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Cool site man on NYT

“He started Cool Site in 1994, after discovering the thrill of happening upon an especially interesting Web site and telling his friends what he had found. Within a year, more than 20,000 people a day were visiting the site, and Mr. Davis became a Web celebrity, giving interviews to online magazines and fending off gifts from Webmasters who were desperately seeking his recommendation of their sites. ”

“Today, Mr. Davis has not only kicked his Web habit but also almost completely given up the medium. The Cool Site of the Day still exists, but it is no longer run by Mr. Davis, who has also lost his enthusiasm for trolling for new pages.”

Ray Kurzweil

Kurzweil

“A comprehensive archive of works written by Editor-in-Chief Raymond C. Kurzweil. Also, a directory of selected articles about Kurzweil or the Kurzweil companies.”

“After the Singularity: A Talk with Ray Kurzweil By Raymond Kurzweil

John Brockman, editor of Edge.org, recently interviewed Ray Kurzweil on the Singularity and its ramifications. According to Ray, “We are entering a new era. I call it ‘the Singularity.’ It’s a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence that is going to create something bigger than itself. It’s the cutting edge of evolution on our planet. One can make a strong case that it’s actually the cutting edge of the evolution of intelligence in general, because there’s no indication that it’s occurred anywhere else. To me that is what human civilization is all about. It is part of our destiny and part of the destiny of evolution to continue to progress ever faster, and to grow the power of intelligence exponentially. To contemplate stopping that–to think human beings are fine the way they are–is a misplaced fond remembrance of what human beings used to be. What human beings are is a species that has undergone a cultural and technological evolution, and it’s the nature of evolution that it accelerates, and that its powers grow exponentially, and that’s what we’re talking about. The next stage of this will be to amplify our own intellectual powers with the results of our technology.” (Added March 27th 2002)”

Plenty more there along those lines…

The Singularity – interesting – originates with Vinge and links cyber c with the romantics?

CyberPsychology

CyberPsychology

“This page has links to a number of papers by Hugh Miller and Jill Arnold, of the Department of Social Sciences at Nottingham Trent University, about identity and Web pages.
We’ve also included links to a number of other sites that we’ve found useful and interesting.
We’re keen to make contact with other people who are interested in this area, so feel free to email Hugh or Jill, especially if you’re thinking of linking to this page or to any of our papers: we’d probably like to see your site.
Jill has a questionnaire (and an opportunity to contact her for an interview) about identity and personal home pages.”

This is a site worth having as it identifies something very vital – web pages and identity. Virtual life does not require the paraphernalia of The Matrix, just the Net as we know it.

Later: Friday, 6 June, 2008

The link is now behind a password, but here are some related ones:

Jill Arnold

Article

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Matthew Broersma doing an Eric Raymond interview.

Centralization doesn’t scale

“If you want to go to a really fundamental analysis, what we’re perpetually rediscovering on a scale of complexity is that centralization doesn’t work. Centralization doesn’t scale, and when you push any human endeavor to a certain threshold of complexity you rediscover that.”

Validating Web pages

Update

Having a busy time in the Psybernet website. Been updating the pages. I am happier with all those that have the

Valid HTML 4.0!

sign on them. They validate, are up-to-date and have been spell-checked. If there are glaring errors, or even minor ones on those pages – let me know.