This post’s headline is the title of a story by Clive Thompson in the New York Times Magazine this weekend. Thompson describes the experience of Twittering, explores several theories about the impact of continuous sharing of daily details, and includes comments from several viewpoints derived by interviews. This interesting article touches on things that are good, bad and ugly. My own point of view is summed up in this paragraph from the article:

“It’s just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already,” Tufekci said. “The current generation is never unconnected. They’re never losing touch with their friends. So we’re going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that’s very new. It’s just the 20th century.”

Justin Oberman posted on techPresident the personal Democracy Forum about the usage of mobile phones in this year’s election and writes us: “Even though it doesnt mention Smartmob in the article that is essentially what it is talking about”

The difference between mobile’s original political roots and what we are seeing in this years election comes down to one word: “organic.” While the Clinton, Edwards and Obama mobile campaigns have had their savvy moments, they are all generally the same thing, that is, “campaign orchestrated.” And, as David All points out, the text messages smell like it.

According McKenzie Wark, Professor of New Media at Eugene Lang College, “This process of commoditization ends up polluting the very channels of communication it relies on in the first place to make the market efficient.” And these are all things that we, apparently, signed up for or thought we wanted. Junk mail, Spam email… mobile will be next. We may get excited about political campaigns going mobile in the beginning but as the interaction and messages remain stale so will our excitement eventualy become.

MoMoment: Momo #7 - Yme Bosma
posted by Sam Warnaars, filed under MoMoments
more about Yme Bosma

In this 35 minute video Yme Bosma gives his personal view on mobile, value creation, and social networking. Yme uses practical examples taken from his work at Hyves, the largest social network in The Netherlands. According to Yme, Hyves functions as a switchboard communication hub for the users of the social network. The emergence of mobile networks and mobile phones have enabled a lot of new ways of social interaction. How can these new forms of social interaction be used to create value?

Yme shares screenshots of the mobile Hyves application which is due to be released shortly. The mobile application will mainly focus around creating value around the user’s contactlist.

Video + slideshow are in Dutch. Recorded at MoMo Amsterdam on September 1st, 2008

MoMoment: Amsterdam MoMo #7 - Rudy de Waele
posted by Sam Warnaars, filed under MoMoments
more about Rudy DeWaele, founder at MobileMonday Madrid

In this insightful 23 minute keynote Rudy de Waele gives 15 tips to create value for mobile. He shares his view on the various drivers in the mobile value chain. Each tip is accompanied with an real world example. The tips range from “The power of openness” to “utilizing the address book”. It’s a must see if you want to get an quick and clear overview of the value drivers in mobile.

Video + slides are in English. Recorded on MobileMonday Amsterdam on September 1st, 2008.

Thanks to University of Washington (UW) computer scientists, hearing-impaired users might soon be able to use sign language over a mobile phone, like in Japan or Sweden. The research team received a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to start a 20-person field project next year in Seattle. Of course, deaf people were already able to use text messages for communication. But as said the lead researcher, ‘the point is you want to be able to communicate in your native language. For deaf people that’s American Sign Language (ASL).’ Now the researchers have to convince a commercial cell phone manufacturer to integrate their MobileASL software before this service becomes widely available. But read more…

Links: ZDNet, Primidi

Today’s top story in the New York Science Times is about a new digital game where the action is not blowing things up. In the new game Spore, things evolve.

. . . Spore [is] one of the most eagerly anticipated video games in the history of the industry. After years of rumors, the game goes on sale Friday. Spore’s designer, Will Wright, is best known for creating a game called the Sims in 2000. That game, which let players run the lives of a virtual family, has sold 100 million copies. It is among the best-selling video game franchises of all time — an impressive achievement in an $18-billion-a-year industry that is now bigger than Hollywood.

Spore, produced by Electronic Arts, promises much more than the day-to-day adventures of simulated people. It starts with single-cell microbes and follows them through their evolution into intelligent multicellular creatures that can build civilizations, colonize the galaxy and populate new planets.

Unlike the typical shoot-them-till-they’re-all-dead video game, Spore was strongly influenced by science, and in particular by evolutionary biology. . . .

[Note: I was unable to publish this weekly column last Sunday because of a software problem -- which is now solved. Roland.]

Virtual Worlds Get Real About Punishment

A virtual world for mobile devices, called Cellufun, has established a courthouse, where rule-breakers are indicted by their peers and tried by a jury of other community members. If found guilty of a charge, such as using profanity, users must carry out varying levels of sentences, from being mute for 20 minutes to being banished.
Source: Kim Hart, The Washington Post, August 20, 2008

How RFID Tags Could Be Used to Track Unsuspecting People

If you live in a state bordering Canada or Mexico, you may soon be given an opportunity to carry a very high tech item: a remotely readable driver’s license. Designed to identify U.S. citizens as they approach the nation’s borders, the cards are being promoted by the Department of Homeland Security as a way to save time and simplify border crossings. But if you care about your safety and privacy as much as convenience, you might want to think twice before signing up.
Source: Katherine Albrecht, Scientific American, August 21, 2008

Satellites track Mexico kidnap victims with chips

Affluent Mexicans, terrified of soaring kidnapping rates, are spending thousands of dollars to implant tiny transmitters under their skin so satellites can help find them tied up in a safe house or stuffed in the trunk of a car.
Source: Mica Rosenberg, Reuters, August 21, 2008

VoIP Goes Mobile

Scott Goldman uses his mobile phone to call friends and business contacts all over the world, from Britain to Australia. But the Southern California-based consultant doesn’t pay a dime in international tolls to his mobile-phone carrier, AT&T, the biggest in the U.S. Instead, Goldman places the international portion of the calls — roughly 100 minutes a month — through a service called Gorilla Mobile that relies on Internet-based technology to route wireless calls virtually toll-free.
Source: Olga Kharif, BusinessWeek, August 26, 2008

Road Tolls Hacked

A researcher claims that toll transponders can be cloned, allowing drivers to pass for free. Drivers using the automated FasTrak toll system on roads and bridges in California’s Bay Area could be vulnerable to fraud, according to a computer security firm in Oakland, CA.
Source: Duncan Graham-Rowe, Technology Review, August 25, 2008

The Internet’s Biggest Security Hole

Two security researchers have demonstrated a new technique to stealthily intercept internet traffic on a scale previously presumed to be unavailable to anyone outside of intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency. The tactic exploits the internet routing protocol BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) to let an attacker surreptitiously monitor unencrypted internet traffic anywhere in the world, and even modify it before it reaches its destination.
Source: Kim Zetter, Wired News, August 26, 2008

Technology That Outthinks Us: A Partner or a Master ?

In Vernor Vinge’s version of Southern California in 2025, there is a school named Fairmont High with the motto, “Trying hard not to become obsolete.” It may not sound inspiring, but to the many fans of Dr. Vinge, this is a most ambitious — and perhaps unattainable — goal for any member of our species.”
Source: John Tierney, The New York Times, August 26, 2008

Novelties - Lines and Bubbles and Bars, Oh My! New Ways to Sift Data

PEOPLE share their videos on YouTube and their photos at Flickr. Now they can share more technical types of displays: graphs, charts and other visuals they create to help them analyze data buried in spreadsheets, tables or text. At an experimental Web site, Many Eyes, (www.many-eyes.com), users can upload the data they want to visualize, then try sophisticated tools to generate interactive displays. These might range from maps of relationships in the New Testament to a display of the comparative frequency of words used in speeches by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.
Source: Anne Eisenberg, The New York Times, August 30, 2008

Sheila Scarborough of Every Dot Connects highlights the usage of social media in preparation for Hurricane Gustav.

“The Web 2.0 world right now is doing what it does best; sharing information, passing links and exchanging ideas as we prepare for Hurricane Gustav to hit the US Gulf Coast.
A sample of some pertinent social media activity can be found here: Social media prepares for Hurricane Gustav “

Gustav Information Center

At around 5:24pm on August 30th, 2008 a storm of social-media activity was launched by Andy Carvin, National Public Radio’s senior product manager for online communities.  Using “Ning” Andy was able to lay the foundation for the Gustav Information Center (GIC) social network to help in the coordination and dissemination of information relating to Hurricane Gustav.  The GIC community is very diverse and possesses volunteers who have come together in an incredibly short period of time through announcements on Twitter.  There are GIC volunteers from within Louisiana discussing potential ways to harness social media tools with colleagues from all points of the United States including many volunteers from the Caribbean, Europe, Asia and South America.

On behalf of Smart Mobs, I would like to encourage all our readers and community members to take a moment and think about how you can do your small part in this effort to help those affected by Gustav.  Join in the efforts of the Gustav Information Center, volunteer with your local American Red Cross Chapter or take action in any effort you feel comfortable being a part of.

Let us join together and harness the social-media tools offered us to open lines of communication and cooperation to make certain we are not unprepared for Gustav to prevent another disaster like we faced with Katrina.

Please visit the Gustav Information Center (GIC) and join other social-media activists in coordinating efforts to help our brothers and sisters who will be directly impacted by Gustav.

In the 2004 Presidential election, PowerLine.com earned fame for the emerging blogging phenomenon, and for itself, by leading the collection from the crowd of material about Dan Rather’s coverage on 60 Minutes of George Bush’s military service during the Vietnam War. A respected conservative political blog, Powerline also covers the hosts’ home state of Minnesota, with Miss World and Miss Universe coverage mixed in for spice.

How have things changed for blogging in the new election cycle? In a post yesterday, one of the three Powerline principals, John Hinderaker, describes a trend he has been watching:

The Power of Google Images

In a relatively short time, Google Images has become a huge source of internet traffic. A substantial percentage of our traffic comes from Google searches, and a rapidly growing segment of that comes from image searches. I was reminded of this once more when I checked the numbers and found that over the past 12 hours, nearly 18,000 people have found their way to Power Line by searching “Sarah Palin” and linking to the “Miss Wasilla” photo that you can see below.

Over the years, we have also gotten an astonishing number of hits from people doing Google Images searches who link to this post, and this one. Beyond that, various Miss World and Miss Universe posts have garnered large numbers of Google Images referrals.

It’s never occurred to us to post photos to troll for Google Images, but it may be something to consider.