The fall of Wired

When I was a teen in the 1990s, one of the biggest events each month was my pilgrimage to the only bookshop in town that sold...



Wired, back then, was about something. About this big new thing, the Internet. About democracy, change, and a whole new conception of life. About cryotechnically-insured, singularity-worshipping, life-extending Californians with toasters running Java. And pretty soon, we'd all have a modem and be like that.

Today, Wired's CD is Agent Smith, and his greatest idea seems to be to make money with downloadable multimedia CD-ROMs. How 1990s!

VoltDB

VoltDB looks really cool. It's an open source database that I think is based on the highly interesting H-Store research.

For "Version Next", the roadmap includes:

• High Availability: replace failed node on the fly

Which is, I think, a great sign of how far from the commoditization of scalable data storage we still are. In almost every project, HA is planned for the next version. Only Cassandra seems to scale automatically at the moment.

Marc Canter's Persona Editor

Entertaining and inspiring talk by Marc "Partyboy" Canter, on a kind of be-all/end-all outliner to rule the social data web (Doc Searls wants the same thang). The details are somewhat foggy, and I don't know if such a totally integrated architecture will ever be possible on the web, but hey, outliners rock!