First it was the war in Iraq. Then it was global warming. Then it was subprime.

Now there is a forecast that sunspot activity is intensifying and within the next four years could be significant enough to knock out a lot of our digital devices.

Here is the forecast:

Detours
Clumps of ions in the atmosphere could interfere with GPS. Satellite signals are slowed by bumping into particles, meaning your trusty navigator may lose its way. Remember those colorful paper things called maps?

Falling Satellites
Increased solar energy heats Earth's atmosphere, causing it to expand. That's a drag on low-flying satellites and can even knock them out of orbit. A solar storm in 1979 deposited Skylab on Australia.

Layovers in Alaska
Particles are drawn to Earth's magnetic poles, right through popular flight paths. Electrons absorb the energy in shortwave signals, causing radio blackouts — and unscheduled stops in Anchorage.

Light Shows
Auroras occur when waves of charged particles light up gases in the upper atmosphere. As more particles stream in, the so-called aurora oval grows, bringing the "northern lights" as far south as Key West.

The Home Page Daily site seems to be finding a really good balance of material now. Over the last couple of days every video that I have viewed there has been tremendous.

Of course this could just mean that there is an increasing level of professionalism in the content that is being made available. One of the videos that I discovered at HPD was this one from Real News.

I just heard this track from John Fogerty for the first time this morning.... Absolutely sensational. Rocks like Little Richard did back in the early 60's and has a message for right now.

Wake up, people. Social networks give us the ability to communicate and to influence. First stop is to influence each other and to become active. And there are still a lot of fruitcakes out there who don't get the fact that the human race has some serious challenges ahead and they are here right now. The #1 challenge is humanity itself and its inability to deal with its own pollution.....

Enough of that - listen to the song!


I Can't Take It No More
I Can't Take It No More
I'm sick and tired of your dirty little war
I Can't Take It No More

You know you lied about the casualties
You know you lied about the WMD's
You know you lied about the detainees
All over this world

Stop talking about staying the course
You keep a-beating that old dead horse
You know you lied about how we went to war
I Can't Take It No More

I can't take it
I can't take it

I bet you never saw the old school yard
I bet you never saw the national guard
Your daddy wrote a check and there you are
Another fortunate son
I can't take it no more

It is amazing how addictive Facebook becomes.

I just discovered a really useful tool for the face though. Its called Blog Friends. You plug it in and it scans blogs that your 'friends' have and gives you an update of new entries. And additionally lists 2nd degree of separation (friends of friends) blog entries.

I'm interested now to find out how much google juice this adds to a blog, since presumably, the more you blog, the more your entries show up in other people's blogs. This surely has to create a quite subtle viral activity for one's blogging activity.

2 weeks ago on July 14th I did some research on the number of friends Australian politicians had on MySpace.

I thought it would be interesting to see what, if any, changes there have been over the last two weeks, to those that I originally researched.

Here are the results - previous numbers in brackets.

Howard Government –  9 Friends (8)
Kevin Rudd – 9545 Friends (4131)
Bob Brown – 958 Friends (181)
Andrew Bartlett – 573 Friends (261)
Steve Fielding –  60 Friends (5)
Peter Garrett –  1040 Friends  (933)
Joe Hockey – 567 Friends (275)
Kerry Nettle – 205 Friends (83)
Tanya Plibersek – 201 Friends (101)
Malcolm Turnbull – 229 Friends (123)
Warren Snowdon –241 Friends (26)
Dennis Jensen – 95 Friends (6)
Julia Gillard – 1671 Friends (778)
Wayne Swan – 417 Friends (180)
Stephen Conroy –  208 Friends (112)
Maxine McKew –  573 Friends (133)
Nicola Roxon –  149 Friends (66)
Greg Combet –  553 Friends (342)
Steve Ciobo –  100 Friends (71)
Sam Crosby –  10 Friends (10)

The take away: Even the Liberal Party can grow its friends! But Sam Crosby can't....

Here is a book I am looking forward to reading, from the review I just read by David Marr. Silencing Dissent is a collection of essays about how the public has been propagandized in Australia. It started long before our current Prime Minister, but he has certainly fostered it, and accelerated it.

Here is a part of the review:

He came to office in 1996 with a list of people to be targeted and removed from universities, government authorities and the public service. In his first week, he sacked the heads of six departments. Those senior bureaucrats who survived Howard's purge were instructed in future to report all calls by journalists to the Prime Minister's press office. The new communications minister Richard Alston was soon lashing the ABC over budgets and bias. And the new men and women in power were deploying a new rhetoric of abuse against the critics they lumped together in a shadowy conspiracy called the left.

Touted as a contest of values, this was really a party political assault on Australia's liberal culture. In the name of "balance" the Liberal Party agenda muscled its way into the intellectual life of the country. And the party had changed. This wasn't the vaguely patrician party of Malcolm Fraser. Small business had triumphed and brought to government the ethos of the corner shop.

Robert Cringely has an incredibly perceptive insight into the Googleplex and its vision for the future here.

He sees Google building a portfolio of data centres and bandwidth... substantially under the radar of everyone who should be paying attention...  all with an eye on video.

Google is building a LOT of data centers. The company appears to be as attracted to cheap and reliable electric power as it is to population proximity. In Goose Creek they bought those 520 acres from the local state-owned electric utility, which probably answers the land question posed above. By buying out all the remaining building sites in an industrial park owned by an electric utility, Google guarantees itself a vast and uninterruptible supply of power, much as it has done in Oregon by building a data center next to a hydroelectric dam or back here again in Columbia by building near a nuclear power station.

Of course this doesn't answer the question why Google needs so much capacity in the first place, but I have a theory on that. I think Google is building for a future they see but most of the rest of us don't. I'll go further and guess that Google is planning to build similar data centers in many states and that the two centers they are apparently preparing to build here in South Carolina are probably intended mainly to SERVE South Carolina. That's perhaps 100,000 servers for four million potential users or 40 users per server. What computing service could possibly require such resources?

Video is going to be the future. And the traditional media players are not far behind Google. And the TV station proprieters, the newspaper owners, even radio networks are all in the game too, along with the major telcos. This is a truly high stakes poker game. But I don't think that it will be fought in the US. I believe that the real game for all online media is China. Broadband is rolling out at an incredible rate. China is preparing to stun the world at the Beijing Olympics. They don't have legacy copper network issues to deal with - it is all mobile there....

I have been watching the evolution of One Minute World from behind the scenes - the production end of the program, the development of the business model and the creative concepts.

It is not just that the barriers to entry have fallen in terms of price of technology. It is also the fact that there are now talented graduates coming out of universities that have grown up around a massively changing media landscape. Take Will and Yvette: Both of them are totally natural in front of the camera, and both are involved too in the production end of the OMW program. Will and Yvette both do editing using Final Cut Pro. Yvette designed and made the animated top and tail of the program - and both are involved in the creative concepts too...

And because they are also totally different as individuals they have entirely different views on the things that they talk about. Robyn, the Executive Producer of the program sets the scene conceptually and they take it away....

This episode is the first of many on 'dating'. Worth watching this to then see where this goes to.... (I have seen some of the follow up episodes uncut - going totally to the edge!)

What's web 2.0, we get asked a lot. One example. Firefox is a great browser. Microsoft have stolen ideas for their Explorer 7.0.  But download Skype 3.0 beta. Then see how one idea talks to another. Using Firefox you see phone numbers highlighted on websites. One click and there's a connection, via Skype, to that telephone, anywhere in the world. Simple, cheap, one thing leading to another.

Unbelievable how quickly ugly minds now find ways to screw up great things. Spam emails are  a huge headache. Denial of service attacks strive to kill off legit websites daily. Stuff we fight daily are the obscene blog trackbacks multiplying like mushrooms. What end do they serve? Spam email I get, (not like, get) along with with standard scams like phishing, pharming etc etc. But suggestive trackbacks? Mindless.