Currently viewing the tag: "Web 3.0"
The complete notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, as collected by the Project Gutenberg, are now available through Scribd iPaper, a unique new document format that allows for scrolling through book-length documents right on a static web page, without downloading. The service is a great complement to any project aimed at expanding knowledge, the free flow of information, and access to the great ideas of the past, present, and the future in progress.
We are living in a time of unprecedented global integration, where economies, security interests, legal systems, and languages and systems of learning have been dispersed and interwoven across the globe. There are obvious positive effects to this integration, along with certain overarching and seemingly intractable problems that cause real worry for even the most hopeful or studied observers. Languages and cultures intermingle, yet seek to remain distinct and continuous, and individuals seek to enhance their own possibilities (requiring freedom of information, and freedom of movement), while seeking to prevent the corrosion of already structured social fabrics.
The open-source movement has been a revolutionary phenomenon of startling proportions. It has changed the way software works for us in our daily experience, by bringing costs down far enough that now anyone with an internet connection can launch a web-based publication in literally seconds. Its efficiency, its appeal, its human element, make it a standard to watch as other sectors of economics and public life evolve to integrate the latest communications technologies, and aim for optimum end-user freedom and flexibility.
As the world acclimates to digital technology, and its usefulness in everyday life becomes increasingly relevant to how we achieve a higher quality of life, higher quality of education, and more efficient means of deploying solutions to complex problems, the standard for securing data and ideas may shift from closed environments behind firewalls to a new open standard, where the commons guarantees provenance, and thereby, rights, when warranted.
The digital age has brought the most potent test for the security of intellectual property, and thanks to the open source movement, has also shown that intellectual property is not always most productive or most valuable when kept under wraps. Increasing numbers of large firms and institutions are opting not only to use open source software —to avoid licensing fees—, but are also building their own products and services with open source code, meaning they cannot keep the contents safely secret.
The United States is facing what some experts are calling an “economic perfect storm”, with historical economists worrying about symptoms and reactions “not seen since the Great Depression”. Resources (natural and financial) are increasingly scarce, strained by tight credit markets and by competition from major emerging economies (China and India), and food prices are soaring.
We are on the verge of a major communications and global economic revolution, in which major media, technological advances, cloud computing and dispersed optimization, adapt to and take over new models for living and producing in human society. The New Scientist magazine reports in its March 15-21, 2008 edition that “web 3.0 will be about making information less free”.
A revolutionary web-based social networking project, Witness.org has created a platform for delivering evidentiary video documenting human rights abuses for the collective conscience of the online world. ‘The Hub’, as the video sharing platform is called, is designed to ensure that individuals who have documented potential human rights abuses, or who are able to give their testimony via video, can put their message before the eyes of the world.
The potential for broad-scope “electronic agents” —preprogrammed service aggregators and self-organizing databases with proactive marketing capability—, aiding in everyday information-related activities, will require a new security standard to prevent identity theft, which could become one of the gravest threats to economic performance and individual liberty.
HotSpring is a new debate and discussion forum, aimed at providing users with the flexibility to pool their resources, spout outlandish ideas, and test the ability of readers to suspend their disbelief long enough to contemplate new directions in science, technology and communications.
The project is aimed at anyone with a mind for getting beyond the obvious and embracing the subtleties of truly innovative thought, and our ultimate goal will be to create a deep-running current of talent and criticism that will lead to opportunities for the implementation of complex technological solutions and genuine conditional compensation for those who contribute materially to their development.
The Hot Spring connects people to brainstorm, solve problems, and build a more just, more sustainable future.
Events
Archives
