Print. Broadcast. Online.
A jet stream on global politics. Hot like a sirocco, cold like a mistral. An airstream of financial news, ending up in a trade wind of dark clouds.
Your own article hoping to sail in tailwind, dreaming of becoming a twister, but in the end it’s just a mild zephyr.
A crosswind diverts your focus onto something minor while you are unaware that a sandstorm is reaching you soon.
To some a survival reaction is to move inside and switch off the sources. You can do that. It’s not real weather. But you also know you just can’t do that, not for very long.
How about building your own wind farm?
Counting the number of entries in my password database I’ll soon reach the psychological limit of a hundred online accounts. How can you possibly manage all that in a timely fashion? Some web applications out there can help you in the first place. One I used to use is netvibes which offers you a “dashboard” view.
But if you’re a techie like me – and you’d like to keep it fully under your control – you can build your own “wind farm”. Here is how to get started:
- Buy a domain name. Not necessarily .com since it’ll mostly be used by yourself. Can be .net or even .cc. Maybe even .org.
- Choose your cloud provider, you can go with a small and cheap virtual machine first, don’t spend too much on it.
- Point your domain to your newly created VPS.
- Install a LAMP(HP) environment.
- Install Drupal. (6.x is still the way to go for me simply due to the massive amount of stable and mature modules available out there)
- Start playing with the feeds module.
- The trick is to divert the wind to your wind farm – instead of let it blow from all directions.
- Find your data sources and where possible grab their data feeds. Add them to your wind farm.
- Start organising your content by tagging them.
Watch it grow.
The plus one:
In case you want to turn your wind farm into a wind blowing engine there’s nothing stopping you from feeding the aggregated news into another website – it can even run on a completely different content management system, not necessarily Drupal.
Once you’ve got the information fed into your farm, organised and tagged that serves you needs YOU ARE IN CONTROL.
The singularity is near.
Yesterday evening I was catching up with the latest news on the web when I found a link to the WWDC 2011 keynote speech.
While I was waiting for the streaming video to load I checked my phone, an iPhone 4 with the latest iOS 4.3.3. Nothing unusual, just a normal phone…
In the meantime I’ve also checked the Apple UK homepage where I’ve noticed that they are just pushing out the new landing page - some images were still not loading correctly from the CDNs but the page started to change from the white iPhone 4…
OK, let’s watch the keynote then…
At certain points I jumped ahead I was more interested in seeing the iCloud offering – I’m guessing that’s the same with everybody.
And so it just happened…
I finished watching the keynote, shut down my laptop and checked my phone – expecting nothing new.
Expecting nothing new. I was wrong.
I touched the App Store icon and something was different.
I saw the new section “Purchased”. Hmmm, let’s see what’s behind.
iPhone App Store
…and then tiny little clouds started to appear on the screen – next to the apps I purchased before but at the moment they were not installed on the phone.
iPhone App Store - iCloud
I think this is what you can call magic.
You hear someone in SF talk about a new feature and 3 minutes later you’ve got that on your phone.
The singularity is near…
