In addition the the sad passing of respected writer and film director Anthony Minghella, it is sad news that the visionary author Arthur C Clarke has also died today. Although best known for writing the film 2001 which was filmed by Stanley Kubrick he was a well established as visionary and respected author long before this.  Clarke had published papers describing things such as geo-stationary orbit years before it was achieved – something that is central to our everyday lives and take for granted.  The BBC has full Obituary here.

  MIT have implemented a fascinating site that analyzes net traffic showing which cities around the world the traffic is travelling to and from. The traffic is then being brilliantly visualised.  The project was developed to help people analyse and understand the volumes of traffic and how it changes over time.  To see the site go here.

The RIAA are being sued by a woman who was mistakenly sued for file sharing.  The case is likely to result in the RIAA disclosing both their process model (lawyers fees, what money goes back to the artists from settlements, how organisations such as Media Sentry are paid, how settlement figures are arrived at) and how they acquire the information on which their cases are built. Given the RIAA’s apparent track record in the area of acquiring information this could look bad, if not criminal.

If the disclosure of such information does look criminal and reach the public domain then it could trigger off a class action from all those who have been on the receiving end of the RIAA’s claims.  It would be very ironic if the class action does come to court as it could end up costing the RIAA more than they have recovered in settlements.  It would validate the argument that its bad business to sue all of your customers.

What ever happens, the outcome is likely to be months away, possibly even years.  For more detail on the case see the Wired article here.

I have to admit having been a little unconvinced by social networking sites, they seem to only offer a poor man’s version of a web presence, photo sharing that pails besides Flickr, blogging that can’t touch WordPress et al. So my MySpace presence is only because I use MSN Messenger and it gives me a chance to create more links back to my own site – verging on anti-google-bashing. I picked up on LinkedIn purely because it provides a professional presence (something that some may suggest my domain name might not provide).

Then I signed up to Facebook, more out of curiosity, and a bit more more anti-google-bashing.  But the provision of the APIs has made a world of difference. I can integrate my Flickr and LinkedIn profiles along with a dozen other best of bread solutions.

Over the years the number of people who attend conference presentations and have laptops out to take notes has grown and grown – understandable given how laptop prices have dropped.  But watching a presentations here at JBoss World Orlando, has left me thinking that there is an opportunity to be had in terms of allowing peoples laptops to show and record what is being shown on the presenters screen, and allow the laptop user to annotate as things went along.  After all if you’re in a medium sized conference suite amongst a see of upright laptop monitors it can be hard to see the presenters screen clearly.  The basic idea isn’t exactly new either  after all web meeting tools such as GoToMeeting pretty much do this.  The only difference is that the server would need to run on the presenter’s computer equipment through a local wireless hub.