September 2011
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Moods on Twitter Follow Biological Rhythms, Study... →
Drawing on messages posted by more than two million people in 84 countries, researchers discovered that the emotional tone of people’s messages followed a similar pattern not only through the day but also through the week and the changing seasons. The new analysis suggests that our moods are driven in part by a shared underlying biological rhythm that transcends culture and environment.
...
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Amazon has Palm in its shopping cart — will it... →
Rumor has it that Amazon is about to scoop Palm from the chaos at HP. Will Amazon become an innovative OS company? Will they build a social operating system?
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“Both the UK and the global economy are facing a familiar foe at present: policy...”
– Adam Posen, cited by Paul Krugman in Defeatism
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Open the Future: The Foresight Paradox →
Jamais Cascio lays out the core paradox of futurism:
In every foresight or forecasting exercise, there are two overarching tensions:
The more certain and detailed the forecast, the more people will accept it and believe it to be useful.
The more certain and detailed the forecast, the less likely it is to happen.
This is the foresight paradox: you can be completely accurate, or you can be...
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“Time is the element in which we exist. … We are either borne along by it...”
– Joyce Carol Oates, Marya
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“@SKarakasis: RT @stoweboyd: 62% of companies have remote workers, 34% spend 40%...”
– September 29, 2011 at 06:57AM via http://bit.ly/ppgjqx
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Stowe Boyd on Hacking the Food System: Social Food... →
I wrote a piece for Danielle Gould’s Food+Tech Connect, in a series on Hacking The Food System. A Sample:
We have treated food as a commodity for centuries, however, and the dangers associated with that no longer surprise, but are instead simply taken as a given. Farmers farm, and their output is swept into global markets managed by multinational corporations, converted into ...
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“We will create a new food system through our involvement in each other, and...”
– Stowe Boyd, Social Food- Taking Food Back From Corporations
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No Future To Risk: Why Social Unrest Is Inevitable
Nicholas Kulish digs into the rise of civil unrest in recent months, and finds decentralized, bottom-up, and spontaneous resistance to established order, even those parts of the establishment that theoretically represent the interests of ‘the people’, like political parties and unions:
Nicholas Kulish, As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around Globe
Increasingly, citizens of...
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Who Benefits?
Bryce Roberts, For Whom Is This Service Built?
As I absorbed the new messaging around Facebook as the place to tell the stories of our lives I couldn’t help but be reminded of a post Fred wrote when Google launched their Facebook killer. In it, Fred surfaced a question he had when looking at why Google was requiring use of “real names” as a condition of Google+:
It begs the question of...
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The Future Of Books: A Dystopian Timeline |... →
John Boggs projects a timeline for books transitioning to digital.
John Biggs via TechCrunch
2013 – EBook sales surpass all other book sales, even used books. EMagazines begin cutting into paper magazine sales. 2014 – Publishers begin “subsidized” e-reader trials. Newspapers, magazines, and book publishers will attempt to create hardware lockins for their wares. They will fail. 2015 – The...
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“Artificial intelligence machines are getting so good, so quickly, that...”
– - Farhad Manjoo, Will robots steal your job? If you’re highly educated, you should still be afraid.
The ephemeralization of work: why a really large number of people will be moving out of work requiring that application of (relatively) simple rules to (relatively) small heaps of data. Like...
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“Facebook really changed things up last week. Oh sure, it’s as...”
– - Matt Honan, Unlike: Why Facebook Integration Is Actually Antisocial
Matt adopts the perfect ‘what the fuck’ voice for this story.
Facebook is proving — again — that it isn’t designed as a platform for us to share and grow and interact. It is a thin veneer of social...
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SlideShare ditches Flash, gets a speedy HTML5... →
Slideshare joins the movement away from flash, ensuring that it will play nice with iOS.
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“@AmberCadabra: My friend and brilliant thinker @stoweboyd is Kickstarting his...”
– September 27, 2011 at 04:02PM via http://bit.ly/oVaC0k
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“@umairh: Check out @stoweboyd’s Kickstarter for his new book: Liquid City...”
– September 27, 2011 at 03:56PM via http://bit.ly/mYKhIg
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WatchLiquid City: A Liquid, Not A Solid, A City, Not An Army
Please check out my kickstarter project for the new book.
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New Delicious Is Not That Tasty
I returning to using Delicious a few weeks ago, after a long hiatus, mostly because I had read that it was going to be relaunched with updated sensibilities. This morning I discovered a new Delicious when I created a link, and I have to say, I agree with Marshall Kirkpatrick: it’s not that tasty.
Marshall Kirkpatrick, New Delicious is a Bitter Disappointment
A tool that lets everyday...
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Tumblr Lands $85 Million in Funding - NYTimes.com →
Jenna Wortham via NY Times
Over the past few years, Tumblr, a microblogging service, has steadily built a community of fans and users who like the site’s combination of social networking features and simple blogging tools that lets them quickly post photographs, videos, songs, links and bits of text.
Now, the company has attracted a slew of venture capitalists who are hoping to capitalize...
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Culturomics: The Rise And Fall Of Words
Culturomics is a form of computational lexicology that studies human behavior and cultural trends through the quantitative analysis of digitized texts.
- Wikipedia
I read about the Google Ngram Viewer, and plotted ‘network’ against ‘bridge’.
We are clearly in the age of the network.
Why do I have to collaborate? « Esko Kilpi on... →
I disagree with this emphasis on increased collaboration.
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Why do I have to collaborate? « Esko Kilpi on... →
I disagree with this emphasis on increased collaboration.
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“Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of...”
– Cory Doctorow, How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook
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“Any delusions that this industry will continue to grow astronomically have to be...”
– Mobile phone bonanza ‘over’, despite demand in developing markets | Technology | The Guardian (via mediafuturist)
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“The advice is to log out of Facebook. But logging out of Facebook only...”
– Logging out of Facebook is not enough, via Mike Rose. (via nikf)
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BYOT (Bring Your Own Tech) keeps gaining ground in... →
Verne G. Kopytoff via the NY Times
Some companies have even surrendered to what is being called the consumerization of I.T. At Kraft Foods, the I.T. department’s involvement in choosing technology for employees is limited to handing out a stipend. Employees use the money to buy whatever laptop they want from Best Buy, Amazon.com or the local Apple store.
“We heard from people saying, ‘How come...
China Consolidates Control of Rare Earth Industry... →
China produces nearly 95 percent of the world’s rare earth materials, and it is taking the steps to improve pollution controls in a notoriously toxic mining and processing industry. But the moves also have potential international trade implications and have started yet another round of price increases for rare earths, which are vital for green-energy products including giant wind turbines, hybrid...
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Twitter Shakes Things Up Again: Fred Wilson, Bijan... →
More turnover as Costolo marches out more of the old guard at Twitter, turning early stage investors out, after making room for seasoned entrepreneurs like David Rosenblatt and Mike McCue last year.
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Arm Race: Your Wristwatch Is Your Next Web Portal... →
I gave up on wristwatches so long ago I have a hard time imagining that they could be an are of web innovation, but I guess it’s possible, especially as an adjunct to smart phones.
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google+Buzzblog: Has Google's CEO stopped using... →
Larry Page’s last public post on Google+ was August 15. Has he dropped out? Have you?
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Broadband TV News » Curation will beat... →
The curation of content is needed if audiences are to be able to cut through the noise of social media, according to the futurologist Gerd Leonhard.
I agree.
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Source: Facebook To Launch Read, Listened,... →
Facebook plans to unveil ‘read’ ‘listened’ and ‘watched’ buttons as the upcoming f8 developers conference, hoping to increase social gestures dramatically. Sound like Beacon?
If all of this is starting to sound a bit like Facebook’s infamous Beacon project, it shouldn’t be too surprising — from what we’ve heard a key part of these new Facebook features is to...
“Instead, the human story goes somewhat like this “sitting in caves, coming up...”
– Albert Wenger, in his talk opening the Turing Festival (via fred-wilson)
Wenger is completely right. The internet is the largest, most expensive, and most complex human artifact ever created, and is setting the context for the greatest explosion of creativity and innovation, ever.
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“If you want to seed a place with activity, put out food. Food attracts people...”
– William H. Whyte in the Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
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“For as much as he’s invested in sharing, though, Zuckerberg seems clueless...”
– Farhad Manjoo, Facebook Ticker: Mark Zuckerberg’s terrible plan to get us to share everything we do on the Web.
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“@marovdan: Select U.S. Cities See Brain Gain http://t.co/hj69CVnv via @WSJ...”
– September 22, 2011 at 06:41PM via http://bit.ly/qaT9PU
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“@Richard_Florida: Removing Signals & Signs from Intersections Just Might...”
– September 23, 2011 at 01:57AM via http://bit.ly/qUkWYr
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“@fuldog: First steps towards ‘Kings of Sleep’… or mind...”
– September 23, 2011 at 01:40AM via http://bit.ly/mSXYmK
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“@cemaridag: A popular Tumblr extension that adds extra features to a...”
– September 21, 2011 at 11:58PM via http://bit.ly/r2cTAg
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Watchfuturejournalismproject:
Where Scientists Fail, Gamers Succeed
For 15 years, scientists struggled to figure out the molecular structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys. Deciphering the structure, they believed, could lead to an HIV/AIDS cure.
As they hit dead ends, a few began to think differently, crowdsource the issue and created a multiplayer game within Foldit, a...
Broadband TV News » Curation will beat... →
The curation of content is needed if audiences are to be able to cut through the noise of social media, according to the futurologist Gerd Leonhard.
I agree
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Vint Cerf Agrees With Me
Another brilliant mind that thinks Facebook is the new AOL:
Dan Sabbagh, Google evangelist warns Facebook could be the next AOL or IBM
Speaking at an event organised by the Guardian, [Vint] Cerf said that Facebook was at risk of following the path of companies such as AOL, whose original business model became irrelevant, or being rendered obsolete like proprietary networking systems once...
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“In June, we talked to a self-described “disgruntled” Patch ad sales person, who...”
– AOL Patch Ad Sales Leaders Are Suddenly Gone (via tedr)
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“My fading hope is that this is Obama’s opening bid and enough Republicans will...”
– - Thomas Friedman, Are We Going to Roll Up Our Sleeves or Limp On?
A call for a third party?