May 2011
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April 2011
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Orbital Content - Cameron Koczon →
I really like this piece by Koczon, who I haven’t read before. His ideas about content liberation and orbital content are congruent with my discussions of the web of flow and liquid media. Like this:
Orbital content
Our transformed relationship with content is one in which individual users are the gravitational center and content floats in orbit around them. This “orbital content,” built...
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Jay Rosen on What I Think I Know About Journalism
Jay Rosen, What I Think I Know About Journalism
[…] what I think I know about journalism.
It comes down to these four ideas.
The more people who participate in the press the stronger it will be.
The profession of journalism went awry when it began to adopt the View from Nowhere.
The news system will improve when it is made more useful to people.
Making facts public does not a...
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““We have always thought of individuals as being unpredictable,” said...”
– Robert Lee Hotz, The Really Smart Phone
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“At Northeastern University in Boston, network physicists discovered just how...”
– - Robert Lee Hotz, The Really Smart Phone
There is order in our randomness, it seems.
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Adobe Might Be Blindsided By The iPad
I read a piece recently by Elliot Jay Stocks that made a pretty compelling case that Adobe might be shooting themselves in the foot with overly bloodthirsty pricing in the iPad marketplace:
Adobe’s pricing model
Perhaps it’s foolish of me to be surprised by the extortionate software prices set by Adobe — it’s certainly their usual practice — but the shocking aspect is that Adobe are going to...
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BRYCE DOT VC: bit-rank and the Bitly Data Stack →
brycedotvc:
Today marks a big milestone in the life of a little company- Bitly. They’ve released a really killer iPad app called News.me. I’ve been using News.me for a few months now and have seen it evolve from a buggy prototype to a slick news reader to the powerful application that is in the iTunes…
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“Twitter has gone from a novelty to necessity. Increasingly, I was late to the...”
– Michael Wilbon might have been the last man standing without a Twitter account, but he has finally begun to tweet. - ESPN (via fred-wilson)
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“That was desktop publishing. It was fun, it was creative, it was...”
– Adam Burks Adobe’s Digital Publishing mistake (via moapp)
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Liquid: The Mobile, Social, Connected, Webbed...
We are clearly at the tipping point of a new era in computing, and we haven’t got a great name for it. Steve Jobs used a ‘post-’ characterization recently, saying that the iPad represented the gateway to the post-PC world. But we need a term to characterize what this is, not what it isn’t.
And what is it? It’s a convergence of a number of trends, some of which are...
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lakmar asked: Thanks Stowe, for understanding the visually challenged folks, such as i, and implementing a vertically linear timeline design.. Really appreciate it.. :))
whitneymcn asked: Not really a question, but my theory on Kickstarter backers was that you'd have a huge number of one-project backers due to friends and family, existing fans of the creator, project-specific marketing, and so on, with a big cliff after one (which appears to be the case).
Where I went wrong was thinking that if someone jumped off that cliff by backing more than one or project,...
Where I went wrong was thinking that if someone jumped off that cliff by backing more than one or project,...
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The AOL-TechCrunch Investing Controversy - Kara... →
After a long and interesting rant about Michael Arrington’s transcendent ethics (21st century, or zero ethics, depending on your view), Kara Swisher sums it up this way:
it’s pointless to give a turtle a hard time for not being a fish.
The skinny is that Arrington recently decided to up his level of personal investing in companies he reviews, and Swisher thinks that’s...
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“A free press is the immune system of democracy.”
– Craig Newmark
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News Aggregator Zite Wants to Play Nice With... →
Zite announces a new CEO, and wants to smooth the controversies around the company’s model of republishing content into its ‘personalized magazine.’ Al Davar, the former CEO, is out after peeving the entire publishing world, and getting a cease-and0desist letter from just about everyone publishing.
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The Great Ephemeralization - Timothy Lee →
Timothy Lee looks into the corrosive effect of software’s power to unmake tangible goods by creating software that does the same thing on general purpose devices:
Timothy Lee, The Great Ephemeralization
[…] a couple of years ago, Google waved a magic wand that transformed millions of Android phones into sophisticated navigation devices with turn-by-turn directions. This was...
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Joichi Ito Named Head of M.I.T. Media Lab -... →
A great choice at this juncture.
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Empire Avenue Is On The Wrong Side Of Town
Martijn Linssen suggests that we take a look at the terms of service before signing up to a new service: in this case, he is thinking of Empire Avenue, the newest sizzling social game. He quotes the TOS there:
Here’s the crucial part of Empire Avenue’s TOS:
For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, such as photos and videos (“IP content”), you...
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EmpireAvenue: All Heat And No Light?
I signed up to EmpireAvenue after hearing about it last week: a fantasy stock market fashioned on the notion that people and brands can be traded like stocks.
It’s getting a lot of play on the interwebs because — I believe — people would like this to be some sort of useful proxy for influence. Again.
Jeremiah Owyang does a serious writeup, implicitly advocating that brands...
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At Last, Couric Is Expected to Say She's Leaving... →
Brian Stelter offers up the lamest excuse for anonymous sources, ever:
At Last, Couric Is Expected to Say She’s Leaving CBS - Brian Stelter
The meticulously arranged exit plan was described by four people with knowledge of it, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it was not supposed to be revealed before the formal announcement.
The editors at the NY Times really are slipping...
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Studios and Theaters Battle Over On-Demand Movies... →
The corrosive impact of the web continues to reconfigure the movie industry, with advocates for old school movie houses battling with others who see the future as increasingly digital delivery to the home or mobile devices:
Studios and Theaters Battle Over On-Demand Movies - Michael Cieply
Last week, four studios — Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, and Warner...
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“Google has a market share of 97 percent for mobile searches.”
– Claire Cain Miller, citing Statcounter research in Google, Already Dominant in Mobile Search, Isn’t Resting
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Data-Driven Decisions Can Aid Companies'... →
Is there any real evidence of a “data payoff” across the corporate world? It has taken a while, but new research led by Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggests that the beginnings are now visible.
Mr. Brynjolfsson and his colleagues, Lorin Hitt, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania,...
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Is workplace loyalty an outmoded concept? →
THE PROBLEM
Michel Balthazard had worked for carmaker Renault for 31 years and was then fired after the company linked him to corporate espionage. Last week, Renault said it may have been hoaxed. Should three decades of service have bought Mr Balthazard the benefit of the doubt? Or is employee loyalty outmoded in the modern workplace?
Lynda Gratton
Loyalty is dead – killed off through...
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“Practically every week some magazine runs a story about how email, cell phones,...”
– Michael Chorost, World Wide Mind
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Neuronal Recycling And The Next Step In Cultural…...
There’s great deal of heat these days (and little light, I think) about intentional evolution, where humanity will tinker with its own DNA, or put gizmos in our brains, causing a step function in the way that humans think, act, or perceive the world.
Mark Changizi thinks the most obvious path to some significant change in human cognitive capabilities is neuronal recycling, where we take advantage...
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“Why is surprise the permanent condition of the U.S. political and economic...”
– - Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Blyth, The Black Swan of Cairo | Foreign Affairs
And is the same true in business? Businesses often have ‘stability at all costs’ as an unstated operating principle. And to achieve that goal management will prohibit risk taking, and avoids entering into...
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“As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism...”
– Noam Chomsky
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“The best opinion journalism has a clarity and readability that far surpasses...”
– Gideon Rachman quoting Geoffrey Crowther, Simplify, then exaggerate:the neo-cons’ route to disaster
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Economies of small - Seth Godin →
I think we embraced scale as a goal when the economies of that scale were so obvious that we didn’t even need to mention them. Now that it’s so much easier to produce a product in the small and market a product in the small, and now that it’s so beneficial to offer a service to just a few, with focus and attention, perhaps we need to rethink the very goal of scale.
Don’t be small because...
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news.me - John Borthwick →
John Borthwick announces (at last) the release of News.me, a social news app, for the iPad:
John Borthwick, News.me
Why News.me?
For a while now at bitly and betaworks, we have been thinking about and working on applications that blend socially curated streams with great immersive reading interfaces.
Specifically we have been exploring and testing ways that the bitly data stack can be used...
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Predicting The Future Through The Zeitgeist
Read a fascinating piece by my friend Ulrike Reinhard, an interview with Peter Kruse, the founder of nextpractice. He has worked to create a method to predict societal change by tapping into the collective insight embedded in the minds of groups of experts in various fields.
For example, if were interested in trends in food fashion — like Chipotle might have been before concocting their...
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“Success is when reality catches up to your imagination.”
– Simon Sinek
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So Is Web 3.0 Already Here? - Sarah Lacey →
Oh god, not another attempt to label something as Web 3.0’! Reid Hoffman and Tim O’Reilly are smart guys, but why flog the Web 3.0 angle?
Back a few years ago, Jason Calacanis tried to dub what he was doing at Mahalo as Web 3.0, and I wrote this:
Personally, I feel the vague lineaments of something beyond Web 2.0, and they involve some fairly radical steps. Imagine a Web without ...
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Amazon Media Room: News Release →
Amazon to launch library lending for Kindle in 11,000 US library systems.
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Can a complete novice become a golf pro with... →
Dan McLaughlin was a complete novice at golf when he conceived a plan to dedicate 10,000 hours to the sport, hoping to become a professional golfer.
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Font Size May Not Aid Learning, but Its Style Can,... →
I bet some jingoistic editor renamed this piece of Carey’s, because the actual subject matter is significantly broader than font size. It’s really about about learning activities that are more difficult cognitively — like writing outlines from scratch, or working on unfamiliar math problems — are significantly more likely to improve learning and retention. It tuns out that...
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A Better Way to Teach Math - David Bornstein →
There might be a bell curve in natural ability, but does that mean we are condemned to a bell curve in the results of training? Perhaps not, as the Jump approach to teaching math shows:
Children come into school with differences in background knowledge, confidence, ability to stay on task and, in the case of math, quickness. In school, those advantages can get multiplied rather than evened...
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To Tug the Heartstrings, Music Must First Tickle... →
Tapping into empathy?
The brain processes musical nuance in many ways, it turns out. Edward W. Large, a music scientist at Florida Atlantic University, scanned the brains of people with and without experience playing music as they listened to two versions of a Chopin étude: one recorded by a pianist, the other stripped down to a literal version of what Chopin wrote, without human-induced...