Steve Jobs gives his commencement address at Stanford university in 2005.
Read the entire speech – with commentary.
The return of the platform game: From Jet Set Willy to LittleBigPlanet
I’m not much of a “gamer”, although I have to admit I am able to reference my life by what computer game I was playing since I was about 10 years old (for the record – Jet Set Willy, on the trusty ZX Spectrum) – maybe before then, if you include the clunky Radio Shack games I played on my Dad’s computers.
Jet Set Willy (1984: ZX Spectrum), Sonic the Hedgehog (1991: Sega Megadrive), Monkey Island (1990: PC), Doom (1993: PC), Worms (1995: PC), Abe’s Oddysee (1997: PS1), Grand Theft Auto (1997: PC), Rainbow Six (1998: PC) and many more; they all chart a certain personal view of the evolution of console and computer gaming. And it’s incredible to think how things have changed.
I can mark eras of my life in the same way you might signpost your autobiographical memory with where you were living. Sad but true. It tends to be just the one game as I don’t devote masses of time to gaming – when I find a game that I like, I stick with it.
Recently, I persuaded my wife that a PS3 would be a great addition to our family because “a PS3 is so much more than just a games console – you can use it to view all those digital photos and videos of our son”. And I’m glad I did as I think I’ve found the game to mark the next era - LittleBigPlanet. This game is incredible. It has brought the traditional platform game into the future with a fun, creative and collaborative online world that is constantly changing and ever evolving. Irrespective of what it represents in terms of amazing media and technological innovation, it also represents a return to pure and simple platform based game-play, with a few twists. And, possibly most importantly, it is impossible not to feel happy playing this game. It looks like we’re going to have some fun with this one…
Open source: utopian-dreams, recession-proofing and socialism…
Those who know me will undoubtedly have at some point had the pleasure of listening to me ranting on about the power of the open source movement – or, more generally, social collaboration online. On the bus yesterday I read an editorial piece – “Collaboration is the new revolution” – in the Guardian newspaper that certainly struck a few chords. Here’s a few extracts, by way of a summary:
1) Open source paves the way for the odd utopian dream:
Sir Thomas More’s description of Utopia as a place where “nobody owns anything, but everyone is rich” is not a bad way to describe the open source movement in which people around the world collaborate with each other to produce services that anyone can use – or improve on – for nothing.
2) Open source is recession proof:
One of the interesting things about the collaborative movement is that it is probably recession-proof, though you won’t see it in economic statistics because it mostly does not involve cash transactions.
3) Open source is robust and well-trusted by large successful organisations:
Big corporations, such as IBM, Google and Amazon, are devourers of open source software because they find it cheap, efficient, low-maintenance and reliable. But UK government departments, including health and the foreign office, have proved risk-averse with hardly any open source in their infrastructure.
4) Open source is socialism (well, social collaboration at least):
…open source combines the cooperative spirit that was at the heart of the Labour party in the past with the entrepreneurial skills needed today.
And with nothing more to add to that summary, I’m off to join the revolution (well, okay, I’m off down the pub to carry on ranting to anyone who’s too polite to stop me).
No more mobile tweets?
Twitter has announced they will cut outbound SMS alerts for users in the UK because it was costing too much!
Whatever you say about Twitter, I was enjoying the ability it gave me to receive updates via SMS. In fact, it was this feature that won me over to using it and helped demonstrate what it was all about to mates. I figured that the initial free SMS alerts that appeared in my Twitter account would run out one day and then I’d have to pay for more credits – easy business model. I’d happily have paid too. So why pull it? Maybe its all part of some ploy by Twitter to gather a crowd reaction – so that when they announce payment plans for SMS alerts, they already have the crowds’ support. Yeah – okay, that may be a tad cynical but I do hope they listen to their UK users (and, in fact, anyone who used the UK based SMS alerts). The reaction is already gathering pace – with comments and tweets a plenty – and now a Facebook group. SMS is huge here and it seems to be a glaringly obvious way to actually turn Twitter into a revenue making business, in the UK at the very least.
SWO: Semantic Web Optimisation?
It looks like the semantic web is about to gain traction with the Yahoo! Search open platform that was announced last month. In summary, Yahoo! is hoping to spread the use of semantic web standards by supporting microformats and RDF – promising enhanced search results for content adhering to such standards.
And with this promise of an enhanced search presence will come the marketing need for publishers to create content that capitalises on this. Just as SEO emerged as an industry all of its own, I expect Semantic Web Optimisation to emerge as an industry all of its own in the very near future.
[Before submitting this post, I quickly searched on the topic (yes - I appreciate the irony of having used Google!) and came across this article - essentially saying the same thing as me above. But please can we not fall into the trap of applying version numbers after "Web" for every evolution in web technology that occurs!]
The rise and rise of websites
Another graph. This time showing how the number of websites has grown since 1990. Actually, things only really started to grow about ten years ago in 1998, a year or two after I first played about on the Internet at university. It took six years (1990-1996) for the number to reach 100,000. In 2008, it is now 162 million! While the numbers have risen and risen, what is also interesting to note is the dip in numbers during 2002. Post dot-com bubble slump? Anything to do with 9/11? Or was it simply that a lot of domain names, bought during the dot-com boom years – with little more than a holding page to show, expired at this time? This little blip aside – it seems the upwards curve is un-stoppable. Will it ever reach saturation point?
The rise and rise of Google’s advertising revenue
Scary or exciting?
(day) streaming our lives away
I’ve just taken a quick look at friendfeed.com – it’s basically a lifestream service, where people can aggregate and publish their web-lives. It’s done rather nicely – enabling you to quickly create your own lifestream from various feeds (here’s mine) and not too different in look to the lifestream I quickly hacked together with pipes – but done way better and on a grand scale! You can also track friends’ feeds easily too, making it a much more two-way tool than others out there – say Tumblr, for example, which publishes your combined feeds. There’s definitely a need for this – with the whole micro-blogging/twitter/lifestream thing, it is useful to show this data in one place and provides an excellent way for potential stalkers to gather all their up-to-the-minute information on a particular target in one easily digestible feed 
