Oh boy what a day with Amazon’s cloud failure in east coast clusters taking down all of our radio sites. Warrior needs sleep, badly. Might expatiate on this further, later, but needed to make a note of this. It was a big day in internet history.
Nov
12
2010
12
2010
Great Literature Retitled To Boost Website Traffic
Spencer Sloe gave this to me just now – awesome web media seo geek / literary geek humor:
Great Literature Retitled To Boost Website Traffic
BY MIKE LACHER
- – - -
7 Awesome Ways Barnyard Animals Are Like Communism
The 11 Stupidest Things Phonies Do To Ruin The World
8 Surprising Ways West Egg Is Exemplary Of The Hollowness Of The American Dream
6 Shockingly Evil Things The Turn-Of-The-Century Meatpacking Industry Doesn’t Want You To Know
5 Insane Ways London Could Become a Dystopia (And How It’s Not That Far From
Reality)
1 Weird Thing Caddy Smells Like
May
27
2010
27
2010
Apple and Amazon are my 3-Way Lovers… um I mean Readers
No matter who I talk to who owns a Kindle, they’re all jabbering about the iPad, wondering if they should ditch their Kindles. And I’m always saying “NO! Keep your Kindle! Did you even know you can read your Kindle books on your iPhone, or iPod Touch, or (I assume), your putative iPad???”
From my experience in traveling and on my commuter train, your average e-reader owner today is using a Kindle, and seems to be very happy with it. But they all seem to be missing one thing.
What’s that thing?
Kindle / iTouch / iPhone 3-Way
They can read their Kindle books on their iPhone.
So I’m in Arizona with my wife at the Royal Palms Hotel. It’s a brief 24-hour respite from our 3 children, who are being watched, thank the Lord, by her parents. We are at the pool, and eventually strike up a conversation with the nearly-retired couple in the lounge chairs next to us. The husband asks me about his Kindle. He says “How do I know what page I left off on?” and we get into a rambling conversation about text sizes and pages and positions on the Kindle.
Then I say, “What kind of phone do you have?” He picks up his device – an iPhone. I offer, “Did you know you can read those Kindle books on your iPhone?” He had no idea. Then I told him the real coup de grace. “And whether on your Kindle, iPhone, iPod Touch, no matter what, it will always keep track of the last page you read.”
That’s the killer feature. My last-page-read-in-the-cloud. Pick up any one of “my books anywhere” and it always knows what page you’re on. Time-saver. Time spent reading, not finding.
Here’s what I do, when I’m reading a Kindle book.
I leave my Kindle at home next to my bed. It’s for bed-time or serious day-time reading. It’s small and light enough, but my iPhone is lighter, so when I’m on the road (my train ride, or in an elevator, or waiting on line for lunch), I read same book from my iPhone. Really, no waking moment is wasted when your reading materials are always on your phone.
Then when I get home and go to bed, sometimes my wife is awake and reading too. Then, I read the Kindle. But then she wants to go to sleep, and can’t stand any kind of light. I used to have no good answer for this, and would read in the very dim light, annoying both of us. Now, of course, Apple has solved. I pick up my iPod Touch, which is about 4 years old now, but still as functional as ever, and open up the same book, and it finds my last page. I have the iPod’s brightness turned WAY down, the background turned black and the text color white. As such, I can read almost in the complete darkness, without making anything bright. My wife sleeps. No sounds of turning pages. The finger-swipe-over-glass is soundless.
In the morning again, on the train, if I use the Kindle app on my iPhone, it immediately takes me to wherever the hell I left off when last night I finally fell asleep and dropped my iTouch on the floor. Yes, that’s why I use the iTouch for ultimate reading. It’s dispensable to me. Damaging my iPhone would be a more serious proposition.
I have not seen a single iPad on my train yet. I think that’s a function of its weight, not the fact that it’s new. I’ve held an iPad. It’s hard to hold up casually.
I think more and more people will start to realize that for true mobile reading, a smaller screen is just fine! It is, for me.
May
21
2010
21
2010
Way Cool – Pac-Man on Google Homepage!
Check it out – a real, working version of Pac-Man as the Google logo! That’s way retro-rad!
Click on “Insert Coin” to start!
I guess the Wayback machine will have a record of this even after it’s gone but I doubt the video game will work there.
Apr
30
2010
30
2010
Like is the new Link
Facebook’s delivery of social plugins including the “Like Button” last week will change the fabric of the internet, from link-based, to like-based. “Like” is the new link.
A lot of us were anticipating something big from the Facebook F8 conference, and we weren’t disappointed when Mark Zuckerberg announced the Open Graph initiative and Social Plugins, notably the “Like button.”
Soon after F8 concluded, a group of us convened to recap and discuss. KickApps CEO Alex opened the subject and asked what we thought. Our head of product Mike Sommers offered a perspective I hadn’t considered, but which made immediate sense. The gist of his thesis is that Google has owned relevancy and web organization on account of controlling the index of success between linked pages, but that Facebook has abstracted the direct linkage of pages to linkage of content and people, via the “Like button”. People are beginning to consume the web based on personal recommendations, rather than by Page Rank relevancy. This consumption behavior is increasing, and if it continues on this vector, Facebook can overtake Google in searches, which is a big deal.
Today, the new Facebook searches aren’t directed query-based searches like Google searches, but browsing-recommendation-based searches. Google’s approach, strictly semantic (relevance of crawled textual meaning) and concentration-based (amount of links to), will lack Facebook’s social recommendation filter and its increasing popularity. Facebook may even add semantic and concentration-based inputs to their algorithm. I would imagine that is already in work, and to up the ante, I would bank on Facebook’s introducing a semantic and socially-filterable search box in the next 2-5 months. The search box would not just show you content your friends liked, but content the world liked (with options to filter by your friends or sets of degrees of separation).
So back to our recap meeting at KickApps – here’s what we did. Agreed that we were enthused by these developments due to the opportunities that they opened for KickApps to integrate major-client private-domain social software with the leading horizontal social net Facebook, a few of us set to work defining how we would best participate in this ecosystem, from everything as mundane as how it’s integrated to our corporate site, to how it gets integrated to our platform.
Then, the final a-ha! moment for me. Today, after we had completed the first step of introducing Like buttons and the Like box to our corporate site and blog, I notified the staff that we had done so in an e-mail. I was typing the e-mail and was trying to type “I want to see a whole lotta liking going on” and out of habit (I guess) or subconsciously having dwelt on this subject a lot (perhaps), I instead wrote “I want to see a whole lotto linking going on.”
Realization: I had had a Freudian slip of “link” for “like”. It hit me – they’re the same thing, but the latter directly connects people with content.
And as Mike said in our F8 recap meeting (and I noted in my journal), “the social metadata of liking, rating, commenting on, and sharing content, can become more important or relevant than the content itself.”
Like is the new link
Feb
15
2010
15
2010
We upgraded our Igloo
This one should have more staying power. We used large storage container blocks for the first two tiers, then medium-sized blocks on the next few tiers, then went to the smaller blocks as we created the conical cupola. The big block on the top is a keystone, I hope, forcing everything to hold shape. It was a workout, and a lot of fun!
Here’s a 30-second video slideshow I made with Animoto.
Apparently there is more snow coming tonight!
Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.
Feb
03
2010
03
2010
Real-time access to a Global Brain
Preamble
About 15 years ago I spent a couple years writing a thesis about the emergence of multimedia representation from the 18th to the 20th centuries as a force of cultural change. Put simply – the fact that when creators mixed imagery with language, meaning became more accessible to the educated and (importantly) the illiterate, and opened new avenues of thought to create more opportunity – or in many cases, to fight oppression. I didn’t know it would be that relevant to whatever I did next as I left academia, but fate led me to creating the next generation of connected products on the web, and as I have recently learned, representational theory and case studies from former centuries demonstrating the effect of representational technique on society, is more relevant to what we are experiencing today, than I ever would have expected. Much like the “Human Condition” – it doesn’t change, it just repeats and adapts itself to present conditions…
At this point I’m hung up on two things that would seem dichotomous: the future, and the immediate now.
The “immediate now” is more than the concept of moments fleeting every moment. At this point, the concept of “NOW” has been popularized by connected devices to mean access to immediate information, as it happens. This access is not ubiquitous, but the principle is demonstrated, and more and more, culture is adapting to wanting “nowness” in many contexts.
On the other side of the dichotomy I am focused on the future because I want to predict how these dynamics will trend into future opportunity. I’d like to create a business in providing the vehicles wherein businesses flourish in the future economies of data exchange, spanning many dimensions of relevance, whether they be semantic, geospatial, social, temporal, or some other dimension I haven’t thought of yet.
The Global Brain
At this point, the people of Earth are sufficiently connected and communicating in real-time that the Earth begins to resemble a global brain, creating new inferences by the pulses of information we pass to each other, actively and passively, and the results that ensue in real life. Each person a neuron, each connection, a synapse.
We can see that in the past centuries certain tools and technologies have activated communication patterns, let’s call them “thought patterns”, when they enabled connections or synapses between motivated peoples, communities. concepts or prospects. This has increased in velocity, at orders of magnitude, from the 18th century to the 19th, and from the 19th, to the 20th. This adaptation/corruption of Moore’s law, or the approximation toward vertical asymptote, looks probable also in this case, for the 21st. At some point on reaching vertical, profound change may happen (this is where I go scifi, the rest is all logical).
What have we been doing to actuate this increased pace of development & capability? Regardless of the century, we have been using available toolsets to iterate on the current extensible connections, which can further grow, branch, and reconnect. As human brains grow and develop, so do cultures eventually follow at one order greater, and where cultures and empirical forces prevail, organisms also adapt. At various degrees of magnification, the rebranching and growth of possibility happens in child development, in community growth, in cultural development, and it happens ultimately in the evolution of species.
If you haven’t seen this video, it illustrates the concept, somewhat spiritual, of our place in a spatial cosmos, and infinitely extensible, even without reference to the time dimension necessarily. It’s 70s Nova stuff, never gets old, just like The Miracle of Life, which moved me in the Expecting Parents class 7 years ago.
Powers of Ten http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2cmlhfdxuY
Let’s try to get practical, if possible.
So, we are now at a place where the availability of connected data makes a global brain, or a semantic web, an actual and tangible prospect. However, many, in fact I would guess most, areas of global consciousness (datasets) are willfully disconnected – they are “dark”. Those dark areas are not subconscious, they are just unconnected, unharnessed regions. Why are they dark? In most cases, I think, because owners of connectable data are not ready to connect them. They fear the loss of advantage by making their advantagous data available for connection. These are dark, but high-potential areas of the global brain.
My thesis is that creating an environment wherein owners of tight-held data become encouraged to open up their data with some, perhaps flexible, assurance of reciprocity, will yield a greater benefit to all via a larger potential in the global brain.
My suggestion to accomplish such willingness to open up datasets, is to create an open specification and platform for data exchange, which rationalizes all contributing datasets where possible, and allows undefined data elements to be added and where possible subsequently rationalized as well, against the specification. It would then create a controlled marketplace for exchange of proprietary data, which would be metered not on a one-to-one basis, but on a one-to-many, creating a mutually-beneficial collective.
Sep
12
2009
12
2009
Dreamtime Surround Sound
Have you ever heard a song in a dream? I did, last week. And it had the best sound I’d ever heard. I’ve asked a few people who remember dreams, if they ever remembered hearing music in their dream. I didn’t get anyone who remembered.
Dreamtime. I was a hundred feet or so above a far-spreading ocean panorama as the day neared sunset, and I was riding some sort of combination flying-saucer / jetski. I was on the right side of the craft, and a flight partner was on the left. We held on with some kind of synthetic tether, and flew through the air. It was warm.
Suddenly, music started playing everywhere. It was “Dakota” by the Stereophonics, and the sound surrounded me. I was consciously quizzical about it. I had not consciously identified that this was a dream, but it still seemed very unusual, much more unusual to me than flying a saucer jetski.
I looked over at my flight partner and he smiled and nodded his head, and we turned our nose down toward the ocean. We dove and dove and dove as the music played on, in better sound than Dolby or THX or Dick Burwen ever dreamed of.
Then we hit the water, and our craft continued to dozens of feet beneath the surface. We could breathe, and the water was clear, although dark in the increasingly setting sun. Dolphins sported around us. We were exploring a new world, and the Stereophonics played on the best stereo ever heard.
>> Play “Dakota” by the Stereophonics. (Note: this song is also in my Streampad playlist, but you can play it immediately (and once only for free) with the Lala player here.
