Mixtapes & Playlists: A Few Favorites

Online playlists are everywhere, some services better than others. As with most things that come in multiple forms on the web, I've messed around with many of them and have found a few favorites. (iMeem is not one of them.) Half of the fun is just browsing and listening to other people's mixes and with a bunch of good sites popping up, there's no shortage of mixes to browse. First, I like Muxtape, which allows you to upload tracks and make one 12-track mix under your username at a time.

IFTF in the news

The Institute's new future of making map got a mention in the New York Times.

As important as tinkering has been to the nation’s past, it could become a much bigger deal before long, said David Pescovitz, a research director at the Institute for the Future, a consultancy in Silicon Valley. A new report from the institute argues that the makers could force enormous changes in the ways that goods and services are designed and manufactured. The renewed urge to tinker, along with flexible manufacturing technologies, could shift production from big companies and stores to communities of makers and consumers, Mr. Pescovitz said.

"It’s about having a deeper connection with the stuff around you, and through that with the people around you," he said. That is why his research group took the slogan from the pins given out at the Futurama pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair — "I have seen the future" — and edited it for the report to "I am making the future."

"If you want something done right, do it yourself. That’s really what it’s about," Mr. Pescovitz said.

Maoists on the Streets of Mumbai? Coming Soon

BusinessWeek Asia is reporting some genuine news for me - about the growing threat of India's home grown Maoist insurgency, the Naxalite movement, that is starting to bubble over after decades of simmering in the remote countryside. Now that Maoists have overthrown the Nepalese government:

Will sociability make Zune cool?

With the rise of recommendation-based music discovery systems like Last.fm and iLike, and the increased importance of friends and contacts as trusted recommendation sources and filters, music discovery is more social than ever. In an attempt to compete with Apple's iPod success, Microsoft has announced that it will release a portable subscription card for its Zune players. Users had recommendation functionality in the past, but it was accessible only through the website. With the portable card, Zune users can share their favorites with other Zune users.

Watch Your Carbon Footprint As You Go

Participatory web service Dopplr, which allows individuals to coordinate travel and inform colleagues about where they'll be, has now introduced a tool for calculating the carbon footprint of your journeys.

Dopplr co-founder Matt Jones describes its purpose this way:

Technology Horizons conference

Everyone at the Institute is at the Technology Horizons conference today on "The Future of Making." It's rather different from our usual events. Conference attendees started trickling in yesterday at the Maker Faire, and we put them through a couple exercises that encouraged them to spend some time exploring the Faire and talking to people. Today is more like our usual conferences: we're combining talks and roundtables, with exercises in which conference attedees think through the implications of what we're talking about.

Today's list of guests is also unusually interesting. Joshua Kauffman from Regional talked about DIY in Cuba (here's a video of a similar talk they gave at Stanford recently); Dale Dougherty (founder and editor of Make) and David Pescovitz (who divides his time between IFTF, Boingboing.net, and Make) talked about "the Maker mindset." Our panel on the future of open source included Bunny Huang (creator of the Chumby), Dan Morrill (Google Android), and Brian Carver (an IP attoruney at Fenwick & West). After lunch, we got into Citizen R&D with Eric Wilhelm (founder of Instructables), Hugh Rienhoff (founder of MyDaughtersDNA.org), Jeane Frost (founder of PatientsLikeMe.com), and Gary Wolf (a senior contributor at Wired, and now working on a project on the quantified self). Now, Mark Hatch (COO of TechShop), David ten Have (founder and CEO of New Zealand-based Ponoko), and Liam Casey (founder and CEO of PCH International) are talking about lightweight manufacturing.

Editor's Choice Blue Ribbon for IFTF @ Maker Faire!

The Bionic Athlete

The cover story of the current ESPN Magazine, "Let 'Em Play," explores the bigger issues surrounding the augmentation of our biological bodies with prosthetic technologies. The story's author, Eric Adelson, looks at a cross-section of prosthetic enhancements, some allowable, some not, and notes that this wouldn't be the first

Maker Faire: It's About Rethinking Assumptions

Maker Faire opened today with a Maker Day—a time for Makers to meet each other and showcase some of their cool projects. As I was listening to Umberto Crenca, one of the founders of AS220, a non-profit arts center in Providence, RI, that provides spaces for different types of media artists and performers, it occurred to me that the Faire is not just about seeing great DIY projects, it is about much more; it is about breaking established modes of thinking, established approaches to living, working, organizing.

Atlantic v. Howell Ruling: A Troubling Caveat

Yesterday I posted about the decision [PDF] in Atlantic v. Howell that found having a shared folder on a sharing service does not constitute copyright violation. After the initial excitement wore off, analysts began to look at a second part of that ruling which, according to David Kravets at Wired, could "embolden" the RIAA's lawsuit extravaganza.

X2 in Europe

One of the Institute for the Future's most powerful research tools is the expert workshop-- events in which a cross-section of experts spend a day brainstorming, creating maps of the future, and developing scenarios that look in depth at possible futures and our responses to them. The Institute has been organizing workshops for years, and has built up a tremendous store of both practical and tacit knowledge around them; and in addition to their being useful research tools, they're a great excuse to spend time with very interesting people.

The X2 project has been organizing workshops in Asia this spring-- I was just in Malaysia and Singapore, and we're going to Korea, China, India, and other places later this year. Now we're setting our sights on Europe.

"Shared folder" != copyright violation

After years of muscling fans into settlements and lawsuits over sharing folders of music on various P2P services, a judge has ruled that offering a "shared folder" of media does not constitute a copyright violation unless there is proof that an actual file changed hands.

From PC World:

A year of television = 2000 Wikipedias

My colleague Jason Tester pointed out (ultimately via Boing Boing) a post by Clay Shirky that helps answer a question that often comes up about collaborative media. As Jason put it, "Often when I give talks illustrated with examples like Wikipedia, delicious, Flickr, etc, to largely non-tech audiences (HR for example) someone will ask 'Where do people find the time?' or the less thoughtful 'Is this just about nerds in basements?'"

Clay points out two things. First, that a lot of time that goes into writing blogs, adding content to wikis, mashing things up on Google Earth, etc., is taken from other activities like television-watching. He notes that Americans watch something like 200 billion hours of television a year.

That's an amazing amount of time, and when you can take little bits of your time and spend them on projects that other people can also spend little bits of time on, it adds up pretty quickly.

The impact of the Hajj on social attitudes

In David Lodge's great novel Changing Places, Euphoric State University professor Morris Zapp declared that "travel narrows." He was a world-renowned Jane Austen scholar, he said, precisely because he had never been to England: his lack of interest in the real England let him focus more sharply on the novels, and made him a better critic.

This attitude may hold true for literature (or not), but Slate reports on a fascinating recent study (available here) suggesting that Muslims who make the pilgrimage to Mecca "came back with more moderate views on a range of issues, both religious and nonreligious, suggesting that the Hajj may be helpful in curbing the spread of extremism in the Islamic world."

Long term future: Inner planets collide

Astronomers looking at the long-term future of the solar system have concluded that "a collision with Mercury or Mars could doom life long before the Sun swells into a red giant and bakes the planet to a crisp in about 5 billion years." USCS astronomers Gregory Laughlin and Konstantin Batygin, and Jacques Laskar of the Observatoire de Paris, ran computer simulations of the solar system. According to the New Scientist,

The studies suggest that the solar system's planets will continue to orbit the Sun stably for at least 40 million years. But after that, they show there is a small but not insignificant chance that things could go terribly awry....

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