No company has embraced the liberating aspects of the Internet as a 'new marketplace of ideas' more than the search giant Google.
— Steven Levy
Normally, my digital peregrinations take me to destinations like Facebook, YouTube, and boingboing.net.
Two thoughts occur to just about any parent whose child is about to enter college. The first is, 'I can't believe how quickly the years have gone by.' The second: 'I can't believe how much it costs.' As one of those parents, I did my best to get past the disturbing first thought and tried to calm my churning stomach while dealing with the second.
Computer technology is so built into our lives that it's part of the surround of every artist.
There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.
The vast majority of Americans perform sophisticated digital tasks on a daily basis. Grandmas and grandpas e-mail digital photos of their cruise trip and IM their kids in school. So a politician admitting that he or she can't bother to learn those things indicates a horse-and-buggy mentality.
Microtargeting, as its name implies, is a way to identify small but crucial groups of voters who might be won over to a given side, and which messages would do the trick.
The fact that biological, or 'natural' rules might help in the creation of a computer generated work of art is interesting, but even a wonderful work of art made in this fashion isn't the same as a person, with all his or her experiences and emotions involved, making art.
The world is poised on the cusp of an economic and cultural shift as dramatic as that of the Industrial Revolution.
When superpower countries like the United States and the former Soviet Union contemplated moving their conflicts to outer space, there was justifiable fear and dread.
To political technocrats, 2008 marks the maturation of 'microtargeting' - a technique that, if things are as close in November as expected, may well affect who takes the White House.
I think that the most beautiful thing lately hasn't been in hardware or software per se but collaboration - the idea behind Napster, which uses the distributed power of the Internet as its engine.
We were promised a society of philosophers. But the Blogosphere is looking more and more like a nation of ankle-biters.
