December 2009
The Piracy Problem: Why Culture Isn't Free by...
Ken Orvidas
via www.dgaquarterly.org
Andrew Keen makes his usual arguments about media companies’ desire and rights to own our culture, this time transposed to a discussion about movies, ostensibly.
A Peek At Litl
I read a piece by Walt Mossberg about a new computing device from Litl that they call a ‘webbook’. It appears to be a smart and innovative return to the idea of a ‘thin client’ laptop. There’s no hard drive: it’s 100% cloud.
Even more interesting than the hardware is the UX, which is a clean break with the ‘desktop + files + folders’ metaphor...
Response to 'Secrecy, Privacy, Publicy' Post
A large surge of interest in the ideas driving yesterday’s ‘Secrecy, Privacy, Publicy’ post. Erick Shonfeld of Techcrunch jumped right in:
It used to be that we lived in private and chose to make parts of our lives public. Now that is being turned on its head. We live in public, like the movie says (except via micro-signals not 24-7 video self-surveillance), and choose...
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Secrecy, Privacy, Publicy
“Gabriel García Márquez once wrote, ‘Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life’, a line that seems to resonate with how we live our lives today, and perhaps how we have lived since the start of human society.”Gabriel García Márquez once wrote,’Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life’, a line...
First Look: Dipity
Stowe B. on Dipity.
I stumbled across Dipity, which creates a variety of ways of visualizing and accessing streams of communications. The widget above is based on my Underpaid Genius tumblr blog.
I will explore that tool over the next few days.
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Texting Isn't The Distraction, Driving Is: A...
Two years ago, in his book “Rocketeers,” Michael Belfiore celebrated the pioneers of the budding private space industry. Now he has returned to explore a frontier closer to home. The heroes of his new book, “The Department of Mad Scientists,” work for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as Darpa, a secretive arm of the United States government. And the revolution...
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Texting Isn't The Distraction, Driving Is: A...
William Saletan, The Body Electric
Two years ago, in his book “Rocketeers,” Michael Belfiore celebrated the pioneers of the budding private space industry. Now he has returned to explore a frontier closer to home. The heroes of his new book, “The Department of Mad Scientists,” work for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as Darpa, a secretive arm of the United States...
Mayor Bloomberg Announces NYC Seed Fund to...
To kick off Internet Week New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced NYC Seed, an investment fund focused on early stage technology companies in New York City. The fund is a partnership between ITAC, New York City Investment Fund, The New York State Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation, New York City Economic Development Corporation, and PolyTechnic University.
via...
Fashion Is Getting Punk'd By The Bloggers
Perhaps it was to be expected that the communications revolution would affect the makeup of the fashion news media in much the same way it has changed the broader news media landscape. At a time when magazines like Vogue, W, Glamour and Bazaar have pared their staffs and undergone deep cutbacks because of the impact of the recession on their advertising sales, blogs have made remarkable...
B.L. Ochman's blog: Self-Proclaimed Social Media...
In May 09 when we first used Tweepsearch to count of the Twitter bios of self-proclaimed social media gurus, experts, superstars and ninjas there were 4,487. A mere seven months later, we were shocked to see that there are now nearly 16.000. They are multiplying like rabbits.
Here’s a breakout of the 15,740 self-proclaimed social media gurus we discovered in our most recent search: ...
NewYorkWare
Isn’t it interesting that Tumblr and FourSquare are NYC’s major contributions to social software in the past couple years? I have a theory! They share this commonality: they’re both semi-closed networks. To wit: Though wildly successful, both platforms still somehow feel clubby and insidery. In the long run, it will be interesting to see if this distinct (dare I say New Yorky?) quality is...
Making The Economist Social
Nevillle Hobson observes that the Economist is moving fast to acquire a strong online presence torugh Twitter and Facebook. He then alludes to the stark contrast with Murdoch and the other media reactionaries who are trying to wall off the Web and it’s freewheeling ways:
This looks like an entirely different model to the ‘stick everything behind a subscriber firewall with little or...
link
The Use of Twitter by America’s Newspapers — Good numbers on the adoption of Twitter, which is surging.
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Streams And Sense Making
A few interesting pieces on streams and our sense making there:
Beyond Realtime Search: The Dawning Of Ambient Streams by Edo Segal (@edosegal) — Edo was very interesting on a panel at the recent Real-Time Crunchup in SF, but this piece doesn’t do a great job in clarifying his thoughts, aside from a handwave at the intersection of augmented reality and streaming.
Towards a...
Driven to Distraction, Some Teenagers Unfriend...
For Walter Mischel, a professor of psychology at Columbia University, who studies self-control and willpower, “what’s fascinating about this is that it involves spontaneous strategies of self-control, of trying to exert willpower after getting sucked into a huge temptation.”
via www.nytimes.com
Crowdsourced Investigation
The three of us, as experienced investigators and prosecutors of financial fraud, cannot answer these questions now. But we know where the answers are. They are in the trove of e-mail messages still backed up on A.I.G. servers, as well as in the key internal accounting documents and financial models generated by A.I.G. during the past decade. Before releasing its regulatory clutches, the ...
Conversation in Comments vs. Conversation in...
Louis Gray has posted some thoughts that have caused the question about the appropriate locus for web commentary to boil up again:
[from louisgray.com: Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners’ Ire?: Silicon Valley Blog
Some of us have just as loudly asked for comments and conversations to enter the world of the RSS feed reader. Now that we’re starting to see...
The Network Is The Computer
Yes; but we’re less interested in computers
all the time. The real topic in astronomy is the cosmos, not telescopes. The real topic in computing is the Cybersphere and the cyberstructures in it, not the computers we use as telescopes and tuners.
via www.edge.org
We invented the Web to happen to ourselves.
Check Out New York's Newest Startup Hangout,...
Polaris Ventures is getting ready to open up its Dogpatch Labs New York startup joint near Union Square, as we first reported last week.
The main idea: Free desk space, coffee, snacks, and collaboration for small (2-3 person) startups for 3-6 months until they can figure out if they’re going to become a real business or if they’re going to move on to a different project.
...
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Twitter API and Microblogging: What About...
Like Fred Wilson and Dave Winer, I am extremely excited about the moves by Tumblr and Wordpress to leverage the Twitter API as a way to get tumbleblogging into Twitter clients.
Tumblr’s David Karp explains on the Tumblr blog:
Inspired by Wordpress’ seriously clever use of Loren Brichter’s new Tweetie options, we’re launching our own Tweetie and Twitterrific compatible API. This ...
Private Life In A Digital World
“What are the legal boundaries of an employee’s privacy in this interconnected, electronic-communication age, one in which thoughts and ideas that would have been spoken personally and privately in ages past are now instantly text-messaged to friend and family via hand-held, computer-assisted electronic devices?” - Judge Stephen Larson, Federal District Court, Riverside CA
...
Random Beats Merit In Promotions?
In 1969, the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter posited the “Peter Principle”: people in a workplace are promoted until they reach their “level of incompetence.” This happens, Peter argued, because we wrongly assume that people who are good at their jobs will also be good at jobs that are one rung up on the corporate ladder — so we promote them. But often the...
Twitter URLs: Are Microformats The Answer To A...
Somehow I turned my head, and while I was focusing on other things (like social business, 301works.org, and a long list of other topics) Microsyntax is breaking out everywhere.
A few weeks ago, I was pinged by Andy Mabbett about this idea of his, a new protocol for Twitter links: Twitter: A Microformat In Lieu Of A Protocol. In that post, he referred back to an earlier post, where he...
The S Word: Not 'Social', But 'Sophistry'
[via Andrew McAfee The S Word]
the point I was trying to make in my talk, and the one I still believe, is that keying the message / sales pitch / marketing / education effort around the word ’social’ is a bad idea.
[via Euan Semple The S Word]
My response “You are right - pitching into the enterprise world using the word social is not going to work. But what is going on is...
Arrington Is Really Rupert Murdock, Jr.
Arrington howls about the rise of cheapo, knock-off journalism undercutting new media, which knocked off and undercut old media. I think.
[via The End Of Hand Crafted Content by Mike Arrington]
Forget fair and unfair, right and wrong. This is simply happening. The disruptors are getting disrupted, and everyone has to adapt to it or face the consequences. Hand crafted content is dead. Long...
Why Foursquare, Rummble, bit.ly, Twitpic & dabr...
Foursquare, Rummble and other location services are a look at the future (the very near future) - when we’ll all know where all our friends & contacts are all the time. Problem is they require you to build a whole new network - and only us hardened geeks are on these services.
via london-twitter.posterous.com
Interesting but not totally persuasive arguments, based on Twitter...
ConventionCamp, Hannover Germany, Nov 2009: The...
I gave a talk called “The Social Revolution: Ten Years Later, Looking Ten Years Ahead”. The slides are posted at Slideshare.
There Is No Geolocation Social Paradox
I think that MG Seigler is dead on whe he observes that geolocation services are exploding right now, but he goes off the rails when he suggests there is a ‘location social paradox’:
A few weeks ago, our own Jason Kincaid wrote a post about how Facebook is poised to take over the geolocation space. In it, he makes a number of good points, but there’s one that’s particularly...
Conventioncamp Interview: The Web Of Flow
Interview mit Stowe Boyd: Web of Flow
Stowe Boyd lebt in San Francisco und beratet namhafte Unternehmen im Internetsektor, darunter Sixgroups und XING. Er hielt die erste große Session auf dem ConventionCamp über den Umgang mit dem Nachrichtenstream und dessen Auswirkungen gegenüberg E-Mails, Chats und Blogs. Das persönliche Interview mit ihm könnt ihr im Podcast hören oder hier im Video...
Guest Post by Aspen Baker: Friend or Foe? UC...
This month the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law sued the Department of Defense, the C.I.A. and other federal agencies under the Freedom of Information Act to learn more about their use of social networking sites.
The suit seeks to uncover what guidelines these agencies have...
Why Controversy Won't Power Next-Gen News - Umair...
Controversy, in contrast, is worth a great deal only in terms of low-value readers. Your average radical libertarian Ayn Rand-worshipping global warming denialist isn’t exactly a high-value reader — just like your average patchouli-sniffing communistic hippie isn’t, either. Both are unlikely to pay for new information, because both think they know it all already. It’s the...
Dan Lyons Bitchslaps AT&T
One of those unbelievably funny, but oh-so-dead-on painfully true posts, with Dan Lyons skewering the stupidity of AT&T’s Stephenson, who has been bitching about the 3% who use 40% of his bandwidth. Lyons basically says he doesn’t realize what an idiot he is: he’s selling bandwith, and people are using more than he has. Shouldn’t he be building out the network?
...
Design What You Do - Bruce Mao
Bruce Mao is the chief creative officer of Bruce Mao design, and a creative force of nature.
[via Meet Bruce Mau. He wants to redesign the world. by Warren Berger]
Mau is at the forefront of a loose movement embracing a new way of thinking about design. It includes individual designers and larger companies like IDEO, as well as several prominent design schools, where new theories...
Google Voice With Your Existing Phone Number
So, I got a Google Voice account some time ago, but I just never got around to doing much with it.
First of all, I dislike the voice mail model: having to call a special number and futzing with phone menus, then having to listen to an audio message, and often having to write down a phone number to call back… well, it’s just a ridiculous model. For years my voice mail message has...
Nick Bilton on Streaming Email
6. If the e-mail is important, it will find me.
Real-time services like Twitter and FriendFeed illustrate the potential usefulness of a streaming interface. I don’t have to see all the tweets in my stream; if something is specifically important it will be re-tweeted by people in my network. The more this happens, the better the chance that I will eventually see it. What if we made...
Solution To Long-Winded Emails
I do about 80% of my e-mails in the subject line. Short and to the point. The nice thing about the message in the subject line - it always gets read.
via Mark of Connecticut bits.blogs.nytimes.com
In Gmail, however, I don’t know how to respond to emails in the subject line. I guess I could create new messages, but then I’d lose the threading.
What I would like is a stream...
Is Facebook Friendship Legal?
Judges and lawyers in Florida can no longer be Facebook friends.
In a recent opinion, the state’s Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee decided it was time to set limits on judicial behavior online. When judges “friend” lawyers who may appear before them, the committee said, it creates the appearance of a conflict of interest, since it “reasonably conveys to others the impression that these...
Timothy Gowers' Guidance On Massively Parallel...
Timothy Gowers is a Fields Award recipient, perhaps the highest honor in mathematics. He thought that massively parallel research-based collaboration might be possible on math problems, so he selected one, set relatively modest goals, and set off with a large sprawling swarm to test this idea (as I clipped recently from the NY Times):
1. It is not the case that the aim of the project is to...
How 3.6 Zettabytes of Data Get Consumed
How 3.6 Zettabytes of Data Get Consumed - Gizmodo
via UC-San Diego
the linked report contains a breakdown of activities by hour, bytes and words for the everyone, average per user and average per american user on 2008.
via roomthily.tumblr.com
There’s no easier way to visualize how weird I am except with the comparison of that chart to mine:
Most important: ...
Meet Dr. Polymath
In January, Timothy Gowers, a professor of mathematics at Cambridge and a holder of the Fields Medal, math’s highest honor, decided to see if the comment section of his blog could prove a theorem he could not.
In two blog posts — one titled “Is Massively Collaborative Mathematics Possible?” — he proposed an attack on a stubborn math problem called the Density Hales-Jewett...
PageRank In Biological Systems
[via MALIA WOLLAN The Ninth Annual Year in Ideas]
Every species — be it earthworm or great white shark — is entwined in a vast and complicated system of predator and prey called a food web. To determine which species in a food web are most important to the survival of the larger ecosystem, scientists design computer programs to model how the extinction of a given species would affect the...
The Death Of Cable
Dan Frommer is 27 years old and works as a writer for a technology Web site. Frommer pulled the plug on cable TV in May 2008 and instead gets shows from the Internet via a Macintosh computer hooked to his LCD television. He can’t get everything he’d like to see, but he’s saved $1,500 on cable-TV fees. “I’m not going to let myself get ripped off for a bunch of garbage that I don’t watch...
Appsfire
You can go to Appsfire to see what various folks have uploaded to their iPhones, and quickly download them yourself. Something that would be a good feature for the iTunes store.
Wrestling With Times People
I am really enjoying Times People — the social news streaming experiment that the NY Times has rolled out. But the natural exclusiveness (clannishness?) of the paper leads to some serious annoyances.
A case in point: I am an active participant in Times People, and get a lot of recommendations from those I follow there (including many NY Times writers and editors, and technoids like Tim...
Time's Up
In the last quarter, Time Inc.’s operating income declined 40 percent amid an advertising recession and the movement of readers away from print toward the Web.
Mr. Bewkes, speaking in April about the future of Time Warner during a conference call with Wall Street analysts, said it “may well include publishing, but we’re not making a religious statement about it either way at this ...
Bump Phones To Discover Mutual Friends
Bump is cool. I can’t wait to try this ‘discover mutual friends’ with someone.
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Facebook Wants To Be Twitter
Marshall KirkPatrick www.readwriteweb.com
Facebook wants you to make the status messages you post visible to the entire internet.
[…]
A substantial backlash has already begun in comments on the Facebook blog post about the announcement. Previous moves by the company, like the introduction of the news feed, have seen user resistance as well - but this move cuts against the fundamental...
AT&T Eyes The Data Hogs As A New Revenue Source
With about 3% of smart-phone customers driving 40% of data traffic, AT&T is considering incentives to keep those subscribers from hampering the experience for everyone else, he [Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility] said. “You can rest assured that we’re very sure we can address it in a way that’s consistent with net-neutrality and FCC regulations.”
Many customers don’t know how...
Personas
I tried the personas experiment, and I am less aggressive than I thought.
The Backchannel Eats Its Young: danah boyd and Web...
I wasn’t in attendance at the recent Web 2.0 Expo when danah boyd and the Twittosphere collided in the perfect backchannel meltdown. However, I will just say what I have said for years (like after the famous Mena Trott Meltdown in 2005 at Les Blogs):
Only project the backchannel on the wall in groups with high social cohesion, like people working together in companies, or in other...
