… but in case you hadn’t heard, and because the purpose of this here web-address is to keep track of things, Google started talking about Wave today.

(complete guide here)

It’s one of those things that deals with such basic interactions, that the full effects of it aren’t that predictable – the real-time collaboration on the same page for example.

In a nutshell though, it makes any conversation (be it via email, blog comments, etc) into an embeddable object. The ramifications of that are huge. Conversation on the web at the moment is a mess. Everything’s everywhere – if this takes off – and I suspect it will, because the viral aspects of it are Skype-like, then it will not only create and destroy whole rafts of businesses overnight, it could well wind up changing the way we interact with each other.

If it does link your email identity to your comments-on-blogs identity… then every comment you leave on every participating service will be traceable back to you – all your comments will become a single body of work. It may well lessen the anonymous arsehole factor – which is a shame, because I rather enjoy being an arsehole sometimes, still, there you go.

Google (and in fact the entire internet) is, as far as I can gather, not a million miles-away from being a giant artificial intelligence machine. Possibly the greatest ramifications of this are in this area – if so, what does it mean? Far, far smarter linking between conversations I think. The Universal Mind may be about to have an IQ leap.

If it catches on, and I think it will. I think this will be a bit of a game-changer.

It’s a massive list of predictions made in science fiction… tracking which ones are coming true. The military bit reads like a Pentagon shopping/fantasy list.

Here for example is a thing about Read/Write brain electrodes:

As forecast in:

Heretics of Dune, by Frank Herbert : 1984
Oath of Fealty, by Jerry Pournelle (w/L. Niven) : 1981
Neuromancer, by William Gibson : 1984
Death by Ecstasy, by Larry Niven : 1969

and now “IMEC, a nanotechnology company out of Leuven, Belgium, reports that it has developed a new process that supposedly can improve electrode resolution and sensitivity. Using the new technology, the company built a prototype probe that can simultaneously read and stimulate brain neurons, paving way for smart neurological implant systems that can quickly react to a detected stimulus.”

(from Imec : via medgadget)

Although this still looks pretty invasive and scary to me. Wouldn’t it be better to de-couple the plug from the probe?

Anyway – www.technovelgy.com is devoted to a couple of my favorite concepts – that everything comes true in the end… and that any artifact imagineered in a science-fiction story is automatically a self-fulfilling prophecy – assuming the story becomes popular enough.

Ironically, William Gibson from the list above says that he’s not going to write Science Fiction any more because the future has become too unstable to make predictions about – The Science-Fiction-Singularity. It’s here – the present has caught up with the future… and it won’t be long before it leaves it behind.

(via)

There have been a couple of sites like this of late – forums for “new ideas” which look suspiciously like they’re about to devolve into just-another-design-company-spam location. I think the “design challenges” bit is a great idea – kindof like “what are 20 other potential uses for a paper-clip”. The amount of information about each idea/design seems to be a bit sparse though.

It also reminds me a bit (because of the recycling angle) of that utterly brilliant Indian site which has hundreds of DIY toys/Experiments etc.

I think this is interesting because it’s a kind of ecosystem (not dissimilar to the entire internet in some ways) for “products” that compete on their ability to get attention rather than be sold. This makes for weirder and more interesting things.

Although, alas… (and ain’t that always the way?) you could be forgiven that design agencies are using it for free advertising.

From http://www.usnowfilm.com/, which is a pretty cool site I think… which is to say, it’s interested in exactly the same things that I’m interested in etc. It’s crashing about all over the place at the moment though on account of being written in RoR which is of course pants. It’s like colouring-in-book programming.

Still cool site – I like the video link layout as well… and I think I’ve just noticed myself not hating youtube’s new(ish) titles.

The challenges of our time are challenges of collective adaptation.