Grant Cerny

Today was my first foray into team athletics for about 15 years.  I had already bought a new mitt and broke it in, having failed in finding my high-school baseball mitt from my parents house.   I went out at lunch today and bought some cleats from Paragon in Union Square, on the warning that I’d injure myself without them, and was all set and wearing my AOL Softball jersey (number 00) and joined the motley bunch of colleagues who were ready to head to Central Park to play against the current opponent, “Highbridge”.   As we gathered in the office lobby and desparately tried to determine if we would have enough players, and enough mitts, we discovered one of the players wasn’t coming because she was covering the story of Michael Jackson’s heart attack.  It seemed unbelievable.  Late, we rushed off to the subway.

When we were walking up to the field, a catcher on another game stood up and yelled loud “Michael Jackson has left the building!”  A buzz went around, people saying that Michael had died.  Again it seemed unbelievable, and random jokes went around that it was a hoax to relieve the troubled star from his upcoming European tour.  By the time we were settled in at the bench, the sad truth was confirmed… indeed Michael had passed away.   The game was about to start.  We warmed up for five minutes, and the umpire called game on.  We grouped up to cheer and chose to cheer for Michael.

I had already discovered that I was doing a really cold start for anything athletic, having not worked out in the area of sprinting, or throwing, or any sort of quick-twitch action, in…. well a really long time.   The warmup had already got my hamstrings ready to seize.   Our coach Jake smartly moved me from right field to first base, where I was much more comfortable not having to run so much, but ready to catch and throw.  The game began and we started off smart, one of our guys Tony stealing home in the first inning and holding back the opponents with a zero.  Things changed quickly after that.  The other team, clearly, were not as motley and either had great experience or had actually practiced a bit.   I found that I enjoyed myself a lot, even while we worked our way to a spectacular loss of 15 to 1.  While doing my best to focus, be ready for the quick catch, and doing all I could to coax my 36 year old office-bod into base-running sprints, I marvelled at playing a game in Central Park for the first time, in a verdure of green with actual spectators watching, surrounded by tall buildings beyond the trees, and rediscovering the baseball I had last played in high school 20 years ago.

After the game we checked our devices and got caught up on the story.  Everything was confirmed, indeed Michael had passed, creating a double tragedy to a day starting off with the passing of Farrah Fawcett who had bravely battled cancer for so long.  Apparently while we played the game, a lot of controversy had ensued between the people who had openly voiced opinions about hoax-theory as we had jokingly done on our way to the field, and the people who indignantly replied with later, better information about the sad truth.

I joined the team for a couple celebratory — even though we lost abysmally — beers, which we raised to the departed, then I headed home to my suburban life and family, including doing baby-duty til now.   All in all, I have to say that the diversion from the ordinary in the way of softball was really wonderful, and made a bit surreal by the surrounding tension of a world responding to several losses of  significant magnitude, certainly worse than losing 15 to 1.

I am now migrating west* from the Blip.tv moving party.  Mike Hudack and his team sure know how to pick an office space and throw a party.

You enter the office and it’s comfy chairs, brick walls, screen projection, make your way past a large floor of production desks (which were shielded for the party by big taut colored fabric dividers), then to the far side where there is a big space.  Music was spun by YouTube DJ, George (I didn’t get his card so don’t have his last name), playing an awesome mix of electronic and nostalgia, and everyone I talked to agreed with me that the music was right on.  I wanted to hook in my laptop and download it, it was that good.   Moving on:  then there’s a Scandinavian-style kitchen, with a beer tap, which was flowing with microbrew provided by Six Points Brewery.  Then you move further beyond the kitchen and there’s an elevated stage, with windows that look north up Lafayette.  Perfect for preparing product presentations, perfect for embarrassing karaoke, or anything else toward which a stage lends life.

What’s more, Blip is doing great business, and all the best in video were there to celebrate and network.  I met guys from Boxee and TubeMogul and a new group called Branded Evolution.  Hundreds of folks I didn’t meet.  Well done on the office move, Blip!  And thanks for the party!

* “migrating west” is a newly-coined vanity expression for commuting home on NJ transit to New Jersey.

Copied from Thomas Chau (@tomchau) w.r.t. AOL Radio (@aolradio)’s all-twitter request station.

“Beginning at 12 PM ET and lasting until midnight, tweet your song request on Twitter as follows:

Artist Name, Song Title #aolradiorequest (example: Madonna, Like a Prayer #aolradiorequest)

If we have it, we’ll play it the next day at aolradio.com.

Full details are at: http://www.aolradioblog.com/2009/06/09/aol-radio-all-tweet-song-request-radio-station/ “

I’ve been thinking about how our online experience increasingly correlates to some dimensions of our human experience.

Semantic

The search engines, and predominantly Google, “organized the world’s information” through smart robots that find and sort and rank content continuously and tirelessly, according to smart and ever-smarter algorithms. The world reorganized itself around search engines as the fastest and easiest method for finding relevant content.

Social

The searchers soon found that a supplemental index of relevance, the social graph, could be laid over this index of knowledge and, uniquely to every individual person, allow all to additionally consider whatever their friends considered relevant. With personal relationships as a keystone to the psychology of trust, the social graph became a new critical dimension to the relevance of available content.

Geospatial

In the years to come, algorithmic and social relevance of content will be supplemented by another human dimension: geography. Already we enjoy many geo-relevant applications (e.g. google maps), but in the future all content should be filterable with reference to a user’s expressed location (I am here), a user’s intention location (I will be or want to say that I am here), and the assigned or determined location value of a piece of content.

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Applications will be able to cross-reference algorithmic, social, and geospatial relevance. In fact they already can and do. But I suggest that in less than two years this will be ubiquitous. Our product designs and innovations should correspondingly begin embracing and bulilding upon this concept.

What other dimensions of relevance can we add to our searching and finding? How closely does this in fact map to the dimensions of human experience?

Meaning, People, World…. what else? Time, perhaps, could next be more comprehensively organized, as all of history becomes indexed…

(this is a repost from my October 3rd 2008 post on the AOL Design Blog “ControlShift”)