“ It doesn’t take rocket science to predict what the craven and corporate-friendly Obama administration wants to do. The president is already doing what he intends to do. His telecom lobbyist-in-chief at the FCC isn’t opposing the Comcast-NBC merger because the president doesn’t intend to. There’s no assertion of FCC authority over the internet because President Obama won’t choose the public interest over corporate interests here either, any more than he has done anyplace else. The president can stall another month, and a new Congress will be in town. Then he can crow a little, but not too loudly or forcefully, about being for internet neutrality again, but how tea party Republicans in the Congress are holding it up. That’s what the president has done, and what we can reasonably expect he’ll do. The question now is what will what was once thought of as the movement for media justice do. Will it hold its breath another year, waiting to be noticed by the president? Will it forget its own problems and come together to re-elect Barack Obama for a second term? After all, Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin are worse, right?”
(via azspot)
“”Here, then, is what Silicon Valley’s not: An economy of funds seeking returns bigger than industrial age short-term “profits,” investing in forporations that are built to earn them, which have vaster, more enduring purposes than just “satisfying” already overleveraged, forlorn “consumers,” and sparking 21st century jobs that are riveting, involving, compelling and downright fulfilling because they tap into the deeper meaning inherent in all the above — all of which make a more awesome measure of national economic health, like Net National Happiness, go.
Hence, if you wanted to find a shining example of the old order, you’d be hard pressed to do better than Silicon Valley. Funnily enough, while it embraces new gizmos and gadgets with a vengeance, what it hasn’t yet embraced with any ardor is new institutions: new kinds of corporations, markets, banks, accounts, jobs, national income, and even “profit.” If anything, from an institutional point of view, Silicon Valley is — counterintuitively — a textbook example of 20th century capitalism. Hence, whenever I talk about 21st century capitalism, my friends in the Valley and the Alley (understandably) want to throw me out the nearest window.
Here’s how I’d put this fundamental difference between myself and my tech-savvy friends. You can believe that new technologies wrapped in yesterday’s approach to doing business are good enough reboot prosperity: the engine’s fine, it just needs more gas. Or you can believe that it will take a better approach to doing business first: the engine’s the problem, and it needs to be rebuilt. But you probably can’t believe both.
- Umair Haque, Silicon Valley’s Disruption Deficit Disorder
I don’t think we can look to VCs or Super Angels to turn the world economy onto a better path. They are part of the ‘architects of power’ that Chomsky talks about.
I am starting to believe that the only hope is state capitalism, or some form of oligarchy where power gets so concentrated that some small group of super elite can actually make decisions that are in the long-term benefit of the human race, once they are firmly in charge, and can act to cut across petty interests.
Of course this will mean the end of personal freedoms, but it might be better than a 4ºC increase in global temperature, and a constant boom-bust cycle as the financiers ride the economy like a rented mule.
“ Despite some good actors, self-regulation of privacy has not worked adequately and is not working adequately for American consumers.”
RIM acquires The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), the SWAT team of UI design | BGR | Boy Genius Report
My hunch is that this will lead to a disgruntled group of TAT designers, who will melt off, one by one, yielding maybe one generation of innovation for RIM. Bets?
Pilcrows And Flows: The Fragmentation Of Media In A Web Of Flow
A pilcrow is a typographic term for the paragraph marker that many publishers use, such as the New York Times. It looks like this: ‘¶’.
This has come into recent prominence since the NY Times has implemented anchors on every paragraph of its news stories, so that every paragraph has a distinct URL. To access the URL you can double tap the shift key when viewing a NY Times page in a browser, and pilcrows appear at the head of every paragraph, serving as the place to copy the paragraph specific URL.
This allows a simple way to direct someone to a specific paragraph in a news story, instead of qualifying a URL to the story’s page by saying ‘3/4ths down the page, he writes…’.
This techniques is also called Winerlinks by some in recognition of Dave Winer’s use of these anchors, and the NY Times is referring to them as Deep Links.
Here’s one:
Or one that highlights a specific sentence in a specific paragraph:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/technology/30jumo.html#h5s2
I find it interesting that no one has considered this in terms of the adoption of stream-based social tools, where the use of URLs is increasingly not about navigation, but of fetching. Instead of clicking on a URL to a photo in my twitter stream, my Twitter client pulls the photo and resolves it in the context of my streaming application.
One of the principles of the web of flow is the fragmentation of older, page-based media into easily streamable bits. And for that to work, each fragment has to have a unique ID, which is exactly what deep links are all about.
So, clever Twitter tool developers will soon be implementing deep links, and hopefully so will content management systems.
So in a few weeks time, I might post this:
I think Krugman is dead on about the Irish http://sto.ly/eevbPT
where the shortened URL was based on a much more complex structure:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/opinion/26krugman.html#p2h3h4s2h5s1,3
And if you click on it you’d be taken to the NYTimes, which would resolve it like this:
And I would expect a hypothetical Twitter client, one that implements deep links, to show me something like this:
I think Krugman is dead on about the Irish http://sto.ly/eevbPTO.K., these days it’s not the landlords, it’s the bankers — and they’re just impoverishing the populace, not eating it. But only a satirist — and one with a very savage pen — could do justice to what’s happening to Ireland now.
The Irish story began with a genuine economic miracle. But eventually this gave way to a speculative frenzy driven by runaway banks and real estate developers, all in a cozy relationship with leading politicians. The frenzy was financed with huge borrowing on the part of Irish banks, largely from banks in other European nations.
Then the bubble burst, and those banks faced huge losses. You might have expected those who lent money to the banks to share in the losses. After all, they were consenting adults, and if they failed to understand the risks they were taking that was nobody’s fault but their own. But, no, the Irish government stepped in to guarantee the banks’ debt, turning private losses into public obligations.
As we want to pull more context — to create deeper meaning — we can expect the URLs to get more and more sophisticated, representing much more than a physical address on the web, but instead emphasis, and contrast.
Bit.ly recently introduced bundles — collections of URLs bundled together. Combined with capabilities like deep links you can start to imagine very sophisticated ways to represent a collection of viewpoints on a contentious issue, for example, or a series of posts on a specific theme. It will require more tooling to help those that are curatorially minded to create these collations, or every to devise a complex deep URL like the one in my example above.
There’s a lot of moving parts: better CMS, like the NY Times has implemented; better Twitter (or other streaming media) clients, that would resolve these elaborate URLs effectively; and better tools for creating the complex URLs for curators.
But I bet it will all come together very quickly, indeed.
[disclosure: I am an advisor to Bit.ly, and have a financial stake in the company’s outcome.]
“ If the iPad had come first, we wouldn’t think of the iPhone as a phone; we’d think of it as a tablet small enough to hold up to your ear.”
- Paul Graham, Tablets
Graham makes the case that we should be calling this generation of devices — always on, touch screens, new notions of UX — tablets, not mobile devices, or palmtops, or whatever.
“ I think Nick [Denton] is eager to declare this a post-blog design as a sop to advertisers. It’s still a blog, it’s just the blog is in a narrower column.”
- Anil Dash, cited by Nick Bilton in Gawker Hopes to Transform “The Blog”
Denton IS on to something, though, and Anil is missing the forest for the trees. Yes, the new Gawker will still be incorporating some of the mechanical elements of blogs, so in his eyes it’s still the same old, same old.
But Denton is moving into a era where blogging’s tools and tenor have been ingested and digested by big media, but the social dimension has not been. If anything, his new foray into New Gawker will make his property grossly less social, less involved in community, less us and more them.
That’s what he is on to. He is joining the big media companies who are hoping to stripmall the social web, to become part of the sprawl.
I have argued long and hard about the need for something like the New Urbanism Movement, so we can save the best aspects of social media before it is all razed to make way for media malls. I call this New Spatialism.
Denton is going with the other guys, who are dominated by dreams of scale and control.
I am dreaming of the next stage of the social revolution, one that continues to emerge from our connections and conversations, where we have a stake and a say, not just a ticket to sit in the audience with a box of popcorn in our lap.
Web 2.0 on the Ropes. . . Kleiner Perkins Halts Investments - SVW
Tom Foremski caught a passing remark from a Kleiner Perkins partner, Randy Komisar, which he interprets as ‘we are no longer investing in Web 2.0 companies.’ In the blowbank, Komisar qualified what he said — or what Foremski heard — but still…
I think Web 2.0 is played out as a metaphor, and not for the deep inner thinking by Tim O’Reilly of the ‘web as a platform’ or whatever else Web 2.0 was supposed to mean.
Web 2.0 was once a forward leaning metaphor, but now is only relevant as backwards-oriented map.
What we learned is that the most important part of Web 2.0 is social. The social web has remade the world, and the rest turns out to be plumbing.
KP is still investing in social, and social is still changing the world. Lots left to go.
