Jonathan Harris: The Web's secret stories
Though this is not a typical Web 2.0 presentation, it is worth watching as it is about human emotions and our expressions of them. It is a spectacular video which is guaranteed to leave you breathless.
- Jonathan Harris helps people around the world tell their stories.Â
- We define ourselves by our gaps, be they gender, economic, cultural,education, religious etc.
- We have a need to express ourselves.Â
- We need to express ourselves, but must balance this with the number of people who will put up with this.
- People now do it online and in the process, leave 'footprints'.
- Harris writes programs that analyze these footprints.
- One project is 'We feel fine'. It is used to find occurances of 'I feel' on the Internet and other factors like the age of the person who put in online and the context in which it was said.
- Murmurs: He demonstrates the emotions felt online by dynamic colors the dart about the screens. One can find the authors of the blogs who wrote these feelings and then connect with them.
- Montage:Â He demonstrates the feelings felt on a grid
- Mobs provides statisticaal breakdowns and gender breakdowns of feelings
- Weather displays the weather experienced by the person who made the statement.
- Metrics provides numeric values on the data. Other views like gender are available
- Mounds display feelings as blobs.
- Location displays the location of the person who made the statement.
- His tool also has a search capability.Â
- He calls his tool a passive observer
Watch the rest of the show to see a spectacular sound and light display as Harris projects human emotions and interplay using the Redrock Canyon rocks in Alburquerque, NM.Â
- Harris sees the same patterns of emotions of happiness and sorrow repeated over and over.
- If we were to make new constellations, what would we name them? This is the new project that Harris is working on today.Â
This is one of the most inspiring thoughts I've seen.
Watch it here.
Alec Muffet talks about Web 2.0 Security
- With the coming of Web 2.0 entities like blogs, wikis, Ajax, there are NO security issues that are brought out by Web2.0
- With Mashups we must understand that we have been hyperlinking for years.
- With distributed computing we have to understand that load balancing and horizontal scalability have been around for years.
- With uploads, theses are the same issues of SMTP mail relay.
- All security problems are rehashs of old security issues.
There are security challenges however.
- The newer generation will use a number of devices at the same time.Â
- If they don't get this freedom they will simply change jobs.
- This decentralization will cause a problem.
- If you employ dishonest people, you cannot stop them with software.
See the presentation here.
