Disqus - Latest Comments for Nik Smit

Re: Human 2.0: Trading Individual Power for Collective Consciousness

Nik Smit — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 13:01:46 -0000

As our technology becomes ever more powerful, I think it becomes easier and easier to accept our own brains as being (wonderfully!) complicated entities, but deterministic nonetheless.

Given a known (vast) set of inputs, could you model the actions of humans? Our knee jerk reaction is to assume not - but that could quite easily be a side-effect of our (relatively) limited brains.

Most importantly, at what point do you rename "behavioural goals" (as predicated by your environment) to "desires, self will"?

ASIMO and similar projects are fantastic in bringing this to the collective consciousness in a very tangible way.

The next few decades are going to be very interesting as we are forced to come to terms with these ideas.

Loving your blog, fascinating content.

Re: Twittermania 8 New Twitter Services

Nik Smit — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:30:58 -0000

Not sure if you've covered this one before, but http://www.thebetanews.com/ is quite fun.

Re: Twittermania 8 New Twitter Services

Nik Smit — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:31:56 -0000

Oops, copy and pasted too quick. http://www.twittervision.com is what I meant.

Re: I am Hyper Connected

Nik Smit — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:26:25 -0000

The overhead associated with being constantly distracted is huge. In CPUs, this is called "switching cost" - every time a computer switches between tasks (threads), it has to load stuff out of its memory, load other stuff into its memory, and get going again. This is actually very inefficient.

People work in the same way. We can only hold so much in our heads at one time, and distractions can cause to to start from zero again.

I too am hyperconnected, and I know exactly what you mean about the cold shudder of asking "what now?" if the internet is gone.

Services like twitter only add to the already huge load of incoming (news) data we get.

Its just not sustainable though - every single tweet/rss item can lead to 10 minutes distraction. There are only so many hours in the day (and occasionally we need to sleep/eat/get married, etc.).

I think we're going through an adolescent phase with data - its all so new and shiny and instant, that we cant get enough. But ultimately we'll have to grow up,and start putting strong filters on whats grabbing our attention.

Probably software will come to our rescue here - intelligent agents interrupting as at good moments, with just the (summarized) data we need.
In fact, it has to! We're probably too addicted to wean ourselves off alone ;)

Re: Online Business Card

Nik Smit — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:36:34 -0000

Hey there, Nik from retaggr here.

Sorry to hear it wasn't working optimally for you - we've made some speed imprrovments, and more are on the way.

We also have a new option for embedding your Card on your site - a badge that opens when you click it - you'll find it in the Tools section of retaggr.

Thanks - shout if you need help with anything else, and good luck with the open source ;)

Re: Tricky Asp.net MVC URL Rewriting

Nik Smit — Sat, 24 May 2008 07:15:38 -0000

I've done exactly this for a project. It isnt ideal in that if you have a live system, and you subsequently need to add controllers, you need to check that *existing* users havent already used that controller name.

Re: Going Solo is Tomorrow!

Nik Smit — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:01:33 -0000

Hi!

Just found your blog, and enjoying the content. Hope the conference went well.

All the best.

Re: Carsonified Golden ticket competition

Nik Smit — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 09:26:30 -0000

They sound like a good bunch of people - bon voyage! ;)

Re: 2008/11/24/data-visualizations/

Nik Smit — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:21:15 -0000

Check out wefeelfine.org for some interesting visualization of the global zeitgeist.

Re: Retaggr - a web2.0 profile card

Nik Smit — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:25:35 -0000

Hey there!

Nik from retaggr here.

Yes indeed - we definitely plan to allow you to be able to take your status message from any service in the future. Unfortunately can't give a timescale right now, but its a good idea, so we'll try get to it as soon as we can.

By the way - we've increased the size of your profile photo on the card, which we think makes it look that much nicer -if you re-upload your pic you'll get the new size.

Thanks for the blog post - let us know if we can help out in any other way.

Cheers,

Nik

p.s For GTD - take a look at http://www.tudumo.com/, it may be of interest.

Re: Why blogging comments suck

Nik Smit — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 13:53:52 -0000

The problem of context, and being able to get more info about someone, without leaving the page, is *exactly* what we do.

Your Retaggr Card is sort of a business card 2.0. All your personal, social and professional info, is in there, and the content you generate on on the web (Flickr, twitter, etc.) is there too.

But here's the cool bit : add our wordpress (.org) plugin, and when people leave comments on your blog, instead of just having the url to the person, their Retaggr card pops up and does exactly what you want Robert - you can see their Friendfeed, twitter, etc., and get to know them.

Think of it as the gravatar idea but taken to the next level.

You can see it in action on our test blog : www.spicevine.com
Or more info : www.retaggr.com

Re: TED – Ideas “Definitely” Worth Spreading

Nik Smit — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 08:46:44 -0000

TED is fantastic - you can loose hours to it, and be inspired in the process. Wouldn't it be great if this kind of stuff was on TV as much as big brother... ;)