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One Social Web

A lot of the hype this week has been about Google Buzz, and for good reason: Google tends to do internet projects very, very well. But the project that has me most excited is the much more ambitious One Social Web.

One Social Web aims to decentralize the social internet by allowing all social networks to interact. Buzz, Facebook, Twitter and all the other social sites we use really should be able to talk to each other and we should be able to keep in touch with friends no matter where they decide to share their lives. What OSW does is create the framework to allow this, which is a wonderful development.

The purpose of onesocialweb is to enable free, open, and decentralized social applications on the web. Its protocol can be used to turn any XMPP server into a full fledged social network, participating in the onesocialweb federation. The suite of extensions covers all the usual social networking use cases such as user profiles, relationships, activity streams and third party applications. In addition, it provides support for fine grained access control, realtime notification and collaboration.

11.02.10 View Comments

Quotation Collection

I’ve amassed a number of quotes I haven’t found a good outlet to share before now. Clogging up Twitter would be shameful, so a blog entry seems an ideal way to present them. There are bits of profundity, inspiration, compassion and geekiness in the words that follow.

“Self and culture and nature go together. We have to liberate all three of them or none at all.” ~Ken Wilber, “Creative Friction”, What is Enlightenment #36

“The weak believe that destiny is what happens to them, the strong believe that they are what happens to destiny.” ~ Rogue

09.02.10 View Comments

Lifelogging and Meditation

Lifelogging provides an effective way to objectify pieces of our lives, and when it is used in the service of subjective practices like meditation it gets really juicy. Equanimity Project works at the convergence of the objective and subjective, providing tracking of meditation to aid in establishing a practice and overcoming resistance. The Equanimity application is currently available for the iPod Touch and iPhone, but the website also includes printable charts and a flash timer.

This meditation timer both times your sittings and provides graphical tracking, giving you clear feedback on your meditation practice. It’s carefully designed to be the ideal companion for anyone who meditates.

Easy to read graphics let you know at a glance how regularly you are meditating, and how long your daily practice has been going. A chart illustrates your progress over the course of the year, and a bar graph shows the total number of hours you have meditated.

It’s much easier to keep going with a routine when you can see so clearly how you are doing. ~ “Meditation timer for the iphone“

Gary Wolf featured Equanimity Project and its creator Robin Barooah at The Quantified Self blog today and shared the following video, in which Robin explains his application.

04.02.10 View Comments

Podcast Selections: Polyamoury, Erotica and Speculative Fiction

Podcast Selections Podcasts are meaningful media for me; they’re the closest thing to radio I can have any passion about. Here is a selection of sexy, speculative and informative ‘casts that I have recently added to the ‘casts I enjoy enough to listen to weekly.

These ‘casts often include mature, sexual or violent content, so if you’re timid you may not want to explore the material I am about to present. If you are interested in being challenged in thinking about relationships, wish to be tantalized with otherworldly fiction and … wish to be tantalized with otherworldly fiction, read on.

28.01.10 View Comments

Personal Fabrication and Torrented Objects

3D scanning and printing are quickly becoming near future certainties. The advent of cheap 3D scanning and printing, along with cheap data transfer means that we will soon be able to share physical objects digitally as easily as we do music, movies and books. This is going to change more than we can imagine.

The easy analogy for understanding 3D printing and scanning is the obvious one; 2d –or conventional– printers and scanners are the predecessors of a far more exciting set of technology that is coming to consumer space very soon. Instead of scanning flat paper, we will be able to scan objects in 3 dimensions. Instead of printing an image, we will be able to replicate an object as an object. In between we will be able to manipulate objects just as we edit documents and alter photographs.

3D scanning can already be done with consumer webcams.

In a recent article from British Columbia’s The Tyee, “The Replicator, No Longer a Star Trek Dream“, great care was taken to outline the ways 3D printing is already widely in use and where it may take us.