This insight from Eisner about the current internet scene is strong stuff:

“It’s always the content that defines the platform,” he says. Now the platform owners are “being arrogant and saying, ‘we’re it,’” he adds. “But eventually exclusive content wins out.”

Then he gives an important caveat: The content must be professionally produced as well as exclusive. “How many skateboarding cats can there be?” he says.

Cryptographers from around the world have laid their best work on the line in a contest to find a new algorithm that will become a critical part of future communications across the Internet. The winning code will become a building block of a wide variety of Internet protocols, including those used to safeguard communications between banks and their customers. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) organized the competition and plans to release a short list of the best entries by the end of this month, beginning a four-year process of painstaking analysis to find the overall winner.
Source: Erica Naone, Technology Review, November 18, 2008

Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs

As America’s newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover. Here it is VoiceofSanDiego.org, offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists — the province of the traditional media, but at a much lower cost of doing business. Since it began in 2005, similar operations have cropped up in New Haven, the Twin Cities, Seattle, St. Louis and Chicago. More are on the way.
Source: Richard Pérez-Peña, The New York Times, November 17, 2008

‘Interplanetary internet’ passes first test

NASA has finished its first deep-space test of what could become an ‘interplanetary internet’. The new networking commands could one day be used to automatically relay information between Earth, spacecraft, and astronauts, without the need for humans to schedule transmissions at each point.
Source: Rachel Courtland, New Scientist, November 19, 2008

Monty Python launches its own YouTube channel

The comedy troupe said they wanted to “get their own back” on people who had been illegally uploading their sketches onto the site by taking matters into their own hands. “We know who you are, we know where you live and we could come after you in ways too horrible to tell,” they wrote in a light-hearted message introducing the channel.
[Note: This channel is at http://www.youtube.com/user/MontyPython.]
Source: Matthew Moore, The Telegraph, November 20, 2008

Track your fitness, environmental impact with new cell phone applications

Researchers at the University of Washington and Intel have created two new cell phone applications, dubbed UbiFit and UbiGreen, to automatically track workouts and green transportation. The programs display motivational pictures on the phone’s background screen that change the more the user works out or uses eco-friendly means of transportation.
Source: University of Washington News, November 19, 2008

Google SearchWiki brings custom search results

Disagree with Google’s search results? You’ll be able to do something about it with a change the company plans to release starting Thursday. Google’s SearchWiki is a feature that lets people elevate, delete, add, and annotate search results. Google remembers the changes a person made to search results, so repeat searches will show the same customizations and notes.
Source: Stephen Shankland, CNET’s Webware, November 20, 2008

YouTube videos go HD with a simple hack

Wired, with the help of users on the VR-Zone forums, has uncovered a simple way to get high-quality uploaded videos to display in 1280×720–also known as 720p.
YouTube has long been expected to roll out high-definition video playback, and this appears to be the first viable way to do it. The hack in question is similar to the one that was first used to toggle on the “high quality” mode. It is done simply by adding “&fmt=22” to the end of the video URL.
Source: Josh Lowensohn, CNET’s Webware, November 20, 2008

New European online library crashes under weight of interest

The EU’s new Europeana digital library has swiftly become a victim of its own success, forced to shut down for weeks within hours of its launch due to the enormous amount of interest. The Europeana digital library, an online collection of Europe’s cultural heritage, was launched to great fanfare on Thursday. Immediately after the europeana.eu website got up and running it was swamped by an unexpected 10 million user hits per hour, swiftly bringing the system to a crashing halt.
[Note: The site is at http://www.europeana.eu/portal/ and will be unavailable until mid-December.]
Source: AFP, November 21, 2008

Links: ZDNet, Primidi

“It may look as though kids are wasting a lot of time hanging out with new media, whether it’s on MySpace or sending instant messages,” said Mizuko Ito, lead researcher on the study, “Living and Learning With New Media.” “But their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning how to get along with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page.”

The announcement from MacArthur begins:

Results from the most extensive U.S. study on teens and their use of digital media show that America’s youth are developing important social and technical skills online – often in ways adults do not understand or value.

“It might surprise parents to learn that it is not a waste of time for their teens to hang out online,” said Mizuko Ito, University of California, Irvine researcher and the report’s lead author. “There are myths about kids spending time online – that it is dangerous or making them lazy. But we found that spending time online is essential for young people to pick up the social and technical skills they need to be competent citizens in the digital age.”

Many students don’t even want a college e-mail address these days because they already have well-established digital identities before they arrive on campus. That’s the conclusion that officials at Boston College came to in a recent review of their online services. So the college recently decided to stop offering full e-mail accounts to incoming students starting next fall.

Instead of a standard college e-mail account, next year’s freshmen will be offered an e-mail-forwarding service that will pass along messages to whatever personal e-mail account a student specifies . . .

Katrin Verclas of  MobileActive has brought to our attention that the Vodafone Americas Foundation is launching a Wireless Innovation Challenge.  This Challenge seeks to: “identify and fund the best innovations using wireless related
technology to address critical social issues around the world.” 

I encourage you to take the time to visit the Wireless Innovation Challenge website and let your mind go wild with what you would do if you were to submit a porposal.

Innovation | Vodafone Americas Foundation

“Projects must demonstrate a multi-disciplinary approach that uses an innovation in wireless related technology to address a critical global issue in one or more of the following areas: access to communication, education, economic development, environment, or health. The technology should have the potential for replication and large scale impact”

A symphony of light-emitting diodes, smartphones, global positioning systems and mobile sensors may soon work together to help drivers avoid traffic jams.

Researchers from different universities are working on ways for cars to better communicate with each other and relay crucial driver information such as traffic speed, weather and road conditions. The data could be used to decipher faster routes. In the meantime, there are options for residents of big cities to check out live traffic feeds on their cellphones.

The aim is to address the growing problem of traffic congestion through improved communications between cars. . . .

Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new. Instead, by bolting together social-networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then the Republicans. As a result, when he arrives at the White House, Obama will have not just a political base, but a database, millions of names of supporters who can be engaged almost instantly. And there’s every reason to believe that he will use the network not just to campaign, but to govern.
Source: David Carr, The New York Times, November 10, 2008

MP3 player headphones may hinder pacemakers

Headphones used with MP3 digital music players like the iPod may interfere with heart pacemakers and implantable defibrillators, U.S. researchers said on Sunday. The MP3 players themselves posed no threat to pacemakers and defibrillators, used to normalize heart rhythm. But strong little magnets inside the headphones can foul up the devices if placed within 1.2 inches of them.
Source: Will Dunham, Reuters, November 9, 2008

Social Media Leads the Future of Technology

Internet-connected televisions, social media, and the power of simplicity were all cited as launch pads for future innovation in technology, according to a panel of experts that convened at Harvard Business School as part of the HBS Centennial Business Summit in October. And though advertisers love the Internet, to what extent they can capitalize on these transformations remains an open question.
Source: Martha Lagace, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, November 10, 2008

Text messaging may help children fight off obesity

A new study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill suggests that cell phone text messaging could be used to reduce children’s chances of becoming overweight or obese later in life, by helping them monitor and modify their own behaviors now.
Source: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill news release, November 11, 2008

The Next Step in Health Care: Telemedicine

Imagine a scenario where doctors from different hospitals can collaborate on a surgery without having to actually be in the operating room. What if doctors in remote locations could receive immediate expert support from top specialists in hospitals around the world? This environment could soon become a reality thanks to research by a multi-university partnership that is testing the live broadcast of surgeries using the advanced networking consortium Internet2.
Source: Rochester Institute of Technology news release, November 12, 2008

Search Engine With Roots in Genomics Unlocks Deep Web

A research-focused search engine founded by Human Genome Project scientists is claiming to go where even Google doesn’t tread: the deep web. DeepDyve is designed to search the 99 percent (they say, citing a study from UC Berkeley) of hits not picked up by other search engines, which return pages based largely on interpretations of popularity and work only if a page is findable. Content hidden behind paywalls or that is not linked to enough sites to gain page rank remains obscure, but often contains the source material required for serious research.
Source: Chris Snyder, Wired News, November 11, 2008

The Coming Wireless Revolution

If you believe some radio researchers and engineers, within the next couple of years, high-bandwidth, far-reaching wireless Internet signals will soon blanket the nation. Thanks to a decision by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last week, megahertz frequency bands that were previously allocated to television broadcasters will be opened to other device manufacturers. The frequency liberation means that future wireless gadgets will be able to blast tens of megabits per second of data over hundreds of kilometers.
Source: Kate Greene, Technology Review, November 14, 2008

Several times a day, with increasing frequency and accuracy, one of the people who follows my personal account on Twitter — someone I’ve never heard from before — sends me a specific URL to check out. I check it out. Yes, indeed: this is something I need to know. Within the last couple hours I got one about blogging and the public sphere, and another one about teaching and learning. I try to reciprocate, but not necessarily as a direct quid pro quo — if I see something that someone I follow probably ought to know about, I send a link. A diffuse kind of ad-hoc educational institution emerges from the twittersphere in this way. There is no teacher and no student. We’re all teaching and learning from each other. But that’s just one way people use Twitter as a platform for ad hoc collaboration. This article on great twitter moments put it well, I think:

I believe what makes Twitter so valuable are these moments of connectivity that simply aren’t possible through any other communications tool. I’ve had these “Twitter moments” and I set out to discover “Twitter moments” from others as well. What all the following stories have in common is a Twitter user had a question or a concern, and someone (or many people) responded. Twitter was the connective tissue that made that moment happen in a time of need.