Cryptocurrency Cryptocurrencies are digital currencies that work without any central bank or single administrator. They were designed to remove the control from banks and governments. Bitcoin was created in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. It was the first cryptocurrency ever created. Since then, many others have joined the market including Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, Dash, and Monero. …
Cory Doctorow wrote an excellent piece about trolls here (from which I took a phrase to furnish the title field for this post). Here be sage advice. Life’s too short for meaningless quibbles with people who are either pathologically argumentative, or who will simply never understand your point of view. Ignore them when you can. Goodness knows, I’ve …
Wikipedia on your Mobile Phone A Cologne-based company called Sevenval has developed an application that converts webpages into WAP pages, stripping the original HTML code to its leanest, mainly function-oriented essentials. One of their pilot projects is Wikipedia, which they enabled for the mobile as a getsure of goodwill. According to Sevenval’s website, the mobile Wikipedia is accessible in all …
Bitnotic created this program called Chill that generates ambient music ‘randomly’ (that would be impossible). It’s not bad – but if I could port this to whatever soft synths I wanted it’d be ideal (e.g., the voicing built in to the app appears to be merely Quicktime Instruments). At any rate, I’ll try and export what it generates …
zine to blog 2: a mapping of questions [Part Two of a Ten-Part Series on Zines and Blogs] In developing a historical narrative of zines and blogs, some preliminary mapping of questions and issues is warranted. Here goes. I will take up each of these areas in turn. I had originally intended to write the …
Hey, read this: The greatest threat to mobile innovations like the iPhone isn’t consumer behaviour, cultural differences or reception to features, but epic and unregulated telco pricing. What’s needed is nothing less than a telecommunications revolution in which mobile developers and consumers join together to demand better data plans that are both competitive and realistic …
The Faculty of Applied Sciences at SFU warmly welcomed Cory Doctorow to deliver our Leonardo Lecture for 2007 (entitled “The Totalitarian Urge: total information awareness and the cosmic billiards”). It was a packed event, and a great speech (the same one he’s been delivering elsewhere of late). Ivaniv at Blogaholics has posted audio from the event. Some of we grad students …
Just two days before I posted at Mobile Muse about social media mashups around health information, Google announced their Health API and Health Data API. So it looks as though some of the pieces are already in place for the development of tools for managing health information on a personal mobile computing device. As the logical social media annex of this sort of …
MOSHING (Mobile Social Health Informatics ‘N Google) Read More »
There is a socio-technological irony in terms of the accessibility of what many are calling free culture. If oral cultures, or communities that have low literacy rates are to participate or be included in the fervour of free culture, then they will require a richer media environment. In a nutshell (and we can unpack it if …
This is a topic I’ve been meaning to cover for a while, but I’ve been so mired in Actor Network theory (in one of my other, somewhat overlapping lives as a PhD student) that I’ve had no time to finish the story and get it out there. Until today. What got me inspired to address …
Digital Music Futures and the Independent Music Industry Read More »