Fads 3D

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I never believed in 3D. I always thought it was ridiculous having to wear extra glasses, watching effects that are little more than just … effects, and having to pay even more for already grossly overpriced theater tickets to see shitty movies with things flying at you. No thanks, I rather watch good movies. Flat.

The problem is that 3D television requires people to change their viewing habits. Normally, viewers watching even their favourite shows tend to be in reasonably lit rooms doing several things at once—scanning newspapers and magazines, using the phone, even browsing the web and answering e-mail. Taking 3D glasses off and on to do such things quickly becomes a chore. No surprise that even ardent early fans of 3D television have largely gone back to watching traditional fare. - The Economist “The Difference Engine: Beyond HDTV“

I am not saying 3D will never work, but so far there just have been modest improvements on a technology that is decades old. What we need is a break and something truly innovative and intuitive, not yet another multi billion dollar production like Avatar, which looked only slightly better in 3D. Here’s another rant I wrote about 3D in movies, many months ago.

Is 3D a fad? Comment below

How Google kills Facebook and Skype

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Google launched its own social networking contender recently. While it is officially still in a closed “field test”, thousands of Google users are already on the platform, and among tech circles, Google+ is already the next big thing. Google PlusThat is surprising, considering Google’s relatively meager track record in  the field. It has abandoned Jaiku, which was like Twitter. It has never tried to upgrade and spread Orkut, which used to be more popular than Facebook in countries like Brazil and India, it had to abandon Wave as a social collaboration tool, and Buzz never really took off as a social sharing mechanism. While many of Google’s services have a strong social component, it has been unable to intertwine them and turn them into a unified social platform. Enter Google+, which along with a visual interface refresh across the company’s services, tries to bring together existing ones, the recently launched +1 button, as well as ideas from Orkut, Diaspora and – Skype.

The platform is clearly over-hyped, and in a way too early stage to seriously judge its qualities and potentials. It will take many months until it enters a stage where it can reach Facebook’s usability in terms of features and fine tuning. However, I am already convinced that they managed to “kill” Facebook and Skype with one strike, and possibly a few other competitors as well. Here is why….

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10 Things Ubuntu is Doing Right and Wrong

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Yes the age of operation systems is coming to an end, as it is more and more irrelevant which one you use. You’re storing your documents on the web, you’re using Facebook to communicate, something browser-based Google Talk for phone calls, an RSS reader to get your news and you’ve replaced your email client with a webmail account from a provider starting with M, Y or G most likely. But most people still use an operation system and for most of them it still matters, for various reasons. I use Ubuntu Linux, for various reasons which I don’t want to get into right now. What I want to write about today are 5 things I believe Ubuntu is doing right and 5 other things they are doing wrong, with the hope that someone will read this :) Continue reading →

The Perils of Dominance

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One of my hobbies is the Vietnam Conflict (I plan to read more about post-American phase soon), it’s origins, implications and conduct. That the conflict makes for a whole sub-genre of war movies is a different but not altogether unrelated matter. Vietnam was a huge issue for those young enough to remember student riots, Nixon and Woodstock, but for someone like myself it is a highly interesting academic study area. I have read a number of books, but want to point out one that I just finished that is particularly interesting for scholars of international relations. Gareth Porter‘s Perils of Dominance is an excellent re-examination of the road to war, that does away with some common misconceptions and credibly builds a new hypothesis for what constituted the rationale for war and the factors that influenced foreign policy decision making in the pre-Nixon administrations (the war itself is not subject of this book). It should be clear by now that what’s known as the Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened, but what’s not so well known is how strongly all three presidents under examination resisted going to war and how over the decades their own national security bureaucracy mutated into a beast that was almost impossible to tame. That the “domino theory” was more of a PR slogan than actual policy comes out nicely from this book, and one of the more enlightening moments is when the author has the reader understand how completely different the reality in Vietnam and the perception of that conflict in Washington was. It is a depressing fact that at one point, the North Vietnamese were ready to accept all demands and hold nation wide elections and accept South Vietnam, but that information was simply suppressed, ignored and rejected. Not by a president, but by an advisor. The book is a careful argumentation and reconstruction of incidents that takes a close look at the Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese perspectives before turning to the inner workings of the presidents’ advisor circles. To cut it short, I found it to be a very informative analysis that will not change most people’s perception of the conflict but helps readjust the discourse and the history-writing. It is a very enlightening book but certainly not an introductory text, let’s call it a very advanced additional reading. Highly recommended.

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Knowledge Management and the neglected gov 2.0 application

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The Government 2.0 scene is in a buzz, CIO conferences and “gov camps” are proliferating, and more and more governmental entities can be found on Twitter and other “cool” social networks. That is nice and reflects a general willingness to embrace technical progress to some degree, but it falls short of the actual possibilities and promises that ICT has to offer.

One of the much heralded novelties of the “web 2.0″ age were wikis. Still today, the Wikipedia project and its offshoots are cited as the most successful forms of crowd-sourcing and user-generated content (even though the project’s governance structures are everything but democratic or bottom-up and only a tiny percentage of its users actually produce content). Still, sometimes I have the impression the only thing “2.0″ that is actually catching on in the public sector are applications that are fairly easy to implement, and not connected to too much effort. Setting up a Twitter account takes about a minute of time, content can be fed to it automatically from RSS feeds, checking it once or twice a day probably is sufficient for most agencies. Other things can be out-sourced (and often rightly so), such as the development of mobile applications, or the management of e-participation platforms. What is missing, is knowledge management, and all its promise for sustainable inter- and intra-agency empowerment and progress.

“Governments need more wikis” is not entirely what I am going for here, but it is puzzling that amid all the Government 2.0 buzz, the debate about how knowledge cane be most effectively bundled and harnessed, has largely quieted down. All the knowledge in an organization is usually hidden in a “garden salad” of proprietary documents on hard drives, hard copy folders in dusty shelves, the brains of under-used personnel or the horribly inaccessible web sites. Both internal and external wiki-based knowledge platforms would be game changers. Not only could public sector entities gradually and unrestrictedly build up easy-to-access hubs for knowledge (bringing with it a lowering of cost, freeing up of physical and digital space, empowerment of employees, etc.), with semantic technologies and the low cost of storage, much knowledge could also easily be provided to the public (creating trust through transparency) that might not be suitable for complicated integration into regular “home pages”.

The argument in favor of better knowledge management is hard to make, as its benefits are hard to measure, and especially (and that’s my point), and especially because in the end it is hard work. Such knowledge hubs need to be created. That is a slow process, and its effects might not show in months or years. Politicians don’t think long-term (that’s only one of their shortcomings), but public administrators should know better. Setting up such platforms requires little work or financial resources, so it is hard to understand why one would not be interested in taking a step toward more organizational sustainability. Hand books, tutorials, memos, transcripts, financial data, human resources data, planning documents, why lock all that away into inaccessible files and folders, when it could be at the fingertips of your employees?

I will be back with a blog entry on…. governmental blogging.