Hyperpeople: Information, Knowledge and Power in the 21st Century
Part Three: Essays, 2006-2007
After several attempts to combine all of the ideas in Hyperpeople into a single text, I realized that the most appropriate form for my work, at present, is as a series of essays, published at semi-regular intervals, using WordPress blogging software.
Thus far, I have written 25 essays on a wide range of subjects: mobile social networks, the commercial ecology of Wikipedia, the impossibility of censorship on the Internet, how to manage online communities, and so on. This is an ongoing process, and I expect to be adding essays to the collection for the next several years.
The complete text to Hyperpeople: Essays is available online. Click here to begin reading.
Hyperpeople: Information, Knowledge and Power in the 21st Century
Part Two: The Telephone Repair Handbook (with Angus Fraser), 2006
Social networks are probably the most potent technology within human experience. A huge amount of our cognitive abilities are dedicated to making us effective social beings. Now those social networks are being amplified and extended digitally, available everywhere through mobile telephony. The Telephone Repair Handbook looks at the trends in social networks - from the paleolithic through to the present, and offers a reinvention of the mobile telephone - one which looks curiously like Apple's iPhone.
The complete text to Hyperpeople: The Telephone Repair Handbook is available online at Mindjack. Click here to read the book.
Hyperpeople: Information, Knowledge and Power in the 21st Century
Part One: The World Is My Hard Drive, 2005
File-sharing has transformed media creation and the media industries. In this first section of Hyperpeople, I explore the turbulent world of peer-to-peer file-sharing, audience behavior, commercial and legal countermeasures (and their futility), and ask an important question: once everything is available, everywhere, what will we watch, and why?
The complete text to Hyperpeople: The World Is My Hard Drive is available as a downloadble PDF.
DirectShow and Digital Video, Microsoft Press, 2003.
A comprehensive introduction to Microsoft's DirectShow API for Windows. DirectShow provides a complete audio/video programming environment allowing sophisticated capture, encoding and playback features in any Windows application with just a few lines of code.
The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming Our Imagination, Ballantine Books, 2000.
The toys we give our children today shape the way they think tomorrow. Interactive toys, such as Furby, LEGO Mindstorms and Sony's Playstation2 are teaching our children the hidden rules of a "playful world" that is learning to respond intelligently to our wants and needs.
An award-winning website provides an in-depth examination of many of the ideas in the book.
Learning VRML 2: Design for Cyberspace, Ziff-Davis Publishing, 1998.
This introductory text to the then-new VRML 2.0 (aka VRML 97) was the product of my first two years of teaching neophytes the fundamentals of 3D computer graphics. It was among the first books to be published in an online-only version, in PDF format. By special arrangement with the publisher, the book is now available for download, free of charge. Click here to download the ZIPped version of the PDF files for this book.
VRML: Flying Through the Web, New Riders Publishing, 1996.
This entry-level text guides VRML novices through the interactive, 3D worlds newly available over the Internet using VRML and a compatiable web browser.
VRML: Browsing and Building Cyberspace, New Riders Publishing, 1995.
This landmark text was the first book on the then-emerging Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), which is now the standard for 3D graphics on the Web. Translated into 6 six languages, it sold nearly 70,000 copies.