August 2010
4 tags
Facebook is the new AOL →
Jason Kottke made the same statement I’ve been shouting recently, back in 2007: “Facebook is the new AOL”.
However, he did not suggest that social primitives would be built into our future operating environments. He simply stated that the Internet is richer than an app can ever be, so he definitively had one side of my argument down way back when.
2 tags
9-Bits: I Want a Stupid 7-inch iPad
After using the iPad as my sole device last week in Ireland, I could imagine a small iPad, too. Especially with a bluetooth keyboard, which could also be scaled down.
9-bits:
Lance Ulanoff thinks The 7-inch Apple iPad is a Stupid Idea:
Kidding aside, I have not heard one good argument for the existence of this device. What’s more worrisome to me is that some companies like Samsung appear to...
10 tags
Facebook Is The New AOL
[originally entitled: Blogtalk 2010: Notes And Thoughts On The Social Future]
Galway is a lovely place, and I have always wanted to see where ‘the hills sweep down to the sea,’ so Blogtalk 2010 was fun. I saw old friends, and made some new ones. But this get-together reinforced a few thoughts, which wound up in my keynote, as well.
The era of blogging is over: its impact as a goad, a competitive...
2 tags
Pointers For The Blogtalk Attendees Re: My Keynote... →
Rather than writing up my notes from the talk this morning, I will simply point to the top posts here on my blog, many of which I think are relevant to my talk.
1 tag
Pervasive Information Architecture » Manifesto →
5. Horizontal prevails over vertical In these new architectures correlation between elements becomes the predominant characteristic, at the expenses of traditional top down hierarchies. In open and everchanging architectures hierarchical models are difficult to maintain and support, as intermediaries push towards spontaneity, ephemeral or temporary structures of meaning, and constant change.
...
2 tags
Vote to bring the Sotropians to SXSW 2011 →
Borrowing on the idea of Extropianism, Sotropians anticipate that social networking will change the course of human history, shifting the way humans function everyday on an individual and social level and ultimately affecting such areas as government, business and education. We’ve put together an amazing panel (our own Jodee Rich along with Brian Solis, Stowe Boyd, Deanna Zandt, and...
“Great design does not come from great processes; it comes from great designers.”
– Fred Brooks
via Wired
“Knowledge is not democratic.”
– Michele Lamont
2 tags
Why Apple's iTV Will Change Everything -- Kevin... →
Rose makes some great points, especially about the market for TV apps once the stream has an API.
3 tags
3 tags
New Numbers Reveal: Cord Cutting Is Real -- Janko... →
The business intelligence company reports that cable companies lost 711,000 subscribers, which represents the biggest quarterly loss in cable TV’s history. Six out of eight cable TV operators also reported their worst subscriber losses ever last quarter.
[…]
“the $100 cable bill is dead; the cable industry just doesn’t know it yet.” — Ryan Lawler
6 tags
The Future Of TV Is Social
Once again, media watchers fail to connect the dots. In this case, the tectonic shifts underlying TV are missed while the details fill the discussion:
The Sofa Wars - Plenty to Watch Online, but Viewers Prefer to Pay for Cable
A New York Times/CBS News poll this month found that 88 percent of respondents paid for traditional TV service. Just 15 percent of those subscribers had considered...
1 tag
Free of Freemium, Things Are Starting To Look Up... →
Will Ning turnaround after turning off all the free accounts, or fall into the dustbin of tech history? I am betting on a hard landing: there are too many alternatives.
2 tags
Reinventing E-Mail, One Message at a Time - Bits... →
Nick would like to have Hilary Mason’s E-Mail Classifier, and who wouldn’t?
selloutsamizdat asked: The Gartner piece was interesting - too bad it's 2 years old. Got anything more recent?
Anonymous asked: What happened to Twitpitch concept?
3 tags
Facebook Places ‘boring' says Foursquare chief -... →
“The only interesting thing about Places is that it has a potential audience of over 500 million people around the world… but that can only be a good thing for location-based services, like Foursquare, as Facebook will educate the masses about check-ins.”
Facebook may be overextending in its quest to become the social dimension of the web.
3 tags
Leo Laporte Is PIssed At Buzz, The World,...
Leo Laporte had set things up so that his Google Buzz was reposted to Twitter, and then somehow the set-up failed, and 15 days or so of his ‘show notes’ had not been public, or at least had not been reposted to Twitter.
But no one pinged him to say ‘Where’s the notes?’
Buzz Kill : LOL: The Life of Leo
No one noticed.
Not even me.
It makes me feel like...
1 tag
The Definition Of Publicy
pu·bli·cy
noun
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 of living in public, and identifying with others that do so; publicness.
5 tags
“Freedom of Association 2.0: people must be able to have multiple social IDs,...”
– Twitter / Eve Maler
In Twist, Nonprofits Honor Technology’s Failures -... →
MobileActive’s FAILFaire for non-profits is a good start: organizations need to be more open about failure so that we all can learn from them. This is a massive benefit from publicy in business and policy: don’t keep those failed projects private!
For more information about launching your own FAILFaire, visit MobileActive.org.
1 tag
America’s Love Affair with TV | Retrevo →
The US has 1.6 TV’s per capita, and 3% of Americans report having TV’s in their bathrooms.
I did some research a few years ago that suggested Macedonia was the highest TV watching nation on earth, with almost 6 hours per day invested, but this survey might not have reached many Macedonians and Bulgarians.
You can’t make shit like this up.
8 tags
Zemanta Integrated With Wordpress.com
Zemanta has announced a partnership with Wordpress.com, so that bloggers using that platform will have direct access to Zemanta’s technology.
I have been using Zemanta on my various blogs (stoweboyd.com, underpaidgenius.com) and it is a great support. In my case, Zemanta is a Firefox plug-in that does a lexical analysis of your post in the editor mode, and recommends related articles and...
7 tags
The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet | Magazine →
Chris Anderson -
As much as we love the open, unfettered Web, we’re abandoning it for simpler, sleeker services that just work.
I buy a good deal of Anderson’s pitch, but he misses the biggest aspect of the next wave: the movement is not just away from HTML to apps, its from a web of pages to a web of flow.
The dominant motif of all strategically important web apps from this point...
3 tags
Media: News Corp. plans national newspaper for... →
Murdoch thinks he’s going to get young people reading his new national newspaper because he’s putting it on an iPad? Clunk.
Social news has a big future, though
3 tags
The New World Of Film Distribution
Peter Broderick is someone that has been involved in movie distribution for a long time, and he has done a magisterial job of pulling together a handbook for the new economics of indie movies:
Peter Broderick, WELCOME TO THE NEW WORLD
Welcome to the New World of Distribution. Many filmmakers are emigrating from the Old World, where they have little chance of succeeding. They are attracted by...
4 tags
I am featured on paper.li, or, er, my upstream is
Paper.li is self-described in this way:
paper.li organizes links shared on Twitter into an easy to read newspaper-style format. Newspapers can be created for any Twitter user, list or #tag.
Jamie Burke pinged me today, pointing out that my paper.li ‘daily journal’ is at the top of the service’s featured page.
I don’t know how the featured list is composed, but...
5 tags
Your Brain on Computers - Studying the Brain Off... →
A group of brain scientists take a rafting trip in Utah out of touch of cell phone rambling about attention, multitasking, and the impacts of disconnecting on cognitive behavior. And it’s interspersed with snippets of commentary about research on attention, etc. But no real case is put together, and the author, Matt Richtel has cherry picked the research, never mentioning research that...
2 tags
Cory Doctorow On Social Media Naysayers
Doctorow skewers the naysayers:
How to say stupid things about social media
There are plenty of things to worry about when it comes to social media.
They are Skinner boxes designed to condition us to undervalue our privacy and to disclose personal information. They have opaque governance structures. They are walled gardens that violate the innovative spirit of the internet. But to deride...
5 tags
An Assault On Privacy
It seems likely that new sorts of surveillance that police and prosecutors want to use are running close to the edge of privacy guarantees in the constitution:
Charlie Savage, Judges Divided Over Growing GPS Surveillance - NYTimes.com
“Often what we have to do with the march of technology is realize that the difference in quantity and speed can actually amount to significantly more invasive...
8 tags
Eric Schmidt Confirms Google Is Off Track
Last week it was Peter Norvig admitting that Google has missed the opening rounds of the battle for the social web (see Google’s Biggest Mistake: The Rise Of The Social (Post Search) Web), and this week his boss confirms that Google is still off in algorithm land instead of understanding the social dimension of the web:
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.: Google and the Search for the Future
The day is...
4 tags
TLists
I haven’t even had a chance to review Twitter’s new Tlists integration which seems to have gone live on 13 August, but Tlists is popping up all over:
AOL “Head Of Technology” Jeff Reynar Already Bails For Startup After Half A Year ]]>
AOL’s Jeff Reynar, hired in January as “head of technology for engineering and products in New York,” and later also...
3 tags
How Starbucks Plans to Capitalize on Free Wi-Fi →
Starbucks is rolling out their own network — with streamed content from Rodale and other partners — to support free WiFi. Plus:
“This is just the beginning of how we plan to leverage this channel,” says [Starbucks’s Vice President of Digital Ventures Adam] Brotman. He imagines a future filled with more Apple goodies, exclusive e-book downloads and eventually the opportunity to...
4 tags
More RIM Problems: India Wants Access
India Warns It May Block BlackBerry Traffic
The Indian government said Thursday that it would block encrypted BlackBerry corporate e-mail and messenger services if wireless companies did not enable law enforcement authorities to monitor those messages by the end of the month.
The ultimatum suggested that Indian officials had reached an impasse after weeks of negotiations with Research...
1 tag
“A non-discrimination rule that bans all application-specific discrimination, but...”
– Barbara Van Schewick, Professor of Law at Stanford
via Fred Wilson
4 tags
Google Mythstakes: It's Our Internet, Not Theirs
In a post on the Google official blog, the search giant’s Richard Witt takes exactly the wrong tack in trying to clarify what Google is up to with Verizon on net neutrality. First of all, using the rhetorical device of contrasting ‘myths’ (what others are saying) with ‘facts’ (what Google is saying) is condescending.
And when you dig into it, the truth is that Google...
4 tags
Stanford Is Providing iPads To Medical Students
Stanford sees the promise of iPads, at least for medical students:
via email
Aji, LLC has just announced that their popular iPad app iAnnotate PDF will be part of the required course materials for first-year medical school students at Stanford. Apple recently announced that educational institutions will be able to buy apps in bulk through iTunes, and as part of a trial program to integrate the...
2 tags
Adjusting To iPad
My two day trip to NYC with just an iPad for company has been enlightening.
Overall I have adjusted to the keyboard, which is certainly adequate for typing blog posts and twittering. Many other annoying issues have come up, even in the first 24 hours. I don’t use Safari on my Mac so I expected transition headaches. One annoyance: when I select a link to open in another page, I am...
4 tags
Red Cross Wants Us To Use 9-1-1 In Crises, But...
The Red Cross would like us to use 9-1-1, not social tools in disasters:
Web Users Increasingly Rely on Social Media to Seek Help in a Disaster
A new American Red Cross survey shows many web users would turn to social media to seek help for themselves or others during emergencies—and they expect first responders to be listening.
The online survey asked 1,058 adults about their use of...
4 tags
Nomad Editions
Print executives see new opportunities in the exploding mobile marketplace; another way that iPad is changing the web landscape and by extension the aspirations of old media.
A Magazine Meant for Mobile - NYTimes.com
A small group of former magazine journalists and editors, including a former president of Newsweek, plan to publish a weekly digital magazine this fall, seeking to create content...
Peerflix Is Shutting Down
I guess the Peerflix model has been crushed by Bit Torrent, NetFlix, and the people’s ability to rip movies?
Dear Peerflix Member,
Effective April 23, 2008 Peerflix is discontinuing the Marketplace and DVD buy/sell/trade portions of Peerflix.com. While the Peerflix.com web site will be available beyond April 23, 2008, you will no longer be able to buy, sell, send or receive DVDs on...
2 tags
We’re Living In The Dark Ages Of Social Media |... →
Ross Kimbarovsky thinks that today’s social media is pretty unevolved. Personally, I avoid the greater social media world: I don’t click on links about ‘Ten Tips To Increase Blog Traffic’ or ‘How Twitter Can Increase Your Influence.’ I simply follow people I find interesting, watch as actual issue rise, and participate in a way that suits my own interests.
I do...
6 tags
Forbes: Facelift Or Foundational Change?
I was (briefly) a contributor at True/Slant, prior to my mother’s illness and death in the first half of the year. I never really posted much, and by the time I was back at work, True/Slant was in process of being acquired by Forbes.
The reality at Forbes is stark. Advertising falling like a rock, growing competition from AOL and Yahoo, and the rising expenses of a paper magazine.
So can...
2 tags
6 tags
Google's Biggest Mistake: The Rise Of The Social...
Near the end of a long, rambling discussion with Google’s Peter Norvig about making (and learning from) mistakes, Kathryn Schultz gets to where Google has stumbled hardest:
Kathryn Schultz, Error Message: Google Research Director Peter Norvig on Being Wrong
Schultz: What do you think have been Google’s biggest mistakes?
Norvig: I can’t speak for the whole company, but I...
2 tags
Marco.org - Great since day one →
The Android ecosystem doesn’t seem capable of producing devices that are great on day one. Yet Apple consistently pulls it off.
minimalmac:
Great analysis of the core difference between Apple and Android. It is deeper than hardware or features. The differences are rooted into the two cultures. Marco is at his best with these sorts of posts.
I agree on both counts.
“Any outcome, any deal that doesn’t preserve the freedom and openness of the...”
– Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman
But beware, since the NY Times article that quotes his says “Many Internet purists believe that a system that includes a sort of toll lane for faster routing of some content to Internet users violates the long-held tenet of net neutrality, which...
2 tags
Let’s Celebrate Google’s Biggest Failures! →
Danny Sullivan pulls a complete list of Google’s failed products. Wow.
5 tags
Massive Censorship Of Digg Uncovered « OOO →
Looks like arch conservatives have been gaming Digg to block liberal stories from getting attention.
