Speculate.it

Will some techno babelfish eventually displace English as world's second language? Not sure...

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 14:40:53 -0800

This article in The Economist is interesting, but I'm not sure software will be able to translate natural language well enough any time soon.

Amplify’d from www.economist.com

English as she was spoke

The days of English as the world’s second language may (slowly) be ending

ENGLISH is the most successful language in the history of the world. It is spoken on every continent, is learnt as a second language by schoolchildren and is the vehicle of science, global business and popular culture. Many think it will spread without end. But Nicholas Ostler, a scholar of the rise and fall of languages, makes a surprising prediction in his latest book: the days of English as the world’s lingua-franca may be numbered.

Conquest, trade and religion were the biggest forces behind the spread of earlier lingua-francas (the author uses a hyphen to distinguish the phrase from Lingua Franca, an Italian-based trade language used during the Renaissance). A linguist of astonishing voracity, Mr Ostler plunges happily into his tales from ancient history.

English is expanding as a lingua-franca but not as a mother tongue. More than 1 billion people speak English worldwide but only about 330m of them as a first language, and this population is not spreading. The future of English is in the hands of countries outside the core Anglophone group. Will they always learn English?

Mr Ostler suggests that two new factors—modern nationalism and technology—will check the spread of English.

English will fade as a lingua-franca, Mr Ostler argues, but not because some other language will take its place. No pretender is pan-regional enough, and only Africa’s linguistic situation may be sufficiently fluid to have its future choices influenced by outsiders. Rather, English will have no successor because none will be needed. Technology, Mr Ostler believes, will fill the need.
Read more at www.economist.com

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Sorry, Amplify. Not really "feelin' it" lately.

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 14:16:25 -0800

So Amplify's latest slogan is:

The Social Learning Network.
A place where news and ideas you share become conversation.

Sounds good. (The second line sounds a bit awkward to my ear, but it's not a big deal and is probably just a defect of my profession.) And there's been talk on #Amplify about there being a need for open-minded conversation and about serendipity in who we "spark conversation" with on the site. And that's all great.

Trouble is, I'm just not feelin' it these days. It's a subjective thing, I know, but I'm finding that I don't really "resonate" with the site all that much anymore. And I guess this post is just me trying to work out why exactly that is.

I think at the heart of the matter is that there's a bit of a mismatch between what the service wants to be and what I want from the service. I mean, #conversation and learning from others is great, but I can (and do) get that lots of places (some of which I've been ignoring since joining Amplify). Does Amplify provide enough added value in that regard to justify committing a significant amount of my online time to it? That's a question I need to answer for myself, I think.

What first excited me about Amplify was it's clipping and curation tool (and its related potential as a blogging platform), but that's been practically stagnant since I joined. Most notably, there was talk some months ago about enabling multi-source clipping, which would be great, but nothing's happened in that direction since. The focus of development has been almost entirely on enhancing the conversation platform, and so the amplogs have virtually been ignored. Which is fair enough, I suppose. You have to have priorities when developing a service like this.

Then there's the fact that I've been trying to take all of my social networking off of my desktop, where I do "real" work, and get it onto my iPhone, so that I can work without the distraction of social media getting in the way. Trouble there, though, is that the Amplify #mobile web app has been vaporware for about as long as the multi-source clipping #feature has.

There are a few other design decisions lately that I haven't been crazy about, but on their own, these are no big deal and so not worth mentioning individually here. At most, they may be other signs that the Amplify philosophy is starting to diverge away from my own desires of the service.

So Amplify is a service I'd really like to love and that I had been really excited about for a while, but it looks like the honeymoon phase is coming to an end for me. Now I need to decide if the relationship can survive the transition and mature or if it's time to move on (but we can still be friends ;) ).

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"I nuovi barbari" (The New Barbarians), an essay by Alessandro Baricco

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 13:24:00 -0800

By Alessandro Baricco, 52. In 2006, he wrote I Barbari (The Barbarians - not translated in English as far as I can tell), and he has now written a “sequel” to that series of essays for Wired Italia. (Original in Italian -- translation below by Grey A. Drane, links added to translation) Believe it or not, I wrote this article in 2026, sixteen years from now. Let’s just say I’ve gotten a bit ahead of myself. Something like that. Here is the article: At times, we write books that are like duels: when the shootout is over, you see who’s left standing, and if it’s not you, you’ve lost. When I wrote I Barbari twenty years ago, I looked around, and everyone was still there, standing tall. It had all the appearances of a defeat, but it didn’t make any sense. So I sat down, and I waited. I just had to wait for them to fall, one by one, late but stone-cold dead nonetheless. It just took a bit of patience. Some suffered with great flair. Others fell to the ground in a heap. But I still wouldn’t call it a victory; they more likely died of natural causes, and not because of my own bullets. Even so, I can’t say my aim was bad, if that’s any consolation. The last to fall, after swaying slowly back and forth and with great dignity, was a bit upsetting because I knew him well. I think I may even have worked for him in the past (with pistols loaded with words, as always). This last survivor was profundity – the concept of profundity, the practice of profundity, the passion for profundity. Some of you may remember these beasts when they still had form, in the time of the Barbarians (I Barbari). They were fed by the stubborn conviction that the meaning of things was to be found in a secret chamber, safe from more facile views, stored in the freezer of remote obscurity and accessible only through patience, hard work, and determined inquiry. The things around us were the trees, and we sought out the roots. We went back in time, dug for meaning, and let the clues settle and sediment. Even in emotion, we aspired to the deepest of feelings, and we wanted beauty itself to be deep, in our books, our actions, our traumas, our memories and, at times, in our glances. It was a voyage, and our destination was profundity. Our reward was meaning – which, at times, we called “ultimate” meaning – and the satisfying roundness of a concept to which, years ago, I believe I had sacrificed all too much time and energy: the profound and ultimate meaning of things. I don’t know when exactly, but at a certain point this way of seeing the world began to feel inadequate. Not false exactly, just inadequate. The fact is that meaning which came to us through profundity was too often sterile and, at times, even harmful. So, as if in a hesitant overture, we began doubting whether a “profound and ultimate meaning of things” truly existed at all. At first, we turned to milder definitions that seemed to better reflect the reality of things. That meaning was something which could never be pinned down in a single definition, for instance, felt like a good compromise. But today, I believe we can simply say that we weren’t daring enough and that the error in our ways was not so much in believing in ultimate meaning, but in placing that meaning in the profound. What we were looking for existed; it just wasn’t where we thought. It wasn’t there for the disconcerting reason that the changes of the last thirty years had thrown in our faces, giving us one of the most fascinating, most painful of findings: profundity is what doesn’t exist; it’s an optical illusion. It is the puerile translation of a legitimate desire into spatial and moral terms, placing that which is most precious to us (i.e. meaning) in a stable place, safe from circumstance, accessible only to a select few, attainable only at the end of an arduous journey. This is how we had hidden the treasure. But in hiding it, we created an El Dorado of the spirit, of profundity, which in reality seems to have never existed and which, in time, will be remembered as one of the necessary lies that humanity told itself. Rather shocking, that’s for sure. Indeed, one of the traumas that this change caused was that we found ourselves living in a world that was lacking a dimension, that of depth, that we had grown accustomed to. I remember that, at first, the keenest minds had interpreted this curious condition as a sign of decadence. They pointed, not incorrectly, to the sudden disappearance of as much as half of the world they once knew – and, to make matters worse, the part that truly mattered, the one that held the treasure. From this came the instinctive tendency to see events in apocalyptic terms – the invasion of a horde of barbarians who, having no concept of the profound, were reorganizing the world within the only remaining dimension they knew: superficiality. With the consequent, disastrous loss of meaning, of beauty… of life. It wasn’t that it was stupid to see things in this way, but we now know, with a certain precision, that it was a nearsighted view. They confused the abolition of profundity with the abolition of meaning. But in actual fact what was happening, amongst the thousands of challenges and uncertainties, was that, once profundity had been abolished, meaning was shifting to inhabit the surface of things. It wasn’t disappearing; it was shifting. This reinvention of superficiality as the place of meaning is one of the challenges we have overcome – a work of spiritual craftsmanship that will go down in history. On paper, the risks were huge, but we must remember that the surface is a place of stupidity only for those who believe that we only find meaning in the profound. Once the barbarians (and by that I mean us) had unmasked this belief, automatically equating superficiality with lack of meaning became a reflex that pointed to a certain degree of ignorance. Where many saw a simple surrendering to superficiality, many others sensed a very different phenomenon: the treasure of meaning, which had been relegated to a secret crypt accessible only to a select few, was now distributed throughout the surfaces of the world, where the ability to reconstruct it no longer meant an ascetic descent into the depths of the earth, attainable by an elite few, and was now a collective ability to recognize patterns in the fabric of reality. And that doesn’t sound too bad. In fact, it sounds more suited to our natural abilities and our desires. For people unable to stand still and concentrate on one thing, but who do move quickly and are able connect fragments with great speed, the open field of surfaces seemed the ideal place on which to play the game of life. Why on earth would we want to play it, and lose, in the corridors of the underworld that they insisted on teaching us in school? So we don’t feel like we’ve had to give up on a noble meaning of things; we’ve just begun to pursue it by different means, by moving along the surface of things with a speed and skill that mankind has never before known. We have turned to forming objects of meaning as constellations of points in the reality through which we now travel, doing so with unprecedented agility and ease. The image of the world that the media provides, the geography of ideals that politics proposes, and the idea of knowledge that the digital world gives us lack the slightest shadow of depth. They are a collection of thin, fragile facts that we organize into objects of a certain strength. We use them to understand the world. We lose our ability to focus; we’re unable to do just one thing at a time, and we always prefer speed over depth of understanding. The combination of these defects results in a technique of seeing the world that systematically seeks out a simultaneous overlap of stimuli – what we call experiencing. In books, in music, in all we call beautiful in what we see and what we hear, we increasingly appreciate the ability to express the emotion of the world simply by shining light on it, not by bringing it out into the light. We cultivate esthetics, where any and all boundaries between “high” art and “low” art disappear, as there is no longer any high or low, but only light or dark, vision or blindness. We move quickly and stop rarely. We hear pieces, never the whole. We write on our phones. We marry and then divorce. We watch movies without ever entering a theater. We listen to readings instead of reading books. We stand in slow lines to eat fast food. And nonetheless, all of this moving about without roots and without burden results in a life that we must find to be extremely meaningful and beautiful for us to worry with such urgency and passion – more so than any generation ever in the history of mankind – about saving the planet, about cultivating peace and protecting monuments, conserving memories and prolonging life, protecting the weak and defending Lardo di Colonnata. In times that we like to imagine as being simpler, they burned libraries and witches; they used the Parthenon as a weapons depot; they squashed out lives like flies in the folly of war, and they wiped out entire populations just to have a bit more space. And these were people who absolutely adored profundity. The surface is everything, and in it is meaning. Or better, in it we are able to trace out a meaning. And since we have acquired this ability, we are almost embarrassed by the inevitable tremors of the myth of profundity. Beyond all reason, we suffer the ideologies, the fundamentalism, any art that is too lofty or serious, any brazen statement of absolute truth. We are likely even wrong in this, but these are the things that we remember as being founded on the profundity of reasoning and indisputable dogma that we now know are based on nothing, and we are still offended – or perhaps afraid. This is why any false profundity now seems tasteless and why any concession of nostalgia seems somehow cheap. Profundity appears to have become a throwback for the elderly, the short-sighted, and the poor. Twenty years ago, I would have been afraid to write anything like this. It was perfectly clear to me that we were playing with fire. I knew that the risks were enormous and that, faced with such a change, we were playing with an immense heritage. I was writing I Barbari, but I knew that the unmasking of profundity could have given rise to the domain of the insignificant. And I knew that the reinvention of superficiality often led to the undesired effect of validating pure stupidity or the farcical simulation of deep thought, all for a misunderstanding. But in the end, what happened was only the result of our own decisions and our talent and of the rapidity of our intelligence. The change led to specific behavior, crystallized perspectives, and redistributed privileges. Now I know that, in all of this, the promise of meaning has survived and that it was the myth of profundity which has, in its own way, given this to us. Of course, among those who were the quickest to understand and manage this change there are many who do not know of this promise, are not able to even imagine it, and have no interest in passing it on. And from them we are receiving a bright new world without a future. But as has always happened, the culture of that promise was equally full of determination and talent, able to pry from the masses the scattering of hope, of confidence, and of ambition. I don’t believe that it is foolish optimism to say that today, in 2026, such a culture exists, appears more solid that ever, and is often at the helm guiding change. These barbarians are giving us a view of the world that is suited to the eyes we have been given, a mental design that is appropriate for the brain we have, and a hopeful plot deserving of our hearts, so to speak. They move in swarms, guided by a revolutionary instinct for collective, suprapersonal creativity, and in this they remind me of the great many unnamed copyists of the Middle Ages. In their own strange way, they are copying the Great Library into our own language. It’s a delicate task and is certain to contain errors. But it is the only way we know not only to hand down our legacy to the generations to come, but to give them a future as well.

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So tired of dystopian future scenarios in #scifi. This Tom Hanks project sounds interesting.

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 12:05:01 -0700

Could be a cool "multimedia" show. Looking forward to it.

Amplify’d from bigthink.com

Tom Hanks Defines and Carves the Future

Hanks is now sketching out a picture of the future that is noticeable precisely for its sunny outlook. "Electric City," a series conceived and written by Tom Hanks, will offer "a tantalizing view of the future of civilization, presented through the lens of provocative themes such as energy consumption, freedom of information, crime and punishment.

In an with the New York Times, Hanks explained, "Without a doubt, everything has changed, but not necessarily for the worst. In fact, a good life and good world has been created out of the usual end-of-life scenarios. It hasn't degenerated into an Orwellian society - just the opposite." It may sound naive, but why is that? All our perceptions of the future are based on science fiction novels and movies, almost 100% of which portray a future which is cold and alienating, a violentchaotic place populated by androids and dark skyscrapers. Perhaps it will take a movie star again to have us rethink what we've been led to believe. In "Electric City" there is hope in a highly energy constrained world.

"Electric City" will not only air on NBC every Thursday at 8pm. It will be streamed in bite-sized animated modules to your phone, to the web, and be available for full immersive experience in the form of a virtual city like SimCity.Read more at bigthink.com

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Interesting article about deep sleep and states of consciousness (Psychology Today) #integral

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 12:24:11 -0700

Nice hat-tip to Ken Wilber (philosopher of Integral Theory fame) here, too.

Amplify’d from www.psychologytoday.com

The Mystery of Deep Sleep

What is deep sleep and why is it important?

Deep is a mysterious state that we usually enter several times each night. The nature of deep sleep is somewhat less well known than the more dramatic dream sleep. While we are very aware today of dream sleep and of the ability of some people to be conscious of and even direct their in a state known as lucid dreaming, the nature of deep sleep continues to invite a sense of mystery.

Subjectively deep sleep is a time of nearly complete disengagement from the environment. It is very difficult to awaken a person in deep sleep, and children in this state may be nearly impossible to wake up. It is from this stage that emerges. This happens when there is a sudden arousal from deep sleep that causes the motor centers of the but not the higher centers to awaken so that the person is in a sleep state dissociation characterized by complex motor activity with limited judgment and awareness.

According to the integral philosopher Ken Wilber, with training in advanced meditation, it is possible for people to be aware of the subtle and very subtle states of consciousness to the point of being aware of the states of dreaming and even the state of deep sleep. We now know that lucid dreaming is possible. During lucid dreaming people can be aware of and alter their dreams. If Wilber is correct, then some advanced practitioners of meditation may actually be able to maintain a form of conscious awareness of even the formless void of deep sleep.Read more at www.psychologytoday.com

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Entertaining article on The Globalist re: Amazon & the "Era of American Enlightenment

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 14:31:53 -0700

The article is more about the difference between buying books (electronic or physical) online and going to a bricks-and-mortar bookshop, but it's an enjoyable read. The Globalist often has good, original content to read.

Amplify’d from www.theglobalist.com

The Richter Scale > Global Society
Amazon and the Era of American Enlightenment

By | Friday, October 08, 2010

At a time of shrinking incomes and concern over greenhouse gas emissions, online shopping and e-books — with their cost savings and environmental benefits — are becoming increasingly popular. But what about the effects on struggling independent bookstores? The Richter Scale explores.

I realize that this online book-buying thing does not necessarily trigger a broad wave of American enlightenment, but at least it means that we enlightenment wannabes can do so a little more cheaply.

If book buyers find out that shopping online and UPS-ing it is better for the environment, what will that do for bookstores' sales prospects?

And an act of environmental awareness to boot. While this seems counterintuitive seeing as how a UPS truck must deliver the book to our home, people have actually done the numbers. Some studies have found that online commerce is better for the environment because it minimizes infrastructure, reduces the need for warehousing and maximizes transportation efficiency.

The only good news for these bookstores, as for newspapers, is that people tend to live ever longer. And there is a whole segment of the population — those who never connected to the online (i.e., Western cultural) revolution — who will continue to frequent physical bookstores, if for no other reason than to congregate with others.

Bookstores, before long, are going to be the equivalent of open-access retirement homes — public spaces where a fading generation finds space to congregate.
Read more at www.theglobalist.com

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Cool concept for the @stephenfry ebook app w/ a unique, non-linear index

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 13:05:29 -0700

A bit pricey by iPhone app standards (but not so much for an ebook), so I haven't tried it myself yet, but I'm intrigued by this scroll-wheel, non-linear index.

Amplify’d from gizmodo.com

It only figures that a man of 's internet standing should be feathering his nest with apps a'plenty, and MyFry—while pricey—should be a must-buy for any fans of the scribe's words.

He promises it's not just "doing something rather prosaic like reproducing the printed book on a touchscreen," rather it's the "unique visual index" of the aforementioned four categories, which enable you to "discover and interact with Stephen's story in new and unexpected ways."
Read more at gizmodo.com

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After 'What Technology Wants', Kevin Kelly also to say goodbye to traditional publishing?

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 08:03:38 -0700

This sounds like a cool book, but it's also interesting to note that, when announcing this new book, Kevin Kelly has also said that this will likely be his last "physical" book. So another author/blogger says goodbye to traditional publishing.

Amplify’d from www.kk.org

The book's theme is why particular technologies are inevitable and why we have a moral obligation to increase the amount of technology in the world. It is a summation and refinement of the hundreds of ideas I've posted here on the Technium in the past six years. I've cut out anything inessential and have added additional reasons and evidence into one long narrative argument -- what we call a book.

You too can own one of these remarkable reading gizmos. No batteries, ambient light screen, random access, containing the full text of my 120,000 word manifesto.

Another reason to order this fine physical specimen: I suspect this will be the last paper-native book that I do. The amount of work required to process atoms into a sheaf of fibers and ink and then ship it to your house or the local bookstore is more than most of us are willing to pay anymore. And of course the extra time needed upfront to print and transport it is shocking. This book was finished, designed, proofed, and ready to be read four months ago. But atoms take time, while bits are instant.
Read more at www.kk.org

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Back home with my sweetie [view from Recoaro Mille]

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 12:10:05 -0700

Posted via web from That's Grey-posterous!

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On vacation at the seaside with my two lovely ladies [Caorle, Italy]

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:15:09 -0700

Posted via web from That's Grey-posterous!

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Posterous’ new iPhone app could make citizen journalism and lifestreaming the norm – The Next Web

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:43:09 -0700

Breaking News

What’s really exciting is the potential in news to break faster and with more information than every before. Sure, with Twitter, news has been known to break fast and with the odd image linked from within the Tweet too. With PicPosterous however, you’ve got video and images being immediately uploaded and shared across all the viral hubs (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc..).

via thenextweb.com

Yes, Posterous and PicPosterous are very intriguing, but sometimes I think they go overboard in trying to keep things simple. PicPosterous, for example, could do with the ability to add a bit of text to the album post, and it would be nice if you could delete individual photos from an album, which doesn't appear to be possible even on the Posterous web site.

All in all, though, I do thing Posterous is managing to make "blogging" cool again.

Posted via web from That's Grey-posterous!

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How Twitter can bring us together

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:37:56 -0700

Twitter may just be a collection of inane thoughts, but in aggregate that is a valuable thing. In aggregate, what you get is a direct view into consumer sentiment, political sentiment, any kind of sentiment. (via Mining The Thought Stream)

"Sentiment". Yes, that's a very important point. Because "tweets" are very short, immediate messages, they are very different in nature from blogs, discussion forums, or any other longer means of communication, which take longer to write and so are generally more thought out, less spontaneous. More mental, less from the gut. Also from the article (emphasis added):

What makes Google and other search engines so valuable is that they capture people’s intent—what they are looking for, what they desire, what they want to learn about. But they don’t do a great job at capturing what people are doing or what they are thinking about.

Traditional search engines typically focus on more static content -- the blogs, discussion forums, and so on -- and so do a good job of serving up "ideas", abstractions, but they don't do so well in putting us in touch with the actual people behind those ideas. In other words, neither search engines nor the content they index do much for building a sense of community and for social interaction. Sure, discussion forums and blogs (with their related comments) provide an opportunity for people to discuss specific topics together, but everyone involved usually has some sort of "agenda", even if it's simply to get their specific message heard by the others. I mean, you spend all that time writing up a message, so you want people to read and understand it, right? And many times, you may even be trying to persuade someone to actually do something or to agree with you on some point. So there tends to be a great deal of emphasis on our own views and on self-promotion, which isn't particularly (directly) conducive to uniting a community. Twitter, on the other hand and perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, isn't really all that much about self-promotion at all, but is much more about just making contact and connections with other people. There simply isn't enough space in 140 characters to do any sort of persuading. And the fast, immediate nature of the medium makes the message all about what we happen to be doing or thinking in that moment. Kinda like bumping into a friend in the supermarket. But then, how many of us actually bump into friends at the market anymore? In a way, Twitter is bringing that element of "social serendipity" back into today's increasingly global community, both online and off. So while we may not physically bump into people in the market so much any more, we can certainly virtually "bump into" someone on Twitter doing something similar to us and strike up a brief conversation, and that could then lead to something more in-depth somewhere else, either online on some blog or wherever or face to face in the "real" world. So yeah, tweets can be pretty inane, but then you wouldn't exactly discuss the meaning of life in a supermarket aisle, would you? But that doesn't make that chance encounter any less important to your relationship with that person. People complain about Twitter's lack of features, but in a way, that's what makes Twitter so ingenious. By making it a bare-bones, lowest-common-denominator service, virtually anyone can perform its most essential function: answering the question "What are you doing?" Anything beyond that is left entirely to individual preference and to serendipity. ~G

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My data management dilemma. Any ideas?

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 22:33:36 -0700

OK, here's the deal. For my day job (freelance translating), my data-management needs are fairly basic, and I've been able to get by designing my own database "apps" for tracking jobs (scheduling, etc.) and doing billing. For a few years, I used an old version of FileMaker (ver. 5.5, I think it was) before recently switching the job tracking portion over to Bento. What I like(d) about Bento was the way it integrates with the Mac Address Book, and creating the forms and what-not is really simple. Unfortunately, there's no decent way for Bento to do the invoicing, so I rigged up a way to export job data into my old FileMaker invoicing database fairly painlessly, and I had hoped that'd be enough to get things done. But... then I started having technical problems with Bento which would cause all my job data to essentially disappear now and then. So I've decided that Bento just isn't ready for critical business use, yet, at least not for me. Hence my dilemma. Since I've been doing a bit of thinking about "cloud computing", social networking and all that sort of thing, I was thinking it'd make sense to take my database needs online. And there's a whole sh..-load of apps and services out there to choose from. The problem is that none of them I've found so far will sync (not import, but actively, automatically sync) with my Address Book, and this is something that's become crucial to me now that I've also got an iPhone. Basically, it just makes a lot of sense to me to centralize at least the core of my contact needs in Address Book, since it hooks in so nicely to so many other tools I use (my iPhone, Apple Mail, MobileMe, etc. etc.). Now, I also really like the way Plaxo synchronizes with Address Book and gets my contacts up into the cloud for social networking needs. So it seems there should be a way to take advantage of Plaxo (or something similar?) to hook into a web-based invoicing and/or CRM platform, but again, I haven't been able to find one yet. Zoho comes pretty close to giving me what I need, and it has three options I can choose from (Zoho Invoice, Zoho CRM, and Zoho Creator), but it's missing that key Address Book syncing. And contact sharing between the various Zoho apps isn't even really there at all (other than through importing), which seems like a huge oversight and missed opportunity to me, but there you go.... So I'm turning to the creative potential of social networking to see if collective wisdom can't help me to come up with a solution to this problem. In short, I need a data management solution that syncs with (or connects directly to) my Address Book, either directly or through a service like Plaxo. It doesn't have to be web-based, I suppose, but it seems to me that taking this sort of thing up into the cloud offers the most potential for more creative uses in the future. Any ideas? Cheers, ~G

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"Cloud creativity"

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 21:01:53 -0700

"When the thunder roars, do you not hear your Self? When the lightning cracks, do you not see your Self? When clouds float quietly across the sky, is this not your very own limitless Being, waving back at you?" ~Ken Wilber

I was just checking out Aviary (a "cloud-based" suite of creativity tools) today when I came across this cool image there. Enjoy! ~G

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The iPhone: An Ideal Social Networking Device

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 21:36:32 -0700

With all the excellent apps that are out there for it, the iPhone has just about everything you need for social networking, blogging and hyperstreaming, so that you can h/stream whenever the urge strikes you, rather than having to wait till you're in front of a computer. About the only things I'm still waiting for are Skype and cut-and-paste (or at least text selection - for bookmarklets - but why do that without cut and paste, too?). Well, a better text-input system would be nice, too - like speech-to-text and/or something like swype, or at the very least a Dvorak keyboard layout so that I don't have to remember both layouts and keep switching back and forth in my head. But even so, writing this blog entry on my iPhone wasn't too bad. ~G

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My first WordPress.org blog post!

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 19:12:02 -0700

Hey there! This is just a quickie place holder until I figure all this cool WordPress stuff out. Watch this space, as they say! Metta, Grey

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