Genevieve Bell grew up in Australia, moving between the working class suburbs of Melbourne and Canberra and the Aboriginal communities of Central and Northern Australia. She has a PhD in anthropology and works as Director of User Experience within Intel’s Digital Home Group. There she manages an inter-disciplinary team of social scientists, interaction designers and human factors engineers.

Heewon Kim addresses the trends in web usage in South Korea, and focuses in particular on how teenagers use social software in the world's most wired country.

Pierre Bellanger talks about the future of social networks. As the founder and owner of Europe's largest site of such a kind (and the 17th most visited site on earth), he has a very interesting vision on what directions these tools will take, and hints at a future made of instant communication and mobile.

If you aren't already a Dopplr user, I recommend getting set up with this social application for travel (see below). By logging your upcoming trips on Dopplr, you can see which of your friends or contacts may be in the same city, but also see their upcoming travel plans. Members of the top 100 non-profits, business schools or luxury brands have special invites. http://www.dopplr.com. It's a good way to see LIFTers also travelling.

Equally as interesting is an app developed a while back by nodesnoop called Offsetr, which analyzes the travel patterns for you and your friend network to calculate your future travel-related carbon footprint. Make of the data what you will, but it is an interesting exercise in transparency. http://www.nodesnoop.com/offsetr/

PS: Noneck, did you cover all that carbon with an offset? ;-)

The german parliament has passed a law on data retention. In brief, the law obliges Telcos, ISPs and Mail-Providers to retain data for six months.

"Data" is your name, the mere fact that you have a contract. Data is as well that you were connected to the internet. When, how long, with which IP address. That you called this and that mobile Phone number. That you tried to call it. That you sent a sms. That you connected to your mail server. When.

All this data is urgently needed by investigators to fight terrorism.

Well. As actually few terrorists have a residential DSL line in germany, the data pool comes in quite handy to track down people who commit as evil crimes as sharing music. We fully understand that, the music industry needs to protect their cold-war business model. Of course it's not lawful to copy music and give it to somebody else. But if anybody claims that it's a crime in the range of murder, I would be surprised.

What remains as a fact is that the privacy of every person communicating in or with somebody in germany is from the 1st of January 2009 on nonexistent anymore. For six months, whoever is interested will be able to analyze your network, track down where you have been (net-wise) and when.

That's not the end of the world, but it's a very significant turning point. Privacy Laws in germany have been set up to protect people from a state which wants to know too much. We had those states, two in the last century, and the constitution was a foundation to ensure civil rights - free speech, democracy, liberty.

It was - because it's been given up on November 9th by the parliament.

What does that mean for the future of the internet?

Bruce Sterling's presentation at LIFT evening Korea on Industrial Products And Ubiquity. Bruce talks about sustainable design, recycling, total life-cycle management, tags, radio-frequency identity, search engines, locative media, computer fabricators, industrial design, user records, metadata. web commerce and ubiquitous computing in the service of sustainability.