A preview of Michael Lawrence’s Bach Project was screened at EG2007 to much regard.
In another EG2007 story of kismet, John Abele, who spoke about his family’s submarine search, has decided to provide substantial funding to the film so it can finish production.
Read all about it in the Baltimore Sun.
I wonder what connections will be made next year?
Last week Kara Swisher had a short conversation with Michael Hawley about what the plans were for EG2007.
Now she’s compiled a 5 minute video showing “the brass band that opened the conference; shell art; a speech by Wurman; some piano playing by Hawley; former Microsoftie Nathan Myhrvold making VP Dick Cheney “cute” (no easy task!); Royal Calligrapher to Queen Elizabeth II Donald Jackson teaching the audience some moves; some amazing pictures of real snowflakes; “Heroes” creator Tim Kring talking about the intersection of television and the Internet; and a bracing violin piece.”
Politico has picked up on Rob Glaser’s presentation in this story, ‘Liberal’ lingo’s Tinseltown translation.
Adam was gracious enough to answer a second set of questions I had, sent in by a good friend’s three children, who are huge fans of his show.
For the record, here’s their favorite episodes:
Sophie (11): the one where they try to quietly break into a building
Ben (9): the one where they shoot a hole in the ground with a machine gun
Owen (6): the one with the yodeling avalanche
Thanks again Adam, you’re a true gentleman.
Chatting with Nathan about the Dvorak keyboard layout.
(These are loose, John went fairly deep into the three stories.)
Want to tell three stories that were under appreciated by my editors. I think I’m the longest surviving technology reporter in Silicon Valley. Peter Kerry is at the Merc and one of my heroes, but he’s mostly an investigative reporter. Went to school with William Hewlett Jr., grew up in Palo Alto. Was the paper boy at the house where Steve Jobs lives now. A few years ago Larry Page moved in the hacienda behind my mother’s house. One coda to the pretexting HP scandal, which is using social engineering techniques to find out what numbers you’ve called, I’ve never been a privacy stickler, but what really pissed me off was that Jay Keyworth (is that right?) was talking to 8 other reporters and not just to me.
About 5 months ago my wife tried to pay her phone bill via phone, it had a password, it turns out that HP had gotten his wife’s phone records!
What newspapers might have given us that the web hasn’t yet. All of my computer friends promise me agents that will do the kind of meta-information like things that will recreate the newspaper-like experience, we have torrents of information that’s not the same, like the front page of the New York Times. It’s very carefully crafted.
Why is the New York Times like the Metropolitan Opera? Average age is 60 and increasing by one a year.
Why are these stories not on the front page of the NYT? Sometimes acts of God. Too early. He wrote a story on the world wide web in 1993, he said think of it as a map to the buried treasure of information. When there was an explosion of economic activity I sulked for 5 years. Sometimes it’s Politics inside the NYT. He broke the Poindexter story twice, he was going to do Total Information Awareness. It got stuck on A-11, Washington Post did the story the next day but didn’t front it because the Times didn’t front it.
Adam Savage talks about what he wants to do after Mythbusters:
The web thing that we’re all talking about, is less than 5,000 days old. If 10 years ago I told you everything was coming, and that it all was coming for free, you wouldn’t have believed. We thought the internet was going to be TV but better. Wikipedia is impossible in theory, but possible in practice. We have to get better in believing the impossible.
What about the next 5,000 days? What we’re getting out of all these connections — laptops, cell phones, etc — is we’re getting one machin. It’s the most reliable michine ever made: zero downtime. The internet is longer than 5,000 days, I’m just talking about the web. 100 billion clicks per day on all the computers around the globe. 55 trillion links. 1 billion PC chips on teh internet, 2 million emails per second, 8 terabytes per second of traffic, 65 bilion phone calls per year. It uses 5% of global electricit on the planet. The number of of links is almost the same as the number of synapses in your brain, to a first approximation, the size of this machine is close to your brain.
But your brain isn’t doubling in power every 2 years.
If the size today is 1 HB, 1 human brain, in 30 years it will be 6 billion HBs, and in 2040 the processing power will surpass the processing power of humanity. In the next 5,000 days we’re going to embody it, give it structure, and become co-dependent. Every screen in the world is looking into the one machine. The web will own every bit.
Everything will be connected, there’ll be an internet of things. The cost of manufacturing will be its embedded electronics, not its materials. TV, film, video, phone, podcasts, newspapers, etc become one media platform, and follow the same laws of media. Copies have no value. Value is in the uncopyable. Media wants to be liquid. Network effects rule.
First stage was exchanging packets. Second step is linking pages, the unit has been reduced to pages. You can’t stop someone from linking to you. The third stage is linking the data. We’re going from machine-to-machine, page-to-page, now data-to-data. All the data about you should be carried around, all your relationships. Semantic web, web 3.0, global graph. You have to be open to having your data shared.
After that is the internet of things, the physical thing become part of the web.
Co-dependency, always on. Total personalization requires total transparency. We are the web. We’re going to be the machine. Next 5,000 days isn’t going to be the web, only better. It’s going to be something different, it’ll be smarter, more personalized, more ubiquitous. We have to begin to htink about this as the web only better but a new stage, that’s more global, it’s a big machine, more reliable than its parts.
There is only one machine. The web is its OS. All screens look into the one. No bits will live outside the web. To share is to gain. Let the one read it. The one is us.
The Entertainment Gathering 