e-Madness or what?

In our need to computerize all our daily goodies Koga Miyata has made the next step. Their Tesla S tour bicycle is software driven. The software helps you to control the electric engine and the amount of support it delivers. Next to that it informs you constantly about the remaining battery life. Okay, I can see the benefit of these features as you go for a long ride in the Dutch polder wind.

But how about this, when you bring your bike for maintenance it's plugged in at the dealer to get a full service read out on the computer screen! It sounds fabulous, but I wonder what there is to read out since most bicycle parts are still mechanic. I'm sure it's really nifty software and that your Koga will run even smoother after a computerized service check-up. But let’s be honest, haven't we gone mad? If we have nothing better to do I suggest we spend some time at more useful features. How come bikes still get stolen for instance, or why do we still end up with flat tires all the time.

I'm lost without FFFFound

I've been addicted to FFFFound for a couple of weeks now. It's a very neat bookmarkingsite for images. The images displayed on this site are truly amazing (well most of them are). From psychedelic graphics to retro advertisements it is just awesome to look at.

There is just one thing that I don’t like (but secretly I do): you can’t register for it yourself. You need an invite from somebody, just like Gmail used to have. It is brilliant and frustrating at the same time that I can’t seem to get an invite. Since I’ve discovered FFFFound I’m lost without it.

Truth or truthyness?

The other day I saw a rather interesting documentary about Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia on the internet. It seems like no matter what you're looking for, your search engine will always come up with some Wikipedia pages as part of your search results. “Great!” You'll think, stop the search, there is this bulk of information just around the corner. Unfortunately you can wonder whether this is really true. Sure, Wikipedia holds millions of pages about thousands of subjects. Ten thousands of people discussed these subjects, but, does this mean you can rely on Wikipedia? Does the huge amount of writers, editors and opinions really make the content more reliable?

The two founders of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, struggled with the same question. Jimmy Wales is still a strong believer of free editorship and uncensored contribution. Wikipedia to him is as valuable as for instance the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Larry Sanger however left Wikipedia, since he couldn't let the public decide what his online encyclopedia should contain. From his point of view Wikipedia can only be reliable as long as professional editors moderate every single bit of content.

The question probably is whether the truth of the expert can compete with the truthyness of the 14 year old kid altering some content on the internet. I guess In the end we are responsible ourselves, and checking facts should probably be done by comparing multiple sources, just like in the old days.

Internet celebrities: good or bad?

Comedy Central recently decided to show all South Park episodes online for free. In exchange for a few commercials in the middle of the show you can watch all the episodes for free. It is an upcoming trend that companies give products away for free, and make money on selling advertisements. But I’m not going to talk about giving away free stuff. I want to discuss this week’s episode.

I know what you’re thinking: Indivirtual makes websites and shouldn’t care about TV shows but this week’s episode does concern our line of business. The makers decided to do an episode with a spoof of all the people who got famous on the internet. Andy Warhol once said that in the future everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes; he was right. People like Chris “leave her alone” Crocker and Fat Star wars kid are big hits on Youtube and they're now featuring in this week’s episode. It’s interesting and weird at the same time that people without any form of talent are getting their short moments of fame on Youtube and are becoming famous for no obvious reason. For example:
this guy . He looks like a typical gamer with a personality disorder; however by posting his video on Youtube he now has got over 380.000 hits on Google. Chris Crocker got famous by trying to protect Britney Spears and walked away with his own reality show.

I don’t know if all these internet celebrities are a good or a bad thing, I like to watch these videos, but somehow I’m a bit disappointed by the development of the internet and content created by normal people like you and me. It hasn’t evolved at all and offers the same quality of popular 90’s show “America’s funniest home videos”. And in this business not going forward means going backward.