Social bookmarking, tagging, and editing have helped launch Web 2.0, or whatever you want to call it. This is a phenomena few if anyone accurately predicted. Except that Vernor Vinge predicted it quite accurately in 1999 with his Hugo Award winning novel A Deepness in the Sky. In the novel, a future race of humans called the Emergents has enslaved the brain by turning many of its citizens into autistic savants. These “zipheads” become so focused on one task that they are unable to take care of themselves. The Emergents make use of these zipheads in an end-to-end system roughly analogous to a grid of networked data centers, complete with pattern-recognition capabilities, redundancy, and low latency (the zipheads speak to each other with their own highly modified and efficient language.)

Although I highly recommend the novel, the “technological enslavement of the mind” depicted made the novel exceedingly difficult for me to get through. There have been several recent and unsettling developments in social technologies that remind me of these zipheads.

Zipheads at Work

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project, something Amazon is calling “artificial artificial intelligence,” will pay humans to complete tasks for which they are better suited than computers. Many of these tasks depend on repetitive pattern-recognition, something humans are exceedingly good at. This is not enslavement, of course. Instead, Amazon Mechanical Turk is a synthesis of capitalism with Web 2.0. Which I guess some view as a form of enslavement.

Zipheads at Play

First there was Slashdot.org. Then there was del.icio.us. Then there was Digg.com. Now there is Diggdot.us, a website that combines them all while attempting to eliminating redundancy. And of redundancy, there is much redundancy. Not only do the major social bookmarking/tagging/editing sites overlap in their own coverage, they reveal the redundancy so common in the media- and blogosphere to which they link.

A case in point: I follow planetary science and astronomy news very closely. My options are numerous. The sites I visit, many of which have RSS feeds to which I subscribe, include Space.com, SpaceRef, Spaceflight Now, New Scientist: Space, Universe Today, space agency sites, and mission-specific sites. Many of the same stories also show up on news sites, social sites, and blogs.

In true ziphead fashion, I run my own website primarily focused on planetary science news and commentary.

How do we cull through all this news and commentary? Aggregate sites like Diggdot.us and technologies like RSS and CNET’s “The Big Picture” visual tool are helpful. Unfortunately, the number of aggregates sites, RSS feeds, and tools continue to grow until they too become redundant, a result of the lack of coordination between zipheads. Each feels that he, she, or other has something unique to add to the larger conversation. The cream tends to rise to the top, but not without serious information overload.

Zipheads at Death

The ziphead phenomena may be short-lived. What I have not pointed out yet is that all of this activity is part of a larger scale culling of middlemen everywhere. Eventually, automation technologies will feature those techniques now unique to humans and will relegate humans to prosumers. I expect this to occur by 2010, when the first autistic savant software agents emerge to create some sort of order out of cyberspace while feeding the results of their reorganization to new user interfaces that are less dependent on text and web portals. In the process, they will eliminate the need for any media giant, web portal, aggregator, as well as the social aspects of Web 2.0.

The automation of news reporting and editing, of searching, categorizing, bookmarking, and tagging…it begins with human zipheads, but does not end with them.

When it is a vidcast. The number one and two podcasts listed in Apple iTunes’ “Today’s Top Podcasts” list are vidcasts, with three more in the top 20. There cannot possibly be as many iPods with video purchased yet as there are older video-free iPods; the new iPod came out a few weeks ago. Therefore, portability must not be the primary feature driving people to vidcasts. Despite claims to the contrary, people really are watching longer-form video on their computer monitors.

Simply put, we love video, regardless of where it comes from and where it is displayed. Do we love video more than we love music? Possibly. Podcasts went from nowhere to everywhere in less than one year. Vidcasts appear to be doing the same in half the time.

Personally, I cannot listen to a podcast if I know there is a video version available (Diggnation is a case in point.) If a favorite podcaster announces a vidcast versions of the show, I will jump immediately. Let me repeat here a prediction I made two months ago about the future of podcasting and vidcasting: Vidcasting will be huge, and it will dwarf podcasting. All the hype about podcasts that made many shake their head? It will all be realized with vidcasts.

Dear Apple (with greetings, and apologies, to Disney/ABC),

Thank you. Thank you for finally providing legal downloads of television shows. I just deleted all the episodes of “Lost” I downloaded via Bittorrent and from now on I will pay US$1.99 per episode (plus tax in my state) the day after that episode airs on the ABC network. It took only ten minutes to download an episode of “Lost” using iTunes, compared to several hours to complete a download using Bittorrent. There were no commercials (making the US$1.99 price absolutely worthwhile to me.) It was convenient and legal.

Please continue to add other television series to your lineup and consider offering older series at US$0.99 per episode with a discount for purchasing an entire season (please, bring me “Buffy, The Vampire Slayer”!) Here are a few other changes and future additions that will keep me happy and eventually wean me from Bittorrent forever:

• Double or quaduple the file size for better quality video. Episodes downloaded using Bittorrent still have the advantage in quality (an hour of television looks great at 340 MB and absolutely fantastic at 700 MB.) Currently, the episodes through iTunes look about as good as standard television. Let’s bring on high definition…
• The first season of Lost is available for US$34.99. If I buy all 24 episodes of this second season of Lost, I will pay nearly US$48.00. Please offer a subscription to a full current season of a show for the same price as full past seasons. I will prepay before the season even starts.
• Please consider adding in extras that would normally show up on the DVD release of a television series, for no extra charge, when purchased with a full season.
• More series, including obscure series, classic series, series that were cancelled early, Internet-only series, independent series, public-access series, series from around the world (hello, “Dr. Who” and “ReGenesis”,) and free series. Oh, and “Buffy, The Vampire Slayer”!
• Movies - no more than US$9.99 to own, no more than US$0.99 to watch one time. All movies. I will pay, I assure you. Just please, please, please, build a complete movie library of all known titles from the dawn of movies until the present, accessible at any time (like those sleepless nights when just one particular treasured movie or genre will do.)
• Let these movies be displayed on my iPod video, computer monitor, big screen television, refrigerator, glasses, sunglasses, retina-writing contact lenses, etc. In other words - buy once, own forever, play anywhere. If I cannot buy once, then at least let me buy everything for one-time playback at US$0.99 or less. I promise I will spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars per year.

Again, thank you, Apple. Thank you, Disney/ABC, Pixar, and the music video publishers, for your early offerings. I no longer require physical media for my entertainment content. Put everything on the Internet, let competition work on the prices, and let me have immediate access to it all whenever I want.

Best regards,

Richard Leis

All the excitement of a Dan Brown bestseller, but real. The hot new obsession for the technology geek in the know is trying to figure out what Google is up to. While conspiracy theorists spend years weaving dire tales from the fewest of crumbs, the Google devout can feast upon an absolute smorgasbord of Google activity, with new surprises occurring almost every day. Netizens are on a cyberspace-trotting hunt for information, including a self-described “Google Addict”, columnists, technology news sites, an ebook author, and the multitudes of social bookmarking “diggers” at Digg.com. Here is the partial list of Google’s activities, including:

• searching for and buying up untold miles of dark fiber optics, left over from the Internet bubble burst five years ago;
• the opening of Google WiFi spots in San Francisco and the release of Google Secure Access to “ensure your connection is secure.”
• hiring Internet pioneer, Vint Cerf;
• new media-specific search engines, including Google Video, Google Blog Search, and Google Scholar;
• releasing the first episode of the new Chris Rock UPN sitcom “Everybody Hates Chris” on Google Video;
• the purchase of domain names related to television and high definition television;
• providing over 2.5 gigabytes of free storage in their email service Gmail;
• the development of free software like Google Earth, Google Desktop, Google Talk, and Picasa (3-D Earth map, local desktop searching, VoIP and instant messaging, and image management, respectively);
• raising over US$4,000,000,000 in cash from a recent stock sale;
• and, most recently, inviting 400 bloggers and reporters to an event called Google Zeitgeist 05, on the proviso that they all keep their mouths shut about what they hear.

Is Google about to unveil a free, advertisement-supported nationwide wireless network? Are they building a supercomputer with a centralized Google operating system, accessible by anyone with an Internet connection? Are they expanding their efforts in China? Are they backing the long-fabled “Internet over power lines” technology? All of the above?

Is there a pattern to all of this activity? Cybersleuths are hot on the trail, but Google just might surprise everyone with what they actually have in mind. What would you do with a mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” billions of dollars in cash, several top scientists and engineers, and a loyal and creative employee base in an era that is seeing the most rapid acceleration of progress in human history?

Zeitgeist, indeed.

The announcement today that eBay was paying US$2.6 billion for Skype left many people scratching their heads. What in the world is an online auction retailer doing buying a two-year old VoIP telecommunications company?

The mistake confused people are making is that eBay is not an online auction retailer, and Skype is not a VoIP telecommunications company. Recently they might have been so easily described, but in the world of Google, a world where a search engine is no longer just a search engine, these companies must become something else entirely.

Bidding on an auction, making an audio call between computers, and typing in a keyword at a search engine, are all related activities. Each is a form of communication, person to person, person to computer, computer to person, and computer to computer. The meme emerging, a meme that these big companies cannot quite bring themselves to articulate, is the rise of the communications platform.

Communication platforms have existed before, in the form of traditional telecommunications industries including radio, television, telephone, cable and satellite. In addition, and separately, software development companies have provided other forms of communication.

What eBay, Google, Amazon, and Yahoo are becoming is the next step in the evolution in communication. They are positioning themselves as the perfect merger of the above traditional media platforms with the Internet, in a package that will be much more than a sum of their parts.

The cost of entry into the telecommunications industry has plummeted, leaving the traditional companies in shock. When a small band of software developers can independently create in just two years a gigantic voice network that uses the computer and networking infrastructure that already preexists, all bets are off. Suddenly computer to computer voice calls are free, computer to phone and phone to computer calls cost a fraction of traditional price plans, and the platform itself gets put to new uses by third party developers nearly every day. This is Skype, a company that freely released a small VoIP client to the public and one year later shocked the existing telecommunications world by announcing that they had over 30 million users after only one year.

Ebay started on their current path several years ago with a decision to treat their auction site as a communications platform that brought buyers and sellers together in a virtual marketplace full of advanced and efficient tools. Their decision to buy Skype enhances that virtual marketplace with more cutting-edge technology, just as their purchase of Paypal allowed them to provide a convenient payment option to their buyers and sellers. Also just like Paypal, Skype will provide new opportunities outside of eBay’s virtual marketplace. After all, Paypal is not just used for making eBay auction payments. It has become a payment option for many other companies and vast amounts of small entrepreneurs.

The company most aware of the changes afoot is the very company driving companies like eBay to purchase companies like Skype. Google, the maelstrom of change that began with a better search engine, has quietly been diversifying into other opportunities, including shopping, advertisement, email, VoIP, mapping, social networking, and many others. Again, each one is a form of communication. Google is building a platform that dwarfs anything AT&T or the cable companies have every imagined.

This seamless platform will be something never seen before in human history. It will be your phone, radio, television, newspaper, library, email, daily planner, map, address book, yellow pages, shopping list and coupons, and dating service.

Google Earth is one early convergent platform for many of the above. It is a 3-D globe of the Earth pieced together from increasingly high resolution satellite images overlain with layers of information as varied as the third party developers that created them. Locating nearby businesses is easier than thumbing through the phone book, with additional conveniences like a map and the ability to fly over the landscape so that you know exactly where to drive and exactly what landmarks to look for. Soon the ability to call a company you found will be as easy as a click on their 3-D representation on Google Earth, provided by local VoIP networking with existing landline systems.

EBay starts out with different initial products but heading toward the same direction. Their marketplace will eventually merge with a 3-D globe of the earth while Skype allows another communications option between buy and seller. Beyond auction sites, small and large businesses alike will save enough amounts of money currently spent on telephony services by networking their existing computer infrastructure with Skype. As more and more people start using Skype, the price of a business telephone call will collapse to near zero, just as it has already begun to do with personal telephone calls. Value-added services like video conferencing, social networking, automated recording of all calls, and others will become cheaper for end users while still providing a huge windfall for the parent communications platform company.

Yahoo, unlike its search engine competitor Google, is betting on content to be the launch pin for their own communications platform. After developing relationships with existing media content providers, Yahoo has recently begun to provide its own original video programming. It has hired a seasoned reporter to provide original news reports just for Yahoo (pitting it against the existing news media companies.)

And then there is Amazon, the direct sale retailer who has an obvious competitor in eBay and, until recently, a not so obvious competitor in Google. Amazon has launched its own search engine initiatives, building off of the technology it developed for its main ecommerce site. Its relationship with book sellers, publishers, and authors has allowed it to begin accruing a vast library of digital material. Its dependence on buyers to provide their own personal recommendations about books and other products has lead to a vast experiment in social networking, while creating a platform with an active membership it can offer for a fee to interested parties keen on integrating the platform into their own business models.

The real breakthrough in all this activity is the convergence of services and communication tools into a much larger whole. Microsoft, while trying to keep up with these developments, did not see that convergence was the endgame. Instead, they thought they simply needed to have their fingers in as many different pies as possible. Google understood that a million different tools were ultimately useless if they were not integrated into a userfriendly, flexible, and adaptable platform that could be adapted for many different situations.

This is why eBay, Google, Amazon, and Yahoo are not just software companies, or retailers, or search engines, or telecommunications providers, or media companies. They are all of these and more, setting up a future littered with the remains of traditional players in each separate industry who could not quite manage to get their heads around the convergence of all human activity into just a few communications platforms.

The emergence of participatory journalism and the blogosphere provides further evidence to the only saying I truly believe in: Overall, things do not get better or worse…they just get different. The best in the blogosphere comes with the worst in in the blogosphere. The blogosphere has emerged and the world has changed, but it is meaningless to say things are better or worse off than they were before.

To those who argue that this is true democracy, I might agree, but I would not necessarily agree with their unstated belief that this is also better. The vast majority of content out there is inane chatter, much of it misspelled, with a deplorable lack of grammatic consistency. If and when this phenomena becomes the basis for a world government, we will at times wish for the quaint problems of the nation-state era. We enter a world of memes bypassing their usual course from the brain to the body to physical media to other bodies and finally into other brains. We instead face brain-to-brain memetic transfer, complete with incredible efficiency gains and frightening control issues.

And to those who argue that rapidly converging technologies and communication will vanquish anonymity with metaphorical barcodes on our foreheads to track our every move and thought, I might agree yet again, but I would not necessarily agree with their often stated belief that this is worse. Great progress can be made by knowing precisely where every atom resides in relation to every other atom, or every meme to every other meme.

What results is the real future, the one that is neither utopia nor dystopia, but another realm more fantastic than our imagination can create. That future comes with new wonders and new challenges, only on a greater scale than those we experience today.

What we are today as humans could not remain the same if either utopia or dystopia were to result. That neither will is something even more terrifying. The only metaphor I have been able to come up with that approaches that feeling is the idea of falling up. When you fall up, you fall into infinity, and the madness that results, the madness that is the child of awe and terror, is something no human today can handle. The madness will make all the difference.

Why isn’t cyberspace a sanctuary from the real world’s problems? New Scientist reports that a man has been arrested for using unbeatable bots in an online computer game to attack and mug the virtual avatars of human players. After stealing their virtual valuables, he turned around and sold them on an online auction site.

The article mentions rumors about escalating bot wars and organized syndicates behind other virtual attacks. But another article, this time on Wired, suggests that we might want to be careful before jumping to conclusions. Is this an isolated case or the end of Internet innocense (it was never innocent). In the Wired article, the reporter wonders where all the evidence is for organized crime and terrorist being behind pirated media.

Are we creating monsters where none exist? The answer will likely be yes. We do that all the time. But some monsters truly do exist, and it is certain that those who commit crime in the real world will not hesitate to do so in cyberspace. Where all this leads puts the “future” in the future.

It’s okay to send a teenager against his will to be cured of his homosexuality. It’s okay to process animals through “rendering plants” if they are “unfit for human consumption.” It’s okay to seize someone’s home against their will if it’s in the public good.

Yes, I use to wish that my homosexuality could be cured, sometimes I eat meat without thinking about how animals are processed, and I have stolen in the past.

And none of it is okay.

A little over a year ago after a few rough months I decided to start doing what I wanted to do, rather than helping other people with their own goals and dreams. I guess I just didn’t have the confidence before to strike out on my own. An acceptance letter from the University of Arizona (I had applied but didn’t expect to be accepted) provided the opportunity I needed to leave the old baggage behind and start a new life. At 31 I swallowed my fears (Am I too old? Is it too late? Can I do this on my own? Where am I going to get the money?) and moved to Tucson, Arizona.

My “freshman” year is now over. It was rough - I should have done a lot better - but taking control of my life and pursuing my own dreams has turned out to be the very best decision I have ever made. You see, I have always wanted to be a planetary scientist. Well, I am now a member of the operations team for the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), set to launch this August. HiRISE is a technological marvel which will allow resolution of objects on the surface of Mars as small as a meter across.

I did not expect to have a job like this until many years in the future, after I got through school. This new opportunity is a dream come true. There is no way I can put into words just how I excited I am. Everything that has happened in the past year is a direct result of my decision to pursue my own passions and maintain my own independence.

The HiRISE camera is certainly cutting edge, but new technology will make it obsolete very soon. Over on Marshal Brain’s “Robotic Nation Evidence” blog, he provides a link to information about a new robotic binocular vision technology from a company called Focus Robotics. This remarkable technology allows two robotic “eyes” to scan their environment at “[u]p to 60 frames per second of 752×480 depth information” (Focus Robotics, Processor Overview). This compares to current hazard avoidance technology used by the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity that can only scan at a few frames per second at much smaller resolutions.

This technology could enable rovers and orbiters that truly see their environment and respond to it in real time without waiting for instructions from human operators on the Earth. In fact, hazard avoidance is not the only skill this technology enables. Future probes will eventually take over all targeting tasks, currently hardcoded by programmers here on the Earth and uploaded to the probe as a set of rigid instructions through the Deep Space Network. When probes take on these targeting tasks, much of the operations work done here on the Earth will be eliminated.

Of course, such technology will eventually threaten my job, but I have never been one to pass up automation just to feel needed. There are many other ways I can participate in a planetary science mission. If automation means more rapid and comprehensive scientific results, and less repetitious and laborous work for me, then all the better. Instead of distant tools, future probes will become valuable members of science team in enviable frontline positions, returning breathtaking images of alien vistas throughout our solar system and beyond.

I am glad to finally be in a position to not only watch this incredible future unfold but actively participate in it. I challenge everyone to reconsider your current routine and take a chance on your own passions. You cannot do it without hard work and perhaps some luck, but the rewards are even better than you can imagine.

There are a great many video weblogs and Internet television series available now that are interesting and better than most of the crap on over-the-air, cable, and satellite television. Unfortunately, you have to download episodes of each show manually (a few weblogs can be automatically downloaded through videocasting which is similar to podcasting), find them in their individual folders, watch, and then click too damn much when one ends and you are ready to watch another.

What I want is an Automated Internet TV platform that automatically downloads and stores episodes of my favorite series and creates a channel that randomizes the shows while keeping the episodes in order. For example, I want a channel with “Star Trek: Hidden Frontiers”, “Rocketboom”, “The Scene”, and independent films, but set on shuffle, with episodes of each show coming in the right order.

There IS Winamp Internet TV, which you can surf through like regular television channels, but the content is generally poor and you cannot mix up shows by individual episodes from different channels into your own playlist. A couple of organizations, Brightcove and Participatory Culture Foundation, are working on improved Internet TV platforms but little is known about their user interfaces and features.

Once this dream platform is created then I want it to become so incredibly popular that television series created for the networks and cable jump ship and become available over the Internet. I’ll even pay a fee. How about US$1.99 for each new episode, US$0.50 for older episodes, or a $19.99 yearly subscription with unlimited reruns of all episodes prior to the latest?

Of course, once that becomes incredibly popular, then prices will start falling and packages of several different shows will become available for less than $19.99 a year. By then, there will be many more shows available than now, a level playing field for independent, public, and corporate-funded programming, and little need for the middlemen networks and cable companies. While we’re at it, throw in the entire movie, television, video, and DVD library since each were invented and make the Internet the ultimate video storage and jukebox.

Oh, believe you me, an exhaustive Automated Internet TV platform IS coming, no matter how hard the middlemen try to fight it. Unfortunately, I wanted it now. Now I have to wait, and that makes me a little angry. Time to watch more “Rocketboom” and decide whether or not I have a crush on host Amanda Congdon.