is a knowledge base for machines to look up "noiseless" information. But wait! Who said that machines and us humans need to share one web anyway?

The idea of the Web of Data came about as a result of both this limitation and the existence of countless structured data sets distributed all over the world and containing all kinds of information. These data sets are the property of companies that trend to make them accessible. Typically, a data set contains knowledge about a particular domain, like books, music, encyclopedic data, companies, you name it. If these data sets were interconnected (i.e. link to each other like websites), a machine could traverse this independent web of noiseless, structured information to gather semantic knowledge of arbitrary entities and domains. The result would be a massive, freely accessible knowledge base forming the foundation of a new generation of applications and services.

Linking Open Data

One promising approach is W3C's Linking Open Data (LOD) project. The above image illustrates participating data sets. The data sets themselves are set up to re-use existing ontologies such as WordNet, FOAF, and SKOS and interconnect them.

The data sets all grant access to their knowledge bases and link to items of other data sets. The project follows basic design principles of the World Wide Web: simplicity, tolerance, modular design, and decentralization. The LOD project currently counts more than 2 billion RDF triples, which is a lot of knowledge. (A triple is a piece of information that consists of a subject, predicate, and object to express a particular subject's property or relationship to another subject.) Also, the number of participating data sets is rapidly growing. The data sets currently can be accessed in heterogeneous ways; for example, through a semantic web browser or by being crawled by a semantic search engine.

To get a feeling of how this machine Web of Data feels like, you may want to look up:

• the company Yahoo! on CrunchBase,
• the city of Berlin or the game Tetris on DBpedia,
• the book iPhone: The Missing Manual on O'Reilly Media.

With every fact available on the Web of Data, more general and specific knowledge is made accessible to machines that will enable a whole new generation of services to be created. Highly sophisticated queries become machine-processable and accessible to the next generation of, say, search services.

Check out Tim Berners-Lee's talk at TED about the Web of Data. How do you think about it? Do you encounter the same issues being overloaded by information or too much noise?

(Photo by zorro-art. Graph by the Linking Open Data project.)

Any serious Twitter user will tell you that half the fun of watching a major television event or popular show is tuning into the backchannel provided by those twittering their thoughts and reactions to what's being broadcast. An excellent example of this type of live backchannel was seen during President Obama's recent public address - a hotly tracked item on Twitter where the hashtag to follow was #NSOTU (aka "Not State of the Union.") Even lawmakers were getting in on the action by twittering from the House floor while listening to Obama speak.

This real-time view into the reactions of the crowd has been at times insightful, at other times humorous, but is always an interesting and interactive way to participate in any event, including something shown on TV. Yet when it comes to Twitter and the television, it's often a two-screen experience involving a web-connected laptop or phone and the TV itself.

But with Verizon's new widget platform, developers will be able to build widgets like this one which displays Twitter updates on your TV. But unlike Twitter's own search tool that only lists the trending topics, Verizon's widget demonstrates how Twitter could enhance your TV-viewing experience in a whole new way. When launching this widget, for example, one of the options is "current channel." Select that and all of a sudden you're seeing the tweets related specifically to the program or movie that you're currently viewing.

Another widget, this one for Facebook users, lets you update your status with a message about what you're watching. It also provides access to your friends and your photo albums.

These two widgets were built in-house by Verizon engineers and won't necessarily ship with the upcoming update to the DVR... but they could. In a recent demonstration of the software's capabilities, Joseph Ambeault, Director of Consumer Product Development Video, hinted that the company had talked to various internet companies about their providing widgets for the new platform. However, he would not confirm any specifics. (There were some very cagey head rolls - half nods, half shakes - when providing the non-answers, though!). We specifically asked about Twitter, but the Verizon representative said he could not comment. We're taking the decided ambiguity to mean talks began but nothing is official.

In fact, seeing the widget in action makes us wonder - is this a part of Twitter's mysterious business model? It very well could be. Verizon's widgets, which could potentially reach several million customers here in the United States, will be monetized through on-screen advertisements like banner ads. These ads, similar in look and feel to those seen on the web, will launch a quick TV commercial when selected with the remote control.

The Widget Ecosystem

At present, Verizon has widgets for weather, traffic, headlines, horoscopes, and community information. There's also an ESPN Fantasy Football widget which provides stats on your players and scores. But when the widget platform goes live, the potential for an entire ecosystem of widgets will explode. However, the questions as to how this ecosystem will look and behave are things Verizon is still figuring out as, up until now, they've solely focused on the technical aspects of the solution.

What they can say now is that widgets will be programmed using LUA, a standard technology which many game developers will be familiar with already. The process for signing up to create a widget won't involve any laborious steps, either. Instead, there will be a quick web form to fill out and then developers can gain access to the company's SDK (software development kit). According to Verizon, they're not interested in tightly controlling which widgets become available to their FiOS customers - they just want to provide tools for widget creation and sharing. As Ambeault describes it, the ecosystem's level of openness will be "somewhere in between Apple and Google" - a reference to the variation between the App Store approval process for the locked-down iPhones versus the wide-open Google Android platform.

Also of note, Verizon seems less interested in competing with the other newly launched widget platforms, like the Yahoo/Intel TV widgets that are being integrated into new televisions themselves, and are more interested in working to port those widgets to their platform. But when asked if they were working with Yahoo, the only answer was yet another cryptic head roll.

Internet Video with No Extra Box (Just a Computer)

Another aspect to the upgraded Verizon Web + TV experience is the introduction of internet content, searchable through their "Interactive Media Guide." When the new software launches, Verizon FiOS DVRs will stream software from YouTube, DailyMotion, Break.com, Blip.tv, and Veoh. The format conversion that makes this possible actually takes place on a computer connected on the home network running Verizon Media Manager software, not on the DVR itself. Verizon says they configure this software for consumers at the time of installation.

This Media Manager software also allows customers to stream videos and photos from their PC to TV.

Beyond the Net

Multiple upgrades to the DVR software will take place over the course of the coming year. The first upgrade, due out this summer, will deliver new features like the updated program guide with its richer contextual menus. Here, for example, customers will find things like colorful thumbnails of movies when searching through on-demand titles - an experience somewhat reminiscent of Netflix. Also included will be the ability to preview programs from channels you don't currently subscribe to and the option to then order the channel using your remote. Most notably, though, the summer upgrade (from version 1.6 to 1.7 of Verizon's 2nd-generation software) will introduce the internet video content. Later this fall, the widget SDK will launch.

Given Verizon's position as a TV company, phone company, ISP, and wireless provider, they plan to maximize their new software across all various platforms. Already Verizon mobile phones can access TV through V-Cast, but in the future they may be able to use the widgets too. Mobile phone users can also program their DVRs remotely.

Of course, this news is only of interest to Verizon FiOS customers - still a relatively small market here in the U.S. when compared to cable but one that's growing in key markets. However, Verizon's move is raising the bar as to what consumers will come to expect from their web-connected TVs in the future, whether the web content comes from Verizon, is built into the TV itself, or arrives as part of whatever comes next.

Recently, we've seen a handful of companies attempting to develop technologies that could build an "internet of things." One example is Tikitag, a company that presented at the DEMO 08 conference.  With a Tikitag starter kit and some client software, you can program your own RFID tags so that they can do anything you want them to do. They can launch an application, deliver you to a URL, and so much more.

What's great about Tikitag's tags is that you don't need a specialized RFID reader in order to scan them - they're compatible with third party readers like NFC (Near Field Communication) enabled mobile phones. There are already over 40 million of these phones available and analysts expect over 250 millions to be sold in 2012.

You can get the Tikitag starter kit with one reader and 10 tags for 34.95 Euro + VAT/$49.95 U.S. Additional Tikitag RFID tags are sold for 19.95 EURO or $29.95 U.S.

Mir:ror

Mir:ror is a device from a company called Violet that detects the objects you show it and gives them powers. As you wave a device over the USB-attached mirror, you can trigger applications and multimedia content automatically. The "magic" mirror isn't actually sensing the object itself, but is reacting to an RFID tag placed on the object which then tells your computer what to do.

Those tags are embedded in the company's Ztamps, colorful RFID stamps that you stick on the objects you want to connect. They also work with the company's other more well-known internet-connected object: the Nabaztag, an adorable rabbit that can deliver anything from ambient information through lights and sounds to verbal information - like when he reads your email or RSS feeds to you.

Pachube

Pachube is a service that lets you "tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments around the world. The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual." On their web site, you can either input a feed or use one of the feeds available. The feeds come from devices, buildings, or interactive installations that are already connected to the internet or that send out SMS messages. Also supported are Second Life installations.

By registering a feed on the site, you can share your real-time data with other objects, keep historical records of your data, or create online graphs to use in a web page.

Arduino

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform made up of open source hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments - that is, "the internet of things."

For an example of the type of internet-connected objects you can build with Arduino, look at this presentation where the author configured a kid's toy ray gun to react when anyone posted on Twitter about the #barcampliverpool hash tag.

ZeroG Wireless

ZeroG Wireless is a semiconductor company that's focused on building low-power wireless chips. Their low-power Wi-Fi chips can be embedded into any system including consumer electronics, smart energy devices, home and building controls, portable medical sensors, and sensor networks. The company was founded "based on the belief that a new paradigm of wireless connectivity is upon us. According to their web site, they envision a "4th Age of Wireless™ -- the Internet of Things."

According to Pew's research, Generation X is most likely to shop, bank, and look for health information online, but boomers are just as likely as Gen Y to make travel reservations online. Even the older Silent Generation is competitive when it comes to email, although that could point to the fact that email is an activity that is trending older.

Who Uses Email?

It's true: email is for old people - at least it is now. Today, 74% of internet users age 64 and older send and receive email, making it the most popular activity in this group. Meanwhile, email usage among teens is dropping. In 2004, 89% of teens said they used email. Now that number is 73%.

Social Networking Dominated by the Young

Teens and Generation Y (18-32*) are the most likely to use the internet for entertainment and for communicating with friends and family through social networks. They're also more likely than others to play online games, watch videos, send instant messages, hang out in virtual worlds, and download music. In other words, they're the most likely to use the net for fun.

The favorite online activity for teens, however, is not social networking - it's game playing. 78% of 12-17 year-olds play games online, but only 50% of Gen Y does.

Older Generations Research, Shop, and Bank

It's not really surprising to discover that the older generations use the internet less for socializing and entertainment and more for research, email, and shopping. Generation X (ages 33-44) remains the leader when it comes to online shopping with 80% using the internet to buy products online, compared with 71% of internet users ages 18-32.

What is surprising is that users age 73 and up use the internet just as frequently for doing health searches as does Gen Y. In fact, researching health information is only the third most popular online activity for seniors, after email and general online search.

However, when it comes to online banking, it's Gen X that dominates. 67% of this age group does their banking online. Gen Y will most likely do more banking online as they grow older. You can see the activity trending up in their group from 38% in 2005 to 57% in 2008. As Gen Y ages, this number will continue to increase, as does the percentage using the net for booking travel. In 2005, 50% of Gen Y booked travel online and today 65% do.

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Pew Internet also released several charts and diagrams that accompany this report. You can find them online at Slideshare.

* In this study, the Generations are defined as follows:

• Gen Y (millennials) - Born 1977-1990, Ages 18-32
• Gen X - Born 1965-1976, Ages 33-44
• Younger Boomers - Born 1955-1964, Ages 44-54
• Older Boomers - Born 1946-1954, Ages 55-63
• Silent Generation - Born 1937-1945, Ages 64-72
• G.I. Generation - Born -1936, Age 73+

If Obama and his team are going to use the Internet to help change America, so should we. The Internet is the most powerful information technology ever invented, and it has already changed the way we elect the President of the United States. Next, it just may help us restore America to its true self. How? One person at a time, starting with you and then passing it along. Here are 7 things you can do on the Internet to help President Obama turn this great country around.

1. Read About and Know the Issues

The least you can do is be aware. In this day and age, ignorance cannot be excused. All the information is out there, and whether you are Democrat or Republican or independent, the least you can do is find it. Maybe you prefer the Huffington Post or the New York Times or Fox News or CNN or independent local media; whatever your channel, spend at least 1 hour a week learning what is going on in America and around the world.

2. Join the Conversation

Obama is not a one-way president. If he was, he would never have assembled such a diverse, opinionated cabinet. Mr. Obama knows that our strength is in our diversity, and he wants to hear from you. We've been living in the age of the read/write web for the past 5+ years, and we have recently seen a decline in user participation. The time is now to re-engage, particularly around the conversation on how to turn this country around. You can directly help shape the future of America, one comment at a time. Find the blogs and online newspapers that you like and comment on the issues that matter.

3. Spread the News

The social explosion on the web created a wonderful way to disseminate news. Before, news was broadcast through centralized hubs; now, through Twitter, Facebook and other social networks, the news is spread by individuals. The implication is that your tweet matters. When you tweet news, it does not matter if it reaches thousands or dozens of people. What matters is that it reaches the people who want to hear the news from you. By spreading the news, you are leveraging our social fabric, helping the right information travel through the right channels.

4. Learn American History

To change the future, it is important to know the past. Even if you are well versed in American history, there is always more to learn. Learning history is both educational and patriotic. It is the subject that all of us should turn to in tough times. A good starting point is the Wikipedia page on American history, packed with links to historical figures and events. About.com features a whole subdomain dedicated to American history. You can find articles on subjects ranging from the Civil War to presidential elections to biographies. For more in-depth learning, head over to Kindle books on Amazon. Over four thousand books on American history come up.

5. Get Your Finances in Order

Let's face it, the latest financial crisis is partially our fault. Sure, Wall Street execs were greedy and went too far, but so did we. Many people were not disciplined and lived beyond their means. If you haven't yet, start using financial software such as Mint and Wesabe, and get your finances under control. Getting organized is the most important step to getting your finances in order. And like news dissemination, fixing the financial crisis is also done one person at a time.

6. Learn about Green Tech

The issues of global warming and green technologies are going to be at the forefront of Obama's presidency. Yes, the current economic crisis and the needless war in Iraq are the issues of the day, but global warming and green tech are the issues for decades to come. The first step you need to take in 2009 is to educate yourself. What is this all about? What is my energy consumption? What are "green homes"? Which products are green? What is the state of the solar energy industry? The web is full of green tech information; you just need to pick a source to start learning. And for a deeper look at the profound issues facing us, read Thomas Friedmans' Hot, Flat, and Crowded.

7. Engage Locally

There is one place where Obama needs your help more than anywhere else: your community. Federal government can't reach out to each corner of America, and frankly, that is not its job. This is why you can really make a difference by engaging in local politics, buying regional produce, taking your kids to a local history museum. Every township is online these days. You can connect through the Internet and engage in local issues. From spring to fall, you can shop at your local farmers' market, helping make things a little greener. Stepping up and doing just a little locally really goes a long way.

Conclusion

We are living in troubled yet exciting times. Electing Barack Obama was only a first step to turning America around. Now the tough work, the heavy lifting, begins. Mr. Obama is ready, but he needs your help. Take the time to think about things you can do on the Internet to help The Change. It's patriotic, it is right, and it is a lot of fun. Ready? Let's do this together!

See also: ReadWriteWeb Guide to Celebrating Inauguration Day

Even more interesting is that the simultaneous media usage for men decreases the older they get, but for women it's the opposite. Up until the age of 40, it's the women who are the better multi-taskers. Amanda Welsh, head of research for IMMI, thought the trend was surprising, given the amount of sports-related programming on the web. What does this mean? She says that they're interpreting the data to mean that "women are more inclined to multi-task than men."

What About the Digital Natives?

Arguing against hard data is difficult, but we have to agree with Amanda - this information is surprising. It seems to support the age-old theory that women, because of their "natural" abilities as mothers and in running the household, have some sort of innate multi-tasking abilities that allow them to engage in different activities at the same time more often (and the subtext implies "better") than men.

But is that still accurate? We're not entirely sure. The ability to take part in different activities when surfing the web is something today's teens and young adults, aka the "millennials'" or "Generation Y," also reportedly do well. Because this generation grew up with the internet a part of their world from the day they arrived, multi-tasking while online just became a normal part of their existence - for both boys and girls. Surfing the net while instant messaging, listening to music, and/or watching TV, is something that this younger generation of internet users are known for. And since these millennials are a part of the age range (15-48) involved in this study, you would think their learned multi-tasking behavior would have some impact on the reported results. But Instead, the results seem to uphold the more traditional view about women and their multi-tasking abilities.

Then Again, Multi-tasking Could Be a Myth

This idea of multi-tasking being a skill to boast about is left over from the days when technology like desktop PCs and email systems were being integrated into the workplace. Suddenly, HR managers were looking for "multi-taskers" able to focus on several different aspects of the job at the same time. However, in later years, it's been discovered that multi-tasking is more myth than reality, since the human brain can only really focus on one thing at a time, no matter how many activities a person is engaged in. The new advice for increased productivity is to slack off, work simpler, and ditch multi-tasking altogether.

So perhaps women sit in the living room with notebook PCs on their lap more often than men, but let's be honest - they aren't multi-tasking. They're just tuning out the TV to engage in something more interesting instead; the internet.

PdaNet is an application that allows you to use the internet connection via your smartphone to connect your computer to the internet. PdaNet is available for PalmOS, Windows Mobile, and the iPhone. PalmOS and Windows Mobile users are required to install the app on both their phone and their computer. Users will also need a USB cable or bluetooth to enable the connection to their computer. PdaNet is available for jailbroken iPhones via Cydia, which works without the need for cords. Instead PdaNet runs via a Wi-Fi ad-hoc network that the user must create for their iPhone.

The Best Back-Up to Have

In our tests, connection speeds were faster than a dial-up connection. If you're looking for optimal broadband speeds then your connection will depend entirely upon your service provider. On Verizon Wireless, we were able to watch Youtube videos and download a song or two within 2-3 minutes. On the AT&T network with no 3G connection, downloads and loading times were about 5-10 minutes for pages with videos or music. We were not able to test AT&T's 3G connection on our iPhone. PdaNet is available for free on the iPhone. PalmOS and Windows Mobile users will have to cough up $34 to use this app, though a trial version is available to download. Is it worth the money? We think so if you'll ever need to use your smartphone as a back-up internet connection.

The Widget Channel will allow developers to create widgets that will display on TV screens in JavaScript, XML, HTML and Flash. Yahoo will curate a directory of widgets and has currently signed up Blockbuster, CBS, CinemaNow, Disney-ABC, eBay, Joost, MTV, Samsung, Toshiba, and, interestingly, Twitter, which Yahoo demoed during the announcement at the IDF.

Comcast is also joining in the effort and will start testing the Widget Channel framework in the first half of 2009.

Challenges

By just focusing mostly on relatively simple widgets for now, Yahoo is at least partly sidestepping one of the major issues with bringing the Internet onto a TV set: navigation. As long as you only want to bring up some widgets on your screen, a simple remote control will do. However, as a typical usage scenario, Yahoo expects its users to want to browse to a friend's Flickr photos while watching a TV show - at that point, trying to find a set of photos on Flickr might just a bit more than your standard remote can handle.

Yahoo might be planting a Trojan horse in every living room here by creating a demand for Internet enabled TVs - but the real problems for interactive TV have never really been technical. Most users simply aren't interested in interacting with their TVs beyond flipping channels. The Widget Channel might just be simple enough for more folks to start using it and it might precipitate a cultural shift in how we look at our TVs, but so far, every other similar initiative has failed because of a lack of demand.

If you would like to see the slides that accompanied the IDF presentation, you can find them here (PDF). We will also provide a link to the video of the presentation once it becomes available.