Post on banking and jobs

I also have a blog called "Mortgage Maven" where I post about issues in the banking industry to supplement my freelance writing for banking trade magazines and other bank/economic related issues and information.

Read my latest blog post called "Jobs, cash and credit"

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Life 2.0, Part 4

Take it another step and we have total integration of the Internet into all our devices. Broadband cable and WiFi in every part of the home, why not? It’s just about possible now. There really is no reason my set top box, DVD player, Computer, and even my refrigerator can’t be all networked on a WiFi so that I can access information about everyone of them on a LAN or out to the World Wide Web. And why not?

I want the smart house. I want my refrigerator to send me an email when the filter in the water dispenser is low. Better yet, I want to set the preferences on my refrigerator to order me a new filter when it needs to be replaced and then email me an alert to expect the filter to arrive in the mail by UPS and by the way here’s the tracking number and here is where that package is in transit right now. Same for the air filters in my forced hot air system. What about my light bulbs in my recessed lighting?

I ask this question of myself all the time: Why do I have to stick my DVD into my computer to access the web content? With WiFi technology and a simple operating system loaded with a browser interface, my DVD player can show me the content right after I watch the movie. (Advertisers are you listening because then you know exactly my tastes by what DVD I was watching and can target those banner ads accordingly.)

Here’s another question I ask myself: Why can’t my stove give me access to the latest recipes when I am feeling inspired to cook like Emeril while watching the show on TV? I can tell my stove to access one of many websites where I can find recipes and then get a list of ingredients emailed to me or better yet WiFi the information to the printer directly. That way I can run out and get exactly what I need. There’s probably a thousand brands out there who would love to be the exclusive sponsor so when my list prints it doesn’t simply say to buy butter but Land O’ Lakes butter.

Some say this is evil. It’s like movie product placement but in your real life. And when is it too much networking? Does my lamp or my cheese grater really need a WiFi connection? Probably not. But there are major appliances that are missing an opportunity here. And the advertising reduces the cost of the actual item then so be it. Already we are getting immune to ads blasting at us on billboards, phone ads, commercials on radio and television, free websites and Google Ad Sense is everywhere, even your Aunt Tilly’s blog. But this kind of thing allows it to be free to blog, share photos and upload videos of teenagers blowing up Coke bottles.

In the next step, the web will not only be pervasive but invisible. We know it is beginning when our phones and our computers and our iPods all are coming together. When telephones and televisions started invading our homes the world became smaller and more connected. The Internet increased that networking of people across countries. Someday we’ll be talking worlds or stations in space or on the moon. If you think I am being grandiose just remember that as little as twenty years ago CDs were an extremely expensive option to cassette tape and people still bought 45RPM singles.

Some of you knew I was going to get to this eventually: The Singularity.

If anyone has been reading or listening to the theoretical talk in technology lately you might have heard of a concept called the Singularity. This idea is explained, as the time in the future when the exponential increase of technology is so fast we cannot imagine it. In Moore’s Law, the processing speed of computers will keep expanding exponentially. In the future, Artificial Intelligence, because of this infinite increase in technology, will be smarter than humans. Either the collective of computers networked throughout the world (or solar system!) will surpassed the collective human intelligence or AI will be the only way to capture this increase of technological computing power in any meaningful way. Some profess that this is the natural evolution of the universe, from organic to artificial intelligence. Of course we can also rely of biological enhancements to our own intelligence, the seeds of which we see in medical science today.

Personally I do not have that sense of impending doom regarding the advance of technology. It does make humans more dependant and somewhat lazy but it has so much going for it. I think the major debate is: What is life? Will computers and machinery ever live? Will they question their own existence? Will they have wants, needs and desires like us? Will they love? Hate?

Even if the computers can process so quickly they can network together and imitate life, the beauty of life (biological, life as we know it) is that each of us, you and me encompass a whole host of emotions, ideas, potential that I think a machine can't have. It can't grow like us. Growing, struggling, surviving despite all odds, that is what makes a being eligible to be considered alive.

Each of us in our journey from birth to death grows and learns so much that we are different from each other as can be. My universe is not your universe even though we live together. Even though we share the same space. Machines cannot live if they merely download the information they've learned from generation to generation. We have to learn it all in a unique and personal way every time, except the most basic biological functions.

In life, we must earn our way. Life is precious. Life is tragic. How concerned can I be with a machine whose whole existence is backed up on a server? You and I are not "backed up." We exist once and then as unfair as it seems, in a brief time we disappear, never to exist again. Never to occupy the same space again. Never to "be" again. That is the essence of life. It only happens once and it is beautiful and fragile. It is not a series of codes that can be copied from drive to drive. That is just data back up.

Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil promote the Singularity concept, derived from the Singularity in Physics where Gravity is so strong that it verges on infinite strength. In Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns he describes exponential growth much like Moore’s Law but applies it generally to include technology from before the computing circuit.

Some have debated the idea that our technology may surpass us and lead to us becoming less and less necessary in the paradigm. Can machines overtake their maker and become the dominant intelligence force in the universe? Is that progress? If that happens will we be in a better position where the machines will strive for our well-being and general comfort like a direct intervention from a deity? Or will they adopt our power corrupting ideals, enslaving or eliminating us from the equation. Science Fiction has made much hay of this concept.

Can we avoid our own destruction not by War or Disease or Famine but by the very thing we have relied on so much to make life more and more comfortable, accessible and safe: Technology.

I think we will continue to reach to that future time as we come closer to the event horizon of the technological singularity and try to understand its implications but like the unfathomable idea of the physical singularity the singularity of the computing world may just be a possibility, ever out of reach of true understanding and conception.

In the meantime, I’m going to watch that video of a monkey peeing off a branch on YouTube again.

End.

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Life 2.0, Part 3

I am waiting for Web 3.0, which will ingrain itself into my real world in such a way that it will be virtually inseparable from my environment and approach a certain Artificial Intelligence aspect.

The Web 3.0 thing is a definite. I see it as the collective consciousness of all the information you can find on the Internet combined with your personal profile put through marketing and modeling software (algorithms?) to make predictions on behavior or even suggestions.

This is all dependant on our use of the Internet, which is becoming more and more prevalent. Web based applications are replacing locally run software. This idea gets us back to the mainframe model where your computer is simply a terminal slave for a larger, smarter, central computer. (Ever see Wargames?) But the larger smarter central computer in this case is replaced by a smudge of information across geographic and electronic areas.

Of course there will always be customization and personalization because that is what we demand but imagine a world where instead of choosing a system platform to run, you choose what site you will log into to do all your computing. Google seems to be heading in that direction and they aren’t the only ones who get it. In all honesty, I shiver at the idea of giving up my individuality to buy and pick and choose my software as I like for my own system that resides on my own hard drive locally instead of having an internet box that gets me access to a remote server that only looks like its mine.

This has been tried before but not too much success. Now with online video and photo sharing, blogging, and services like Gmail, this is becoming a reality. All a large company like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple or someone else has to do is start acquiring all the little websites and making them their own. Oh wait! This is already happening. More and more, the graphical interface of the web is replacing what lies beneath.

Bit Torrent is a file sharing protocol where multiple computers that hold the same file speed up uploading requests and limit bandwidth consumption by sending bits of data over a wider distribution of files across multiple sources. That’s my understanding of the technology. As more people pick up the file the faster the download time since there are more bits out there to take from simultaneously. With technology like that and an ever increasing bandwidth, it will not be long before we can seamlessly share all kinds of data and files no matter how large, further allowing remote accessing and increasing the ability of storage space to become almost infinite.

If I have a virtual hard drive but the files I keep are merely images of what I want instead of the actual file, every time I want to access it (lets say it’s my favorite movie or album) the file is sent to me by this distribution protocol instantly. Would I know the difference between actually owning a file and just having immediate access to it whenever I want?

Is the next evolution a model where my children buy dumb boxes and the internet makes available for free, powerful applications and services like Photoshop, Microsoft Excel, Gmail and Youtube all for the simple price of having to look at some pop up ads? Or a small subscription fee? Perhaps the ISPs will start offering subscription packages to online software apps ala the current model for cable offerings.

Even better I choose a menu of items I want to access for a price per month that I can change month to month as my needs change. Do I need to retouch photos this month? Order Photoshop. Is it tax season? Order Turbo Tax. Is my child going back to school in September? Time to reorder my favorite word processing software. For a couple of dollars per month I always have the most updated and latest software version instead of paying hundreds ever time I want one or have to upgrade.

The software companies make out because distribution costs and packaging is eliminated in favor of allowing more users access to their software. Lower price points may translate into exponentially larger subscribers and legal subscribers, at that. How much does Adobe loose on all those pirated and copied versions of Photoshop? Or how many people don’t use it because the price point is too high but they’d love to have it?

Take a $500 program and charge $10 per month for it. Then offer it so that you are always able to use the most updated and latest version if I so choose (or I can continue using the previous version I am used to until I want to switch up.) I’d do it so that I never have to mail in a registration card again or worry that in a few years I have to fork out another $200 to upgrade to the version that everyone else is using or that runs on the latest operating system.

Do you want the basic broadband subscription with channels like Google and Yahoo along with basic photo editing, word processing, email software and the 500 Terabytes of storage? Or do you want the Silver package where you get all the search engines plus the Microsoft Office Suite and Adobe package of application subscriptions and the 1 Petabyte of storage space? Great, now wait while we scan all your appliances and stereo equipment for integration into our control panel web page. What’s that madam? Sure, you can control everything when you are on vacation or at work, just log into your account. Your kids will get the PG-13 version access as well.

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Life 2.0, Part 2

The personal web log, otherwise known as a Blog, has exploded over the last few years. The average web surfer can now access hundreds of site that allow them to set up a their own blog for free. Anyone with a connection to the Internet can be a content producer. Blogs can be rarely updated, extremely personal diaries or professionally run, frequently updated, journalistic reports on the world, politics or culture.

Wikis are the public sites where anyone can contribute and edit content. The most famous, Wikipedia.com allows anyone who registers to alter the encyclopedic content of the site on everything from politics to comic books. I think of it as the collective consciousness of the web.

Podcasting takes things a step higher. It is a natural evolution of the blogging phenom where a person (and usually more than one) takes their blog ideas and records them by voice. Think AM Talk Radio.

In addition more technologies like social networking sites that let you post your own profile and photo sharing site that allow you to upload and post your own photos for public viewing can be rolled into the Web 2.0 movement.

On MySpace millions of posters keep a running list of interests, connections, bulletins and news. They post photos and connect with old or new friends. The teenage market seems to be a high user base and indie rock bands seem to proliferate MySpace with their profiles. The ability to modulate the site with art, music and video adds to the appeal. Of course the real value in the site is for the advertisers to put their message in front of the millions of users that visit the site everyday. MySpace has minimal interactivity. It allows you to post your personal information and connect to others but it does not allow for anything close to real time feeding of information and on the fly changes. It’s pretty much a dinosaur that is a victim of its own massive popularity.

Digg.com is a site where users pick up articles off the web and link to them. Then other users vote up or down the article or story. It can be anything and of almost any subject although technology news seems to get the most “DIGGS” as they are called. The popular items are then talked about on a podcast. If you can imagine that this site draws in thousands of users every day and none of them are paid to search and post their favorite stories. It seems almost a badge of honor to be a newshound for Digg.com and then have your picks become popular. While great for disseminating information that a group might find useful and share with each other it also could provide a boost for an otherwise not-so-popular blog or news site that gets a story or post DUGG and becomes popular.

This brings us to a term that even I just learned but have been experiencing and using for a long time now: Folksonomy, better known as Tagging. On the web, people use tags to describe a created object or piece of information. The difference between Folksonomy and Taxonomy is that Folksonomy is an organic, user created system that has no formal rules and Taxonomy follows strict guidelines. So when I post by picture on Flicker for the world to see, I apply search tags to it myself based on what I feel best describes the image. The same idea applies to my blog posts, sound bites, video uploads and all other user created content. When you add a tag to your information and it is picked up by other sites it will then be grouped with other pieces of information that are similarly tagged.

So all I need to do is apply a group of generic tags to my Flicker photo and when a user comes on to search for all tags related to “Ford Mustang” the picture of my classic car may show up. The downside is that there is no subsystem in this type of classification so if I only tag my image as a “Ford Mustang” then there is no central database that will also group all “Ford Mustang” searches under “Automobile” as well. The benefit is that I can add as many tags as I wish and require to my information and am not beholden to a committee defined classification system. In this iteration of the Web, users are defining the content themselves or it could be said that the lunatics have taken over the asylum.

In addition I would categorize the Massively Multiplayer Online Games like World of Warcraft in this category. People are living, fighting, socializing and bartering (and even making a profit) off of this virtual world. Second Life is another wildly popular site where people create alternate personalities and basically live a second life online. This is attracting real businesses to set up shop in the Second Life virtual universe.

As a side note, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash featured a virtual world where players immersed themselves in a total virtual reality. The author coined the popular term for an online personality that is called an Avatar. Though the virtual computer world in the book was more extensive and visceral than current virtual reality experiences online it was a very good prediction of the direction we are heading.

This has made us a culture of writers, performers and consumers of media in a fashion never predicted. I profess that technology is making us more literate and expressive and less apt to being swayed by the old paradigm of Mass Media.

The diversity of the information that real people share is amazing. I ran across a blog that someone was running where they documented their experience dealing with being a single father trying to gain custody of his children. Where can someone with that specific interest go to find support and companionship but in this arena?

Narrowcasting to niche interest groups is where the future lies. Sure, we may still have the need for a big media companies to handle the large stories, the ones that require a behemoth to get done but within that is a splintering of interest groups. A picking and choosing of what I want rather than having to wait for someone to discover my demographic needs to be fed.

No matter how you slice it, no matter how popular it becomes, sites like MySpace are ugly, tacky and virtually non-functioning. Ever notice how slow it is to load a MySpace page or navigate. The access and networking it allows outstrips its flaws for most teenagers and they probably never even notice. MySpace probably has a few good years left (if that) and it will die a painful death. Or has no one learned the lesson of AOL yet?

Is there an uglier side to all this beyond aesthetics? Of course. The access and networking has allowed many people to do evil to other people, take advantage of unfortunate souls and commit crimes and scams. But this is a facet of human nature not the technology. To change this we must change. In the meantime a democratic and uncensored Internet is a good thing. The censoring and protection has to happen at the nodal level, within the home and at the points of access. Am I sounding a little idealistic, a little liberal? Then let me take the extra step and quote Stewart Brand: “Information wants to be free.” Not that it should not cost anything but that it should be available for those who want it.

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Life 2.0, Part 1

Your real life and the Internet will resemble each other more than your think.

Ever read a fan produced ‘zine? They’re cheaply produced magazines, mostly printed by photocopying or very cheap printing technologies to distribute to a small number of subscribers. They are usually not very slick, professional nor are they meant to be. Quick and dirty is the name of the game here. They are generally written about a specific topic like a rock band or most notably the science fiction culture. They are always self-published and have little if no promotion. Generally a ‘zine has an underground or indie feel to it and is definitely amateurish.

With the increased popularity of the ‘zine throughout the 1980s and 1990s it inevitably gave way to what is now called the Webzine. The web is the best place to publish on the cheap. There are more than enough free software, hosting and promotional sites out there to support a large number to focused webzines.

Centuries before ‘zines people produced their own bills, flyers, newspapers, pamphlets and libels to disseminate their point of view. These most democratic carriers of personal expression could be distributed or sold on the corners of Colonial towns and European cities. While the distribution of such material was limited by human travel times and low literacy rates, it could still have a great influence on public opinion. In 1649, English Parliament instituted the Printing Act, which sought to stem the decadent distribution of libels.

Pronouncements in public squares in the cities of Greece and Rome were probably the closest equivalent in the ancient era.

When a computer protocol was written by Ward Christensen so that one could dial up a Bulletin Board System in 1977, the early precursor of the World Wide Web was born and the sharing of information freely through networked computers residing in the homes and offices of “some other” people became possible.

The World Wide Web really started at CERN (No Al Gore joke here), European research Lab. Tim Berners-Lee set up the first web server. From the CERN website: “The idea was to connect hypertext with the Internet and personal computers, thereby having a single information network to help CERN physicists share all the computer-stored information at the laboratory.”

The ability to find, browse, search and create information that can be viewed by anyone with a computer and an Internet connection came to be. The Internet has evolved from a means of transmitting scientific and academic information to a great way to waste time.

You can spend hours of your day looking up old Eighties songs and T.V. shows or browse for the coolest gadgets or download the latest music. I will admit that I’ve spent many a slow day at work surfing the web for mindless content to pass the time.

When I first got connected to the Internet, sites on Geocities were all the rage. Those that were successful grabbed domains and set up indie brands of their own. For all the glitz and glamour of the dot com boom, most pages were static sites. They allowed a user to browse for information and the most interactive thing you could do was buy something from Amazon.com. Of course this was a revolution in itself and immediately eBay made us all junk enthusiasts. It revolutionized the dissemination of information from a central location to the rest of the world. A cottage industry of spreading rumors cropped up as well as another host of sites that looked to dispel those rumors.

The growing pains of the industry were exposed in lawsuits and large payoffs for domain name squatters. Also, the dot com boom proved that investors could be both extremely smart and stupid at the same time. In the end, it began to occur to most rational people that an idea and an actual business model were not the same thing just because it was fashionable.

In the last few years the concept of a Web 2.0 has appeared. If you’ve heard of the term then you might already be involved with the movement. O’Reilly Media coined the term in 2004 and have held conferences regarding this phenomenon. It is very well described by Tim O’Reilly in his article “What is Web 2.0?” Do a Google search and you can find it. In his definition he describes Web 2.0 as a “continually updating service that gets better the more people use it.”

There is debate as to the validity of this concept and if it is defined enough to merit such a classification and separation from another “era” of the life of the World Wide Web. People like to retrospectively define the times such as art movements and historical periods in terms of labels. We have the Renaissance, the Cubistic Movement in art and the Jurassic Age. At the time most people did not know they were living in that particular time when a cohesive theme binds them together. For example the Sixties or the Fifties as we define the decades invokes a special set of feelings and ideals, styles and images.

Whether people believe there is a Web 2.0 or if the buzzword is meaningful or not is not really all that important. Web 2.0 is a movement or a cultural shift in the use of the Internet because of ingenious new ideas or technologies rather than an upgraded Internet structure or software itself. Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts all contribute to this shift in the usage of the web from a passive activity on the part of web surfers to a more democratic and interactive experience. The users of the web are the creators and the designers but not just in a static sense; there is a dynamic, customizable aspect to it.

Instead of static pages that are accessed by users surfing and searching, Web 2.0 is more decentralized with a movement toward sharing and deep linking. A website can link between targeted pages or information on that page and the creator of a site can refer or comment on something specifically. No longer are we required to enter through the “front door” as was the custom. Not that it could not be done before but with the development of these new models the World Wide Web resembles an intricate and homogenous design rather than a radial sphere or a spider’s web. Web 2.0 is a fractal.

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