Orrorin’s Diary

I’ve been reading blogs for a long time, but only recently decided to participate actively in the community. Strangely, I read more and more often about top bloggers who decide to stop, post less or focus more on micro blogging. Jesse Stay wrote a post about the reasons for blogging which made me think. It is understandable that people don’t want to do the same thing over and over for years, or that after a while they don’t have much left to say. Like a teacher or preacher just repeating himself over and over, again and again; talking about the first version of the iPhone, then the second, the third, etc.  

Does it mean the end of blogging or just a need for fresh blood?

Top sporters remain at the highest level for a short while and usually decide to leave when their career has peaked. Bloggers might be of the same specimen, expecting the new generation to take over. I also noticed that many top bloggers have more than one blog and therefore shift their focus from one to the other. Based on some empirical data (from my own experience), I would say that a top blog’s life cycle stands around 3 to 5 years.

Many bloggers also discovered other tools they find more comfortable working with, writing headlines instead of full pages. Like the SMS on mobile phones, it shows again the need to convey “relevant” data as fast as possible. I have the feeling many bloggers move from a newspaper quality level to a tabloid. The scoop becomes more important than the relevance of the factual data.

I would also like to come back to the narcissist case. Social networks have been built on the need to position oneself in society and make more noise than the others. When speaking about noise, I believe Twitter and the others add to polluting the net rather than enforcing value. I recently joined Friendfeed which I find interesting, but it is also a huge waste of time.

I suppose this is the normal step that has to be taken, the same way we moved from .wav to .mp3 or .mpg to .divx. We compress our information and keep the dearest. Try however to listen to an mp3 on a high-end hi-fi and you will quickly realize your loss.

Even though we are mainly speaking of early adopters, those are the ones paving the way.

Is our future written? Are we supposed to become addicted and pass 80% of our time in front of our iPhone 4^th generation texting and sending videos to our neighbors on the other side of the world? Does it mean that to find real valuable information, we would be required to start reading again real newspapers? Or will they have to follow the same strategy in order to remain significant in a world based on speed?

I believe that today’s top bloggers have a big responsibility towards society. As they are the ones testing first the applications that might change the way we communicate; they should also carefully study the potential risks. Maybe those same people should launch together a new organization case studying all these new applications, categorize them and simulate the impact on the future generations.

Actually, it might be a fun job.

This is also a message to you all bloggers, in case you decide to stop, please find a way to archive your blog. As I stated before, I really believe each one of our blogs is a part of our culture that should be recorded!

Google started archiving books; maybe we should ask them to do the same with blogs…

O Lively, Lively, why are you so lovely?

I have been waiting for you for a long time to come. Finally and surprisingly it is Google who arrived with this new application: Lively

There are many virtual worlds on the internet, what makes me melt in front of Lively.com?

Second Life, There and the others showed us we have the technology to build virtual worlds. However most of them lacked a conducting line, something more relevant than just chatting. Video games like World of Warcraft (WOW) added background and a raison d’être to the whole story. People joining know why they are there and what they are supposed to do.

Virtual worlds have to evolve and bring content, this is one of the reasons why we start seeing them merge or become compatible supporting avatar movements between them.

Lively and Vivaty are following another scheme and work on another scale. Both of them use a decentralized structure implementing links in existing platforms like blogs or social networks. Today each of this links works separately creating a unique room. I personally installed Lively on my blog and started creating my own personal “chez moi”.

Anybody can create a room or house in other existing virtual worlds. But what’s amazing about it?

The way Lively works or at least I hope will function in the near future, is like the ghost portraits in Harry Potter or the painting used by the protagonists in the Sandman Comic books. The way I envision it is that with time, Google will build tunnels linking the existing rooms, therefore supporting the travelling of an avatar from one place to another. This means that with time blogs, social networks and virtual worlds will become one. The search for contacts will be done through virtual travel, but the real content or personal ID will be the person’s blog or profile. This might become a possible evolution to the actual search engines in combination with behavioral and semantic search.

As I tried to explain in my last post, the iPhone opened something new, transforming with time a mobile phone into a person’s virtual ID. The relation between mobile phone and virtual worlds will grow through this new infrastructure. Again, hardware is becoming more dependent on the road software is taking. As the Web2.0 is related to human interaction and the Web3.0 to human - technology interaction, we may expect to see a lot of virtualization. This might give a whole new meaning to the Google Phone and Android.

Virtual Worlds are considered today as additional worlds parallel to ours. However, an infrastructure like Lively might actually create a new layer to our real world.

The iPhone 3G has arrived in Belgium!!! Yippee!!!

600€ plus subscription, that’s indeed a lot of money! So the question is: is it worth it? Why do people spend so much on a mobile phone? Why so much hustle on a piece of hardware?

Hardware?  What hardware?

You mean:

Applications! Applications! Applications! (thank you Steve)

Technology wise, the new iPhone is busier catching-up than actually innovating. As I do not have an iPhone, nor plan to buy one (yet), I can’t give any opinion on its technical aspect and have to refer to others who tested the phone, like Engadget.

What I believe to be groundbreaking with the new iPhone, its 3G, GPS and usability is actually that it copied what Microsoft did a long time ago with IBM. In the years ’70 Microsoft provided Big Blue with software. At that time, IBM was a colossus focusing on large hardware who actually didn’t really believe in the evolution of personal computers, opening this way a breach for others. That’s how Microsoft and Intel succeeded into developing what was at the start a niche market and evolved to become the technology we use today.

As hardware evolved taking giant leaps, so did software, and with the broadband Internet, even faster. Due to social medias, we arrived today at a turning point where the software will motivate the development of the next hardware. Software is no more a complement providing you a return on your high investment in a complex combination of metal and silicon pieces. The program is today king.

But what is the relation with the iPhone?

There are many powerful PDA’s on the market with 3G, GPS and access to libraries of software, but none focuses on the user’s experience.

Not only did Apple intelligently focus on the usability but it also combined a closed-kind-of-open platform and a strong dedication to applications through their online store. It is true most of the applications can be considered as of limited value and sometimes too expensive. The point is that Apple came again with a new frame of mind and others will have to follow.

More people will start using iPhones and alikes, more society will move to a mobile internet structure. This will help reduce costs and standardize mobile connectivity.

Each mobile phone represents a gate to others, whether applications or people. It becomes an interactive ID or avatar of the user. More than anything else today, the new mobile phone will be the link between the user and the virtual world.

If Second Life and the others showed how virtual worlds are in its infancy, the iPhone will help build a structure moving it into maturity.

Though I’m more like an HTC guy, I’d say thank you Apple for forcing this new paradigm. I just hope the telecom companies won’t screw it up…