Vanity and Identity
Having read this interesting post about the upcoming vanity URL nonsense, I couldn’t help but agree totally. Having discussed this briefly over lunch recently, I think that while its great that people are starting to use these services, they are
- nothing we haven’t seen before (IRC anyone?)
- ok - the usability of the trending UI is nice but there are a lot of users who simply use it to stay on the bandwaggon all the time and gather followers, etc.
- and as was pointed out in the post above, you can own your own personal domain, etc…
Phew - rant over…until the next time. 
Test Post
please ignore - cheers.
I work here…
It always nice to see the place you work in the newspaper for a good news story.
A quantum of water
It was pointed out to me that drinking water is becoming a more finite resource globally. My initial reaction (from living in Ireland, where it literally falls from the sky almost every day) was “not around here it isn’t”. But then I was reminded that there’s wide scale pollution of the water tables, problems with existing drinking water delivery systems and while it hasn’t seemed likely for the last few years, every once in a while, a drought could cause serious problems. This is exacerbated by the fact that we do little as a nation to store rain water for non-drinking purposes.
So I was interested to see news of this device. I wonder how it would compare on John’s power consumption table. While it would be a great solution in countries where there is little water in the air, Ireland has plenty of it. I’m sure there is more discussion related to this.
A patent from Google related to wireless carriers
While Damien got to it first, I spotted this patent in Techcrunch. I hope they consider contributing it to the Open Innovation Network because an idea like this could be really useful in the long term. Also worth noting that Google apparently joined OIN in August 2007. Either way, work has started in this area already on this side of the world in the form of Perimeter.
ahoy hoy
Interesting post from Jay about Asterisk/Adhearsion development. I encountered pretty much all the issues listed here and went through many of the arguments.
In a slightly related note, Paul passed on this link on Monday. I thought the story was a little out of the blue as version 0.8 was due at the end of last year but I’m guessing since Jay moved things over to GitHub, that he’s back to the business of developing nice software.
Interesting Thoughts
Miguel has nicely summarised IETF72 which I attended for an introductory session last week. A lot of people with some good ideas for the(more immediate) future of the net.
These guys also have some interesting thoughts on what the future might hold and how to get there. But at parts, it sounds more like a conspiracy theory. I don’t think I’d agree with Laurence Lessig all the time, but some of his work is relevant and worthy (i.e. Creative Commons isn’t all bad 
).
Wrong Way!!
I remember my dad telling me this story when I was very young.
Interesting TV
Given that there’s continued interest in solving the “what next” issue around television, this presentation seems like an interesting idea.