From this excellent video

There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.

You and I are alive at this moment.

KK for Wired

With reports that a “New Worm Chats with Users on AIM” link and even goes so far as to respond “lol no its not its a virus” when questioned it’s not too far of a leap to imagine personalized viruses.

Don’t imagine the personalized viruses tailored to your DNA that many sci-fi novels talk about, but instead think the evolution of Spear-Phishing.

This kind of an attack could use the information it gathers about you (contact names, frequency of contact, online purchase history, emails, IM history etc) to masquerade as a “trusted” contact to everyone you know. If it wasn’t too intrusive, then it would be difficult to even notice if your system had been infected.

Imagine that instead of trying to steal your credit card numbers, or other information that has a lot of attention focused on security this “personalized” virus simply pretended to be you occasionally.

It could IM/email your contacts, and suggest products or services. If it only chose things that you would recommend, or have purchased (think of Amazon’s suggestion engine), to the type of people who would be interested (search for keywords in email/IM interactions), and could do it in your ‘voice’ (copy phrasing from IM/email) it would be very effective. Perhaps it would even place VOIP calls, and remix your voice for maximum effectiveness.

Whatever the mechanism, the fact remains that eventually one of your friends would say ‘Thanks for the heads up on that (stock pick, book, software package, membership website etc)’ and it would come out that you didn’t actually tell them about it.

The question is – would you mind?

Think of it this way – If someone had a website with EXACTLY the news that you were interested in, and nothing else you would be very happy to read it. It wouldn’t matter that the site was a splog newsmaster site, or the product of a great news team. Either way you are happy with the end result.

By the same token, you really would like to let all of your friends know about the products and services that you think would improve their lives. It would be even better if you were able to do so without taking any effort on your part, and it just “worked in the background”.

By making itself unobtrusive, and even helpful you would have very little incentive to track down and remove the bot. From there it’s just a short step to reminding you about appointments, screening phone calls etc. After all if it’s doing a good enough job, you might even want it to help you to manage your relationships a little. Imagine being able to delegate those obligatory chats to your Fetch* .

As I have discussed before the revolution in personalized content may well evolve from search engine spammers. That is just one niche in the digital ecosystem. In order for digital life to evolve there needs to be competition and consequences. With anti-virus, anti-spyware and other types of competitive software in the mix only the fittest will survive.

I can’t wait to see what comes out from this.

* Fetch = autonomous adaptive software agent or knowledge based agent.

What makes this funy is that he makes a good part of his living through “creative search engine marketing” and is generally much more able to game Yahoo than Google.

But now it looks like a lot more people may be thinking his way. Yahoo has launched personalized social search.

Save to My Web is a simple, sociable button you can add to any and every page of your blog or website. Users click to save your content and add it directly to their stored pages on My Web 2.0. From there, the page is easy to retrieve, and easy to share with others. …

By distributing the tagging/microchunking of content to it’s users, Yahoo goes from search & communities (Y! groups) to search + communities + reconstructor. This could be the missing piece for the Yahoo triple play, a la Media 2.0 Strategic Maxims.

via John Battelle’s Searchblog

The RSS is the TCP/IP of Web 2.0 is a very interesting read, as is Nivi in general.


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RSS is like an API for content. RSS gives you access to a web site’s data just like an API gives you access to a web site’s computing power. Most important, RSS gives you access to your data that you have locked up on a web site.

Every Web 1.0 company will have to decide what content they will open with RSS. For example, Amazon already makes their content like their book catalog available through their API. But will Amazon open up user-contributed content through RSS?

Will you have access to

• Your explicit content like your purchase history and reviews you’ve written?

• Your drive-by content like the books you have recently browsed on Amazon?

• Other user’s content such as book reviews?

I believe I heard Jon Udell say that the winners of the Web 2.0 orgy will be the sites that don’t lock up user-contributed content. Instead, the winners will create a compelling ecosystem for you to store your content and bring in your content from other sites via RSS. Food for thought.

Note: This is Part 3 of a continuing series called RSS is the TCP/IP of Web 2.0. You may also like Parts 1 and 2.

There needs to be a standard so that it’s completely unambiguous just what one means when one says “Copy Optimized DVD Audio disc”. It’s that clear specification that will make embedded players and perfect peer-to-peer network copies possible. A disc containing such files could be popped into your home stereo DVD player and made to play, copy and share with no more user intervention than hitting a button…

Via Boing Boing

“DJ’s are like collaborative filters – but the best ones are also sources of novelty. Noise, if you like, – but good noise. Filters that can jump from peak to peak – from things I might like now, to things I will like when my preferences will evolve (or, better yet, that evolve my preferences). Algorithmic solutions don’t do this yet – and probably won’t for a while, because it’s a (really) hard problem. But it’s also a (really) big market gap.” link

You don’t need an algorithmic solution when you can have your users brute force it for you more accurately, and also introduce novelty.

The question becomes where are you going to get a dedicated group of users who are willing to invest their time, efforts and attention into your system?

Untold numbers of music fans & teenagers seems like a good place to start.

“MTV Hits, an MTV offshoot channel in UK, will turn into a fully interactive service, encouraging viewers to choose playlists and influence the on-screen look of the network.

From later this year viewers will initially be invited to create their own home pages on MTV.co.uk, with features including personal blogs, all-time favourite track lists and current favourites.” -link

Compared to “standalone” Web apps and desktop apps, applications developed for this hypothetical platform have some powerful advantages. Because they run in a Web browser, these applications are cross platform (assuming that whoever develops such a system develops the local Web server part of it for Windows, OS X, Linux, your mobile phone, etc.), just like Web apps such as Gmail, Basecamp, and Salesforce.com. You don’t need to be on a specific machine with a specific OS…you just need a browser + local Web server to access your favorite data and apps.

It raises one of the major obstacles facing the idea of Web as Operating System – Lameness

One thing that might deter you from writing Web-based applications is the lameness of Web pages as a UI. That is a problem, I admit. There were a few things we would have really liked to add to HTML and HTTP. What matters, though, is that Web pages are just good enough.

With the introduction of ifthen YubNub could be a solution to the “lameness” of web pages as user interface.

Just as using CSS allows separation of the content from the presentation, Yubnub allows separation of the interface from the application.

This allows for the hypothetical “WebOS” to have the advantages without suffering from “lameness”

– Link

Trust in network environments
The need for a cognitive model of trust
The socio-cognitive model of trust
The beliefs of trust: what X thinks about Y
The “Motivation belief” of trust
Yin-yang trust
Internal and external trust
The sources of trust
Trust and irrationality
Degrees of trust
Trust and risk
Trust and delegation
Trust and control
Trust and adjustable autonomy
The dynamics of trust
Trust and experiences
Trust elicits trust
Trust atmosphere
Trust as a three parties relationship: contracts and authorities
Trust as a communicative act
Trust as a fuzzy network
Trust in contract nets
Trust, security and technology
Trust and technical knowledge
Trust and knowledge management

When I first came across this about a year ago it blew my mind. It’s a tiny bit dated, but still incredible. Go ahead, watch it now! (then read the rest of this post)

While I think some of the specifics are unlikely (or even silly) the examples of the New Media Economics and business models are brilliant. The personalized content meme is definitely out there.

Today at SEO Blackhat I saw a very interesting question tied to the Googlezon idea.

“Who is really pioneering the computer generated content, the rewording and content scraping technology of the Web?

SEO Black Hats

Search engine spam technology keeps improving, so search engines keep evolving. The best SE spammers are the ones who provide as close to EXACTLY what the search engine is looking for as possible. The best search engine is the one that finds as close to EXACTLY what the user is looking for as possible. Therefore as search engines improve, SE spammers will have to evolve as well to deliver EXACTLY what the user is looking for, transforming them from a hated nuisance to a valued resource.