I’ve been thinking lately a lot about my RSS Feed.  I want it to be in constant flux, steadily changing, showing me new blogs, new ideas, new subjects.

I actually wrote about the RSS Curse a while ago, explaining how we get used and accustomed to our Feed; how we are not welcoming change to our established subscriptions. My suggestion back then, was to delete all subscriptions and start looking for some new ones.

Barry Welford suggested checking the sites submitted by like-minded people in StumbleUpon and Justin Kirstner dropped the idea of implementing and using Yahoo Pipes with the RSS Feed. Great ideas both, but they are time-consuming efforts; that was also one of the problems of deleting the whole feed.

Apart from that, I agree with the opinion, that deleting all your feeds is a harsh measure - maybe necessary, but harsh. So, I started looking for new ways to expand my feed and discover new blogs.

Share your RSS subscriptions

I noticed, that most RSS aggregators have this great function called Export. All you have to do is press Export and the aggregator makes an *.opml list of all your subscriptions. This list can be read by any aggregator.

So, instead of searching new blogs and entries all by yourself, clicking submissions in SU and wondering through Mixx, you can just read the RSS Feed of your friends. This is certainly something missing from the social web; we can follow our friends in almost every social network, but it would be great to follow their subscriptions in their RSS Aggregator. (am I missing something, is there such a network?)

Until such a network comes along, I’m still interested in sharing my subscriptions. So you can download my *.opml list and simply import it in your feed.

I’ve thought about the best way to use this import/export trick:

• You export your own feed and save it in a Folder,
• In this Folder you don’t have only your feed, but also the ones of your friends
• with the import/export function you can change feeds, whenever you feel like it, without actually losing your own.

 How to share

I’ve been trying to find the simplest and fastest way for us to share our feeds.

1. One thought was to put an upload button under this post and everyone could simply upload the file. I don’t know how to do that, so if anyone has an idea, speak up!
2. You send me your *.opml file, I upload it and make a list of all the feeds, of course with a link back to your blog.
3. We start a meme, you write a post in your blog and share your *.opml file there. I then put a link at the bottom of this post, pointing at your article.

I think, that’s a great way of discovering new things; having a constantly growing list of the feeds of your friends, people you trust and have the same interests. Much easier than deleting all your subscriptions and of course much more fun.

It is also interesting to see, how many blogs overlap between these feeds. Are we all reading the same stuff?

Go Share

Go

• write a post in your blog posting your *.opml file or
• send me your *.opml file and I’ll upload it here with a link to your blog   or
• tell me how to put a damn upload button here!!

Let’s share our subscription lists, I’m really interested in reading new blogs. Aren’t you?

Download my feed list.

As announced today in Technology Review the trend of social networks now applies in the fields of genetic science. A new service is currently online, where you can compare your DNA with that of family and friends.

We are witnessing a boom in the field of social networks, which now expands to medical fields, where privacy is of utmost importance. My concern is not if these services actually protect their customers, but if customers really realize where they are getting into.

23andMe

The service is called 23andMe and is

a web-based service that helps you read and understand your DNA. After providing a saliva sample using an at-home kit, you can use our interactive tools to shed new light on your distant ancestors, your close family and most of all, yourself.

All they require from you is a sample of your spit and 999$. Then, they will gather all sorts of medical and genetical information and send you a thorough analysis. Purpose of this social network is not only to answer the question “where do I come from?” but also “how do I compare to other people?” Apart from that, as Technology Review notes

23andMe offers information about an individual’s disease risk. But it has also opted to emphasize more entertaining approaches to personal genomics, including using colorful visualization tools to look at a subject’s ancestry and compare it with that of celebrities from Jesse James to Benjamin Franklin and Bono. Now, to capitalize on the boom in social networking, the company will launch a genome-sharing tool that allows people to compare their genome with those of family members, friends, and even strangers who have offered up their DNA data.

It all sounds fun, but a person’s medical history is very thin ice and I wonder if potential users come to realize that.

23andMe’s Privacy Statement

The Privacy Statement of 23andMe is very clear and covers several issues to protect its users.

• they can choose if they want to share their information,
• the information collected are non-personal used for research and never released outside the company without the user’s consent
• users can delete their account anytime, which is also deleted from the company’s database.

It is obvious, that 23andMe takes privacy very seriously - and it should. Users are protected in multiple levels and given a variety of choices.

But one of the main reasons to join 23andMe is the community driven system. Users will likely want to compare information, they will want to see if they have the same genes as Gandhi; and that’s where the real privacy issues emerge.

Privacy in Social Networks; more important than ever

Until now, participators in most social networks were sharing information, of minimal importance: their favourite links, their hobbies, their bio or the number of their friends. Of course these are also subjects, that should be carefully shared, but no big harm can be done.

But with services like 23andMe, we are seeing a transformation in social networks and the privacy issues, that emerge.

Social networking is mostly fun and play, but when it comes to sharing information of your own DNA, things become much more serious. I’m not going to list the problems of publicly showing your medical history/future, these are obvious.

But users of social networks, should start thinking with extreme caution, which networks they should join. The fun and joy remains in social networking, but the hazards seem to increase.

Would you share information about your genealogical tree and your medical history with the wide public of the social web?

Will paper survive the digital era?

It’s a discussion, that started couple of weeks ago with an article of Alex Iskold and really got me thinking.

I really enjoy the merits of technology and always welcome new innovations; but also like going back to print and reading a good book.

So maybe, I would never set books aside to read from any other digital form; but this is just me.

But if we see the subject in a more global level, could digitalization really overpower print? I think not, due to the very nature of these two media.

Print Media

Marshall McLuhan once noted

All the words in the world cannot describe an object like a bucket, although it is possible to tell in a few words how to make a bucket.

Words are inadequate to convey visual information. They leave everything to the imagination, as one of the great laws of bibliography signifies:

The more there were, the fewer there are.

Print allows us to mentally react to and reconstruct information, but this is not the property that will allow it to survive digitalization.

The greatest asset for its survival is, that it requires our full attention and doesn’t allow any abstractions.

Imagine being completely isolated, with just one book in your pocket. If you decide to “interact” with the book, your only option is to concentrate on the book and read it.

Digital Media

Now imagine being completely isolated, with just your laptop. You can watch film, read text, listen to music, connect with people and many more. The possibilities provided by a digital medium are countless.

The coexistence of overlapping windows is now a fundamental principle of the modern GUI and in fact a very common practice among users. Lack of concentration is bound to happen, when several services run simultaneously.

This coexistence of information in a digital medium can be compared with the phenomenon of zapping.

Under that perspective, I find it very hard to substitute paper with any digital medium.

If we disregard the tiresome effect of reading from a screen or the difficulty of editing (running your pen over the text to underline and keep notes), digital reading is still not our best choice. In digital media, the distractions are many and reading would require much more time.

Conclusion

I disagree here with Mark Dykeman, since I don’t see paper dying, even if we had

1. better screens,
2. easier to edit text and
3. free internet access everywhere.

A monitor has multimedia possibilities, paper doesn’t. Whenever we are dealing with a lengthy read or an important document, paper is necessary to keep us concentrated.

For me the only option of digital replacing print is when E-Paper replaces tree-paper. Although, we are far from it realization, such a technology could bring revolutionary results, only because it utilizes the advantages of the digital by keeping simplicity of paper.

I’m really interested to see, how you see this potential of the extinction of paper.

How often do you print out documents you want to read? If you observe the younger generations and the popularity of newspapers, books and magazines, could you imagine the near future without massive use of paper?

Probably, I didn’t mention but I’m in Copenhagen. I visited today the Design Center and The FlowMarket exhibition really got to me. Simplicity in its most beautiful form. Enjoy and see you on Monday, or so…

I just joined Friendfeed. At first glance, it seems to be quite an interesting application. It supports 28 services about news (digg, reddit), social bookmarking (del.icio.us, su), music (last.fm), videos (yotube), etc.

Unlike other social sites, friendfeed is not about having a massive amount of friends. You just choose a few, which you know pretty well and you share the same interests.

It’s not about expanding your network, it’s about getting information you are really interested in.

Anyway, I think friendfeed is worth it. My profile is public, say hi anytime.

Couple of months ago I designed the current theme of this blog. I had mentioned then, that I will aso publish a css-template version of it.

CSS Template

So here is the template with the current features:

• 2 column
• fixed width
• valid xhtml 1.0 transitional
• valid css 2.1
• under GNU GPL license, which means you can do pretty much everything with it. Of course a reference would be appreciated.

Download the CSS Template zip file.

Wordpress Theme

If you are interested in the wordpress theme of the blog, download the newest version. Improvements include:

• simpler header, where you can customize the text
• some SEO improvements I did over these months

Of course if you liked the old one best, you can still get it from the downloads section.

Download the wordpress Theme zip file.

Suggestions for improvement are of course welcome!

The Technology Review posted the other day an article on the “10 Emerging Technologies of 2008“. Very promising technologies indeed, but the one that really caught my attention was the Probabilistic Chips currently studied by Krishna Palem.

The reason I find this particular research so interesting is, that

• it has the potential of extending current scaling laws - and particularly Moore’s Law
• it takes advantage of the principles of collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds.

The theory of Probabilistic Chips

According to the article

Palem has developed a way for chips to use significantly less power in exchange for a small loss of precision. [...] chips could be designed to produce the correct answer sometimes, but only come close the rest of the time. Because the errors would be small, so would their effects: in essence, Palem believes that in computing, close enough is often good enough.

Current Scaling Laws

From the beginning of the twentieth century until today, a series of laws has emerged concerning the growth of computers and networks. They all negotiate the value of a network according to the technological leverage of the time.

• Sarnoff’s law, which was interested in the growth of radio and television networks (the value of the network is proportional to the number of actors)
• Metcalfe’s Law describing the value and the growth of small scale networks (the “value” or “power” of a network increases in proportion to the square of the number of nodes on the network).
• Reed’s Law describing the value of Group Forming Networks (the value of networks, that support the construction of communicating groups create value that scales exponentially with network size).
• Moore’s law handling the evolution and expansion of computer microchips (the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years).

One can notice the evolution from Sarnoff’s Law to Reed’s Law.

While Sarnoff’s Law was suggesting, that the value of a broadcast station (television or radio) would increase proportionally to its audience it could not be applied to more complex networks, since the degree of interconnectivity was much higher.

So Metcalfe’s Law was an evolutionary step of Sarnoff’s Law, which better described the upcoming computer networks (ARPANET) in the 1960s. But Metcalfe’s Law could be easily be applied to small computer or telephone networks, but certainly not to huge networks like the Internet.

Reed’s Law emerged to describe the masive development of the web and more specifically of the social web.

Moore’s Law, on the other hand remains stable. Although it finds application on the expansion of computer microchip technology for more than 40 years, its validity is lately at stake. The reason is, that silicon transistors are becoming smaller and smaller and therefore less reliable.

But that’s where the probabilistic chips come in play, to keep the microprocessor technology rapidly evolving.

With probabilistic chips, tiny microprocessors may be designed in such way, that the individual parts might be imperfect, but collectively bring perfect results.

Collective Intelligence

The probabilistic chip technology actually takes advantage of the theory of collective intelligence.

As supported by the Condorcet Jury Theorem [pdf], the probability of a correct answer by a majority of the group increases toward 100% as the size of the group increases. The validity of the Theorem is based on the hypothesis, that the answers provided by each individual are not random - but instead there is a more than 50% probability to be correct.

The Condorcet Jury Theorem might be criticized when we are dealing with humans, but machines can be programmed to work in such a manner.

It seems to me, that this is how cultural revolutions emerge: combining disciplines, which at first seem irrelevant to bring forth innovative ideas and technologies.

Probabilistic chips, can change the scenery of energy consumption, mobile technologies and microprocessor development; and all that by applying an almost 200 old theory to a completely different research field.