Intel Centrino Duo Blog

I am, as Pim calls it, a “believer” in the power of the virtual community. I actually don’t like using the term “virtual” because I start picturing a Tron-like world controlled by an evil computer, and because “virtual” seems to imply that the identities and relationships we form online are somehow less important, much less real than the ones formed in our physical world. There is still so much fear, so much suspicion when it comes to online communication.

I think I still had a touch of this suspicion myself until last year, when I received and accepted a marriage proposal via SMS. My then-boyfriend (now husband) and I had met under somewhat unpromising conditions: his work visa was expiring and he was leaving New York to return to the UK almost immediately. Long-distance relationships are hard under the best of circumstances but I just couldn’t imagine how we could make it work when we’d just met, were just getting to know each other. I was skeptical, but then we did get a lucky break in timing: just as we had become used to emailing each other daily, my mobile phone provider started to support international texting. Before long, I was living in a sort of mid-tech augmented reality - one where my boyfriend wasn’t thousands of miles away but always, always present through a stream of near-constant text messages. We didn’t get to know each other through texting alone, but our mobile phones played a big part, no question. In fact, now that we live together, we sometimes get confused- I tell my husband that he’s definitely been somewhere that he can’t remember because he hadn’t actually been there at all, I had just been texting him while I was there.

I think relationships like mine and my husband’s are the type of thing that technology fosters. I don’t think we have to fear some widespread defection into Second Life- tools like texting and instant messaging help us stay connected to the world we live in, rather than taking us out of it.

Excitingly, I don’t think we can predict what technology we’ll be using even just ten years down the line. I just don’t think we know right now. Ten years ago the buzz word was “convergence” and by now we were supposed to have ditched our televisions and stereos to watch interactive movies on our computers. That could still happen, but right now, instead, our computers make our televisions and stereos better instead of replacing them. The iPod just turned five years old. Ten years ago, who knew how ubiquitous portable mp3 players would become in such a short amount of time? We don’t know what tech devices and services we’ll find indispensable a few years from now, but I hope they’ll be things so life-altering, and user-friendly, that even my Mom will be using them.

Last year my students helped me make a video in which they predict the future. Here is a 640×480 version.

This is something I spent a lot of time thinking about last year with my students. Some of their favorite future ideas were being able to fly and having a cellphone integrated into your body, like in your teeth.

In the past two years, I’ve gotten a cellphone, become obsessed with mobile applications like dodgeball and started daydreaming my future with technology.

One thing that I would love to have, which is not that far away, is a blood sugar monitor embedded in my arm so that I can see the effect that food has on my blood sugar.

In the near future, I think that location data will gain momentum, disaster preparedness will improve, and it will be even easier to make connections with people in the world who share your interests.

Already in the past two years, I’ve seen a global culture of making things begin to form and it’s empowering to be able to watch what other people make and how they make it. I look forward to more of that!

Technology brings people together rather than tear them apart. Rapidly retreating are the misconceptions that technology would breed an army of naval gazing weirdos who revel in their fantasy lives online. That creature of Hollywood creation is just so 1990’s.

I used to work for a Silicon Valley company whose motto is ‘Technology will change the way people live, work, play, and learn.’ I suppose the Kool-Aid I drank stays with me.

I truly believe that the web of connections created and sustained by technology serves to bring us closer together. It provides space –on emails, blogs, boards, and other online public forums- for people to become acquainted, forge friendships, and keep ties that bind across vast distances.

I have a great story that reenforces my belief in this more every day.

Almost two years ago I started a little campaign on my blog. It began in the wake of the Tsunami that wreaked havoc in Southeast Asia, where I came from. I wanted to do something to help, so I asked a few friends in the food blog world to join me. We called our campaign ‘A Menu for Hope‘. We raised about $2,000 on our blogs to support the work of the Red Cross in the area.

The following holidays season, I decided to do it again. And again I asked a number of food blogging friends to get involved. We changed the format of the campaign, from simply pleading for donation from our readers to an online raffle. Food bloggers from all over the world got involved. We each pledged what we could as prizes for the raffle. Some gave a basket of food goodies from their area –Gascony France, Tuscany, Malaysia, California, and more. There were cookbooks old and new, even some rare, out of print titles. Our prizes might not have been of great monetary values, but they were reflections of the generosity of a community of food-loving friends from all over the world.

We sold online raffle tickets worth $5 each toward those prizes. We didn’t look for publicity. We didn’t do any PR. All we did was posting about the campaign on our blogs.

Words of our Menu for Hope traveled –via online channels rather than traditional media- and almost every day of our ten-day campaign, more bloggers pledged new prizes to add to our raffle. The donations also kept coming –in $5, $10, $25 increments. Few donors gave in great sums, but most gave in small amounts, according to their abilities.

In the end, our second Menu for Hope campaign raised the total of $17,101.32. No, there is no misplaced dot or comma in that number -we raised over seventeen thousand dollars. The money went directly from our online donation site -First Giving- to our beneficiary UNICEF.

What is the moral of this story, you asked? Plenty! And I sound more like a rabid tech-evangelist every time I talk about this. People can build trust and form communities through technology –it creates bridges across distances, bringing like-minded folks together, and helping to keep them together. Those communities can be just as strong as any other communities in the offline universe. That was the reason we were able to attract so many supporters to our campaign.

I’m a believer. Aren’t you?

By the way, Menu for Hope has become an annual campaign in food blogosphere. Our third campaign is running this very moment. This year, nearly 200 bloggers from all corners of the globe are involved. We have prizes ranging from dining vouchers to many fine restaurants, to great books, and to rare opportunities like an invitation to coffee with the famous chef Thomas Keller of the French Laundry, or to tea with the renown food scientist Harold McGee, and even to dinner with Eric Asimov, the NYT cheif wine critic. We also still have those food baskets lovingly put together by bloggers who take pride in showing their regional bounties. Those may not worth as much as a dinner for two at the famous Tetsuya’s in Sydney, but they perhaps have a bigger soul.

Menu for Hope III began this morning –this year we are raising funds to support the UN World Food Programme- and by the time I’m posting this -8.47pm PST- we’ve already raised $4,640!! I am almost too afraid to think how much we may raise come the end of this campaign on December 22.

What did I tell you.. I’m a believer. Aren’t you?

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Updated 12.28.06 - Menu for Hope III closed at $60,925.12.  We more than tripled the total amount raised last year.

Technology in the future will bring people together with the help of several key components - wireless technology and faster internet service from ISPs. Look at Verizon’s FIOS offering; a FTTH, Fiber to the Home, package that provides up to a 30 megabit download speed for little more than people are currently paying for a 6 megabit cable connection (although, I must say that Verizon’s FIOS DNS is rather sluggish). For now, Verizon FIOS and other FTTH connections are extremely rare, region dependent and costly - costing something in the thousands just to get a fiber line to each house. In the future as consumer-grade fiber connections become more prevalent and slowly replace DSL and Cable, the internet can begin to roll out high-bandwidth applications and start to become interesting.

Streaming HD movies, high-quality video-conferencing, the ability to back up your computer’s entire hard drive to a secure online server quickly - it’s all possible in the relatively near future. The further progression of internet connections will bring forward a new generation of social media web applications. It’s no mystery that social media is hot right now - FaceBook, Flickr, etcetera. Remove the bandwidth restrictions currently set in place by abundant low-quality net connections and you will have a completely different web experience able to bring more people together.

Blogs will also be part of this trend. Hosting companies will begin offering more powerful servers for cheaper - allowing passionate bloggers to ditch their restrictive, free blog and spread their proverbial wings. There will be more blogs and more interaction between those blogs, engaging even more people in the internet.

However, the greatest impact technology has had on my life lies solely in wireless technology. In the past 5 years, the stellar widespread adoption, integration and use of Wi-Fi has changed many lives. Take for example the typical, bustling college campus. Now imagine that campus before everyone used Wi-Fi. Completely different scenario huh? With wireless technology, students are able to get a connection ANYWHERE on campus - regardless of whether they are lying on a bench outside of the quad, downing a sub in the student center or trying to find a quiet corner in the library.

In addition to Wi-Fi, there is an interesting industry developing with WWAN offerings such as EVDO and HSDPA. Particularly of interest to me was the recent news of Cingular to deliver a 7.2 megabit connection with their new HSDPA service.

When I read Week 4’s question, the first three things that occurred to me were:

1. Our relatively recent acclimation to free access to information on just about anything anywhere in the world;
2. Instantaneous access to this information that lets us experience the world and events in real time; and
3. Our passion for detailed information and intimate knowledge of people, places and things.

That may sound trite, but it’s true. We’ve always been interested in news, whether in the paper, on the radio or over the backyard fence. We’ve been especially interested in that backyard fence delivery, as it usually has a tang or spice to it that is missing from the mailstream delivery of news and information.

Blogs deliver flavorful information in bite-sized, tasty morsels that can be enjoyed at the reader’s convenience. We can indulge in any treat, at any hour, without the need to interact or the restrictions or social niceties that are required in face-to-face interaction.

We can lurk. We can be anonymous. We can have many personas. We can make a name, whether real or ficticious, in a niche of our own creation.

The avenues and applications and technology and communities available to anyone with access to the Internet have created a vast freedom of movement, freedom to learn, interact, and influence.

Find me a blog that doesn’t do that, and I’ll find you a radio announcer who hates the sound of his own voice.

The single greatest challenge (for me, anyway) is discipline and reasonable restraint. Discipline to work, run a household, study, raise children, be a good citizen while indulging in online exploration. Reasonable restraint is for your own health as well as to prevent neglect in other areas of life; you can only drink from the firehose for so long. No one is going to turn it off for you, and like the mail, the Internet never stops.

The easy answer about why blogging is so popular is that it’s so easy to do. It literally takes 30 seconds and $0 to get started blogging on a hosted service like Blogger, or WordPress. I don’t think we can underestimate how much the tools have to do with the success of a medium. Of course, looking back four, five, even ten years ago, putting up a website was hardly a sisyphean task, but you needed to have web hosting space, install authoring software or use your ISP’s proprietary homepage generator to spit out unsightly pages, and then most likely, after putting up an initial site, it was unlikely to ever to be updated again. Those homepages were like archives, kind of like a map of tattoos of ex-boyfriends’ initials you might see on Paris Hilton’s ankles- it was a static history, not a breathing, dynamic portrait of anyone’s life. You had to be pretty determined to keep up a web presence. Now for anyone with a blog, or with an active online presence on a social networking or gaming site, having minute-by-minute updates is almost effortless.

I do worry that blogging is getting past its freshness date as a buzz word. Look at how quickly YouTube has made audio-only podcasting somewhat passe. Like the blogging platforms did for online journaling, YouTube has made something quite daunting, sharing video, very easy. Of course blogging continues to evolve as well- video and audio are all easily incorporated into new and existing blogs, and all of these tools can be used together, but every time I see a business magazine cover story about “the next web 2.0 superstar” and read on about social networking, wikis, MoSoSos (mobile social networks like Dodgeball), user-generated content, tagging, I think about how many people are thinking about the next big moneymaking blockbuster and less about the beautiful simplicity of being able to share your thoughts with the entire world (oh okay, maybe just a few people, but the potential is there) with the same ease as picking up your bedside journal.

Thanks for all of our bloggers for contributing for the last four weeks to the Intel Blogger Challenge. Our final question of the campaign is more philosophical, focusing on the role of technology in each of our lives:

What role do you think technology will play in the future to bring people together and what is the greatest impact it has had on your life?

Check back throughout this week for our blogger’s responses or add your own - and thanks for reading!

The beauty of blogging is that it is your own personal publishing platform.  You write, take photos, shoot video and then you compile it as you wish and share it with the world by clicking the “publish” button.

For people who make things, having a blog is essential to being a part of the worldwide diy community.  By blogging about your projects, you’ll inspire others, get feedback, and make connections with people who have similar ideas.

Even if you don’t blog, you can use tools like blip, flickr, myspace, and other simple publishing platforms to get videos, photos and text out on the internet
As blogging grows and more and more people have blogs and use them, one of the challenges that I face is absorbing the information in blogs that I’m interested in.  I have an aggregator full of blogposts to read and videos to watch.  If I could add more hours to the day, I’d read more blogs and watch more videoblogs!

I like personal blogs written by people with personality.  I like hearing individual voices experiencing life in different places, with different perspectives and clear points of view.  Have you watched Alive in Baghdad?

My hope is that more people will become grassroots journalists - interviewing others, exploring issues, and shining the spotlight where traditional media can’t reach.

Blogging is also gaining popularity with corporate entities so that they can keep their users and consumers up to date and informed.  If done right, the corporate blog offers anyone willing to read it a window into the company and the people who work there.  A corporate blog can really be a benifit to a company because it’s a real person who works there and shares their experiences and opinions.  By getting to know a corporation through their blog, you get a personal relationship with that company and the experiences that the writer has there.  It’s pretty easy to spot the innexperienced corporate blogs because they sound like press releases instead of personal memoirs or reflections.
Of course blogs can be used for evil too. The tools of propoganda, misdirection, and misinformation can all be employed with relative anonyminity by a mean spirited blogger!  When the election year of 2008 comes along, we will see a massive migration of information sourcing and name-calling on the internet.  Political parties will invest in building a presence on the internet through all means at their disposal, including blogging.  I predict that blogging, videoblogging, podcasting, and every branch of citizen media will really go crazy in 2008!

Blogs are incredibly popular due mainly to their interactive nature. Take your typical online, non-blog news source or publication for example. There is no way to leave a comment or ask a question. The closest thing to that is directly emailing the author given that the email address is listed on the site. Now with blogs, anyone can create an online presence, reach a global audience and interact with that audience on a level previously impossible for the average web user.

Blogs are also amazingly popular as of recently because setting up a blog has become a non-issue. Services like Blogger, Vox, WordPress.com and many others allow anyone to create a blog instantly. The only problem is getting your blog out there and known so you can attain a readership, if that matters to you.

I don’t know if there really is a challenge as far as the growing popularity of blogs and the blogosphere is concerned. The more, the better right? What do you think about this? The more popular the blogosphere gets, the more that mainstream media and others will recognize blogs as viable outlets for news and people won’t immediately jump to the conclusion that blogs are personal, online diaries. Blogs like the frequently updated GigaOM with multiple authors push the envelope of blogs can accomplish.

Thanks to all of our bloggers for contributing and a special welcome to our Mystery Blogger, Robert Scoble who will be contributing “publicly” for the next two weeks to answer our final two questions. The question for Week #4 is:

Why do you think blogs and blogging are so popular right now, and what do you see as the greatest challenge facing the blogosphere in continuing to grow in popularity?

Check back throughout this weekend and next week to see our blogger’s responses and as always feel free to add your own thoughts through commenting on the blog. We will return after the American Thanksgiving holiday on November 29th, 2006 to post our fifth and final question of the campaign.