December 2010
12 posts
TummelVision 44: Stowe Boyd on social cognition,... →
I was on TummelVision last night. What fun!
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“It doesn’t take rocket science to predict what the craven and corporate-friendly...”
– Bruce Davis, Why President Obama Won’t Deliver On His Network Neutrality Promises
“Here, then, is what Silicon Valley’s not: An economy of funds seeking...”
– - 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...
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“Despite some good actors, self-regulation of privacy has not worked adequately...”
– Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, cited by Edward Wyatt and Tanzina Vega in F.T.C. Online Privacy Plan Seeks ‘Do Not Track’ Option - NYTimes.com
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RIM acquires The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), the SWAT... →
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?
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Pilcrows And Flows: The Fragmentation Of Media In...
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...
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“If the iPad had come first, we wouldn’t think of the iPhone as a phone;...”
– - 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.
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“I think Nick [Denton] is eager to declare this a post-blog design as a sop to...”
– - 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...
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Web 2.0 on the Ropes. . . Kleiner Perkins Halts... →
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...
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“By 2015, efforts to systematize and automate social engagement will result in...”
– - Gartner, REPORT: One In Ten Of Your Friends Will Not Be Human By 2015
I am ready for spimes, especially social ones.
November 2010
90 posts
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Hudack On Hulu →
mikehudack:
“Hulu is facing competition from the likes of Google TV and a new streaming-only subscription service from Netflix, but one of its bigger challenges may be growing pains felt within its group of owners. “People are getting more defensive,” says Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey. “You’ve got the ad exec who has their quota, and to keep the advertiser, they bad-talk about how...
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Putting A ® On Fauxial Awareness Is A Faux Pas
[update 4:56pm 30 Nov 2010 — Apparently CV meant the ® as a joke. I suggested that she might want to include a footnote for the clueless, like me.]
I read this post, which castigates the MAC Cosmetics company for using the Juarez Mexico landscape as an ‘inspiration’ for a product campaign. Apparently Juarez has unusually high levels of violence against women, and various groups have...
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Forget Flock and RockMelt: We Need Social...
I saw a post by Benn Parr (Flock Social Browser Declares War on RockMelt with Version 3.5) about a new version of Flock, responding to the threat of RockMelt in the rekindled social browser niche.
It’s like a schoolyard brawl, where two kids wind up throwing punches because they like the same girl, not because they have any good reason to fight. It’s theater, not warfare.
There is...
“I see only one move ahead, but it is always the correct one.”
– José Raúl Capablanca, cited by Philip E Ross, The Expert Mind
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Digital Ads Honored
Watching basically zero television, I miss a lot of what goes on TV. I read with interest about these ad campaigns of the past decade:
Stuart Elliott, Digital Ad Campaigns to Be Honored
The campaigns, in alphabetical order, are as follows, along with the agencies of record. The years represent when they were introduced to consumers:
CHALKBOT, 2009, for the Livestrong Foundation and Nike, ...
totallylikeme asked: wow, i'm not going to hire a college kid! i'm so angry at squarespace for lying to me that i could export my photoblog anytime... guess posterous it is, thanks for your answer!
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“Worry about information overload has become one of the drumbeats of our time....”
– - Ann Blair, Information overload, the early years
A very solid and well-researched examination of the attention overload meme, similar to the themes I discussed in The False Question Of Attention Economics.
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OnLive Gaming System Will Stream to TV Sets - Eric... →
Cloud-based games seems inevitable, but we’ll have to see if OnLive can carve out a niche before the other console monsters wise up.
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“The Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that only 1 percent of online...”
– Adults Are Not So Inclined to Check In - NYTimes.com
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totallylikeme asked: did you have any luck with importing from squarespace to tumblr? dan's ruby script isn't working for me, maybe coz i'm on a mac... just wondered if you could help me?
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The New New Andreessen - Brad Stone →
I think Andreessen is a billionaire playing at VC. Ning raised $120M and is not worth much, and he invested $20M in Kno when the rest of the investment community saw Apple’s iPad as a killer. And the investment in Foursquare is very very risky. He seems to be gambling.
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Google’s PageRank Algorithm: A Diagram of the... →
Analysis of Google’s position in the new economics of the world as monopoly based on network value production, for which we are all paying ‘cognitive rent’.
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“Barring the rise of an unexpected new military enemy, the battleground of an...”
– Christopher E. Couples, The National Information Infrastructure Initiative: Space, Discipline, War Machine
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“The movement from existence in analog spaces to existence in digital spaces...”
– Christopher E. Couples, The National Information Infrastructure Initiative: Space, Discipline, War Machine. (via ajnabee)
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“A September 2010 survey conducted in the UK for Intel found almost half (45%) of...”
– - Colin David, via Nic Brisbourne, The main use case for connected TVs has to be open access to content
Nic makes the case that people are already connecting through phones and laptops, so why do TVs have to become social?
Because someone will come up with a better user experience than he had on...
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Music: Another Pillar of Brain Fitness? |... →
A recent Nature Review Neuroscience article shows that music training can benefit the brain beyond music-related abilities. Specifically, musicians may have an advantage for processing speech in challenging listening environments compared with non-musicians.
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The Seven Principles You Need to Know to Build a... →
Bianchini offers up some fairly straightforward advice to would-be developers of social tools, most of which boils down to ‘narrow focus, be the best, be unique.’
I wonder if she is about to unveil some new product? She’s been gone from Ning for a good while, although she is still positioning herself as Ning founder.
I still think Ning is dead.
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Jolicloud Releases Jolibook
I have been tracking the inventive Jolicloud OS — a social Linux — for some time. Now it appears that the company has developed its own netbook. I guess they felt compelled to do it, but I don’t see how they can compete with low cost offerings like Asus, or top quality from Apple.
However, their OS innovation continues to presage where we will be headed, as Apple and others...
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Can Anything Stop The Facebook Juggernaut? - Jon... →
I dislike Facebook because they’re mediocre. They have a platform and opportunity unlike anyone else, ever—and what have they done with it? Nothing. None of their so-called innovations are actually even remotely so. Copying Twitter was smart, but hardly new; ditto Foursquare. They called Facebook Groups an innovation; it’s a basic feature they should have implemented years ago. Now they’re...
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“What technology do you use in your daily life?
Currently my relatively new...”
– The Vulture Transcript: Sci-Fi Author William Gibson on Why He Loves Twitter, Thinks Facebook Is ‘Like a Mall,’ and Much More — Vulture
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“Enable a flow of signals
Every action in the social intranet – every document...”
– - Lars Plougmann, Your social intranet is where work gets done
A great set of insights about the way that flow-based social tools are changing the nature of work, and how they foster social cognition (although Lars doesn’t use that term).
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Student protests: national walkout live
Today, thousands of students are expected to take to the streets for the second time in a fortnight in protest at plans to raise tuition fees and scrap the education maintenance allowance.
More than 25,000 college and university students across the UK have signed up to a Facebook page organising a co-ordinated walkout from classes at 11am.
Scores more...
Anonymous asked: Hey Stowe. What theme are you using for your blog? I really love it but can't seem to find one like it..
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“On the great timeline of television history, Google TV takes an enormous step in...”
– David Pogue, Google TV’s Chaotic Interface
Provenance Regional Cuisine →
deepthinking:
My little neighbourhood grocery store…
Provenance Regional Cuisine
“The technology has created on campuses a new set of social types — not the...”
– Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction - NYTimes.com
(via gracemcdunnough)
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Facebook Warns Debt Collectors About Using Its... →
A debt collection firm has a policy on how to use Facebook to track people down.
The world wags on…
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Hell, Yes, Google Should Buy Groupon. And Twitter.... →
All those billions should be used to buy up promising tech companies, and these people would definitely add the needed social DNA to Google.
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“As for digital, I am with the utopians – fully aware that some see that as a...”
– - Alan Rusbridger, The splintering of the fourth estate
The editor of the Guardian stuck an allusion of mine into the Andrew Olle lecture 2010 in Sydney, Australia on 19 November. Too bad I am just ‘one blogger’, but I am heartened to think that I am influencing folks like Rusbridger.
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#defragcon @dweinberger on Knowing - storify.com →
A stream of comments from David Weinberger’s talk today at Defrag.
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Don’t Blow It! New York Tech’s Top Investors Have... →
NYC and SF are looking bubblicious, according to Fred Wilson and Roger Ehrenberg.
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Social Cognition, From Defrag
[These are more or less the notes I used to prepare for the talk at Defrag today.]
It probably is no surprise to you that all known human cultures have language, music, and dance. And yes, puns. Even deaf people have puns. These are human universals, along with a bunch of others. If you leave a child alone — perhaps living in the woods with wolves — they will not learn language. But...