For more on digital ownership, listen to Columbia Law Professor Eben Moglen's outstanding talk:

Before and After IP: Ownership of Ideas in the 21st Century, Digital Studies Group, CUNY Graduate Center, November 17. 2010 (audio stream). Download: Ogg Vorbis | MP3

and for a more radical view on who should on what in cyberspace, read Mogeln's classic:

DotCommunist Manifesto

From now on, follow my work at my new blog address:

JPowers.IN3.ORG

Subscribe to JPowers.IN3.ORG via RSS

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

London architecture student Keiichi Matsuda has posted a brilliant and scary visualization of the near future of augmented reality. At the beginning of the 106 second video, a consumer's Advertising Level is set to maximum; his visual field (we assume a heads-up display, maybe built into eyewear) is filled with "rich media advertising," overlapping animated logos and audio pitches for hundreds of products. A meter on the Level control indicates how much he's being paid to watch all those ads.

He brings down the Advertising Level just a bit and the ads are tuned down to virtual billboards placed on the walls of his kitchen. To make a cup of tea, he taps a Tetley logo and a synthetic voice talks him through tea making, pointing out the kettle and the refrigerator with AR markers.

Before grabbing the milk, he checks in with a gesture to his social media feeds, displayed in 3D over a virtual meadow. While the tea is brewing, a biomonitor indicates it's time to purge some liquid waste, so he sets the Advertising Level to maximum to make a few pennies while he pees.

The nightmare is that AR will be consumed by advertising, specifically location-based, real-time, contextual, behaviorally targeted permission marketing. Most of today's best AR is trying to sell something up close and personal. As the tech gets smarter and stronger, the temptation to spam will expand exponentially.

(Matsuda shows a slightly scratchy, inconsistent AR feed. The overlays sometimes drop out as the display system loses synch or maybe picks up some RF interference, and the images lack opacity and resolution. I've always mistrusted the Star Trek holodeck stories in which people can't tell the difference between virtual and real. I'll bet we'll always be able to know when we're being augmented ... at least I hope so.)

Good line: "People are dead, and new people have been born, because of what happens in cyberspace."

Marker-based desktop apps like GE's Smart Grid promotion get early-adopting users to print a special target and jiggle it in front of a web cam, but a little too much jiggling, bad lighting or a pokey PC can easily trash the 3D effect. GPS-driven AR browsers like Layar and Wikitude cram lots of data onto a small smartphone screen, but then the jiggle comes from the user's compass tracking, network latency and GPS synch. Professional augmented video like the virtual first-down line and digital product placement make it look easy; by comparison, today's AR apps don't offer a solid user experience.

And yet. We can imagine many opportunities to link data to the physical world. We already have a lot of location data on-line. Our culture is increasingly infographical. And smartphones with mobile broadband are obviouiesly coming on strong. If we can get it right, there should be some great work to be done.

ARNY, a new Meetup Group in New York City, showcases demos of new work: "5 speakers, 5 AR demos, 5 minutes each + Q&A." Last night's meeting was held at 75 Varick Street, a building that was once a major center of New York's printing industry. Now it's home to Porter Novelli, one of the best tech PR firms that is smartly creating a beachhead for itself in AR. The demos included games (yawn), some proofs of concept, and a few interesting apps for Zagat and Lego. As important, pioneers got together to nudge and wink over the latest inventions, gossip and vendor perfidy, the first steps in building a serious tech community in naked reality. Organizers Ori Inbar and Chris Grayson do a very good job.

A new report from SoftwareAdvice.com, Don’t Wait for the Government to Start Your EHR Implementation, advises physicians to install the new gear now because "it’s nearly certain that you will qualify for ARRA incentives" to pay for the effort, and besides, the potential savings are bigger than the stimulus bump.

I'm an EMR skeptic, and there seems to be a lot of clauses, criteria and certifications attached to the money, but analyst Chris Thorman thinks docs will get the money back from the feds, "more than likely."

But here's the thing: it hasn't made me richer or happier. I've learned a lot from all the blogs and feeds, I like keeping up with long lost friends, and I've profitably lurked in Twitter streams to see which links smart people are sharing, but it all takes too much time. Spam in ubiquitous, 140 characters is gibberish, and I don't need real time search. User-generated content is mostly garbage and the professional stuff often link bait.

For me, closed loops are no fun. Who cares what my friends think? Most of them hate each other anyway. I'd rather learn about the things my little circle doesn't know about and do my work better, smarter, faster, deeper. That's why we dreamed up this worldwide thing in the first place.

Starting now, everything I write will either be here on this blog or – if it's big or worth saving – on my main site IN3.ORG. I'm consolidating HealthcareNBIC and Pervasive.TV into tagged posts, combining the Twitter feeds @JackPowers, @hNBIC and @ConferenceIdeas with follow lists, and posting forwarding messages and auto-tweets elsewhere.

I've only got about 50 years left. I want to make the most of them.

Dan Bricklin / Image via Wikipedia

Dan brought out his new book, Bricklin on Technology, a compilation of his blogs, podcasts and essays over the last decade.

He read from the book -- from his old blog posts -- and illustrated his talk with pictures from the East Coast birthplace of computing around Route 128 near Boston back in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Dan unrolled ancient scrolls from the before-time: DEC minicomputers, dumb terminals, the Apple II, the revolutionary Harris 2200 page layout machine, the first IBM PC and some promo videos for spreadsheet programs that eclipsed VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel. The audience roared at the 1980s dweebs in three piece suits dancing to a pre-Windows jingle as Dan told about inventing the spreadsheet in a wet basement in Massachusetts. In the background were Gates and Jobs but also the armies of hopeful start-ups, brilliant programmers, careful CFOs, lucky salesmen and visionary inventors who drove computing onto every desk and into every home in those years.

Dan's been there and done that. While he prototyped his great invention on a minicomputer and coded it for MS-DOS and cashed out before Windows, he got back up on the horse and founded Slate, an early tablet computer start-up, and Trellix, an early blog-enabling firm. Last night, he mused about new opportunities in gesture interfaces, multi-user networked apps and the future of mobile computing.

Throughout his talk, Dan would mention some tech -- like the 2200 -- and ask the audience if they'd ever heard of it. Response there was none. The mixed crowd of greybeard engineers, grasping entrepreneurs and biz dev naifs knew little about the roots of the industry that they serve. For them, the world was born with Windows 95 or Netscape or Google or Facebook or the iPhone.

I've always felt that that reaction was fine. I've always tried to avoid chewing the fat with old-timers about punched cards, mag tape and the good old days of Atex and Wang. Whatever nostalgia buzz you get, it's irrelevant that a terrabyte used to be unthinkable and that a computer used to cost more than a BMW. We're all going to live in the future where none of that old junk matters.

And yet.  Humans have been crafting tools since the beginning, and there's a lot we can learn from the way we did things in the past. (Those who've never read Santayana are doomed to repeat him.) The iPhone didn't spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, it's the evolution of a lot of ideas that have been rattling around for forty or fifty years.

But it's hard to see the big picture when you're struggling in the day-to-day and your head is too full of what is rather than what could be. Friday's payroll or the next quarter or your investors' liquidity event is a mere milestone on a long path. Folks like Dan remind us that it's not whether you make Gates money or Jobs money or Page/Brin money, it's what you invent, what you build and what you leave behind.

It's important work. Reviewers read schools' applications containing narrative descriptions of programs of study and participate in site visits to schools to observe the programs in action.

We need folks from real life to make sure the kids are getting what they need. Do one school. Do many schools. But get involved. Review the paperwork in May and June; visit the school in the Fall.

The hot programs that need reviewing by the end of June are:

• Medical Laboratory and Assisting Program in Biotechnology
• Academy of Hospitality & Tourism
• Commercial Photography
• Construction Technology, Carpentry, Plumbing
• Culinary Arts
• Graphics & Illustration
• Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning
• Nursing Assistant
• Practical Nursing
• Transit Technician
• Vision Technology

... but there are hundreds of programs that could use a thorough review by people with experience in business and industry. If you work in these fields -- or know somebody who does who's amenable -- get an email to the fabulous Reina Utsunomiya at the New York City Department of Education: RUtsunomiya@schools.nyc.gov. (If you need convincing or stroking, contact me: JPowers@IN3.ORG, 718-499-1884.)

Here's your chance to quit Twittering and do some good, face-to-face. You'll be surprised by how many smart, dedicated teachers are doing truly great things to get kids ready for the world. And they really need your help.

(For some examples about the ways industry gets involved with education, see our Graphics Industry Advisory sites at GTexchange.org)

The Internet has always featured user-generated content: home pages, email, chat lines, fan fiction, blogs, wall postings and the Fifth Circle of Hell -- wrathful and sullen comment threads. But the public Internet also delivers exabytes of professionally-generated content: the academic, journalistic, literary and -- most recently -- cinematic. It's got people we don't like, ideas we're afraid of, philosophies we haven't considered, chances we're not ready to take. It's life. The world. Everything.

Social networks carve up the Net into special interest groups so we mainly see the people who think like we do. No wonder the marketers and spammers are all over social media: we do their research work for them by lining up into the correct psychographic. I think I prefer a life that's not so easily pigeonholed.

I've just updated the IN3 think piece Age & IT Experience that plots the current age of managers, employees and customers against the big developments in information technology. It's a good party starter: find your age when the IBM PC was launched, when streaming media happened, when Google Maps came out. Try to imagine how people from other life experiences feel about tech, and try to avoid the ageist notion that your cohort is the only one that matters, the only one that deeply understands.

It's a different kind of diversity with wide variations in adoption rates, dexterities, familiarity with digital concepts, comfort levels. Everybody comes from a different place on the map, and we'll all fall off the chart eventually as technology passes us by. With the aging workforce, maybe we should add columns for 65-, 75- and 85-year-olds. After all,we start with COBOL in 1960.

The tech-cultural column is very subjective, with headlines from politics and pop culture. Some companies customize the chart with their own industry milestones, and I can imagine versions for healthcare, education and politics. What do you think?