Attention Grab

Featured Articles

Open Letter to Fred Wilson

January 19, 2007 by Jim Parker in blogging, future, media, technology

Dear Fred,

In response to Widget Removal - Please Vote:

First off, I’ve been a big fan of yours for over a year now.  In that time, I have read every post you’ve made, I have linked at least a couple of times from my blog, and I have made several comments (some perhaps naïve).  I read you not because you are worth millions, nor because, necessarily, that other people link to you.  Rather, I read you because your writing is good, your perspective is fresh, your insight is intelligent, and you mostly march to the beat of your own drum.  So I have an aspiration just like the tramp in Think and Grow Rich:  I plan to do business with you one day (today is not that day, though).

Additionally, I am a web application developer by trade.
Given the above self-perceived notion of my authority, I consider myself an expert consumer of your blog and have a good understanding of the technical issues that you face with your widgets.

So here are my thoughts.

You are an influential blogger who desires to express yourself with the best of breed that web services companies have to offer via widgets.  You are aggregating your presence on the world wide web into a single easily reachable and easily consumable web site.  Anybody in the world who wants to understand who you are has free access to more information than I have of my own best friend.  This you achieve with the help of all the wonderful widgets.

In my opinion, this has incredible cultural significance.  You are helping to usher in a world where people are no longer afraid to share their personal details – a world where transparency is the norm instead of just the occasional pleasant surprise.

Thus, I vote for you to keep all of your widgets.
Furthermore, I implore you to ask different questions in dealing with the widgets issue.  Instead of asking what to remove, ask what can be done to make them do what you want them to (speed, look-and-feel, etc).

Technology brought you all of these wonderful tools and technology can make them all work the way you want.  You know that is true.  Settle for nothing less.

Sincerely,
Jim Parker

Comments (0)

Avatars as Our Agents

January 4, 2007 by Jim Parker in avatar, future, technology

Avatars will become our agents, handling all contacts with the world when we don’t want to or when we can’t.

We can’t be everywhere all of the time.  But we want to be.  Back in the day, we purchased answering machines, and then voice mail.  These were (are) a very simple way of communicating to anyone the following:

1. Hello
2. Glad you called
3. I can’t take your call
4. Let me know what you want
5. I’ll get back to you

Perhaps not everyone wanted to communicate all of the above things, but everyone at least wanted to communicate one of them.  In effect, we “programmed” our answering machines/voice mail to handle contacts from the world.

And my point in bringing up voice mail is that people don’t always want to be live or can’t always be live – yet, they still want to be properly represented.  In this case, voice mail is acting as their agent.

Jump to today and beyond:

Avatars are commonplace today on the internet.  Second Life and such virtual worlds aren’t the only place to find them though.  Any graphical representation of your person is a form of avatar – be it a picture, a cartoon, a stick-in-the-mud, or anything.  It is something that represents you.  And these are found everywhere – Myspace, mybloglog, digg, blogs, youtube, flickr, etc, etc, etc.

However, the real future of avatars is with a company called OddCast.  OddCast provides slick animation-synced-with-speech avatars.  They move, they talk, they watch what you are doing.  And they are capable of Text-To-Speech.

Imagine this scenario:

1. I purchase an avatar (customized to my liking) with Text-To-Speech option from OddCast.  I set up that Avatar to read a particular text file from my web server’s file system whenever a person views my homepage.
2. I then set up an application in which my daily activities, schedule, etc are stuck into a database.  I add to that an API calls to Digg, Technorati, flickr, and delicious to pickup my online activity for the day.
3. I write some logic to figure out what’s important, what’s current, and what’s relevant – pretty easy to do with timestamps and importance fields in the DB.
4. I create a job that writes the text file that the avatar will read, I set it to update every 15 minutes.
5. Now, whenever anyone visits my site, they will be greeted by me and I will be able to share with them what’s going on in my life right now.  The ultimate personal greeting.

But this scenario is just the beginning.  Ray Kurzweil’s avatar “Ramona” can answer questions.  Thus, when the tools to consume natural language become more ubiquitous, I too will be able to easily setup a database of my life, my writings, my pictures, my video’s, etc and serve it all up through my avatar. 

Avatars are becoming programmable.  They will soon be our programmable agents, just as the answering machine is today.

Comments (0)

AttentionGrab back today!

January 2, 2007 by Jim Parker in family, future, media, technology

What a wonderful fall it has been, truly a dream come true.  I’ve been dying to come back and write about all my news.  I’ve got a lot to talk about.

Arianna and Ethan are doing well - they are a very loud bunch.  They’ve brought joy to my life I never knew I could have.

Thus, I have a different perspective on everything - different than the perspective I had yesterday.

And I have learned this:  Blogging, managing my online identity, and connecting to more and more people is something that I love to do.  This is my passion:  Using technology to bring people together in ways they never knew were possible  (in addition to the passion I have for my family).

Comments (0)

When VR is AR: Family Style

May 17, 2006 by Jim Parker in family, future, technology

(or when virtual reality becomes actual reality)

I had a conversation with a close body a couple of weeks ago about how Virtual Reality (VR) will enhance the family experience.  His argument was “Why would anybody want to spend any time in an area that just wasn’t real?  I’d rather have real life than a made up fantasy land.”  Which is a very well made point. 

Yet, I believe otherwise.  I asked:  “When you go see a movie in the movie theatre, how much of that 2 hours do you actually spend communicating with your family?”.  Continuing with, “Most families I see at the movie theatre are very quietly, politely sitting in submission to the big screen.”   “Is that what you call real?”, I asked.

Instead, my vision of what’s really real is when a family meets in VR on a Friday night from 6pm until 8pm every week. 

The Son, living in New York, the sister in Chicago, the parents in St. Louis, and everyone comes together for some family activity once a week.  Exploring the Taj Mahal this week, Grand Canyon next week, the Florida Keys the week after that - all virtually, but all together.  Making ripples back and forth on the pools of the Taj Mahal, standing at the edge of The Canyon, wind blowing everyone’s hair as we watch a beautiful sunset, or taking a couple of jet skis weaving in and out of dangerous coral areas…But never life threateningly dangerous…and all of this I share real-time with my family. 

What could possibly be more real than that?

Comments (0)

The humanity of machines

April 24, 2006 by Jim Parker in future, technology

All machines are human.

Some would question whether there is anything human about a robotic welder on the factory floor, or a stamping machine that stamps out quarter panels for a new car, or a 1000 node grid computer, or even a bolt.

Let’s consider the humanity of the bolt.  This is a wonderful piece of technology that solves a uniquely human problem.  It attaches one thing to another.  These “fastening systems” as they are called today had a much simpler past.

I don’t know when fasteners were first used by humans or exactly what form they took.  Perhaps it was the use of wooden pegs to keep pieces of wood together.  Or maybe it was the use of strands of grass twisted and woven together to attach a thatch roof to a dwelling of some sort.  Either way, man has always had a need to attach one thing to another (among other needs too – of course).  But when homo sapiens first showed up on the planet, they didn’t immediately have the ability to attach things.  They didn’t inherently know that if you get this such and such kind of grass and twist it like such and such that you could create a kind of rope that could then be used to attach one thing to another thing.

Homo sapiens didn’t even have tools at first.  But over time – a long time – they started figuring stuff out.  Technology was born.  And it was nothing but human.  Technology was man’s uniquely human solution to a uniquely human problem.  It defined what it meant to be a human.  It distinguished man from animal.

That’s right.  And it’s that simple.  Somebody or some group of early homo sapiens figured something out, and then shared it with others.  Little by little, through collaboration, adaptation, and new innovations, the string or rope was improved.  That knowledge was then passed from generation to generation.  If it worked well enough, solved a problem that needed solving, and didn’t have to compete with a similar but superior technologies then it survived.  Sounds kind of like a contemporary business strategy, doesn’t it?

But that’s what human’s do.  They solve the problems posed by their environment.

Early man, just like contemporary man, was quite resourceful.  He invented language, tools, shelter, food harvesting technology, etc, etc,.

The epitome of what it means to be human is to have the ability to adapt to any circumstance the planet can throw at it.  Through innovation of ideas and technologies and constant communication of those innovations to future generations we humans can adapt in ways that animals could never dream of (if they actually do dream).  This is something that animals can only achieve through evolution – mutations of genes – bad ones dying, good ones living – survival of the fittest – natural selection.
Which brings me to my point:  Humanity’s success is not dependent on biological evolution by natural selection as animals are limited to.  We can pass on ideas and technology.  Animals can only pass on genes – and it takes generations and generations to actually pass on good ones.

Humanity’s success is dependent on our ability to resourcefully solve the problems of the day and our life through innovation and then pass those innovations on to our children.  This cycle of innovation and communication is human.  This innovation brings technology.  Technology makes our lives better because that’s what we built it for.

Technology is all about being human.

Comments (2)

Attention Grab Author

• Jim Parker
  I enjoy watching all of the changes in the world that are caused by us trying to figure out technology.
• Jim Parker