This story on Open democracy taps all the right buttons to scare the hell out of people about the snooping possibilities of Interactive digital TV. And the plans of the marketing people are impressively Machiavellian and need to be watched. But it also falls into the trap of believing the marketing at the next level up.

The people pushing the manipulative benefits of iTV are the same people who have been running the TV game for the last 40 years, and who haven't woken up to the changed reality that surrounds them. These are the people who cry into their beer that not watching the adverts is tantamount to theft of the programming. These are the people who confidently predicted that Digital Television was the next big thing.

I think their word needs to be taken with a grain or two of salt.

yes, theoretically, iTV would enable the kinds of customisation and manipulation that these guys are talking about. But the reality is that customisation is expensive in all sorts of ways. First you have to make the 27 different versions of the commercial to suit each of your demographic splits. The you have to find accurate ways to define, by their actions, who is in each of those splits. My wife mutes the box every time the ads come on, more often she surfs off to some other channel, usually missing the re-entry point into the rerun of Frasier or the Discovery doco. She is not alone, it doesn't matter what ads you serve if the viewer is off having a leak or making coffee.

That doesn't even begin to deal with the reality that we have become extremely good at filtering advertising out of our consciousness. These guys are so desperate they now put adverts on the little plastic bars between the orders on the grocery checkout. (We OWN the Grocery checkout divider space!!!) Fact is, if they need to go that far, they are already in trouble because they have no idea how to reach us effectively, and targeted adverts wont make any difference.

The other point is that TV is such a drug to the senses, and I don't mean a stimulant. All the theories about interactivity with the TV have been wrong because we don't interact with the TV. (OK, except my late mother who watched sports and swore at the umpire and the players.)

yes, its a concern, but these guys taking over our minds is a very long way down the track

I am a New Zealander, so I have absolutely no barrow to push for the Aussies, not after what they did to us in the cricket last night. But Awasu is turning into a very fine application for working with information on the net. Not just a Newsreader, but a real tool for working with distributed information on a network.

And its not just me. Here's one of my favourite Blogs, The Shifted Librarian and a fresh review from Microdocs.

Keep an eye out, this one is going places.

The more I look at what is going on in the Blogosphere the more it seems to me that the Net is making the transition from thinking in terms of "it is just like ..." to thinking in the real terms of the technology. It is the same process that let film shift from being "just like a play" to speaking in its own idiom of pans, close-ups and dissolves.

As usual, the publishing business has been so focused on finding a way to make the net just like their old technology, and getting seduced by the pretty pictures of the web into thinking that it is just slow TV, that they are missing the actual new thing. But they are being co-opted anyway.

The Shifted Librarian Points to the News of the Day Aggregator ....pulling it all together .... where educator Ken Tompkins is pulling together Education News from the NYTimes, the BBC and a whole pile of other sources and making them available online.

The educators seem to be making the running here with RSS for syndicating information about learning objects

The AntiWar crowd is also working in the same vein at the next level up, with their Warblogs CC Metablog

Its like 1996 all over again. Hope we are a little wiser this time.

Remember all those CPU cycles you donated to the SETI Project? Well it seemed they weren't just humming in the vacuum after all. According to Nature magazine, there is a short list of radio sources worth checking again, about 150 of them.

Meanwhile, at a time when US credibility is having some major problems, this doesn't help much

Call to honour space aliens

A bill has been put forward in the United States to designate a day to honour space aliens.

Dan Foley, a Republican from Roswell, New Mexico, the area where some say aliens landed, proposed an "Extra-terrestrial Culture Day" every second Thursday in February.

Mr Foley asked for the bill "in recognition of the many visitations, sightings, unexplained mysteries and technological advances... of alien beings" in New Mexico.

The legislation aims to "enhance relationships among all the citizens of the cosmos, known and unknown," he added.

Mr Foley said by creating a day of alien celebration - interest in aliens and economic benefit - can be spread to the rest of the state. ..."If we can capitalise on something that did or did not happen in 1947 then it can help the entire state," he said.

File-sharing network offers 'Honest Thief' software

A Dutch Internet company has announced the launch of file-sharing software that could be used to compensate artists for music stolen over the Internet.

There's no doubt that something important is happening on the Internet again. For those of us lucky enough to be directly involved from the beginning, I'm sure it feels very familiar. My history on the net only goes back to 1996 but that's how it looks to me. Iteration, getting it a little bit more right each time, rising like a spiral from the ground into the air. feels good, but what is it?

I'm calling it chewing(TM ) in the way that Inuit soften and prepare a sealskin for working by sharing the chewing around the edges first. Something similar is going on with Blogs and it has almost nothing to do with online journals, egotism, public venting and guts-spilling.

The combination of Blogs, Trackback, RSS feeds and aggregators and meta-aggregators, Blogdex, Blogroll, Technorati cosmos and the fact that Google has bought Blogger indicates that something exciting is going on. We are moving towards an isometric information network that creates value at the ends and then feeds it back into itself, where information competes for attention by making itself available through as many channels as possible, and people like Awasu and FM Radio and others are building the tools that we will need to do this stuff.

This meme is taking off. Damn i wish LJ had Trackback enabled. Anyone know how to do that? Anyway get this

Not only do the stories in my blog describe my road of discovery through listening, but following the dialogue that often results from these stories is a journey of discovery as well, and appeals to the feeling of wonder I had as a 3 yr old when confronted with the world.

Dialogue in the blogosphere is somewhat hidden from the casual
observer, especially if this observer is used to e-mail or forums. Responses to my posts seldom come in the form of comments as added to the original posts. Comments usually deal with short messages (Great post!), or impromptu responses that the commenter does not deem appropiate to blog about himself.

Because that is where I'll find the reactions to my posts: in other blogs.
And I have to discover these responses for myself.
A whole range of tools helps me do that, my visitor statistics keep track of which sites refer to me, likewise tools like Technorati, Blogdex and the like. That's how I find where I'm quoted. Also my newsaggregator keeps track of blogs I find of interest, and, as I will explain when talking about relationships in the blogosphere, the blogs I find of interest are often the ones that respond to my blog as well. But this is all invisible on my blog!

I have a gig in July at Questnet in the Gold Coast and the subject we will be talking about is how Education can be a driver for the uptake of broadband. Now one thing is clear, while business and government and entertainment dived in to the net will mega bucks in the late 90's, education has dragged along behind in a big way.

You might be dumb enough to suggest that educators are uniquely resistant to new ideas, that they are irredeemably conservative or just plain too stupid to see the glories of the technology. You might, I wouldn't.

My take on this is that the technology has not yet provided anything that professionally interests educators and they see no reason to spend their scarce resources on wild goose chases. I'll defend that; I think this technology has failed the education sector more spectacularly than any other.

But I think that is changing. The earlier post about the way educators are taking the lead in the application of these new ideas suggests to me that, at last, we are beginning to create the tools they need.

And the heart of education is dialogue, the chewing and re chewing and worrying at information until it turns from the raw data of a sealskin into the soft, pliable, useful material that can be sewn into a boot or a glove or a kayak.

What Blogs and their associated technologies are doing is creating the possibility that we will, at last, start dealing with information in useful and collaborative ways using information technology. It wont be flashy, it wont be all singing all dancing, but it will be very clever, bordering on intelligent, although that might have to wait till the next iteration.

Will it drive the uptake of Broadband? Good question, see you at Questnet.