Europeana.eu

In what has become an arms races towards the freedom of information and knowledge for all, the European Union has announced the launch of its new universal library project called Europeana. The scope of the project is ambitious, to have 10 million books online for 2010.  We can only celebrate and praise all the institutions that in one project or another are attempting to the systematization and free distribution of human knowledge. So long live the Europeana and the legacy of the Universal Digital Library and Google books.

GeoMedia and the emergence of “Social Navigation Systems”

More content to come, for the moment please read my definition of what I call Social Navigation Systems, the new web site will soon be open to discuss everything related to Geomedia, Social Navigation Systems and my hypothesis of a WEB 3.0 series of applications.

First applications in GOV 2.0 ?

The new American President-elect Barack Obama  agenda for the Internet and technology!

Some highlights: “Protect the Openness of the Internet, Encourage Diversity in Media Ownership, Protect Our Children While Preserving the First Amendment, Safeguard our Right to Privacy, Invest in University-Based Research, Reform the Patent System”.

The agenda and the campaign run by President-elect Barack Obama are interesting on many levels, the question I keep having in mind however is; will this new administration go down in history also as the first to develop a new form of active political participation based on technology based social networking (hence GOV 2.0) ?.  Certainly the use of WEB 2.0 tools made by the campaign has been unique, but what is more interesting is that it seems that the president-elect has no intention to let go of these tools. The big question: representational democracy has always been based on the fact of electing someone to “represent” you, to be your vice, in the political process. Technology has strongly changed our ability to participate to the political process. Should not this be transformed in a set of new “democratic” tools to have direct effect on our policy makers decision making? Barack Obama´s technology agenda and new website seems to indicate so, will it be then GOV 2.0 after all?

New Frontiers in Image Manipulation

An incredible amount of image manipulation software is being developed lately these are two that got me realy impressed.

Photosynth: this is quite amazing and certainly will have incredible commercial applications, somehow competing with Google StreetView, has the potential to move into a wealth of image details that are out of (legal?) reach for StreetView. Certainly one to keep an eye on.

The second one does not have a cool name yet, in a typical scholar research style the name of the project is called “Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene“, a project developed by a number of scholars from the University of Washington, Microsoft Interactive Visual Media Group (again!) and Adobe ( I am sure you will notice the similarities with Photosynth)

IVSA International Conference 2008 Panels and Directions to FLACSO, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The conference finished today. It was extremely interesting and we will do our best to maintain the connection with all the new Latin American scholars that participated. See you all at IVSA2009.

This is the Conference Program: here

You can find the conference Panels Pdf file here

The list of the sessions: sessions_list

This is FLACSO address and info on how to reach it: here

This is a view of FLACSO from google: here

THE LIVE CHANNEL: well the live connection was a test, it worked to a certain extent, but not really, the campus connection could not hold the live stream so w had to give up. We will however certainly improve it next year, bookmark the link: here

The Universal Digital Library (www.ulib.org)

“Though Google, Microsoft and the Internet Archive all have launched major book digitization projects, the Million Book Project represents the world’s largest, university-based digital library of freely accessible books. At least half of its books are out of copyright, or were digitized with the permission of the copyright holders, so the complete texts are or eventually will be available free.” (www.physorg.com/news115383203.html) From the website: “The mission is to create a Universal Library which will foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge. As a first step in realizing this mission, it is proposed to create the Universal Library with a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, available to everyone over the Internet. Within 10 years, it is our expectation that the collection will grow to 10 Million books. The result will be a unique resource accessible to anyone in the world 24×7, without regard to nationality or socioeconomic background.One of the goals of the Universal Library is to provide support for full text indexing and searching based on OCR (optical character recognition) technologies where available. The availability of online search allows users to locate relevant information quickly and reliably thus enhancing student’s success in their research endeavors. This 24×7 resource would also provide an excellent test bed for language processing research in areas such as machine translation, summarization, intelligent indexing, and information retrieval. www.ulib.org

TV Evolution and Global Resources

I very rarely watch tv nowadays (with the exception of the occasional film), but to satisfy my need of global tv connection i often use http://www.wwitv.com/portal.htm. This web site collects 1000s of national tv channels from around the globe all available live with on click from one portal. When it comes to experiments in the future models of televisions no doubt www.joost.com is right now the most polished and advanced offering from the creators of programs like skype and kazaa and of course watch out for these new experiments in p2ptelevision: http://zattoo.com/