We humans are a damned predictable lot; only when faced with the prospect of losing everything do we act appropriately. The hastening energy crisis is just such a prospect, one that could effortlessly strip us of our technological prowess, nudging those that “have” back several centuries, down there with those that “have not”, most probably economically, financially, socially and culturally, too.

But aside from all of the verbose rhetoric and political posturing, the most powerful and provocative message to the average European or American citizen comes in the form of a simple question: what would you do if you couldn’t put fuel in your car?

Feel free to substitute “car” for some other equally indispensable item and the outcome would probably be the same: what if you couldn’t charge your cell / mobile phone? Or: what if you couldn’t power up your computer?

Thankfully, I am not amongst those who have to decide where whole economies need to invest time, money and effort in which newly emerging energy source. Fortunately, I just get to sit here and ask “What if?” with no fear of my prognostications amounting to naught.

But someone has to. And if I did have a say, I’d gather together the leaders of all the major nations and demand that they make extraordinary financial provision to fund research & development into renewable energy sources.

Indeed, all over Britain, locations for wind farms are being decided, while entire tracts of the waters around British shores are being marked as additional sites, too. In warmer climates, the sun is a readily available source of energy, one largely untapped. But not for long.

The mainstream news is a capricious animal, picking up Britney Spears miming on live TV, yet missing the news that the very, very clever people at MIT have made an energy storage discovery which could lead to unlimited solar power:

“The process, loosely based on plant photosynthesis, uses solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. When needed, the gases can then be re-combined in a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity whether the sun is shining or not.”

Britney Spears won’t power your car, or charge your mobile phone. MIT’s discovery most probably will. But this is just one of many, many novel sources of energy scientists around the world are quickly discovering.

And herein lies the future of this Earth, one not reliant on any one source of energy. Thankfully, it is a future mostly free of cartels, artificially limiting production of fuels, while aggressively inflating the price of what they allow to be sold.

The future power democracy

The signs are already here of a democratization of energy production.

Because we’re now looking at different, renewable and highly fault-tolerant, often isolated methods of “off grid” energy production, the cabals and cartels running the energy empires of today will enjoy only short-term prosperity in the near future.

Over the long-term, energy production will become dirt cheap and abundant. So abundant that, if my theory is correct, controlling any energy source will be almost pointless, since no one energy source will ever be more significant — either technologically or economically — than any other.

Of course, shares in the water utilities will see a dramatic new lease of life…

Recommended reading

• Why we shouldn’t save the planet
• My gadget energy manifesto
• The myth of Global Warming
• The dirty business of waste packaging
• Build for a better tomorrow
• Alternative energy technologies of the future
• Serious Science: nanotechnology to kill the “upgrade cycle”?
• MIT Energy Storage Discovery Could Lead to ‘Unlimited’ Solar Power

First of all, thanks for the visit. Secondly (and rather lazily, I might add), here’s a little about me and the Blah, Blah! Technology blog:

“Blah, Blah! Technology is about delivering technology commentary and opinion on the kind of technology trends that shape lives, shape businesses and shape the future.

I attempt to take the complexities of technology and distill their terms, phrases and industry nomenclature into smaller, easier analogies and examples that hopefully anyone can read and understand and to make technology accessible to the layman.”

Why are you called Octane on Twitter?

Good question! When I started my account on Twitter, way back in 2005 (I think), I used the name of my company as my username. On the plus side, it’s short & sweet, while on the downside, Octane is a little confusing if you don’t know anything about Octane Interactive Limited, my web design, development and internet consultancy that I founded in 1999.

What’s your follow policy?

The question itself might be a little misleading if you’re new to Twitter. OK, when you follow someone — or at least when I do — I don’t expect those people to automatically follow me back.

As in life, we don’t always find that we have that much in common with the people we meet, or we feel that the person that just followed us isn’t adding the right kind of ideas, thoughts and observations to our stream of Twitter updates.

As an example, if you’re an up-and-coming and you were to buy the latest album of a famous singer, would you expect them to return to gesture? Of course not, because that’s not how it works.

I’m neither famous, nor am I singer. But the fact of the matter is, we are all different and to reciprocate for the sake of reciprocation is disingenuous.

So I might not follow you back if you follow me. And of course, the opposite holds true, too. Obviously, some people feel very differently about this, but this is my Twitter follow policy, and I’ve at least demonstrated my honesty on the subject, if nothing else.

So is Twitter the place to be?

That really depends on what you want from Twitter. I could go into all kinds of detail, but ultimately, you need to know what you want from a thing before you invest time & effort in it.

Twitter is doubtlessly very popular, but it’s also technically a very weak system. There are much better services out there. But yet again, it depends on your needs and your audience.

It’s not uncommon for people to refer to Twitter as a micro-blogging system, which I’ve done myself on occasion, just so people would feel comfortable with what I was writing about. The fact of the matter is, Twitter is a status update service (not too dissimilar to what you get with Facebook), which becomes amazingly obvious the first time you sign in, when you’re asked: “What are you doing?”

Anticipating your next two questions: 1. so what’s better that Twitter, and 2. what’s a proper micro-blog? In a word, Pownce. If you’re familiar with blogging, then Pownce really is a micro-blogging system.

Do you actually like Twitter?

For me, it’s a means to an end. I use Twitter for several reasons, but most of all, it’s a way of keeping in touch with the people who I feel I can learn something from, and I use Twitter as a way of promoting the Blah, Blah! Technology blog, as well as sharing the things that I find.

For a while, I really didn’t like Twitter, mostly because of the very, very silly thing people were saying Twitter could do. As an example, a lot of weight seems to be placed on Twitter as an as-it-happens source for breaking news. Any similar system would work exactly the same given enough people using it — it’s the people that make it work that way and not the technology.

Sitting somewhere between Pownce and Twitter is Plurk, which is vastly far more useful as a service for monitoring breaking news. I say this because with Plurk, you can actually see the news happening. The reason for this unique ability is because of the amazing way you interact with Plurk.

But after all is said & done, Twitter commands a huge audience, so your efforts are as well spent there, assuming you intend connecting with people, making friends, building relationships and sharing the things you’re into with like-minded individuals.

What now?

That’s as open ended a question as you could ever hope to ask! If you haven’t already, you could follow me on Twitter. And if you’re feeling extra kind, you could also subscribe to the Blah, Blah! Technology blog.

And finally, thank you for your time. Always a pleasure…

Blah, Blah! Technology is an Open Web Awards 2008 blog partner, which means I get to invite you to vote on your favourite web technologies and web applications from around the world wide web.

Now’s the time to cast your vote on your favourite nominee, across: Mainstream & Large Scale Social Networks, Embeddable Widgets, Blog Plugins, Social News, Social Networking Applications, Social Bookmarking, Search & Social Search and many, many more!

Want to say something about the Open Web Awards? Be sure to use the #OWA or #OpenWebAwards hash tags when using Twitter, FriendFeed, et cetera.

Watching web traffic in real time

If you’re an active social networker and blogger like me, you need to see things in real time, because that’s exactly how things are happening; you miss the moment and you miss the chance.

That’s why I use Clicky and the Spy tool, to monitor visits to and actions on my blog. I can see visits coming in from unexpected sources and react to them immediately.

The benefits might not appear to be obvious, so let’s start with a simple example. Let’s say I get a visit from a forum thread on SitePoint, which I’m a member of. I can go to that thread and reply instantly, while the conversation is still fresh.

I am, in effect, influencing the traffic to my blog in real time. Google Analytics currently offers no such tool, which in my opinion is a massive loss.

No way to move Profiles

I get about thirty visitors a month who’ve searched on Google looking to find out how to move Profiles in Analytics. I wanted to do the self same thing a while ago, so I sent a support query to the Google Analytics team and was told there is no such feature, and they won’t even do it on request, either.

Again, this is a big hinderance. I often set Profiles up for clients under my own Account. I’d like to then let them have the Profile under their own Account at a later time, but there’s no way to do that.

Lack of a public API

I use WordPress to power the Blah blog, and I’ve also written Plugins for WordPress, too. What I’d like to do is write a Plugin that uses the data accrued via Google Analytics to display things like the most popular articles, or to display articles that match against what a visitor from a search engine is looking for.

As we’ve seen in the last couple of years, the really successful web applications are usually those that allow people to extend them in some way, like Delicious, Twitter and Google Maps, ironically enough.

And I’m fairly sure that the guys who write Widgets would like similar access to the API (Application Programming Interface) of Google Analytics as well. Sadly, that’s not possible because Google don’t have a public API for Google Analytics.

Update: for the ultra observant, this is 3rd point is an update to the original article. I totally forgot to add this one the first time around!

Google FeedBurner, Analytics and Webmaster Tools should be combined

OK, I said two features, but this isn’t strictly a feature as such.

Having my love, admiration and eternal respect probably isn’t high on Google’s list of priorities, but if they were to combine Google FeedBurner, Analytics and Webmaster Tools, they’d make all our lives much easier:

“Google is now the proud, relatively new owners of FeedBurner. If subscriptions are the measurement of trust and web traffic is the measurement of popularity, what happens when the two are combined?”

And finally…

And then there’s the none too inconsiderable issue of there being a possible (and apparently avoidable) security hole in Google Analytics. But that’s for better people than me to discuss and ruminate.

Over all, Google Analytics is still a good product, but it’s one that, for me at least, becomes slightly less relevant each time Clicky add something new to their growing arsenal of features. So I’m hoping that they blow me away with a much more comprehensive update sooner rather than later…

Recommended reading

• Google Analytics for Flash: Welcome to the Engagement Era
• Want to track Adobe Flash? Now you can!
• Google FeedBurner, Analytics and Webmaster Tools should be combined

When I consider the sum total of articles I’ve written over the past three years, by my reckoning, the quality of my writing peaked about a year ago. But that’s not a bad thing!

At certain points in our lives, we peak at a given thing and it’s likely we’ve hit the performance / efficiency ceiling. However, there are many, many aspects to writing, which means there are many more opportunities to explore. I could, for example, delve into investigative writing. Or, I could offer more supportive research, and then there are product reviews.

As it stands, I write about a very eclectic mix of topics, which affords me a certain degree of insulation from hitting what I call the Topic Wall, the avoidance of which can be characterized with a very simple mantra: diversification avoids stagnation. In summary, my idea of a Topic Wall is to disease what the mantra is to the cure.

Hitting the Topic Wall is when, as a blogger, you write within a very well-defined but also very crowded niche. Here I’m thinking about SEO. In this niche, if you’re not the thought leader, you’re really going to struggle to churn original out content on a regular basis, without: 1. going over old themes, or 2. simply syndicating what someone else has already said.

That’s not a route to success. It’s an avenue to blogging oblivion.

A question of professionalism

Without wanting to sound disrespectful, professionalism is something you begin to fully appreciate when you run your own business. Why? Because you become aware of certain facets of business. Things like the art of diplomacy, the deft approach to mediation and negotiation, as well as knowing how to present yourself to maximize your potential. So a lack of professionalism will probably harm you in ways you can’t even imagine.

We often use talent and professionalism interchangeably, which is totally wrong, sports stars being a great example of what professionalism isn’t:

“A huge salary is not a sign of professionalism. Nor is a insulting the competition, getting blind drunk in public, beating up your girlfriend, illicit affairs, gambling addictions, abusive behaviour or questionable TV appearances.”

And for those who don’t learn from their mistakes they’re doomed to repeat them.

So why mention professionalism at all? Because if you want to be a success in such a very public arena as blogging, or within the wider social media community, how you conduct yourself is key to your success as a person, which is the first step to becoming a success elsewhere.

In business, people have to buy into you as a person before they buy anything from your business.

Why time and timing aren’t the same thing

When I look at some of the articles I’ve written that have attracted huge amounts of visits, I can compare them to other articles within the last twelve months and the quality between the two is broadly the same. So why did the latter succeed where the former didn’t? Two things; time and timing.

Time — write for the people

A year ago, I had a measurably smaller social network. Because of this, my articles were exposed to considerably less people. A year later, I am somewhat fortunate to have people of sufficient skill, knowledge, influence and respect to push my articles into their social networks.

So, by having the luxury of such valuable people in your social network, the likelihood of your articles hitting the front page of Digg, or driving a week-long tide of visits from StumbleUpon are increased massively — and hopefully, measurably.

So to paraphrase a common truism: it’s not what you know it’s who you know, we could say: it’s not who you know, it’s who they know! However, who you are isn’t defined by who you know, but by what you know.

Timing — write for the moment

Over time, having all these great people is one thing, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy some wonderful moments. But the really notable successes are those moments when you capture the zeitgeist, distilling thoughts that are contemporaneous with current affairs, such as a political scandal, a momentous sporting achievement, a critically acclaimed film, or a controversial song.

In the first week of October, I wrote an article which examines the views of video games and their impact on children, but looking at the positives, rather than the more popular negative angles we read about all too often. To date, I’ve had over 20,000 visits, mostly from StumbleUpon. But why the success? Because I hit the sweet spot; parents everywhere are concerned about their children playing video games and the web is an instant source of information.

Why being stuck in a social loop isn’t a bad thing!

It’s at this point that we begin to come into contact with another buzzword of mine: the Social Loop. Effectively, the Social Loop is:

1. An idea for an article, which leads to content production.
2. Content promotion via social media, social networking and search traffic, which in turn leads back to the original article.

The final step is where you attempt to coax a conversion (an action) out of your visitors, which can entail many things, such as:

1. encouraging people to subscribe;
2. search for more content;
3. befriend you on a social network;
4. leave a comment;
5. buy a product.

Armed as you are with my thoughts on success and how to make the most of what you have, I’ll leave you with an observation and a final thought. A partial message to a friend on Skype:

“Their success isn’t always because of their talent, but their proximity to those with greater talent and influence.”

Both expertise and success are relative, and require only two things of a person:
1. that you’re interested enough;
2. that you persevere enough…

Recommended reading

• For ‘bloggers, diversification avoids stagnation
• Professionalism in business and ‘blogging
• The Social Loop — to write, share and promote

Last week I showed you how to make the most of Address Book and Mail. Today, I’ll be talking you through some of the simple things you can do with your Mac: like navigating folders in the Finder, web pages in Safari, using your iPod Touch as a rout planner, as well as tips for taking screen shots and adding accented characters to documents.

Google Maps on an iPod Touch with no wireless network?

I left the office without printing out directions to the clients office in Coventry — but I had a plan! What if I could store the directions on my iPod Touch?

Well, if you’re using the Maps application, it needs a network connection, even if it’s just using a previously used route. So how do you use your iPod Touch for directions when you have no wireless network?

Using your iPod Touch like a SatNav

1. Create your route with Google Maps, with the start and end points.
2. Go to the File menu and choose Print.
3. Click on the PDF button in the bottom left and choose the Compress PDF option.
4. Save the file to your Desktop.

Now, you need access to a hosting account of some description, be that MobileMe, an FTP account or some free storage, any will do.

1. Upload your PDF to your storage of choice.
2. On your iPod Touch, open up Safari and browse to your PDF using the link to the file.

That’s it! You’re all set. Safari won’t try to reload the page, or at least it didn’t with me all the way from South Yorkshire down to Coventry.

The bonus here is that Safari treats it like a regular web page, so you can drag, zoom and rotate to view the map and the directions. The only thing you don’t see on the PDF is the blue line for the route itself.

As an aside, be careful when trying to use your iPod Touch as an ad hoc SatNav. I’m guessing if the police spot you, you’re done for. As far as they’ll be concerned, you’re using a mobile device while driving, which constitutes driving without due care and attention.

Also, make sure you have quick thumbs so you can dismiss the many messages you’ll get notifying you of all the wireless networks you’ll pick up as you drive through your average city!

Making the most of your Mac!

When OS X launched, some of the shortcuts I’d become accustomed to vanished. Thankfully, as OS X moved on, those stalwarts of productivity returned. Here’s some shortcuts I couldn’t live without.

Moving down through folders

While in the Finder, hold down the Apple key (or Command key, referred to hereon in as such) and then click on the title of a folder. See the list? You can make a selection and navigate all the way down to the very bottom of your Mac.

This is great for dropping right down to a folder without having to click back, or using column view. Also, you can do this within files, too. So if you’re using Preview, you can do the same thing. Even better, from within Safari, you can go back down through the web pages you’ve just visited.

Depending on what applications you’re using, your mileage will vary. Some support this feature (like most of the Adobe applications), but some don’t.

It’s a handy way of finding where a file or folder is when you’re not too sure.

Taking a snapshot of your screen

On a Microsoft Windows PC, taking a snapshot of your desktop or a collection of windows really isn’t practical. On a Mac, it’s simplicity itself!

For a snapshot of the entire screen, press Command + Shift + 3 and you’re done.

For a snapshot of just a portion of your screen, press Command + Shift + 4, which will give you a cross hair cursor. Make your selection, and the moment you release the mouse button, you’re done.

When you go to your Desktop, you’ll see a file called: “Picture 1.png”, which you can open with most image editors, including Preview.

These options are great for quickly sending illustrations of designs to friends or colleagues. Or for sending evidence of things you’re not sure about to support staff. Just attach them to an email and you’re good to go.

There used to be an option to take a snapshot of the contents of a window, but that’s gone, sadly.

Adding accented characters and symbols

Back in the day, there was a small application called Keycaps. This one tiny application played host to a surprisingly huge amount of utility; you could find out exactly which keys to press to get things like foreign accented characters and symbols.

Sadly for us, Keycaps is no more. And people who’ve been using Macs as long as I have are still struggling. But there’s an alternative to Keycaps:

1. Go to the Apple menu and select System Preferences.
2. Click the International button in the Personal pane.
3. Now click on the Input Menu tab.
4. At the top, click the check boxes for the Character Palette and Keyboard Viewer options.

To access the Character Palette and Keyboard Viewer:

1. Over to the right of the menu bar, you’ll see small flag for your language.
2. Click the language flag to reveal the Character Palette and Keyboard Viewer menu items.

Keyboard Viewer

Keyboard Viewer is essentially Keycaps reborn, but smaller. You press the modifier keys (Shift, Control, Alt and Command) in different combinations to reveal the characters you want. After that, you go to your application of choice and press the right key combination to generate those characters.

Character Palette

Alternatively, using the Character Palette allows you to hunt down the character of choice and insert it directly, without having to figure out what keyboard combinations under which it resides.

However, not all applications support Character Palette, and different typefaces (or fonts) might only support certain characters. A lot of the free typefaces don’t have complete character sets.

So if you’re having trouble inserting a character into Adobe Photoshop, open up TextEdit, insert the character there and then copy & paste into Adobe Photoshop.

Enjoy your Mac and good luck!

Like I said, I’ve been using a Mac for business & pleasure for years. Hopefully, you’ll find owning a Mac as much of a joy and a privilege as I do…

Recommended reading

• Got a Mac? A business user how-to guide for Address Book and Mail
• 5 internet power user tips for OpenDNS, Yahoo! Pipes and Facebook
• 5 apps to help you run your blog
• Skitch! Net lingo for sketch…

I’ve been using Macs since System 6. Remember that? Most won’t. If you’ve got any concerns about your Mac being up to the task of running your business, then you have zero need to be concerned; most if not all of the office productivity tools and accounting applications for Microsoft Windows are on the Mac, too.

Without further ado, here’s a bunch of Mac tips!

Address Book & Mail

If you use Mail then you’re also using Address Book; any email addresses you save are stored there. Any time you begin typing an email address and Mail tries to auto-complete, it’s getting that email address from Address Book. So the two applications are very closely linked.

Groups

Sending emails to more than one person is pretty easy. All you have to do is type a name, wait for the suggestions to appear, choose the one you want and then hit the return key. But what if you’re constantly sending messages to the same group of people over and over again? Well, that’s what Groups are for!

1. Go into Address Book and click the plus button in the bottom left of the main window.
2. Click on the new Group and give it a name.
3. Now, from the middle column, drag in the items for all of the people you want in that Group.
4. Go into Mail.
5. Create a new Message.
6. Type in the name of the Group into the To field.

Now you’ll see the name of the Group turn into the names / email addresses of all the people in that Group. Simple!

Rules in Mail

Having watched many different people using various email applications, the number one thing that still remains totally underutilized is the feature that allows you to filter emails based on special rules. Apple’s Mail, much like Microsoft Outlook, supports this feature, which are called Rules.

Of course, you could just use a bunch of Smart Mailboxs, but I like have a nested Mailbox structure. So for instance, I would have a Mailbox called Apple, inside which would be a bunch of other Mailboxes for each staff member I’m in contact with, such as Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive, et cetera.

So when I get an email from Steve, I want it to go straight into his Mailbox. If I get an email from someone at Apple I’ve never dealt with before, I want it to go straight into the parent Mailbox, named Apple.

The process is straight forward, but there are also got plenty of points to complete:

1. Creating a Mailbox

1. Click on the plus (+) button in the bottom left of your Mail window.
2. Give your new Mailbox a name.
3. Now drag & drop the Mailbox wherever you’d prefer it to be.

2. Creating a Rule

1. Click on the Mail menu and choose Preferences.
2. Click on the Rules tab and click the Add Rule button.
3. Give the Rule a name in the Description field.

2.2 A catch-all Rule

Now, if you want a general catch-all Rule:

1. Below the Description, choose Any from the pop-up menu.
2. In the two pop-up menus below, choose From and Contains respectively.
3. In the text field, type: “@apple.com“, where the end part of the email address is one of your choosing.
4. Now choose the Mailbox you’d like all the emails that match the Rule to be moved to when it arrives.

2.3 A specific Rule

But if you want a specific Rule:

1. Follow the instructions in Part 1, dragging & dropping your newly-created Mailbox onto a parent Mailbox.
2. Follow the instructions in Part 2.2, 1-4, following the example I made earlier; choosing the Mailbox of your choice within the parent Mailbox.

OK, so there’s plenty of stages to this particular Mac tip, but the advantages are many. For a start, you’re going to find your emails much more easy to manage and search by eye. Gone will be the days when you lose emails from people!

But wait! There’s more Mac tips

Yes, there’s more Mac tips to come. In the second installment, I’ll be showing you how to use your iPod Touch like a SatNav and a whole load of handy keyboard shortcuts to keep your productivity high…

Recommended reading

• Got a Mac? iPod as SatNav, shortcuts, screen shots and special characters
• 5 internet power user tips for OpenDNS, Yahoo! Pipes and Facebook
• 5 apps to help you run your blog
• Skitch! Net lingo for sketch…

Last week, Google announced that Google Mail now offers voice and video chat. For someone like me, this changes absolutely nothing. Why? Skype works just fine.

And then there’s the technical minutia, like the fact that Google’s video offering uses the ubiquitous Jabber, now called XMPP:

“Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), a set of open XML technologies for presence and real-time communication developed by the Jabber open-source community in 1999, formalized by the IETF in 2002-2004, continuously extended through the standards process of the XMPP Standards Foundation, and implemented in a wide variety of software, devices, and Internet services.”

As an aside, which name sticks in your head; Jabber or XMPP? Thought so. That’s what happens when you let engineers near product names.

Skype, on the other hand, is a proprietary system. But from an end user point of view, who the hell cares? So long as the service works and enough of the people you know use it, Skype is sufficient.

There you go! I just made a business case for using Microsoft Windows. Oh, wait…

I’m a neo-Luddite and proud of it!

To qualify that statement, what I mean is, I’ve built my workflow, my clients and contacts are using broadly the same services / applications, which work and we’re all reasonably happy with. So why the hell change things each and every time a new whizz-bang application comes along?

A guy in my social network called Robert Sanzalone had this to say a while ago:

“Just logged into Skype for the first time in months. Beginning to question Chatterous. Will take a while to ‘ween’ people off Skype.”

Robert is a self-proclaimed technology evangelist and blogger, and if you have a very long memory, you’ll also remember he was the one who broke the news of Twitter4Skype, which is, as it’s name suggests, a tool that turns Skype into a Twitter client.

Here’s a guy who’s pretty much everywhere from the Pacific ring of fire, right up to colds of Canada. So having a good, reliable telecommunications infrastructure is essential.

However, as experienced as Robert is when it comes to telecommunications, VoIP and such like, in my mind at least, someone would have to show me some demonstrably major benefits to using Chatterous, Google Mail’s video services, or anything else for that matter, before I even considered going to those in my social network and suggesting we all, en masse, make the migration to the next new whizz-bang application that comes along…

Recommended reading

• Twitter4Skype: IM meets micro-blogging

The inverse is probably more astonishing; what happens when our actions in the real world are captured and played out in a virtual environment? Those actions — made up of gestures and movements that we consider our own — become the scrutiny of others, watching from afar.

A body of electronic evidence

The very clever technology behind the Nintendo Wii and ‘touchless’ technologies by Elliptic Labs have potentially more luminous and less strenuous futures:

“One use of gesture recognition that sprung immediately to mind was the world of surveillance. Automated systems could monitor people passing through major transport hubs — such as bus depots, train stations, air & sea ports, for example — spotting violent altercations or individuals acting furtively.”

Similarly, technologies like GreenDot allow for people to be identified by their own unique motion patterns:

“To identify who is in the video, the computer first looks for movement in the scene. As the video plays, and the computer collects motion data, it compares new information to a database of previously ‘learned’ body signatures, and can eventually identify the human.”

Clearly, such innovations could be made to serve the interests of the public. An example would be identifying the movements of known criminals, irrespective of their dress or their appearance. Their expressions and their very motion would betray them. Also, finding people who are lost or who have been abducted could potentially be accelerated.

But what of their potential for abuse? Do they outweigh the apparent usefulness of such technologies? Here, yet again, personal privacy and the perceived invasion thereof is an unwelcome specter.

Beauty is only algorithm deep

For years, magazine editors have given us a false, utterly unrealistic, yet tantalizingly close, vision of beauty. Armed with a copy of Adobe Photoshop, cover girls are transformed from being just attractive, to unattainably gorgeous.

Now this electronic elegance is automatic; photographs of the ordinary are subtly transformed into the extraordinary — all at the touch of a few buttons:

“They’ve built a beauty machine that, with the press of a button, turns a picture of your own ordinary face into that of a cover model. While its output is currently limited to digitized images, the software may be able to guide plastic surgeons, aid magazine cover editors, and even become a feature incorporated into all digital cameras.”

How long before this technology can work with live video?

With so many women and young girls obsessing over their looks and appearance, this kind of technology is reinforcing their mostly unfounded cosmetic concerns and perpetuating a cycle of self image being everything, rationalizing the hiding of the real substance behind a virtual persona, like that afforded by a Facebook profile.

The key to more than just privacy theft

We are now creatures of habit, now routinely guarding our personal details from prying eyes. Our credit cards, mobile phone numbers, email addresses, receipts and utility bills are brimming with data & information that could easily undermine our personal and professional lives, should they fall into the wrong hands. But just how secure is the humble house or office key?

“In one demonstration of the new software system, the computer scientists took pictures of common residential house keys with a cell phone camera, fed the image into their software which then produced the information needed to create identical copies.”

But why do this? This is the work of students at the Jacobs School of Engineering, and this is a demonstration, meant to highlight just how insecure keys are as means of securing ones property. It’s an alarming demonstration, too.

Real life, with added motion blur

Blurring the boundaries between the real world and the virtual are technologies like those of Innovid and VideoTrace. In their virtually real worlds, everything has the potential to not be quite what it appears to be:

“Innovid provides a platform that allows seamless integration of brand advertising into relevant video content.”

“VideoTrace is a system for interactively generating realistic 3D models of objects from video—models that might be inserted into a video game, a simulation environment, or another video sequence.”

Essentially, this is the ultimate product placement, where the product is virtual. We’re looking at the future of advertising, a future where advertising is so targeted to our needs, it’s no longer annoying.

When we combine these technologies, there will be nowhere to hide from advertising, corporate endorsements or sponsorships. Thankfully, such things might just be invisible in the real world, as material costs, environmental pressures and the prevalence of mobile devices means it’s far more practical for advertising to exist in digital form, a layer or two away from the real world, suspended in the electronic ether between this world and that behind a video screen.

When worlds collide

Motion tracking. Voice analysis. Facial and gesture recognition. Real time video effects. CCTV. Incrementally, very clever people are, piece by piece, inventing the various, disparate parts of a new future.

But what kind of a future? We have a choice.

On the one hand, this world of ours becomes a surveillance society. One that is no longer a far off place, confined to the chapters of a science fiction novel. A very real Orwellian present-day future.

On the other hand, we might one day bask in the warm glow of a technological Utopia. A place where our advancements walk in lockstep with our clean and virtuous societies.

It’s probably harsh to try and lay blame at the feet of people with the inspiring, inquiring minds. But the thing is, when their imaginings go beyond the “What if?”, and they either forget or neglect to ask “Why?”, the buzzword and the killer feature of today could become the very real world we live in tomorrow, be that world for the better or for the worse…

Recommended reading

• Serious Science: gesture recognition signals Surveillance 2.0
• The GreenDot Project: Everyone has a unique signature
• ‘Beauty Machine’ Makes Average Face A Knockout With A Single Click
• Keys Can be Copied From Afar, Jacobs School Computer Scientists Show
• What’s the future of advertising?
• Will advertising ever not be annoying?

Now, I’m not saying I’m getting it right every time. But like the old Irish proverb says, it’s the journey that counts, not the arrival. For me, I like to step out into the void of the future unknown and hazard a guess at what might be. The thrill is daring to imagine greater things of man.

Of web traffic and subscriber statistics

This past week as seen the number of subscribers peak sharply not once, but twice. And between the 7th and the 14th, I’ve had over 20,000 visits, split mostly between two recent articles, one being “But video games are bad for kids, right?” and the second being “When internet rumours and urban myths go horribly wrong!”

But why these two articles? Well, it’s all about playing on popular themes that people feel something about. After all, I might write it, but you have to like it!

In the case of the former, parents are concerned that video games are having a negative impact on their kids. Thing is, everyone is saying that, including the popular press, who’re headline-grabbing left, right and centre! So I decided to examine the issue in the opposite direction and see if the opposite is true; that video games actually benefit kids.

The results were highly rewarding. And the comments were great, too. In one of my own comments, I highlighted a mention the article had attracted higher up the media food chain:

“Guys, I got a visit to this article earlier today from another article entitled: ‘Question for Obama: do video games harm kids?‘

It would appear I’ve gone and got myself embroiled in US political debate! Not quite what I had in mind, but it’s certainly interesting to see that some people find my discussion has merit enough to be elevated to the highest political level…”

At that point, you begin to realize that you’re onto something. And this was before the torrent of traffic to the article from StumbleUpon.

In the case of the latter article, not only did I play on a common theme — that being urban myths and internet rumormongery — I also preyed on people’s fears and their often insatiable appetite for the incredible, if not entirely credible.

Every now & then, I like to indulge my own vanity and share my thoughts on various matters, which was the case with urban myths and internet rumours article. I think that contributed in some way towards its appeal. Or is that me just indulging my ego this time?

In any case, the amount of traffic these two articles have attracted has been wonderful, and I offer a big thanks to all those that commented, voted, reviewed and shared those articles.

Thanks — now subscribe to Blah!

All that remains is for me to ask that if you’re not already subscribing, then do so right now!

Also, if you know a friend, family member or work colleague who’s into the big “What if?” on social media trends, technology trends, and thoughts on scientific discoveries, why not recommend the Blah, Blah! Technology blog to them?

Be virtual…