Frank Schirrmacher sagt im De:bug Interview:

Ich sehe Aufmerksamkeit als den Preis für Informationen. Wie ein Ressourcenmanagement, wie einen Rohstoff. Mehr Aufmerksamkeit mag es vielleicht nicht sein, aber es geht um die Erkenntnis, dass es eine ähnlich bedrohte Ressource ist wie Geld oder Gesundheit und dass man Vorkehrungen trifft. Es bedeutet, Aufmerksamkeitssteuerung nicht anderen zu überlassen, sondern Aufmerksamkeit als etwas zu nehmen, das eine begrenzte Ressource ist und zu zeigen, dass – wenn wir sie geschickt einsetzen – sie unglaublich produktiv sein kann. Mehr Aufmerksamkeit heißt also nicht, die jetzt noch dazu zu addieren. Das ist natürlich ein fast rührender Versuch aufzubegehren.

Danke Herr Schirrmacher! In meinen Augen ist Ihr Aufruf nicht nur ein Versuch aufzubegehren, sondern die einzige Chance, dass Internet-User nicht zu willenlosen Opfern einer zentralistisch gesteuerten Aufmerksamkeitsökonmie werden. Wir sollten die google Brillen absetzen und die Facebook-Selbstdarsteller-Accounts löschen, solange unsere Gehirne noch in der Lage sind, sich Orte, Zeitpunkte und die Namen unserer Freunde zu merken.

Die 2-d Barcodes sind schon Technik von vorgestern. Jetzt indiziert Google Gegenstände im “physical space”. Und wozu das alles? Damit wir uns beim glotzen durch die Google Goggles nicht mehr fragen müssen: “was ist das”?, sondern gleich behaupten können, dass wir alles verstehen, was wir da vor unserer Linse sehen.

Ich bin nicht technophob, aber Google Goggles machen mir wirklich Angst. Ich bin nämlich ganz froh, dass ich nicht alles verstehe, was ich da draußen sehe. Was ich nicht verstehe, macht mich eher neugierig. Eine Welterklärung brauche ich erstmal nicht und wenn ich mir doch erklären muss, was ich sehe, benutze ich dafür mein Hirn oder ich frage einen Menschen, der so aussieht, als ob er Ahnung hat.

Die Verdummung geht schneller voran, als ich dachte. Die “Drogenbarone der Kommunikationsindustrie” haben die Menschen schon so weit angefixt, dass sie freiwillig ihre Hirne abgeben, nur um eine Fernbedienung für die Außenwelt in die Hand zu bekommen. Das Geschäftsmodell, das hinter dem Google Gerät steckt, ist Werbung – damit ist auch klar, wer hier von wem ferngesteuert wird.

Meinen persönlichlichen Gegenentwurf zu Google Goggles nenne ich “Reality Goggles”. Darunter verstehe ich eine Zusatzapplikation fuer Google Goggles, die alles ausblendet, was schon von Google indiziert ist. Für die Benutzer der Applikation bleiben also nur noch Bäume, Wolken und alles, was neu ist, übrig.

Oder noch besser: ich erfinde gleich die “Reality Goggles plus” – diese extrascharfen Linsen gibts beim Optiker um die Ecke, sie laufen energiesparend auch ohne Android Betriebssystem und auch sie blenden alles aus, was den Benutzer nervt. Die plus Version funktioniert allerdings nur in Verbindung mit einem Hirn, das mag für manchen Nutzer von Nachteil sein.

My friend Matthias took the photo of these rental bikes in Taipei. It appears that the Taiwanese have adopted the French Velib bikes, painted them orange and called them U-Bikes. I wonder if the Taiwanese are capable of producing U-Bike freeride videos.

Finally the era of Convergence is over. Youtube blocks non-partner-devices and 150 server blocks serve up half of the net’s traffic.

We are approaching an era of divergence. Digital Media Divergence implies that users who don’t want to consume ads sooner or later will be excluded from the net. As the business models drive the development of the digital space the free and non-commercial services for communication and interaction between users will soon die out.

Fortunately freedom outside the digital space exists: in the logical space as well as in the physical space. I could do without Compuserve and AOL and I am pretty sure that I can do without the GoogleNet.

On the p2p Foundation blog Michel Bauwens posted an article by Charles Hugh Smith arguing that the Web will bankrupt government:

Political control depends in large part on a quasi-monopolistic mass media amenable to the political goals of the State and Plutocracy. To the degree that the Web undermines that mass media’s monopoly on “news” then it also undermines the political control of the State and its Plutocratic overlords.

The Internet/Web is thus the acme of creative destruction, for it is undermining all monopolies except that of capital and petroleum.

I wish he were right, but unfortunately this is only half of the story. With the advent of the social web the mass media’s monopoly has started to embrace the Web. Google App Engine lets Internet users run their web applications on Google’s infrastructure. Facebook lets Internet users manage their relations with other users.

The German researcher Jan Schmidt explains how a user’s identity emerges from the interplay of his actions and relationships to other Web users. Following the principle of least action, users choose the communication systems which require the least learning investments and acquisition cost. As a result their actions and relationships rely on the capabilities of a communication infrastructure provided for free by an industry financed by advertisments.

Finally David Burke’s SpyTV prediction comes true:

When you turn it on, they know you turned it on. When you change channels or take a trip to the virtual shopping mall, they’ll be following you. Find out what broadcasters are saying about interactive television. Hear their Orwellian plans to keep a file on every viewer, in every single home.

Who buys the file? The highest bidder. What will they do with it? Figure out how to modify your behavior. What say do you have? None. Just as you have no idea what software is downloaded to your set top box. The applications are already written, many of them aimed at children. This might be the last generation to have privacy as we know it.

There are rumors that google will use DirectFB for their new “Chrome OS“. One confirmation could be that the latest graphics driver committed to the GIT repository adds 2D graphics acceleration for the PXA3xx processors.

Note the benchmarks for CPU usage – DirectFB will put Android on Steroids. A number of phones and PDAs are based on these processors. A google search for PXA303 + Android yields some very low-cost devices, e.g.: “M4300 Micro Laptop (Mobile Internet Device) Android OS“. I predict that ChromeOS will enter the mass market through one these devices.

Many people reported that a guy called Sargun managed to port Doom to the Palm Pre. In his blog he wrote:

Getting directfb working was actually fairly trivial, because palm uses it for their testing.

Of course I don’t know the internals of the Pre but it appears to me that they use DirectFB not only for testing, but it is their internal API for hardware accelerated rendering of graphics. This is great news, because it shows that DirectFB has entered the mainstream.

An open Rendering API is yet-another step to open up consumer devices for independent application programmers. Other steps are underway: Last year DirectFB announced a Liaison with MPEG and contributed to the specification of the MPEG Extensible Middleware.

The adoption of DirectFB is an indication that a programming interface needs not necessarily be an industry standard. 10 years ago I wrote on convergence:

If the device industry does not surrender the control of the programming interface to the users, the users will take control by installing Linux on the devices. [...] The control of the device should be entirely in the hands of the user.

Exactly this is happening now – users are taking over control of the CE devices. It will be a hard time for service providers who don’t get this message.

Das Medium Fernsehen ist ja schon länger ziemlich tot, aber die Meldung, dass heute die Marke Premiere durch Sky abgelöst wird, ist eine Gedenkminute wert. So war es Leo Kirch und nicht etwa Rupert Murdoch, der das Bezahlfernsehen nach Deutschland brachte. Die Sueddeutsche Zeitung schreibt dazu (Nr.150, “Himmelsstürmer” von Stefan Seiler):

Bis Weihnachten soll der Bekanntheitsgrad von Sky mindestens 70 Prozent erreicht haben [...] Im Grunde ist (das Geschäftsmodell) ja auch ein altes, in der Firmengeschichte hat es nicht richtig zum Erfolg geführt. [...] 1990 wurde Premiere gegründet: Deutscher und internationaler Fussball live in digitaler Technik – das war neu und bleibt.

Sehr richtig! Die Marke Premiere stand einmal für Innovation und Erneuerung. Im Angedenken an die Tage, in denen es sogar im Pay-TV Geschäft noch recht menschlich zuging veröffentliche ich deshalb ein Foto von meinem heissgeliebten Premiere T-Shirt.

I am grateful to my friends Matthias, Tim, Supermann and the rest of the DMY crew that they have made possible this festival. In a way what they are doing reminds me of the objectives of DMP: designing an open marketplace where creators, producers and end-users can exchange value (in the form of physical or digital goods and services).

Some time ago Iepe asked me to speak at the Pechakucha DMY special. Last night I had the chance to learn how it feels to stand in front of an audience of 500. Well… that’s an interesting experience… I recognized that I was not born to be a performer…anyway, you can check out the online presentation.

Two photos of my favorite things can be found here. This is another little contribution to the DMY festival.

My interpretation of Chris Cook’s paper Knowledge-based Value and Intellectual Property is that value is a quality a human being feels when he or she receives a good or a service (= Wealth). Since people have different perceptions value is utterly subjective and an objective measure for the Value of Wealth can not be found without further ado. At the same time it would not be so bad if an absolute measure for Value existed, because it could be used compare the value of different goods or services on an open market.

Chris suggested to peg the measure for the Value of Wealth to an International Carbon Unit (ICU). One ICU is defined as the greenhouse effect caused by burning 100ml n-octane at the temperature of 20 degrees centigrade. This unit quasi pegs the value of goods and services to the survival of mankind. The ICU unit has the physical quality of energy (measured in Joule).

Although I like Chris’ approach I do not think that energy is a measure for Value. As said, Value is relative to the subject (a human being) and it also depends on what the subject wants to achieve in any moment. If a human does not want to achieve anything he rests and exchanges few energy with the exterior world. When he starts out to achieve an aim a human needs energy and time.

Each action a human performs on her way to achieve an aim costs time and energy. The physical quantity Action has the unit energy times time.

Action (aim) ~ Energy * Time [~ := proportional]

A thinking and economically acting human being will minimize energy and time and therefore act in accordance with the Hamiltonian principle of least action.

Tools (e.g. a bike, a hammer,…) and Services (e.g. support by another human) can considerably reduce the amount of energy and time needed to achieve an aim. An intelligent human will therefore use that Tool and that Service which minimize the Action to achieve a given aim:

Value (Tool) ~ Action (Tool) - Action (aim)

Hence the Value of a Tool would be maximal whose Action is maximal. Like the Action necessary to achieve an aim the Action of a Tool could be pegged to the physical quantity energy times time (measured in Joule * sec).

Value has the physical quantity energy * time

My assumption is: as long not all humans want to achieve the same aim (e.g. survive through avoiding climatic disaster) not only energy but also time is a measure for value. This goes in accordance with the XEG definition of Transaction: a process by which Wealth is exchanged between two parties. If one subject provides a service to another subject the value of the service only exists in the relationship between the two subjects.

Value (service) ~ Action (service) - Action (aim)

Some forms of Value (goods) transferred between humans are physical matter and can be “stored” in space. Other forms of Value are logical (e.g. words) or digital (e.g. data). Those forms of Value (services) may save time (e.g. the information where the train station is) and thus reduce the Action to achieve an aim. However, it is not trivial to “store” these forms of Value in space.

Credit is time to pay. A subject who wants to achieve an aim may need Value (in the form of a good or a service) now. A Credit can save time to achieve an aim.

Credit (aim) ~ Value (aim) / time

Credit has the physical quantity energy

  
 XEG Entity            phys. quantity        unit
 -------------------------------------------------------------------
 Credit                Work, Energy          J     (kg * m^2 / s^2) 
 Value                 Action                J * s (kg * m^2/ s) 

Assume that a Credit is needed to achieve an aim. Then the Value Unit could be defined as the proportionality constant p beween the Credit and its associated Action to achieve an aim.

Leonardo Chiariglione wrote that “Standardisation is the process by which individuals recognise the advantage of all doing certain things in an agreed way and codify that agreement”.

A standard for a Value Unit would require that many humans agree on a common economical aim. This common economical aim depends on the economical system (e.g. two humans, a group of humans (family, company, state), all humans). If the survival of mankind is the ultimate economical aim then Chris is right when he demands a compulsory levy for goods and services which set free CO2 in order to pay the Action to achieve this aim.

Rather than a Value Unit the proposed ICU is a measure of Credit (energy). Humans could use these Credit Units to achieve an aim i.e. create (subjective) Value.