The next big thing is not the semantic web - it's sensors and robots — edublogs October 17, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentEwan McIntosh on one prediction by Paul Saffo, who says we need to look two times the distance back to forecast the future:
"The next big thing is not the semantic web - it's sensors and robots
1950s TV - Broadcast
1980s Time-sharing - Email
1990s Cient sharing - WWW
2000 P2P - Napster
2010 Sensors - Smartifacts
[…]
The indicators are already in place, though I think we're probably missing it for the immediate ideas and opportunity that the web is offering in 2008.
We're moving from TV to the web, from the living room to everywhere, from watching and consuming to participating and creating, from few and large organisations to many and small individuals. […]
One forecast is looking a dead cert: the future's looking like one heck of a ride."
FT editor Lionel Barber: Why journalism wins my vote October 11, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a comment"…the mainstream press lost touch with its audience at the very moment when technology, via the internet, was dramatically lowering the barriers to entry.[…]
…a shift in the balance of power towards new media, with wholesale repercussions for the practice of journalism.[…]
…whether this same journalistic rigour can survive the current maelstrom.
… the role of the trained journalist as trusted intermediary no longer holds. Some may argue that this privileged status was always precarious, even a fiction. […]
Yet to abandon the quest to write the first draft of history carries risks. There will always be powerful forces seeking to suppress injustice or inconvenient truths. For all their failings, newspapers, especially the well-financed family-owned newspapers, have served as a counterweight. On both sides of the Atlantic, the line between news reporting and comment is becoming increasingly blurred. That is something that should give everyone in the profession pause for thought."
John Naughton: Slavish reporters join Microsoft in cloud cuckoo land | Media | The Observer October 5, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentJohn Naughton on the lack of questioning claims made by big, powerful companies/individuals — here, Microsoft and the easy ride given to its boss, Steve Ballmer. With special reference to BBC tech correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones:
"our tendency to lose all capacity for critical thought when confronted by great wealth or power […] we see it in the way even hardened hacks go weak when offered an audience with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett or even, God help us, Steve Ballmer, chief of Microsoft.
[…] he went on to say that Windows Vista had been 'the most popular operating system that Microsoft had ever introduced'.
This hooey was conscientiously relayed by Cellan-Jones, who was too polite to ask why, if Vista is such a success, Ballmer is to unveil its successor, Windows 7, to the Microsoft developers' conference at the end of this month. Microsoft is such a powerful company that it never seems to occur to reporters that its leaders might be fantasising. It's the aphrodisiac effect again."