Pappmaskin.no

I really enjoyed this talk by Tim O’Reilly at Web 2.0 Expo in New York, it has that great mix of tech and social responsibility that is so important to achieve. I’m currently a bit sick and tired of the myriad of new social media websites that pop up all the time, all doing basicly the same things, trying to connect people that are already connected up to their eyeballs. But connected to what, and to whom?

Take Dopplr. I registered there as I do on almost all new sites, just to check it out, and hooked up with the two other people I could find in my contacts, and after that I haven’t checked in. Why should I? I have no urgent need to know where ANYONE is. As a matter of fact, I would preffer if people STOPPED travelling, and instead stayed home and planted some apple trees. And I know that they added some CO2 calculator thingy to show how much you have killed the planet, but everyone knows that this is just an attempt to be politically correct, while the underlying business idea is to get people to travel more. And perhaps buying a clean conscience while you’re at it.

So it is refreshing when Tim O’Reilly talks about focusing on making websites that does “something that matters”, like Witness or Prosper.com and many others, who are trying to use the web to connect people over something important.

I’ve noticed that I have started to be more conservative about what kind of sites I spend time on or join, not because I no longer like procrastinating, but because there is so little there to feed the soul.

I keep ending up on a few favorite sites, like TED and This American Life (or at least downloading their podcasts). TED because it gives me the whole experience of the TED conference without polluting the crap out of the earth flying there, and This American Life just for making me smile and cry and feeling human. And I’m consuming gigabytes of information on gardening!

And I keep wondering what this means. Is it just me, or is there perhaps a more general feeling of “internet fatigue” going on, or “internet flu”?

photo credit: PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE

Readwriteweb wrote a post a few days ago about the lack of some New New Ideas for web startups, which I commented on. I wrote down a few old ideas I wish someone would like (and then steal):

photo credit: Whatsername?

1. Anything that uses the web to connect people to each other in a physical location

Any service that makes it as easy to approach people on the street etc as it is on Twitter or Facebook. There are heaps of services that touches on this field, but not many that works or have enough members to make it work. So maybe there is room for a service that connects it all, and shows you on a mobile map where people who are open to “hellos” are. It could be a facebook app (facebook has 1 million members in Norway, of 4.7 million inhabitants). Your mobile phone would simply broadcast itself with a “hello, talk to me” to a google map or a perhaps bluetooth. A cross between facebook, twitter and friendfeed, but with the purpose of connecting physical beings in a physical location.

photo credit: rick

2. A web based service that lets you record video from any television channel.

It makes no sense for everyone to own their own PVR/TIVO/Mediacenter and record to disk at home, when you could do it sentralized and distribute it with bittorrent. The business model is like this: 10 gb storage for free, if you are too lazy to delete, or simply want to keep things online longer, you pay extra. Everything you program to record is automatically downloaded to your harddrive if you want to. The gold: You get access to EVERY channel on the planet. I wanted to create this in 1998, but never got around to it, so you can have that idea :)

3. 24/7 live streaming video from your mobile device, with a twist

Livestreaming from a cellphone is not new, it exists today, but here is the twist: 1) a small sensor analyses your brain-response to what you see or hear, and anything that creates an “unusual” reponse is indexed and flagged for later. 2) it also has a built in visual “thesaurus” (think wikipedia meets The Terminator), that can look up information on your surroundings in semi-realtime. So if you wanted to know wether or not to eat that delicious-looking red mushroom with the white dots, the system could advice you not to.

Did you know that american kids can identify 1000 products before they start school, but only know the name of 10 local plants (according to the movie The 11th hour)?

4. A google earth for the body

Read more about “A google earth for the body” here

I’ve been using the VirbTunes plugin for Itunes for a while now, and wanted to find a way to display a list of my most recently played songs on this blog. Virb seem to have hidden this feature a little, I actually had to ask them to find it, so if you are as bad as me at finding stuff, and want to try this, the url is http://www.virb.com/transport

There is a lot of great stuff to be said about Virb, but so far the favorite feature is their plugin for Itunes. Unlike the Last.fm application VirbTunes is a proper plugin, so you don’t have to start it separately like you have with Last.fm, plus the newly discovered transport feature, that lets you display all kinds of content on you own site, and not only that, you can css it like you want to, and make all the content blend in perfectly with your theme. Their transport page is also very well structured, you don’t have to fiddle around creating boring looking widgets like on flickr, last.fm, or youtube for that matter, you just just the pulldowns, select you content, and off you go. Perfect!

Ross Mayfield’s Weblog: Doug Englebart, Rebooted: “We herald the PC revolution, but we should remember that it made us forget to share. Timesharing enabled groups to share a common pool resource, sharing that, which impacted social dynamics. With PCs, we were left on our own, however empowered. When isolated, Microsoft imposed constraints that led to the formation of computer clubs. If you want to understand open source, and in fact, the entire social wave of innovation we are in the midst of — have a little homebrew.”

Douglas Engelbart : The Mother of All Demos (1/9)