THE KONGQUEST

Ah ha!

I thoroughly enjoyed this post by Diana Kimball about changing her life from loving the internet for the serendipity of vast information flow to high fi well thoughtout information in books, music and entertainment. Moving from noise to signal.

I have been thinking about doing this myself for a while but still do not know how I am going to execute it. The lure of RSS, Facebook, and Gmail are always pulling at me all the time while stacks of books and unfinished projects lay on the side. I believe in creating systems and have experimented in blocking out what I can access online and channeling my free time towards higher pursuits but long lasting habits have not formed yet. I guess I need continual reminder of what my goals are to solidify new habits at this stage. We’ll see how things go 60 days from now.

Check out the blog post yourself:

Diana Kimball: Trying

I just watched the Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O and was completely blown away by future potential of this application. Google has rethought the way communication should be done and put it all into one neat little package.

The premise of a “wave” begins with a message that is the start of a dialog between one person and another or a group of people. From there it can transform into a number of things simultaneously. It can become a static back and forth conversation like email, a real time back and forth conversation like instant messaging, or a work in progress like a word document or presentation that can be presented as a whole thought in it’s final state.

The impact of having these options to transform mediums immediately and fluidly will decrease the chances of online miscommunication dramatically. Because you can have a conversation and pop in a comment in any position you want to call attention to or re-write any part of the message and be accountable for it in the conversation playback, accountability for correct informatin lies on all participants.

What I like most of this application as the “email and instant messager killer” is that the Wave can be taken as far as you want it to. Open a wave with a friend and just treat it like you do as email. That’s fine. Open a wave with someone who is currently online and talk in real time. That’s fine too. Take it to the next step in the conversation and brainstorm a trip idea and put some pictures into the email and you can transform that whole conversation into a travel itinerary or travel guide for a book, ready to be exported immediately with some of Googles tools in the Wave.

This is THE application that all the collaboration and web 3.0 and tech geeks have been talking about when they say the future of the internet is content streamed through different portals (RSS makes it so that we do not see the original websites built around blog content) and that information will be collaborated in real time instead of statically in silos all over the web. I am interested in seeing how the world takes on this new technology and runs with it. I hope it’ll reach mass appeal like the advent of email, instant messaging, blogging, and now tweeting and just replace all those older communication channels.

Wow. This is a great video inciting people to action on changing the way education is done in our country. We all have a duty as citizens to take action for our shared better future. I love the quote she cites in the speech:

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed. - Thomas Jefferson

Watch the video:

Interesting. Jay Walker says that English is the world’s second language. English is the common language to solve the world’s common problems. I’m not too sure about the mania part of his speech because English has been put into adoption by many countries for a long time but he makes a good point that English is the default bridge between many people from different regions of the world. Having this common communication channel is key to moving forward as a world community.

TED recently had a post on an interview with P.W. Singer on the future of war and the use of robotics. It’s very interesting to think about science fiction and the ripple effects of the current progress of technology. We as modern human beings are still not ready to accept the use of intelligent robotics or know that they’re in everything we’re using. Check out the article for more information.

Article: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Battlestar Galactica: An exclusive interview with P.W. Singer on the future of war

From the CTIA Wireless Conference, their theme was to add mobile data capacity to absolutely everything. This includes the human body. The more I hear about this stuff, the more of our shared nerd fantasy is coming true. The world is colliding together at a superfast pace. When Edward Lorenz theorized about the effect of butterfly’s flap of its wings on weather patterns, he probably didn’t know that it exactly the same with today’s progressing technology. It’s amazing how one person could in effect do something so simple like post a short message in a remote location with a cell phone and affect the whole world in an instant.  Data and pushing boundaries of our understanding of the world is the future, we will be one giant hive-mind progressing towards new frontiers of thinking. Crazy.

Inspired by this post: Everything Networked - Knowledge @ Wharton

I love funny videos and cartoons. I’d like to start posting the funniest things I find from around the web on my site. If you know of any great videos that I definitely have to watch, shoot me an email or post in the comments! Sharing is caring.

Many people these days go through the whole education process and come out with jobs they hate. At the end, they wonder why life has taken them down this path. Ken Robinson brings up a good point that schools were once created and geared towards industrialism. Today, this system is antiquated and does not fully cater to the multiple facets of a productive human life. Watch the video to learn more!

This is a great video on the basics of storytelling: