…called Chrome (not yet live) and presented it in comic form. No beta to play with yet but the concept presented looks exciting. To my mind second generation browsers (FF3 included) have almost reached their limit and this introduces some pretty revolutionary new thinking, certainly in terms of the technology behind it, which should hopefully provide some good competition to further propel innovation across the browser market. Best of all it’ll be entirely Open Source.
I hate to say “I told you so” but this is moving exactly as I predicted last year - the web browser is becoming the operating system.
Google Street View, the system that provides interactive panoramic pictures of streets in Google Maps, has recently been causing a stir in the UK with privacy groups fearing it might breach data protection laws. After assurances from Google that it would blur peoples faces and numberplates they have been allowed to proceed and there have been multiple sightings of its high-tech cars roaming the streets in and around London.
Some relatives of mine spotted one of the cars while they were having a walk in Surrey (just south of London) and had a chat with the driver as well as taking some pics of the gear he was driving around with.
Apparently the array has 7 cameras at the top with laser range finders just below (to record geospatial 3D information) and an extremely accurate GPS receiver to record the position. All the data is saved to a computer in the boot with 1Tb storage discs which he said he used several of each day!! It’s controlled by a simple touch screen interface which sits in the passenger seat.
Not the most fun job in the world but the technology is pretty cool!
The amount of data they must be archiving alone defies belief and strongly reminds me of the philosophical issues raised by Jean Baudrillard in his book ‘Simulacra and Simulation‘ whereby he questions how can you tell the difference between what is real and what is a copy when the copy is as detailed as the original?
The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA - it is the map that engenders the territory, and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.
Wired have created a cool infographic about the life cycle of a blog post and how your content makes it’s way though a “vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web” before it eventually meet the readers eye:
What always amazes me is how fast Google indexes new content these days. It now only takes a mater of a few minutes from the moment you hit “Publish” to the time when a post can be found in the omniscient search engine. I often wonder just how long it will be before Google becomes a conscious being in its own right! Signs of this are already apparent with Google Reader now able to recommend feeds you might like based on your current subscriptions.
“Philosophy As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together.
Mission To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community.”
Finally a credible move towards being able to move personal data between services. Whilst the reality of this is still a way off it’s good to see the likes of Google, Facebook & Flickr on board. Small steps towards a more joined-up future… (whilst giving privacy nuts a new challenge!).
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