August 2012
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Getting Social Media Wrong By Asymmetry
Today, I got another mail from one of the many progressive political organizations trying to rally support for President Obama’s campaign. And I really do support the president. But these guys just get it all wrong. They are mass marketing in a social medium, using a bullhorn to hammer their messages to their ‘audience’, and blocking the affordances that are possible in even as...
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HBO cuts the cord, brings streaming-only service... →
unexpectedtech:
An HBO streaming service that does not require an associated cable subscription is coming in mid-October, according to Variety. The rollout is confined to only a few European countries, but it’s an embrace from Time Warner to cord-cutters that non-HBO customers have long sought.
The service, named HBO Nordic AB, will allow customers in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark to...
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“for all the accumulating evidence that says that executives who zero in on...”
– - Richard Dobbs and Jaana Remes, Where the Next Wave of Urban Growth Will Come From
via Karen Quinn Fung (counti8)
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“@stoweboyd: Two most common reasons for cellphone breakage are tripping while...”
– August 30, 2012 at 05:47AM via http://bit.ly/PtYI9o
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What is the future of cars? Corporate futurist for... →
Ford futurist Sheryl Connelly says she’s not a car person — ‘I never look at the car industry’ — and then talks only about cars, like Ford’s Traffic Jam Assist, and Ford’s Sync. I can almost hear the trademarks in the interview.
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We Are The Woods We Wander In
I find it odd that we never have to be lost anymore, or even uncertain of where we are, as we wander around holding our mobile devices before us, looking at the GPS-generated maps like tarot cards.
But there’s something lost when we never simply wander around, exploring a new neighborhood, or talking to strangers. So I am fascinated by the notion of apps that help us wander instead of...
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The Game Changer For TV: 5G
Maxwell Wessel makes the case that the status quo of today’s entrenched cartel of TV networks and cable companies could be disrupted by an alternative to cable internet: Wimax.
Maxwell Wessel, The Inevitable Disruption of Television
For about a year now, I’ve been warning producers that disruption is coming. And for about a year now, the conversation has ended the same way. Bundling...
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Is The Social Network Disrupting Social Class?
Rob Horning at Marginal Utility noodles on our bonding too closely with the individualism of the ‘social graph’ (a term he dislikes at face value, just as I do). He suggests that we may have painted ourselves into a corner by rejecting a class consciousness:
Social graph vs. social class – Rob Horning via The New Inquiry
Social media support, obviously, a view of society as a...
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Elisabeth Murdoch Tells The TV Industry To Adapt... →
worktalkresearch:
The first woman in 17 years to give the MacTaggart address at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, Elisabeth Murdoch did more than just bitchslap her brother, James, for his devotion to profits at all costs in his own MacTaggart lecture three years ago.
[…]
‘if we don’t have the confidence to collaborate between producers and broadcasters, advertisers...
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“Profit without purpose is a recipe for disaster.”
– Elisabeth Murdoch
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Twitter Has To Control User Experience: Does It...
The controversy over Twitter’s efforts to close down non-Twitter clients and disable ‘find my friends’ capabilities raise a few questions.
Twitter wants to make money on advertising — sponsored pages and the like — which is reasonable. Let’s leave aside the idea of regulating how third party apps would present Twitter data and ads, which is probably too hard to...
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Today's Scuttlebot: Hacking Your Head, and Twitter... →
Buying Twitter Followers Is Sinful, says Saudi Cleric English.alarabiya.net | A Saudi cleric says it is a sin to buy Twitter followers and that he who does so “suffers from a sense of internal void.” – Joshua Brustein
Square's new pricing: A bold move - Fortune Tech →
Flat $275/mo fee for small businesses — Dorsey is going after small businesses that don’t take credit cards today.
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“@stoweboyd: The Future of Television: Social, Mobile, Over-the-top? Stowe Boyd...”
– August 24, 2012 at 05:05AM via http://bit.ly/NO3Kx7
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Tumblr Gets Instagrammed By Twitter
Twitter is definitely changing the rules of engagement in the social media sphere. Last month, it blocked Instagram access to finding Twitter contacts, and yesterday it did the same for Tumblr, leading Tumblr to removing its find Twitter friends feature, too.
Tumblr responded to an inquiry about this state of affairs by Matthew Panzarino:
To our dismay, Twitter has restricted our users’ ability...
Anonymous asked: Stowe, FYI: I'm really enjoying your work. Russell Lewis of the Chicago History Museum recommended it last night. But on this iPad, the right margin is cut off, maybe about twelve characters worth. I'm new to iPads so I don't know if this normal somehow. Doug vanderHoof
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“@stoweboyd: The real reason Facebook is a dog http://t.co/VtVjOQD7 It’s...”
– August 22, 2012 at 12:52PM via http://bit.ly/PDapeb
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The End Of Silicon Valley?
David Sacks of Yammer wonders if Silicon Valley — meaning the venture-backed bastion of innovation and wealth creation in the Bay Area — has started to lose it’s mojo. His argument — more of a handwave really — is that a/ the economics don’t work in a system with such large incumbents (like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, etc.), b/ partly because todays...
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Are Speakers and Writers Supposed To Never Reuse...
A piece in the NY Times about Fareed Zakaria’s reinstatement to Time and CNN after some apparently unintended plagiarism, included this mention:
Christine Haughney, Time and CNN Reinstate Journalist After Review - NYTimes.com
Earlier this year, Mr. Zakaria was criticized for giving a commencement speech at Harvard that was very similar to one he had given earlier at Duke.
I am baffled...
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Why I Changed My Mind On Klout (And Invested) «... →
Michael Arrington had the same change-of-mind about Klout that I recently did. Although I didn’t turn around and invest (although maybe I should).
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Twitter Sucks The Oxygen Out Of The Third-Party...
Twitter changes the way that third-party clients can interact with the service, tightening the clamps that they put in place last year. Basically, that end of the ecosystem is effectively dead.
Matthew Panzarino, Twitter API Changes Set Maximum User Cap for 3rd Parties
There’s no way to sugar coat it. These changes effectively kill off the growth of the third-party client ecosystem as we know...
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“40% of our thefts are Apple products”
– NYC Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, quoted in Aspen, Colorado (via benedictevans)
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“Do not be the startup that simply chases problems.
Read more:...”
– http://birch.co/post/29547765961/from-lean-startup-to-failed-startup
Read more: http://birch.co/post/29547765961/from-lean-startup-to-failed-startup#ixzz23iHGzUvs
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Medium As A Bellwether
The boys at Obvious have launched a peek at a new experiment of theirs, called Medium.
Medium — to the degree that we can fool with it so far, or so far as they have fooled with it — is more of an indication of a new aesthetic that Obvious is pursuing than anything else. It has a iPad-like clean design — shared by all the curations that have been pulled together.
Reading...
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Magazines Are Falling Like A Rock
David Carr stops short of saying that the American magazine business is headed for a dead cat bounce, but the recent numbers on newsstand sales are grim:
David Carr, Wondering How Far Magazines Must Fall - NYTimes.com
Like newspapers, magazines have been in a steady slide, but now, like newspapers, they seem to have reached the edge of the cliff. Last week, the Audit Bureau of Circulations...
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Robert Reich Proposes Mandatory 3 Week Vacations,...
Reich took a vacation — lucky guy — and had a brainstorm:
Robert Reich, Back from Three Weeks Vacation with a Bold Proposal
Here’s a bold proposal I offer free of charge to Obama or Romney: Every American should get a mandatory minimum of three weeks paid vacation a year.
Most Americans only get two weeks off right now. But many don’t even take the full two weeks out of fear of...
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“The challenge for VCs is that it is easy to spend a lot of time going nowhere on...”
– – Nic Brisbourne, Advisors: they don’t help VCs, but they can help start-ups via The Kernel
This is one of the reasons that I recommend to my startup clients that they create a real advisory board, people that will play an active, although very part-time role working with the company, and that the...
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“This isn’t a self-help book for the recently redundant, egging them on to found...”
– – Milo Yiannopoulos in Bluster and bullshit completely trashes Julie Meyer’s Welcome To Entrepreneur Country.
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Cash Is Essential For A Free Society
The furor over Starbucks investment in Square is boiling over like an exploding espresso machine. It’s pretty frothy.
Starbuck’s CEO, Howard Schultz said ‘The consumer is going through a seismic change in which cash is eventually going to be obsolete.’
That’s a bit much. As I pointed out in Anonymous Cash = Freedom, cash is a prerequisite of a free society, while...
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Be Careful Of The Advice You Give On Your Blog:...
North Carolina prosecutes a blogger for talking about his cave man, paleo diet:
Adam Liptak, Blogger Giving Advice Resists State’s: Get a License
Steve Cooksey eats what he calls a cave man diet — lots of meat and greens, no bread or pasta. He says it has helped him conquer life-threatening diabetes.
But when he wrote about his experiences and offered advice on his Web site, officials in North...
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Peter Kafka Knows Why There Is No YouTube App In...
Peter Kafka, Why Is Apple’s YouTube App Disappearing? (Hint: Think Ads.)
Here’s some insight from an industry executive who works with both companies, and suggests that you’ll increasingly see YouTube take control of all its apps, for the reasons discussed above: Ad dollars and user experience. “YouTube [has] decided they didn’t want third-parties building apps,” says my source. “Their strategy...
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Elie Ahovi Imagines An Affordable Way To Get...
Here’s another good example of speculative design. Elie Ahovi imagines gigantic semi-autonomous underwater drones collecting vast amounts of oceanic plastic in gigantic nets.
Looks like a toy, but imagine it at scale:
Plastic-Eating Underwater Drone Could Swallow the Great Pacific Garbage Patch via Popular Science
A new underwater drone concept could seek and destroy one of the...
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Telephone Surveys Underreport Cell-Only Americans
I no longer have a landline. In fact, I haven’t for years, and that means I am part of a growing segment of the US population, and one with interesting political impact. It turns out that cell-only Americans are more likely to be, according to John Harwood’s inquiry in today’s NY Times,
disproportionately urban, African-American, on either the high or low end of the economic...
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Forget Cord-Cutters: Cable Companies Should Worry... →
Rebecca Greenfield collates a bunch of commentary about the slowing growth — almost non-growth — of TV subscriptions in the US. Around 400,000 Americans cut the cord last quarter, but cord-cutters aren’t the trend to watch: it’s cord-nevers.
Rebecca Greenfield via the Atlantic Wire
Cord-never numbers are particularly hard to measure. A cable company, of course, can’t report the amount of people...
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Horace Dediu on The Computing Renaissance
Looking at the decreasing numbers of Macs and PCs being sold obscures what is really happening: a wholesale shift in personal computing to tablets:
Horace Dediu, Perspective and Context in Personal Computing
Seen this way, rather than there being a crisis in personal computing, we have a renaissance. And as in the actual Renaissance, it’s a volatile and unsettling period.
Nowhere more so than...
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“In all the time I’ve used computers I’ve always been making, building and...”
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buzz
Rev Dan Catt: Leaving the Guardian, creativity vs mild depression, the quantified self and running
I decided not to blog this post when I came across it a few weeks ago out of a general desire to start keeping things a bit more upbeat around here, but I’ve found myself thinking about it and...
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Questioning As A Way To Find Answers
Dan Hill has a great post about an ‘imaginary appliance’ called Brickstarter, and explains how speculative design (not a term he is using, but he should) animates the process of getting people to consider the implications of a design:
Dan Hill, Brickstarter – Brickstarter prototype v0.1, and using sketches to ask questions
Previously on Brickstarter: our project is about sketching...
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Insync: A Google Docs-Loving Dropbox Rival →
Builds a Dropbox-like syncing folder on your desktop connected to your Google Docs account.
I bet Google buys them this year.
