Category: Design

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The net is running out of IP addresses

At this morning’s Internet2 Spring member meeting John Curran, Chairman of The American Registry of Internet Numbers (ARIN) actually stated THIS WILL OCCUR within three years if the internet stays at IPv4. Time to plan your migration to IPv6.

I2 spring meetingBut will this upgrade be the next great Y2K project? Probably. And consider all those IPv4 consumer gadgets that are connecting to the internet today… Yikes! But fear not: Many companies are already moving to IPv6 .Google is already set. And while Apple’s OS X Leopard is already IPv6 capable, oh how Windows XP is not….and I’m not upgrading to Vista based on IPv6 alone.

This session was moderated by Internet2 CEO Doug Van Houwling who is speaking in Madison at WiscNet’s Future Technologies Conference May 13th & 14 at Monona Terrace.

Another strong presentation was John Windhausen‘s “National Broadband Policy” presentation. The goal: an 8 billion dollar investment to provide 100MB broadband service to every school, home and business by 2012.

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Design Education Globalization Google Network OpenSource Rich media Technology

SlideRocket Beta

I have been beta testing SlideRocket, a new online presentation tool. It has a very Keynote like approach to creating presentations, or should I say is also at the exact opposite end of the PowerPoint scale of slideware. Thanks be to God for Edward Tufte.

SlideRocket Beta

The beta period looks to be stable for the short term, but SlideRocket will give Google’s online slideware tool a bit of a hard look, but I just do not believe it will be enough to move the masses to SlideRocket.

SlideRocket is a Adobe AIR application supporting Flickr photos and the ability to directly import Google Spreadsheets. The beta tag sticks because I was not able to get accurate results on my Flickr search on three attempts. It also borrow’s from Adobe the deep grey design UI of the program.

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Design Education Globalization Milwaukee Network OpenSource Reading Technology TED

Latest read: The Starfish and the Spider

Rod Beckstrom’s The Starfish and the Spider reminded me of his very insightful presentation at the 2007 The Next Web Conference about organizations. Two types will define or break you in a Web2.0 world.
the starfish and the spiderAn enjoyable, easy read that further suggests leaderless organizations can fuel dramatic change within organization large and small.

Beckstrom, who just spoke at the 2008 TED conference presents content supporting how organizations can flourish when tightly controlled groups embrace the starfish effect.

He notes how Al-qaeda has embraced this type of leaderless organization and it becomes very obvious to any reader the last five years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This book actually complimented my previous read, The Wisdom of Crowds (review here).

The Starfish and the Spider follows the successful work of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything because both draw upon the power in today’s globalized world to share knowledge — via OpenSource to engage Web2.0 enterprise solutions and corporate blogs to think and more importantly, act independently.

Book website Link

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Design Education Globalization Internet2 Milwaukee Network OpenSource Technology WiscNet

Internet2: Re-invent

i2 reinventInternet2 is looking to re-invent its mission. The organization is now 10 years old, celebrating a decade of advancement in Chicago in December of 2006. Internet2 will engage the community…and will benefit from the wisdom of crowds. It appears some of the reason to re-invent comes from the failed merge with the National Lambda Rail and also from the emerging impact of Web2.0 solutions for individuals and in the enterprise.

In higher education the opportunity to collaborative remains a big challenge due to the fact that working collaboratively now extends across the globe. In the end the fast changing globalized world will benefit from educational institutions empowered by advanced networks. By the way … Internet2’s CEO Doug Van Houweling will be speaking in Madison at WiscNet‘s Future Technologies Conference.

Tags: Internet2, WiscNet, Doug Van Houweling, community, globalization, trends

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Design Education Globalization Milwaukee Reading

Latest read: The Wisdom of Crowds

James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds proves useful in understanding the impact (both positive and negative) regarding knowledge of isolated individuals vs. collective intelligence that shapes business, economies, societies and nations.

Surowiecki opens the book with a great example of the surprising “wisdom” possessed by groups of people. The book is a easy, enjoyable read.

As much as I enjoyed the learning I was somewhat more interested in learning the faults of crowds…specifically his analysis of NASA and the Columbia tragedy. To some extent the exact same lessons can be lifted from NASA and applied to Watergate, the highly intelligent crowd in the White House of Nixon’s inner circle.

The NASA “crowd” knew the danger yet did not as a group act to save the lives of their astronauts. In this lesson, I’m not convinced of the blanket approach to the wisdom of crowds. But Surowiecki is able to relay a number of cases in which this applies in business and societies.

The ability of crowds to outsmart a individual experts on any given topic ultimately supports the strength of communities, but as noted above even groups of specialists with graduate degrees have the ability to ignore their collective wisdom.