June 2010
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Goodbye /Message, Hello Stowe Boyd
Maybe it’s a midlife crisis, maybe I’m bored with old school blogging, maybe the petty annoyances of Squarespace have gotten to me; but whatever the cause, I am moving my blogging from the old /Message (located at www.stoweboyd.com/message) to Stowe Boyd (which is temporarily located at stoweboyd.tumblr.com).
I guess am dropping the more or less superfluous /Message, and making my...
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Le Monde Saved?
Scooped at the 11th hour by a trio of French industrialists, the averted closing of Le Monde may seem like collecting antique watches, or moving the pieces into place for the coming elections. However, the context for Le Monde’s near closing holds some lessons for US media:
The Economist, Le Monde gets a new owner
A second reading is that Le Monde’s troubles reflect those of the...
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Why I am Going To Leave Squarespace
I have had a number of headaches with Squarespace — the blogging platform /Message is based on — but one is so persistently annoying that it is leading me to start the (terrifying) prosect of moving my blog once again. What is that headache? It is the lowly bookmarklet: the piece of javascript that all blog platforms provide so that a user can start a blog post based on a link to a...
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Mind Wandering
Scientists are discovering that our minds wander a lot more than we are aware of. And this is apparently a good thing, despite the bad rap it gets in the self-help section at Barnes&Noble.
John Tierney, Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind
In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology...
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The Game Is Sort Of Over
In an amazing inversion of the logic of ‘hot news’ — where the major news outlets want to be able to claim a blackout period during which no one else can report of news they have uncovered — the major news outlets stole the Rolling Stone article about McCrystal and published the PDF in its entirety, breaking copyright and ‘hot news’ principles. The perps...
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ACLU Fact Checks Facebook's Response to Open...
Facebook is still talking through their hat in response to the open letter sent by privacy organizations on June 16. The ACLU checks the facts in Facebook’s claims. Guess what? Facebook continues to cover up the facts: they are either lying, or don’t know how their own technology works.
Some samples:
Facebook Says: It has heard the concerns of the privacy groups and plans to...
Twitter's character limit sparks new style of... →
Interesting piece by Chris Vognar about short form fiction and writers who find that Twitter helps their long-form efforts.
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Social Reading
Clive Thompson is a bit behind the times:
Nick Bilton, Roll-Up Computers and Their Kin
Clive Thompson, a science and technology writer and columnist for Wired magazine, said that if “publishers are smart — and readers lucky” the content of the e-books of the future will be more open and collaborative.
“You’ll be able to cut, paste and exchange your favorite passages, using them in the same...
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Twitter Taps Into Facebook And Linkedin Networks
Looks like Twitter is getting aggressive in growth plans. They are pushing the convenience of finding friends on other services — Facebook and Linkedin — and following them automatically on Twitter.
Josh Elman, Following your friends and colleagues
Today, we’re improving our Find Friends section to make it easier to find and follow the people you already know — your...
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Sliderocket: The Last Stage Of Jettisoning Desktop...
Over the past few years I have moved pretty steadily to a web O/S model of operations. I jumped on Gmail early, Google maps, and last, Google calendar and tasks. Blog editing has always been a browser-based experience for me. One by one, everything seemed to levitate to the cloud.
I used Basecamp and Backpack episodically and reluctantly for years, and 90% of that sort of collaboration is now...
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Steve Berlin Johnson Doesn't Buy Nick Carr's 'The...
Like Steven Pinker, Steven Johnson makes short work of most of Nic Carr’s hand-wringing about the Web ruining our minds, and by extension, Western civilization:
Yes, People Still Read, but Now It’s Social
Mr. Carr spends a great deal of his book’s opening section convincing us that new forms of media alter the way the brain works, which I suspect most of his readers have long ago...
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The Supreme Court Says 'Dig Your Own Hole'
The Supreme Court has ruled that you don’t have privacy rights to the information on employer-provided pagers or cell-phones. If you want what you are texting about to be private, use your own phone, otherwise it can be seized and used against you without a warrant.
Adam Liptak, Justices Allow Search of Work-Issued Pager
A California police department did not violate the...
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The Business Case For Streams versus Email
I have written a great deal about the rise of streams — also called microblogging, activity streams, and other names — and the application of streams in the business context, but yesterday’s ‘Microsharing’ panel at the Enterprise 2.0 conference demonstrated that there is widespread disagreement, confusion, and even antipathy about streams in business. So I thought I...
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Pinker: The Web Keeps Us Smart
Pinker undoes Nick Carr’s attack on web culture in The Shallows without naming him, but this follows pretty directly:
Steven Pinker, Mind Over Mass Media
Yes, the constant arrival of information packets can be distracting or addictive, especially to people with attention deficit disorder. But distraction is not a new phenomenon. The solution is not to bemoan technology but to develop...
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IgniteNYC: Publicy And The Erosion Of Privacy
[These are the slides I used at IgniteNYC last night, and something like what I intended to say. In several cases I ran out of time before making the final quip! 15 seconds per slide is fast!]
William James once said, “A man coins a new word at his own peril.” Nonetheless, the rapid changes surrounding online sharing and privacy have led me to spin up...
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Pulse Pulled: The Web Of Flow Threatens The Web Of...
Kara Swisher reports that gee-whiz iPad app Pulse has been yanked after very public praise yesterday at the Apple developer conference might be a tempest in a teacup. Perhaps — as many suggest — senior NY Times execs don’t know that Pulse is ‘just’ an RSS reader. Or is this step one in a way against RSS?
Mike Masnick probes at the edges of this:
Basically, this...
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Do 'Supertaskers' Mean We Are Adapting To A...
In a full frontal attack on multitasking and the tools that seem to seduce us into it, Matt Richtel makes the case for the evils of being wired by chronicling the day-to-day media addiction of a California entrepreneur and his family. Kord Campbell misses an email from someone who wants to buy his company, his son is getting C’s, and mom gets pissed when Kord reacts to stress by playing...
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Musing On iPad TV
Adam Lisagor makes some astute points based on hie recent use of iPad as a TV device:
iPad TV
However, when the iPad came, I found myself watching TV shows more often on it than on my TV. My preferred experience is to obtain TV content on my Mac, use software like the brilliant Air Video to convert it on-the-fly and stream it to my iPad, and watch in bed with my headphones while my...
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NIck Carr's 'The Shallows'
I have not read Nick Carr’s new work, The Shallows, although I will order it from my library: I am certain it is not a book I want to own, since it is a continuation of the Luddism he has been peddling on his blog and earlier books, arguing that Google, and by extension, the web, web is making us stupid.
Thankfully, Jonah Lehrer has read the work, and dissects Carr’s arguments:
Our...
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Publicy Defined, And Some Background
Reworking some of the rhetoric I have been using to discuss publicy, so I thought I’d create a dictionary type definition.
Publicy
n. 1. a. The quality or condition of openly sharing personal and relational information with others.
b. The state of participating in open social discourse online, and the social relations that arise from that: a person’s right to publicy.
2. The state...
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Bing Destination Maps: NOw 'Sketchy' Or 'Treasure'...
Bing Destination Maps
via Information Aesthetics
When you ignore some of the UI elements, the sometimes prolonged waiting time, and the occasional crashes, Bing Destination Maps [bing.com] seems quite interesting as a new way of rendering geographical maps in a more visually simplified, understandable and accessible way. In other words, imagine one can now create a sort of...
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WatchThis is the recording of the webinar I gave yesterday for Nten.
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Steven Johnson Goes Deep Into Steve Jobs' Head
Steven Berlin Johnson riffs on some conventional wisdom from Robert Wright, who suggests that Jobs is repeating the mistake of not licensing Mac technology, since he’s doing that same play with the iPhone:
The Microsoft approach harnessed positive feedback. The more models of Windows computers, competitively priced, the more people would buy Windows computers. And the more Windows...
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Chess As A Metaphor, Once Again
Garry Kasparov, perhaps the greatest chess player of all time, recently reviewed Diego Rasskin Gutman’s book, Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind. He details a recent competition that allowed player to team and to use computers. The results? Very surprising.
In 2005, the online chess-playing site Playchess.com hosted what it called a “freestyle” chess tournament in...
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Jason Calacanis on The Conspiracy To Give Facebook...
Very strange email newsletter from Jason Calacanis this week, in which he tells a story about being emailed by some shadowy power broker, ‘he could buy and sell me many times over,’ who demanded that Jason get in line and publicly forgive Mark Zuckerberg now that MZ has held his “we can do better” press conference. Calacanis believes that a large number of the tech elite...
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Steve Jobs on Privacy
Privacy means people know what they are signing up for in plain English. Some people want to share more data. Ask them. Ask them every time. Let them know precisely what you are going to do with their data.
- Steve Jobs, at D8 conference (according to Jason Calacanis)
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Multiphrenic Identity
I stumbled across a word today courtesy of @alicetiara: ‘multiphrenic’, which she defined as ‘multiple identities pieced together from the multiplicity of mediated messages in our environments.’ This sounded so much like my recent musings on networked identity that I did some searching.
Turns out the term was coined by Kenneth Gergen, a well known psychologist and author,...
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Facebook Threatens To Sue Researcher For Crawling...
Despite the fact that the fundamental nature of the web is that public pages are open for indexing and analysis — that’s how search engines and other fundamental tools of the web work — Pete Warden recently discovered that Facebook doesn’t agree.
Pete is the guy that analyzed Facebook data by building his own web crawler, and then published some results of his analysis of...
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Zuckerberg Takes Off Hoodie, But Doesn't Clarify...
I have yet to take the time to exhaustively review the new Facebook privacy settings, as well as various people’s musings about them, but I plan to do so this weekend. In the meantime, Miguel Helft recounts Mark Zuckerberg’s discomfort at the D8 conference yesterday:
Miguel Helft, Zuckerberg On The Hot Seat
About 20 minutes into his on-stage interview at the D8 conference, Mark...
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Creativity = Runs With Scissors
One of the reasons that I have argued against people that denounce multitasking and the roving side of human intelligence is my deep suspicion that the wellsprings of creativity is involved. Recent studies of brainscans suggest that creativity is indeed linked to the receptors that filter and direct thought. The more creative people are, the more likely they are to be uninhibited about making...
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Police Souveillance Illegal?
A disturbing trend, where police will prosecute those that record their public actions based on anti-wiretapping statutes:
Wendy McIlroy, Are Cameras The New Guns?
In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.
Even if the...
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Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Boston MA, 14-17 June...
I had the chance to catch up with Steve Wylie, who runs the Enterprise 2.0 Conference for UBM Techweb. The lineup of speakers looks great, and turnout is expected to be solid despite the economic downturn. Steve thinks that the value proposition for web 2.0 technologies has become so pragmatic and immediate that companies are willing to send their staff to attend, because payback from investment...
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WordPress Releases 'Like' And 'Reblog': We Need...
WordPress is following the lead of Tumblr and other blog platforms (like Typepad) and adopting at least one part the ‘poststream’ model that Tumblr pioneered. The Tumblr poststream model has two ‘sides’:
The Outside View — When Tumblr users are looking at other Tumblr-hosted blogs, they see several controls that are not visible to non-users. Along with the blog...
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Gmail Slow-Down
Seems like I am not the only one who has noticed that Gmail seems to be running very slowly. Gabriel Meinberg believes it has something to do with having more than 4G of email, but I don’t have that much. Still I have decided to jettison various sorts of old email to see if I can speed it up.
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The Seven Regions Of The US
Pete Warden has done a fascinating analysis of Facebook data, determining that the US naturally falls into seven distinct regions. One fact that was quite interesting, vis-a-vis my recent departure from SF and move to NYC, is how inward focused Socalistan is (San Diego to San Francisco, hugging the coast): most of the connections are to other Californians. New York, on the other hand, is a...
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“Journalism doesn’t need to be saved; it needs to be created.”
– - Eric Newton
(via Jeff Jarvis)
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Unbundling The Web, One Link At A Time
Nick Carr wonders if we should sequester all of out links at the end of posts, instead of spread wherever they are referred to, to minimize distraction from what the author is getting at.
Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they’re also distractions. Sometimes, they’re big distractions - we click on a link,...
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Jarvis on FTC's Mumblings About The Future of...
Jeff Jarvis reviews the FTC’s ‘potential policy recommendations’ on ‘saving’ journalism, and finds it wanting:
If the FTC truly wanted to rethink journalism and its new opportunities and new value in our democracy, it would have written this document from the perspective of the people it is supposed to represent: the citizens, examining how we can benefit...
