Humanity

According to Reuters, Hansdehar in Haryana has uploaded itself to the 'Net. Great headline, but somewhat misleading, anyway the upshot is that Hansdehar village is featured on the smartvillages.org website that will become a portal for Indian villages so that they can communicate with the world and find solutions to the day-to-day problems they face.

I'm probably going to get hung out to dry for my opinion on this, I'm sure a bunch of liberal minded souls will say I'm being unnecessarily harsh in my observation, but I think the photographer should be fired. Not because of the quality of the images, but because there seems to have very little effort made to get the villagers to smile. I'm sure poverty doesn't prevent them from having moments of light heartedness, and seriously, if the villagers are going to benefit from the website they need to be seen to be having fun.

On a positive note, the very fact of getting publicity like this is going to facilitate trade in both goods and knowledge. School children from around the world will visit their site and send them emails. The village children will be exposed to other cultures very quickly, and its very likely the villagers will make lasting connections with villages in other parts of the world that have similar problems. That's exciting, an Internet presence means these villagers don't have to rely on remote government officials to communicate with the outside world.

But there are going to be unexpected side effects. Hansdehar is going to find itself dragged into the 21st century whether it likes it or not, and suddenly every child will be downloading and sharing hip-hop, they will be creating their own MySpace accounts and requesting bomber jackets be sent to them, they will suddenly start speaking ghetto English just like their peers. Life will never be the same in Hansdehar ever again.

We have a cat, and she's becoming really fussy with what she eats. I should qualify this by saying she isn't getting fussy about only eating red meat or fish. Oh no, our cat is starting to really freak us out.

How many cats do you know that drink pineapple juice, or eat dried apricots. And worse still, have you ever met a cat who eats brocolli?

Being a meatarian I've been able to enforce a meat eating diet because the cat and I outnumber the other half. Traitor! Now SHE gets to claim the majority and the cat goes along with it, oh boy life is going to get really horrible around here.

Blogging is the next big technology trend, and I fully expect that almost everyone will have one in the next few years. Ten years ago nobody thought that every business would have a website and now you struggle to find one that doesn't.

If you haven't blogged before now, you may be wondering what all the fuss is about. But take a moment to think of how much easier it is to keep in touch when you have instant messaging, email, and sms on your mobile phone.

The big advantage of blogging is that you don't have to send anything to friends and family, they can simply subscribe to your feed and read what you write whenever they want to.

Already it is becoming common to record verbal blog messages, and I imagine it won't be long until video messages gain in popularity, especially given the pace of broadband uptake.

So with that said, who are the bloggers of tomorrow, why will they be the driving force of blogging in 2006? Read More

When you look around at the state of the world it is hard to imagine the global society being ready for the sorts of changes the singularity will bring.

Humanity seems to be lurching from crisis to crisis, and the technology required to solve our problems is still over the horizon.

My feeling is that if we persevere we'll figure out ways of solving our most pressing issues, and what concerns me most is our propensity for savagery and greed. The 21st century should be the beginning of a golden age for humanity, one where we evolve into a better, more compassionate and sophisticated species. Read More