0. General

• Everything you ever need to know by John Naughton in the Guardian is a long but thoughtful analysis of the impact of the Internet.
• Growth of the Internet from 1998 to 2008 [INFOGRAPHIC]
• Undersea Cable Set To Boost West Africa Broadband (Epicenter)

1. Translation

• The Mojofiti social networking website uses real-time machine translation to allow users to transparently collaborate with others in 27 languages. (SingularityHub.com) The languages aren’t just Latin-based, but Asian languages like Korean, Tagalog or Farsi. The translations aren’t perfect but might be “good enough.”
• Google Translates Multilingual Web Into One Universal Tongue: Chrome (Fast Company)

2. Crowdsourcing

• If you’re interested in crowdsourcing folks to make lists, twtpick.in might be your best bet. See Robert Scoble’s review and interview with the founder.
• So You Want to Try Crowdsourcing? (A field guide for making crowdsourcing work)
• Councilpedia Uses Crowdsourcing to Link Money, Politics in NYC

3. Surveillance & Espionage

• A new technology makes it possible to record keyboards being typed on, analyze the audio signal, and determine what keys were struck (Economist).
• Muslim uses Facebook profiles to find and target Christians (Mission Network News)
• USA: Internet monitoring needed to fight homegrown terrorism (Fox News)

4. Geolocation services

• The Fast-Growing Location Market (Atlantic): knowing where you are can be worth a lot of money.

5. Banking & Finance & Peer-to-Peer Exchanges

• In “Banking on mobile phones: out of thin air,” the Economist looks at the behind-the-scenes logistics of Kenya’s “mobile-money miracle”: banking conducted via mobile phones, used by 9.5 million people or 23% of the population, and transferring 11% of Kenya’s GDP each year—inspiring 60 similar programs across the world.
• PayPal 2.0 “Bumps” Money Between iPhones [Downloads]

6. Information overload and the inability to decide

• The Coming Data Explosion (KurzweilAI.net): more and more things are being connected to the Internet, and a new computing platform is required to deal with this massive influx of exascale data & the demand to process it in real-time.
• Statistics for a changing world: Google Public Data Explorer in Labs

7. Robotics

8. Manufacturing & Replication

• Rise of the replicators: researchers & hobbyists around the world are developing desktop manufacturing plants. Low-cost versions of a 3D printer are already available for a few hundred dollars.

9. Biotechnology

10. Collaboration & Sharing

• Easier sharing in Google Docs: new public/private options are rolled out.
• TinyChat Offers Chat Sessions Controlled by Twitter Usernames [Chat]: easily created one-off disposable chat rooms associated with a twitter client

11. Free technologies (and some cheap ones too)

12. Translation

• Giving a voice to more languages on Google Translate: the ability to hear translations spoken out loud by clicking the speaker icon.

14. Advanced, Edgy Technologies (which we can’t otherwise classify)

• Parrot AR.Drone to attack this September, for $300: your own stable quadricopter drone, controlled by iPhone via WiFi.

15. Government regulation

• Lawsuit Posits Social Network Connects Are a Noncompete Violation: In a first-of-its kind lawsuit, an IT-staffing firm has accused one of its former employees of violating the terms of her non-compete agreements through her conduct on LinkedIn.

16. Power

• Extreme DIY: building a homemade nuclear reactor in New York City

17. Books & Libraries

• With the latest update, iBooks will now accept PDFs – retaining their full formatting. This means the iPad (or the iPhone) could become significant portable libraries of missions material. Any PDF (e.g. Mission Frontiers, the Perspectives reader, the World Christian Foundation courses, etc) could be easily viewed on an iPad.

18. Mobile

• Soon, There’ll Be More Mobile Web Users In China Than People In The United States

19. Social Networking

• The Million Follower Fallacy: Audience Size Doesn’t Prove Influence on Twitter

20. Technology & Theology

• ‘Theology After Google’ conference takes look at religion in Web era

21. Technology & Missions

• How Technology Is Changing, or Should Change, the Way the Gospel Is Shared
• The Inseparable Bond of Technology & Mission
• Ten Ways the Internet Is Changing Evangelism and Missions
• The 21st Century Roman Road: How Technology Is Changing Missions
• The Challenge of Keeping Up with Technology for Ministry

http://bit.ly/c8z0XI – Hiding from Surveillance, or spammers: Google users can now run encrypted searches by going to https://www.google.com.

Google has added the ability to speak translations of English text into additional languages, including five of the largest unreached peoples in the world. Now covered: English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, French, Italian, German, Hindi, Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh. (Did you spot the UPGs?)

@WhereIsBruce writes, “Hey all you Skypers – Just saw Skype will be offering 5-way video calling. Huge for global .org like SIM http://bit.ly/cvfWNi”

I don’t go to big conferences so much any more because (1) they are too expensive, (2) they do not make introductions to likely good contacts easy, (3) most of the people I interact with I no longer need to see at a conference – I can talk with in a cheap/free Skype call. This will only exacerbate that.

Ericsson announced mobile data traffic surpassed voice traffic worldwide, amounting to more than 140,000 terabytes per month, generated by 400 million smartphones (vs. 4.6 billion mobile subscribers making voice calls). Mobile providers are worried about the capacity of their networks as smartphone usage grows. In ReadWriteWeb.

Etacts.com looks to be a phenomenally useful little plugin for Gmail, much like Xobni for Outlook. When you’re viewing an email, it will automatically show you details about the person writing you – including your contact history with them, their recent tweets, and other social networking information. There’s also a little button for setting up a schedule for staying in touch with the person. I’m still exploring but this is definitely one plugin I think I’ll be keeping around. See review at Lifehacker.

TypeWith.Me makes it possible to collaboratively write/edit a document: a “solid, simple, as-you-type document with no signup require.” HT: Lifehacker.

Here’s my 3 step process to finding loads of great articles.

1. Add bunches of subscriptions to Google Reader.
a) Create folders on various topics of interest to you
b) Spend time finding the 10 best blogs you can find on each topic.
c) subscribe those blogs’ RSS feeds and categorize them by folder.
d) Sort each subscription “by magic” – Reader will learn and bring you headlines it thinks you want.

2. Skim lots of headlines in Google Reader.
a) Spend time getting good at spotting potentially good headlines.
b) Skim fast, starring headlines that are potentially good.
c) Go back and spend time on the starred items.
d) “Like” the items that are indeed good, “Share”  those “really really” good.

3. Watch as Google Reader learns from your Likes/Shares.
a) Start reading in the “All Items” folder – and notice the vast majority of good headlines will, over time, bubble to the first few pages.

Once you’ve got this system going, you can add loads of subscriptions to Reader – I presently have over 300 or 400 – because “sort by magic” will tend to bring you good articles. I never worry about the unread count. Every so often I mark “as read” everything more than 2 weeks old. The more subscriptions you have, the more likely it is that a really important article will get picked up and reblogged, so you’ll catch it.

A new feature – currently only the development version of Chrome 5 – will automatically detect the language of a web page and translate it without opening a new page. Now you can read all of those Spanish language mission pages by COMIBAM.

Bill Gates reviews a provocative book, Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food, about agricultural biotechnology.