Two column layout (can be reduced to one, could be thought of as three if you count the vertical toolbox on the right) that provides simple presentation with extensive customization; not just for the developer, but for the user. The toolbox showcases the power of stylesheet switching. Users can pick their own color, font type, font size, and even dictate what style of layout they view your web page in. Navigation is kept brief and easily accessible at the top of the page, allowing for a wider area in the content region. A min/max width allows you to control your layout, but remain flexible for low resolution users.
Where does this show up?
- John Gruber, Dell Executive: ‘We’re No Longer a PC Company’
I like that Gruber has a memory. He cites Michael Dell in 1997 suggesting that Apple — facing financial difficulties — should shut down and return the money to investors. But regarding Dell: I think he really means it.
Ouch.
A quote from that site I refuse to link to:
Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google+ between last September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period, according to comScore, which didn’t have data on mobile usage.
3 minutes versus seven hours. I mean, 3 minutes!
The sad thing is: I bet when mobile usage is counted, the gap is actually worse.
We keep hearing over and over how Google+ is on the up-and-up — from Google. 10 million sign-ups here. A billion more there. So many fucking sign-ups.
The reality of the situation sure seems to be the opposite. The only people I know that use Google+ regularly are people who work at Google (and Robert Scoble).
It’s just not working. For fundamental reasons. Millions more in TV ad spend won’t fix that.
Yammer raises $85M in a third round, bringing total investment to $142M, after tripling sales, head count, and paid seats in 2011.
Says a lot about the maturation of the work media marketplace.
Hopscotching between new Metro programs and old Desktop ones–which is what most Windows 8 users will do at first–is going to be an inherently disjointed, unsatisfying stopgap. Windows 8 will only be a landmark operating system if consumers embrace Metro. And they’ll only do that if developers write outstanding Metro programs, and if PC manufacturers create machines that are truly designed with Metro in mind.
That’s a lot of ifs. Most of them will be tackled by other hardware and software makers, not Microsoft. And even once Windows 8 has been released, it will take years, not months, before it’s clear how well they’ve addressed them.
Which is okay. Microsoft is intent on getting this operating system out the door in time for this year’s holiday PCs, but Windows 8 isn’t primarily about moving boxes in 2012. What it’s trying to build is a foundation for a Windows that stands a chance of being relevant a decade or two from now.
”- Harry McCracken, Windows 8 Consumer Preview: One Step Closer to the PC’s Future via TIME.com
Microsoft’s huge gamble. If they lose with Windows 8, they will be just another enterprise software company, with a number of shrinking divisions that should/could be sold off or spun out.
I confess that I hate using wikis. They’re a mess. I like more fundamental structure, like posts on a group blog, or explicit interviews, and old style long-form writing.
I was having a discussion with Will McInnes about this, and I decided to solicit others’ thoughts, leading to this:
View the story "What about Wikis?" on Storify]-->I received an email today from Amplify, a Gimme Bar like service that has been around a few years (and a former client of mine), saying that the service was shutting down immediately, which is a bit ungracious. Usually a service will give users a month or two to export or transition. I tried to open my old account but access seems to be closed.
There is the hope that the closed-beta alternative Clipboard might allow transition, but it sounds iffy:
via Clipboard Blog
I am a Clipmarks / Amplify user and I want my clips preserved. What do I do?We can’t guarantee that all of your clips will be preserved. But if you want all of your clips preserved, you’ll want to look for an email from the Amplify and Clipmarks teams, which contains an invitation to Clipboard. From the registration page, you will be able to request that your clips be migrated from Amplify or Clipmarks into Clipboard.
The Clipboard team will assess the demand for having old clips preserved. If it is sufficiently high and technically feasible, they will build a custom tool to automate the clip migration process. In the event that they have decided that there is not sufficient demand or other complicating issues, they will notify users of that outcome as well.
Ouch.
I found Amplify interesting, but annoying. For example, the tool enforced a 1000 character limit on text clips, which was arbitrary and painful.
Purportedly leaked documents make it seem that Facebook is planning to depart from conventional advertising, where brands can muster ‘stories’ from your friends to make the case for their products rather than advertising content:
E.B. Boyd via Fast Company
“When people hear about you from friends, they listen,” the Facebook materials say. “We’ll expand your ad with stories from friends who have already connected.” (“Stories” is Facebook’s shorthand for a wide varitey of interactions on the site. In the case of ads, it seems to refer to the fact that the ads will display which of a viewer’s friends have Liked the brand.)
Reminds me of BzzAgent, the company that enlists people to talk up products with their friends. Sketchy.
In the case of Facebook’s plans, we’ll have to see if the materials are real. But if they are, this social spam marketing gives people another good reason to leave Facebook.
[originally posted on Aug 20, 2006. I dug out of the archives because of the Knight News Challenge on Networks, which refers to Reed’s Law. It’s still topical reading.]
Back in 2003, at my old, old blog, Timing, I wrote a post, that laid out the basis of Reed’s Law, which is now relevant because of the of the recent IEEE Metcalfe’s Law brouhaha. Fred Wilson recently noted that he wished that Metcalfe had enlarged his arguments to include Reed’s Law. So I unearthed this from the time vaults:
[from Re: Social Disutility and Competition in Network Ecosystems]
Tim Oren writes about Ross Mayfield’s thoughts on ecosystems of networks.
First of all, this seems to all have grown from David Reed’s “Sneaky Exponential” piece, where he introduces Reed’s Law, and contrasts the various stages of value as the network grows. I wrote about this at some length in a recent tissue of Message.
Finding the Value of the Network: Communities
The conventional wisdom about the value of a communication network is embodied in Metcalfe’s Law, named after one of the founders of the Internet. He said that the value of a communications network grows as the square of the number of people using it, or 2 to the Nth. Metcalfe’s Law is focused on the point-to-point, pair-wise communications between individuals. It is a linear model of growth.
But this model seems wrong, and does not account for the non-linear effects of social groups. David Reed is a well-known exponent of the observation that the value of a communication network grows with the number of groups it supports.
“Reed’s law is the assertion of David P. Reed that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.
The reason for this is that the number of possible sub-groups of network participants is 2N, where N is the number of participants.
This grows much more rapidly than either
so that even if the utility of groups being available to be joined is very small on a per-group basis, eventually the network effect of potential group membership can dominate the overall economics of the system. (Wikipedia, www.wikipedia.org)
- the number of participants, N, or
- the number of possible pair connections, N(N+1)/2 (which follows Metcalfe’s law)
Stated another way, any communication network’s value is best estimated by the number of groups that exist in the population of users. The value of a network like the Internet, Reed is telling us, can not be effectively measured by the number of financial transactions it can support, or the number of messages being sent through its millions of routers, or even the number of people using it at any time. The only reasonable way to measure its value is to count the number of groups that it supports, or so he asserts.
Accelerating Collaboration: Communities of Purpose
While its wonderful that Internet-enabled fans of the newest heavy metal band can swap gossip, MP3s and revealing photos, and this may enrich western civilization in some way, it may seem a long way from the factory floor or the pressing realities in the CEO’s suite. But it is exactly this sort of social interaction that forms all groups, even the most practical and purposeful, like those within the enterprise.
Turning Reed’s Law into a tool to enhance value for the enterprise may seem to some to be a bit out there, a bit too new age, like bringing in a Feng Shui geomancer to avoid building the new corporate headquarters in the wrong orientation to the Cosmos. But it is simply pragmatic. Obviously, work gets down by groups, Obviously, you want to harness the value of closer, more productive relationships with partners, suppliers, and customers. And, yes, it is becoming obvious that any significant enterprise performance improvements will require interactions with people – and applications – outside the enterprise.
Tim Oren’s final observations — that people generally contribute significantly to around 2.5 groups, and that groups hit size limits (the Dunbar 150 person max rule) — return to the core theme of social groups and network value. Size does matter. People can only meaningfully be involved with a limited number of groups, and groups lose group cohesion after some ceiling is reached.
But the value of the network is a function of the number of groups supported, even if the membership of each group is bounded. The flexibility associated with group transience is an additional factor — so it’s not just a static equation, its a non-linear flow equation. All of the laws that Reed compares — Sarnoff, Metcalfe, and Reed — are statically defined.
In a recent report I wrote for Cutter (now in production) I argue that real-time groups create value for companies as an extension or corollary of Reed’s Law, which I humbly have dubbed Boyd’s Law. Ahem.
As companies seek to increase their individual responsiveness and decrease the impacts of volatility in their markets, they will increase their synchronous communications with partners, but the net effect will be an increase in asynchronous operations of the meta-enterprise.
This seeming paradox is simply explained. A real time enterprise will have more frequent communication with its partners – passing information from application to application, or conducting real time communication between members of real time communities – and as a result, the latency in information transfer decreases.
This means that companies in the meta-enterprise are free to act on this lower latency information earlier, increasing overall performance across the meta-enterprise. Or put another way, decreasing latency in the individual communication events translates into higher probabilities of increased parallelism in the overall network. This emergent property of increased real time communication in networks is exactly the value creation David Reed was getting at.
In human terms, and leaving the queuing theory aside, this value increase grows from the power of social groups. It’s not quasi-mystical chaos theory – it’s just practical.
So, you have to look at other factors, not just size, or even who is a member, but things like the tools being used to communicate in order to understand the components of value arising from social interaction.
And today, in 2006, it’s even stranger to see some IEEE article attempting to peg the value of a network on some sort of stock market economics, as opposed to the utility of the network in practice: the value created for individuals, groups, and the network denizens as a whole.
[And today, in 2012, I am totally unsurprised that folks are still referring back to statically defined rules instead of something like what I was poking at in 2003: Boyd’s Law. I would now define it this way, taking the perspective of the value of a person in a social network:
The value of any new node in network — and in social networks, a node is a person — can be characterized as the increase in network-wide parallelism caused by the connections the new node establishes.
Nine years later.]
Caterina Fake cited this timeline to 50M users on why the worst thing a social network can do is force growth. “My perspective is it takes a while to grow this stuff,” she said to Liz Gannes in AllThingsD. “It takes time for the culture to grow. You need time to develop antibodies to spammers and trolls.” Adding user registrations at such a fast pace doesn’t leave enough time for a dedicated, engaged user community to organically create itself and establish norms, she argued.
Stats are astonishing, and I’ve been informed by @nik (Nick Halstead) that Twitter is now moving 1B messages every three days.
(via Every 60 Seconds 175,000 Tweets Are Sent [INFOGRAPHIC] | Twitter Tips And Updates From Buffer)
Eyal makes a good argument: that virality — users inviting their friends to try an app — is less important (and more annoying) than habitual use of apps: habit is the new viral.
Nir Eyal via TechCrunch
The Curated Web Will Run On Habits
Increasingly, companies will become experts at designing user habits. Curated Web companies already rely on these methods. This new breed of company, defined by the ability to help users find only the content they care about, includes such white-hot companies as Pinterest and Tumblr. These companies have habit formation embedded in their DNA. This is because data collection is at the heart of any Curated Web business and to succeed, they must predict what users will think is most personally relevant.
Curated Web companies can only improve if users tell their systems what they want to see more of. If users use the service sparingly, it is less valuable than if they use it habitually. The more the user engages with a Curated Web company, the more data the company has to tailor and improve the user’s experience. This self-improving feedback loop has the potential to be more useful – and more addictive — than anything we’ve seen before.
However, I think Eyal’s characterization — helping users ‘find only the content they care about’ — is too limited. Steve Jobs said the users don’t know what they want, so by extension, they don’t know what they care about.
Getting back to Eyal’s habituation remark, these new tools will have to meld into the user’s existing behaviors and amplify them in some adjacent way.
For example, I’ve started to experiment with the user of Timely.is instead of Bitly as a way to publish Tweets. It ‘fits the hand’ in the sense that it works much like Bitly: a bookmarklet in the browser that creates an editable tweet with a shortened URL back to the source. Like Bitly, it provides stats on clickthroughs, but adds one additional feature: the ability to queue tweets and have them post over time.
So, I am able to develop a new Timely habit because it is similar to my habituated use of Bitly, but adding an additional capability. And there is a viral vestige: the promotion of Timely in the footer of the tweets.
Privacy Management On Social Media Sites by Mary Madden via Pew
Social network users are becoming more active in pruning and managing their accounts. Women and younger users tend to unfriend more than others.
About two-thirds of internet users use social networking sites (SNS) and all the major metrics for profile management are up, compared to 2009: 63% of them have deleted people from their “friends” lists, up from 56% in 2009; 44% have deleted comments made by others on their profile; and 37% have removed their names from photos that were tagged to identify them.
How to read the ‘unfriending’ trend?
One option: This rise in unfriending might not be about friendship, per se. People might be just throttling back the torrent of information that they are receiving in their social streams: stream overload.
But the deleting of comments and removing name tags from photos would represent very different, and possibly more privacy-oriented motivations. However, if I delete a comment because someone writes something offensive, is that a privacy issue? Or is it a more of a cultivated image being publicly displayed? That would make it a publicy issue.
I think we will have to get a lot more fine-grained in determining causality in these cases, and more attuned to the publicy/Goffman angle: the presentation of self in everyday online life.
(via entrepreneurwisdom)
(via msg)
Goldman: AOL is a brand with a lot of baggage. It makes people remember that dial-up-modem sound and those free CDs.
Armstrong: One of AOL’s biggest assets is its brand. For people over 30 and, due to AOL Instant Messenger, even a lot of people under 30, AOL was their first real interaction with technology in a positive way.
Goldman: You’ve decided to turn it into a content company. But a year after spending $340 million to acquire the blog TechCrunch and The Huffington Post, traffic has barely budged.
Armstrong: Traffic actually is going way up on the properties where we’re investing for the future and pushing content. Huffington Post is up 46 percent. Numbers have been going down on some of the historical stuff: AIM went down, MapQuest went down and dial-up subscribers go down every year. So flat is up for us.
How can you counter that? Flat is the new up, Tim?
The brutal reality is that people’s aggregated media experience is rapidly shifting, and the rate of drift appears to be increasing. For example, TV sports grew 21% between ‘07 to ‘11, 15% more than TV as a whole. ‘Going to the movies’ is starting to look like a future vaudeville, with ‘11 US tickets falling to 1.29B, from the ‘02 peak of 1.5B.
People are spending their time looking at other things than AOL’s Patch. Oh, and Techcrunch US numbers have dropped like a rock, too, down ~40% in the past year. Huffington Post is booming, so I guess Goldman’s gibe — citing Paul Carr’s belief that Ariana HuffPo will be running AOL soon — might actually have merit.
A study in the journal Biological Psychiatry shows that mind-reading can be improved with a dose of oxytocin—a brain chemical often called the ‘love hormone’ because of its role in trust, friendship and bonding.
Researchers at Rostock University, led by Gregor Domes, tested 30 males’ mind-reading ability—how well they could infer the mental state of another person—after either a dose of oxytocin or a placebo. Mind-reading was tested using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, where subjects looked at 36 pictures of a person’s eyes and tried to guess what emotion the eyes reflected
Domes found that subjects correctly identified the mood conveyed in the eyes more often after taking a dose of oxytocin as compared with placebo, regardless of which they took first.
This study highlights how we can manipulate our mind-reading ability. Just by taking a hormone, we can suddenly become more adept at picking up signals from people around us that alert us to their state of mind. Imagine taking this to a poker table.
As Domes writes in the article, “the ability to infer the internal state of another person [and then] adapt one’s own behavior is a cornerstone of all human social interactions.” We all have some ability to understand our peers’ emotional states by observing their actions, expressions, and words, but a change in our hormone levels can alter that ability.
- Joshua Gowin
Related
A neuroscience look at how oxytocin relates to social motivation
Passion and performance; a link forged by dopamine and oxytocin
An example of correlation is not causation
(via johntropea)
Birch makes a solid bunch of recommendations, based on the fact that no one has time for unsolicited, empty connections:
LinkedIn Connect Fail Syndrome - Mark Birch
Do not fall into the trap of LinkedIn Connect Fail Syndrome. If you are trying to connect with someone that you do not know, be informative, specific, and brief. I provided some recommendations on using LinkedIn effectively in a prior post, but here are some specific points to use immediately:
- Use InMail, Not Connect – People do not want to necessarily want to connect to someone they do not know, but are willing to read a polite message.
- Personalize the Message – Make it obvious that you know the person that you are reaching out to and why you believe reaching out to that person makes sense.
- Provide Context – Write a brief description of your request in as concise a way as possible. Long messages are capped by LinkedIn, and besides people have little desire to read business plans in such requests.
I think Birch has a better, more general term: lazy networking.
This is what I call lazy networking. There is no effort to personalize the request, provide context, and make it easy for me to say yes.
Bumping into people in the offline world is natural and can be serendipitous. Linkedin — in general — lacks a feeling of natural encounter. Getting a request to connect from a stranger is more like being accosted by a panhandler than a chance interaction at a cocktail party.
Bell Labs influence on everthing
Q: Who’s doing the most interesting desktop app design these days?
Vihn: I’m passionate about the Mac and what’s possible on the desktop, and I think independent Mac developers are some of the most creative minds in technology… but right now the most interesting thing happening on the desktop, by far, is Apple’s iOS-ification of OS X. They’re clearly in the process of upending a decades-old paradigm for thinking about desktop software, and whether it’s successful or not is going to be very interesting.
[…]
Q: How should media publishers deal with the fact that readers are increasingly getting news, links, and more from a range of sources filtered through social networks? Is anyone doing it particularly well?
Vinh: I think news organizations have to get really, really serious about creating a social software product that leverages their product in a value-add way. This is basically what a few dozen startups are doing, and somebody is going to figure this out; if I were the owner of a news organization, I would put $10 million towards funding a few of my own startups to get a better shot at owning the winning solution. Because none of the existing ‘old media’ news brands are going to do it. Anyway, within a decade, we’ll have a social news powerhouse brand that can sit comfortably next to the New York Times, Economist, CNN, etc. That seems inevitable to me.
I really think Vinh is one of the smartest people out there in new media.
Compiled below is a selection of estimated dates for some events given certain assumptions in the evolution of Earth, the Solar System, and the Universe. Most events are of an astronomical and cosmological nature though some are geological. A more complete list from which the ones included here were taken can be found on Wikipedia.
- In 10,000 years - The end of humanity, according to Brandon Carter’s Doomsday argument, which assumes that half of the humans who will ever have lived have already been born.[3]
- In 50,000 years - Niagara Falls erodes away the remaining 20 miles to Lake Erie and ceases to exist.[6]
- In 500,000 years - By this time Earth will have likely been impacted by a meteorite of roughly 1 km in diameter.[9]
- In 1 million years - Highest estimated time until the red supergiant star Betelgeuse explodes in a supernova. The explosion is expected to be easily visible in daylight.[10][11]
- In 50 million years - The Californian coast begins to be subducted into the Aleutian Trench[15]
Africa will have collided with Eurasia, closing the Mediterranean Basin and creating a mountain range similar to the Himalayas.[16]
- In ~240 million years - From its present position, the Solar System will have completed one full orbit of the Galactic center.[18]
- In 250 million years - All the continents on Earth fuse into a possible new supercontinent.[19][20]
- In 1 billion years - The Sun’s luminosity increases by 10%, causing Earth’s surface temperatures to reach an average of 47°C and the oceans to boil away.[22]
- In 1.5 billion years - The Sun’s circumstellar habitable zone moves outwards as its increased luminosity causes carbon dioxide to increase in Mars’s atmosphere, raising its surface temperature to levels akin to Earth during the ice age.[23]
- In 5.4 billion years - The Sun becomes a red giant.[29]Mercury, Venus and possibly Earth are destroyed.[30]
- In 7 billion years - Collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies.[32]
- In 14.4 billion years - Sun becomes a black dwarf as its luminosity falls below three trillionths its current level, while its temperature falls to 2239 K, making it invisible to human eyes.[36]
- In 20 billion years - The end of the Universe in the Big Rip scenario.[37] Observations of galaxy cluster speeds by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory suggest that this will not occur.[38]
- In 100 billion years - The Universe’s expansion causes all evidence of the Big Bang to disappear beyond the practical observational limit, rendering cosmology impossible.[41]
- In 1012 (1 trillion) years - Low estimate for the time until star formation ends in galaxies as galaxies are depleted of the gas clouds they need to form stars.[43],
- In 2×1012 (2 trillion) years - All galaxies outside the Local Supercluster are no longer detectable in any way, assuming that dark energy continues to make the Universe expand at an accelerating rate.[44]
- In 1015 (1 quadrillion) years - Estimated time until stellar close encounters detach all planets in the Solar System from their orbits.[43]
By this time, the Sun will have cooled to five degrees above absolute zero.[47]
- In 3×1043 years - Estimated time for all nucleons in the observable Universe to decay, if the proton half-life takes the largest possible value, 1041 years,[43] assuming that the Big Bang was inflationary and that the same process that made baryons predominate over anti-baryons in the early Universe makes protons decay.[53] By this time, if protons do decay, the Black Hole Era, in which black holes are the only remaining celestial objects, begins.[46][43]
- In 1065 years - Assuming that protons do not decay, estimated time for rigid objects like rocks to rearrange their atoms and molecules via quantum tunneling. On this timescale all matter is liquid.[49]
- In 1.7×10106 years - Estimated time until a supermassive black hole with a mass of 20 trillion solar masses decays by the Hawking process.[54] This marks the end of the Black Hole Era. Beyond this time, if protons do decay, the Universe enters the Dark Era, in which all physical objects have decayed to subatomic particles, gradually winding down to their final energy state.[46][43]
- In
years - Estimated time for a Boltzmann brain to appear in the vacuum via a spontaneous entropy decrease.[55]
- In
years - Estimated time for random quantum fluctuations to generate a new Big Bang, according to Caroll and Chen.[56]
- In
years - Scale of an estimated Poincaré recurrence time for the quantum state of a hypothetical box containing an isolated black hole of stellar mass.[57] This time assumes a statistical model subject to Poincaré recurrence. A much simplified way of thinking about this time is that in a model in which history repeats itself arbitrarily many times due to properties of statistical mechanics, this is the time scale when it will first be somewhat similar (for a reasonable choice of “similar”) to its current state again.
Tony Romano exposed the left plant only to Bob Dylan music for a few weeks, and the right to Neil Young. Hey, I’d probably wither too if I could only listen to Neil Young for weeks.
Compiled below is a selection of estimated dates for some events given certain assumptions in the evolution of Earth, the Solar System, and the Universe. Most events are of an astronomical and cosmological nature though some are geological. A more complete list from which the ones included here…
Searching for authoritative numbers on how much of urban space is devoted to cars, I found this gem by Manville and Shoup, People, Parking, And Cities. The authors debunk the numbers bandied about by many — two thirds of LA is devoted to car use, etc. — as being undocumented if you follow the trail of citations. They found that Meyer and Gómez-Ibáñez (1983) had proposed an inverse relation between the share of land in streets and the share of land in streets per person, based on 1960 data:
Automobile use does not result in an exceptional percentage of land being given to transportation purposes. Rather, the automobile seems to create exceptional demands for transportation land relative to the number of people in an urban area. Specifically, cities more dependent on the automobile tend to have more street acreage per person but a smaller percentage of total land in streets.
Basically, larger lots leads to low population density, but more importantly, as the car has become dominant in transportation the cities are designed for cars and not for people:
People, Parking, And Cities - Michael Manville and Donald Shoup
Given these results, how can we account for the perception that low-density areas give more of their land to streets? Certainly people tend to associate lower density with increased automobile use, and automobile use with streets. The first of these associa- tions, as we have seen, is more complicated than a simple one- way relationship, but the second may increasingly be true. The association between low density and auto-oriented land use, in other words, may lie less in the share of land given over to streets, and more in the share of streets given over to cars.
The modernist street designs identified by Southworth and Owens (1993) consume less total land area than the dense grids that preceded them, but broad boulevards and cul-de-sacs are also streets whose primary purpose—and perhaps sole purpose—is the swift and safe movement of automobiles. The desire in newer areas to accommodate the car has often led to the removal of other uses from roads and streets. Cul-de-sacs, which force more circuitous routes and have a notoriously limited utility for pedestrians, have been promoted. Intersections, which slow traffic or cause it to stop—but which make streets more amenable to walking—have been minimized. Those intersections that get built are made wider, allowing cars to turn with less deceleration but forcing pedestrians to traverse more road space (Southworth and Ben-Joseph 1996).
Where older intersections often have a curb radius of 3–4 ft, newer intersections flare out: It is not uncommon for zoning laws to call for 15 or 20 ft curb radii. The 9 ft travel lanes of older neighborhoods were replaced in newer developments by 11 and 12 ft lanes, and parking lanes are recommended to be wider still, so through traffic will not be unduly slowed when drivers pulled into or out of spaces. In practice, parking lanes rarely reach their recommended widths, but the standards illustrate a new concern with the street as a territory of the car, rather than as an arena for multiple modes and activities. In some places parking lanes have not been widened but instead prohibited entirely; Century City has banished all its parked cars to off-street garages, and reserves its broad streets for moving automobiles. The end effect is the same. Because curb parking can help make a street feel more human scaled (by encouraging movement on the sidewalks, and by providing a barrier between pedestrians and fast-moving traffic) its removal can amplify the sense that the street is a facility for cars alone.
Manville and Shoup reevaluated the study data that Meyer and Gómez-Ibáñez used, and reaffirmed the basic insights.
High-res →
They wrote:
Our results indicate that the relationship they identified between density, street space, and streets per capita is still valid. The coefficient of correlation between density and lane-miles per square mile was 0.87, while the coefficient of correlation between density and lane miles per 1,000 persons was −0.39. This latter coefficient is weaker than the relationship identified by Meyer and Gómez-Ibáñez, but still negative.
[…]
Columns 4 and 5 of Table 2 show each area’s daily vehicle miles traveled (VMT) per square mile, and VMT per capita. Like our figures for lane mileage, these numbers are derived from the TTI’s database. Given the relationship we have found between street space and density, it is reasonable to expect that VMT interacts with density in a similar manner. Previous research has shown that traffic volumes correlate highly with density: Ross and Dunning (1997), in a report to the Federal Highway Administration, found that traffic volumes rose at 80% of the rate of population change. It may be, however, that density and VMT share the same complicated relationship as density and street space.
Our calculations suggest this is so. For the 20 largest urbanized areas, the coefficient of correlation between population density and VMT per square mile is 0.90, while the coefficient between density and VMT per capita is −0.58. Los Angeles, the densest area, has the highest daily VMT per square mile (128,000), and by a significant margin. It sits in the middle of the pack in terms of VMT per capita. Using all 85 urban areas weakens the relationship only slightly: the coefficient of correlation between density and VMT per square mile falls to 0.86, and the relationship between density and VMT per capita becomes −0.47. Increases in population density reduce the VMT per person but increase the VMT per square mile. In low-density areas each person creates more VMT, but because there are fewer people per square mile the VMT per square mile falls. These findings accord well with the idea that sprawl can reduce congestion, but that it also makes for longer trips.
High levels of VMT per square mile suggest high levels of traffic congestion. For this reason it is not surprising that Los Angeles has such a large VMT per square mile, not only because it reinforces the popular perception that LA has the nation’s worst traffic, but because the region’s relative equality of density (which we discuss in the next section) deprives it of any truly low-density areas that would offer a respite from high congestion levels. We can follow this logic back further into our original seeming paradox: since congestion is properly thought of as competition for scarce road space, areas with high levels of congestion—which is to say dense areas—can be conceived of as lacking in road space, even though they have more of it than less dense areas.
Obviously the problem is not quite that simple. The optimal solution to competition for scarce road space is not more road space, but—as with competition for any scarce resource—prices. In the absence of road pricing, however, it is not uncommon for traffic engineers to state that a congested area has an undersupply of streets. Congestion worsens as population increases because the supply of streets is relatively static, and cannot keep pace with increases in density and VMT if everyone drives everywhere.
So, cities become designed around their streets, and the lower the population density (larger lots) the more time people spend driving in cars, which leads to greater congestion, like LA.
And the result is that cities like LA do in fact dedicate a higher proportion of space to cars.
This means that the rise of autonomous cars — even in places like LA, will lead to strong motivations to increase density, and to reuse space now dedicated to cars that are generally at rest: parking. LA has 24% of its central business district dedicated to parking, for example, leaving aside the underground and multilevel structures allocated to it.
The final table includes a wide variety of cities, including New York, and rationalize parking as a function of jobs in the city:
High-res →
New York has the amazingly low figure of 0.06 parking spaces per job in the downtown area, contrasted with LA’s 0.52: ten times more parking per person in LA than NYC, and LA is — to the authors’ knowledge — the highest percentage on earth.
The authors quote Lewis Mumford, who said
The right to access every building in the city by private motorcar, in an age when everyone owns such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city.
And they close with a recommendation:
Perhaps the simplest and most productive reform of American zoning would be to declare that all existing off-street parking requirements are maximums rather than minimums. The examples of New York and San Francisco suggest that limits on off-street parking can foster many of density’s benefits, and urbanists who admire these cities might urge other places to adopt their approaches to parking. From a different perspective, however, more regulation may not be the best first step. The market can mediate the supply of parking in most urban areas, and despite the planner’s frequent desire to replace a floor with a ceiling, it may be better to simply deregulate parking—to force it on no one and let those who want it pay for it. A market-oriented approach to parking would eliminate cumbersome regulations, remove incentives to drive, and let city planners concentrate on matters that seriously demand their attention.
Or let some innovation like autonomous cars come along, and watch what happens when 70% or more of the cars go away.
Briegmann wonders if the driverless (autonomous) car would lead to reduced congestion, but also greater sprawl?
Robert Bruegmann via Bloomberg
The driverless car might well substantially alter all the equations: the division between public and private, the collective and individual. Transportation policy has never been as clear as the polemics on the subject would suggest. The taxi, for example, has long shared characteristics of each. In recent years, the divide between public and private transport has been further eroded with the Zipcar (ZIP), Super Shuttle and other on- demand vehicles such as Personal Rapid Transit, a system of small automated vehicles running on guideways. A pioneering and successful example of PRT, constructed in the 1970s, can still be seen in operation in Morgantown, West Virginia.
Flexible SystemWhat the driverless automobile might do is further break down the distinctions. Suppose an individual can summon a vehicle on demand — a small capsule like a golf cart for doing errands in the city, for example, or something more like a van to transport a track team to another city — and that vehicle can go directly from starting point to destination. The flexibility this system could provide might well reduce the incentive for owning an automobile, which has to serve all purposes, is expensive to buy and maintain, and in most cases spends most of its time taking up valuable space in a garage or parking lot.
If the driverless car reduces congestion by maximizing the use of existing highways and taking passengers farther and faster with greater comfort, it could lead to even more dispersed cities. But it could also have the opposite effect.
Given the large amount of space devoted to roads and parking in American cities, even minor increases in collective use of vehicles could lead to less need for new pavement and parking and to higher residential and commercial densities. This would reinforce a trend that is already visible, as new development at the far suburban edge of most urban regions is currently being created at higher densities than in the past and there is a great deal of infill in city centers and close-in suburbs.
Although the driverless automobile, like almost every technological advance, will undoubtedly bring on a great many new problems, it could also help ease several existing problems caused by the automobile, notably traffic fatalities and congestion.
My bet is that the transition will follow an S curve of adoption, with very different models at different stages. At first, when less than 15% of the population use auto-autos it will be like today’s electric cars: a personal choice, but basically leading to only small changes in the ecosystem: for example, very few chargers at strip malls and offices. It is only after the early majority start to adopt auto-autos that things will really change, and I bet it will unfold fastest in cities.
Bruegman mentions taxis as vehicles that have elements of both public and private transportation. What happens, though, when taxis are autonomous, and no longer require taxi drivers? First of all, they become much much cheaper. Let’s imagine that 50% of the expense of a taxi is the human driving it. So taxi fares could — would — drop by at least half, and probably more, including the tip!
Stackable city cars like these are the taxis of the future
In such a scenario, those living anywhere with a high enough population density to support taxis would have very strong motivations to not own a car, much more so that today, even given taxis, Zipcar and other public transport. In areas of lower density, even those where taxis are not really viable in large numbers, taxis would become much more prevalent.
My sense is that this would allow for a strong incentive for people to move from lower to higher density areas, along with the added benefit of not requiring parking for the no-longer necessary car.
In a report by mobile analytics company Flurry, it appears the advertising industry still doesn’t seem to understand the potential mobile advertising has, despite the fact that it’s where consumers are spending tons of their time. (via Advertisers Aren’t Taking Advantage of Mobile)
Looks like a bunch of ex-Googlers are building the ‘Liquid email’ product I’ve been writing about and dreaming about:
Ben Grubb via Sydney Morning Herald
One thing Fluent aimed to change about email was presenting it in a stream that lets one action items as quickly as possible, Adams said.
“So rather than having to receive a message, look at the subject, click on it, read the conversation, and then decide what to do, we sort of present you with the information that you need to immediately action on it.”
Other features of Fluent include letting users quickly browse attachments such as images in a slide show format, the ability to search for emails as one types - something Google’s search engine pioneered with “Instant Search” but is not available in Gmail - and the ability to pinpoint emails one has sent to a specified email address on a timeline.
Another feature in Fluent, which Adams said most webmail clients were “pretty horrible” at dealing with, was its focus on letting users access multiple email accounts under one log-in.
“The market that we’re going for initially is sort of independent professionals and small businesses that tend to have personal accounts [and] maybe several work accounts,” Adams said. “It’s quite important for them to be able to check their multiple accounts at the same time.”
What I want to know is, are they going to support an ‘open email’? Where I can publish email to all my followers, whoever they are? Are they going to support an open follower model?
Cathy N. Davidson - Distraction is Our Friend
In a response to Hanif Kurieshi’s wonderful The Art Of Distraction, Davidson lays down some pretty good thoughts, too.
Popova reviews ‘This Will Make You Smarter’, where various smart people pick a single idea to help you understand the world a bit better:
Wrongologist Kathryn Schulz, whose recent talk on the psychology of regret you might recall, finds optimism in “the pessimistic meta-induction from the history of science” — the idea that, because we now know scientific theories of yore have often been wrong, it’s safe to assume our own present-day theories are quite possibly wrong as well.
At best, we nurture the fantasy that knowledge is always cumulative, and therefore concede that future eras will know more than we do. But we ignore or resist the fact that knowledge collapses as often as it accretes, that our own most cherished beliefs might appear patently false to posterity.
That fact is the essence of the meta-induction — and yet, despite its name, this idea is not pessimistic. Or rather, it is only pessimistic if you hate being wrong. If, by contrast, you think that uncovering your mistakes is one of the best ways to revise and improve your understanding of the world, then this is actually a highly optimistic insight.”
Wrongology.
Paul Higgins: has certainly happened with me. I will email documents to GMail that I need to read or take to meetings. I will send documents to my iPad that I use to run workshops - run sheets, timings , etc. Also send presentations to my iPad into Prezi Viewer so I can practice them on a train or plane. The important difference to my laptop is ease of carrying and the speed of opening and using. The other day I had a breakfast meeting in the city and another one at 11. In between I was going into the virtual office space we hire from Servcorp to do some work on end of month reporting . I needed the accounting software application that I have on my laptop rather than my iPad despite the fact that we share the back up files in the cloud via DropBox. I found myself really strongly resenting the fact that I had to carry my laptop with me. Made me think that the cloud plus tablet are certainly the way of the future and the laptops days are ending faster than I previously thought.
If you think about it, printers are probably the worst-designed gadgets in our homes (unless you own the same awful Samsung Behold as I do). But despite the mythical advance of the paperless office, nobody has been able to kill them off. Until now. A new survey says that the iPad has finally doomed the printer, and is even saving trees.
The survey, conducted by Morgan Stanley Research and named “Tablet Demand and Disruption,” shows that as tablet adoption in business has grown, so the use of paper and printers has dropped. And for tablets here we can read “iPad,” as nothing else is really selling in significant numbers.
Morgan Stanley surveyed 700 tablet users in the U.S and found that 46 percent of them had reduced their printer use. It makes total sense. Even the Lady, a die-hard paper user, took her iPad to some official place or other last month to have them scan a barcode straight from the screen.
» via Cult of Mac
Microsoft’s biggest miss was allowing the world to finally see the truth behind the big lie — they were not needed to get real work done. Or anything done, really.
And that will be what ultimately kills them.
”- Patrick Rhone, Microsoft’s Biggest Miss
(via underpaidgenius)
Duhigg notes the efforts Target must make not to “spook” customers with obvious behavioral-based targeting. Since the company wanted to target pregnant women who haven’t explicitly notified Target about their pregnancy, they had to use informational camouflage:
“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons…. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.” … As long as Target camouflaged how much it knew, as long as the habit felt familiar, the new behavior took hold.
As with political scandal, what’s so bothersome about this less the targeting itself — though that is bad for reasons Turow details, more on that below — but the cover-up. Retailers don’t want transparency in their attempts to manipulate your behavior; they want to control how your habits evolve. They understand that the more you know about their techniques, the less effective they will be. And they try to justify themselves with the idea that they know better than us what we really want and their marketing techniques allow us to get out of our way to indulge ourselves how we really want and become who we really want to be. Thus Duhigg concludes with this quote from Target’s targeting guru: “Just wait. We’ll be sending you coupons for things you want before you even know you want them.” We’re supposed to think that is a good thing. We’re not supposed to think that the company is using the data it has collected on us to shape the possibilities of what we can become, to control the context in which we make our lives and understand ourselves.
”- Nathan Jurgenson, Predictive analytics and information camouflage – The New Inquiry
Jurgenson coins the term ‘information camouflage’: companies that mine data about us, discern a pattern they can exploit, and then conceal that knowledge by randomizing the torrent of ads and promotions they send our way so they can conceal that they are on to us, since if we knew we’d change our mental filters.
Building 20 [a scene of incredible innovation at MIT] and brainstorming came into being at almost exactly the same time. In the sixty years since then, if the studies are right, brainstorming has achieved nothing—or, at least, less than would have been achieved by six decades’ worth of brainstormers working quietly on their own. Building 20, though, ranks as one of the most creative environments of all time, a space with an almost uncanny ability to extract the best from people. Among M.I.T. people, it was referred to as “the magical incubator.”
The fatal misconception behind brainstorming is that there is a particular script we should all follow in group interactions. The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions add up. In fact, they may even be the most essential part of the creative process. Although such conversations will occasionally be unpleasant—not everyone is always in the mood for small talk or criticism—that doesn’t mean that they can be avoided. The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together. It is the human friction that makes the sparks.
”New study shows that a moderate amount of alcohol actually makes people (at least men) more creative, or at least respond creatively more quickly, than those abstaining. “A moderate buzz loosens a man’s focus of attention, thus making it easier to find connections among remotely related ideas,” says Bryan Nelson at the Mother Nature Network.
Basecamp UI Preview37signals have come up with some very unique although simple user experience patterns that should make using Basecamp easier than ever. Jump into the video at 3 minutes to see a demonstration of how they are allowing for you to easily navigate into a project.
via aparticularpath, 37signals
Clever sort of ‘stack’ UX, where content in basecamp is treated as an outline, and clicking on an item — like a to do in a project — creates a new ‘sheet’ for the to do that hovers over the project sheet. Closing the to do exposes the project, and so on.
Need to get access to the beta and find out if 37signals have finally fixed the federated identity bug. I bet they have.
I am glad to say that I going to be working with Claude Théoret and the nice folks at Nexalogy Environics over the course of the year. Claude and I met at a conference in Montreal, and found an immediate common ground in social networks. Claude is a physicist turned social media analytics entrepreneur, and I am a computer scientist turned social tools weenie. We share a belief in the value of developing a ‘physics of humans’ and we both are certain that a key part of that science must be understanding how social networks do what they do.
So I am going to be collaborating with Claude on an investigation of those ideas, and trying to surface those topics on the Nexalogy blog. Nominally, I am a research fellow at Nexalogy, and Claude is a research fellow at Work Talk, my new research commons (about more which next week). We also hope to derive a primer on social networks principles as an outgrowth of this project, too.
In essence, we are trying to promote social network literacy, and hope that a broader and deeper understanding of the science underlying social networks will help us all understand the world better, and adopt business practices that are reality-based instead of ideological.
My first piece digs into some fascinating research by Brian Uzzi, of Northwestern, who looked deep into Broadway to find a pattern for creative teams: What Makes The Most Creative Teams?
I’ll be doing something innocuous — reading a magazine, playing a game, something with a relatively low (but not zero) cognitive threshold, so that my brain is working but not focused — and a phrase will pop into my head. It’ll be novel (to me), typically a combination of terms that don’t usually go together, yet seemingly something meaningful. I’ll hop onto whatever digital device I have handy to see if someone else is already talking about the topic, to see if it’s already a real thing. Often it is, and I can return to whatever I was doing. But sometimes, it’s not — it’s a combination of terms that hasn’t before been seen by the mighty eye of Google.
“Forensic Futurism” was today’s term. And aside from a few pages including the two terms in an alphabetical listing, it’s a term without a pre-existing presence. So the rest of my afternoon was spent trying to figure out what the hell forensic futurism might be, and why it sounded like it should mean something useful and/or important.
”- Jamais Cascio, Forensic Futurism
Jamais wants to analyze failed forecasts that we make, and determine what premises or other factors led to the mistaken outcomes.
Kik has released a new experiment in smart remote control of computer screens — and maybe a foreshadowing of smart remote control of internet-connected TVs. The system is called Clik — clikthis.com on the web side and an app called Clik on the smartphone. By synching a QR code from the Screen via the mobile app, the mobile user can control what is being displayed on the computer (or TV) screen:
Anthony Ha via Techcrunch
You point your desktop browser at ClikThis.com, which generates a unique QR code. Then you open the Clik iPhone or Android app, aim the camera at the screen, and the app uses the code to figure out which device you’re trying to control. Once it’s synced up, you can select YouTube videos from your phone, and they’ll play on the screen.
Right now it’s only YouTube videos, but this is simply the start of something big. The CEO of Kik, Ted Livingston said, ‘Every screen just becomes a dumb output for your smart remote.’
Om Malik is right when he says that the most important aspect of the prominent role Apple has handed to Twitter in the upcoming Mountain Lion release of OS X is the developer API:
I think the biggest news from my perspective is the developer API.
Developers can take advantage of the Share Sheet API to let users tweet seamlessly from their apps. With the API, developers can leverage Twitter single sign-on and Tweet Sheet, so users can tweet with comments and locations, right from within their apps.
As I have said in the past, Apple plans to make OS X and iOS social, and their current strategy is to build on top of Twitter as a platform.
Twitter is really a protocol, one on which the most important social information network lives. Why Apple hasn’t acquired Twitter escapes me.
Nothing could have prepared me for Gruber’s description of his one-on-one demo of Mountain Lion, Apple’s next version of OS X. It wasn’t the software, but the way that Apple is approaching folks like Gruber:
This is an awful lot of effort and attention in order to brief what I’m guessing is a list of a dozen or two writers and journalists. It’s Phil Schiller, spending an entire week on the East Coast, repeating this presentation over and over to a series of audiences of one. There was no less effort put into the preparation of this presentation than there would have been if it had been the WWDC keynote address.
What do I think so far, Schiller asks. It all seems rather obvious now that I’ve seen it — and I mean obvious in a good way. I remain convinced that iCloud is exactly what Steve Jobs said it was: the cornerstone of everything Apple does for the next decade. So of course it makes sense to bring iCloud to the Mac in a big way. Simplified document storage, iMessage, Notification Center2, synced Notes and Reminders — all of these things are part of iCloud. It’s all a step toward making your Mac just another device managed in your iCloud account. Look at your iPad and think about the features it has that would work well, for a lot of people, if they were on the Mac. That’s Mountain Lion — and probably a good way to predict the future of the continuing parallel evolution of iOS and OS X.3
But this, I say, waving around at the room, this feels a little odd. I’m getting the presentation from an Apple announcement event without the event. I’ve already been told that I’ll be going home with an early developer preview release of Mountain Lion. I’ve never been at a meeting like this, and I’ve never heard of Apple seeding writers with an as-yet-unannounced major update to an operating system. Apple is not exactly known for sharing details of as-yet-unannounced products, even if only just one week in advance. Why not hold an event to announce Mountain Lion — or make the announcement on apple.com before talking to us?
That’s when Schiller tells me they’re doing some things differently now.
I wonder immediately about that “now”. I don’t press, because I find the question that immediately sprang to mind uncomfortable. And some things remain unchanged: Apple executives explain what they want to explain, and they explain nothing more.
My gut feeling though, is this. Apple didn’t want to hold an event to announce Mountain Lion because those press events are precious. They just used one for the iBooks/education thing, and they’re almost certainly on the cusp of holding a major one for the iPad. They don’t want to wait to release the Mountain Lion preview because they want to give Mac developers months of time to adopt new APIs and to help Apple shake out bugs. So: an announcement without an event. But they don’t want Mountain Lion to go unheralded. They are keenly aware that many observers suspect or at least worry that the Mac is on the wane, relegated to the sideline in favor of the new and sensationally popular iPad.
Thus, these private briefings. Not merely to explain what Mountain Lion is — that could just as easily be done with a website or PDF feature guide — but to convey that the Mac and OS X remain both important and the subject of the company’s attention. The move to a roughly annual release cycle, to me, suggests that Apple is attempting to prove itself a walk-and-chew-gum-at-the-same-time company.
And all of this without any rumors — like those swirling about the iPad 3. Apple comes across as deadly serious, very carefully moving forward, one major battle at a time, pursuing a grand strategic vision, and unconstrained.
Gruber’s description of Mountain Lion — specifically the close integration with iCloud — is also worth a long read.
- Tom Gerevan, Some best-guesses about what BuzzFeed is up to, and why it is in fact about Arianna, a little via Capital New York
Buzzfeed is trying to live in the stream, a liquid media play.
Amber condenses discussions/emails with hundreds down to the quintessential social hedge:
I’d like to better use social to build my business.
But I don’t want to spend anything because we don’t have a budget, and we can’t cut anything else. I don’t want to have to hire anyone or spend any extra time on this, and no one else can take it on right now, so we’ll need to outsource it or perhaps put the intern in charge of it. We like our culture the way it is and don’t see anything wrong with it, and we’ve always done things this way so we’re not really keen to change any of our processes or people. Some rhetoric around developing a positive culture would be great, but we really don’t have any intention of putting any of that into practice if it involves significant effort or any kind of substantial change that might disrupt the way that we work or how we work with our customers currently.
So we’re really looking for some free strategy guidance, but we’d like to reserve the right to reject it outright if it feels uncomfortable or unfamiliar. We’d like some viral content that’s easy and cheap to create, and we’re really not interested in investing any time or people long term on this. Just looking for some some proven, guaranteed best practices that we can implement immediately, get immediate return on, set on autopilot, call ourselves “social” and not worry about integrating into the rest of our business because we’re looking for a quick win here that doesn’t really require much from us.
Can you help?
She goes on to point out that there is no social perpetual motion machine, and so anyone who wants to make social work for their company will have to spend money, allocate people to it and give them time to do the work, and prepare for a long-term and possibly difficult change process.
Years ago I was doing various presentations for the American Marketing Association on social media, but I finally gave up because it was so disheartening to be speaking to a room full of people who were trying to figure out how to do the least possible in social media, instead of looking for the biggest upside.
The Kowloon Walled City, a maze of apartments, walkways and stairs, so cramped that sunlight couldn’t reach the lower levels and had a population density of 1,255,000 per square kilometre.
MG Siegler confesses that he and many other tech writers have been doing a piss-poor job:
MG Siegler, Content Everywhere, But Not A Drop To Drink via ParisLemon
Most of what is written about the tech world — both in blog form and old school media form — is bullshit. I won’t try to put some arbitrary label on it like 80%, but it’s a lot. There’s more bullshit than there is 100% pure, legitimate information.
The problem is systemic. Print circulation is dying and pageviews are all that matter in keeping advertisers happy. This means, whether writers like it or not, there’s an underlying drive for both sensationalism and more — more — more.
Read the stories that are published in the tech blogosphere tomorrow. Are most published because the writer put in a lot of work or original thought? No, most are published because more — more — more content leads to more — more — more pageviews.
Most are stories written with little or no research done. They’re written as quickly as possible. The faster the better. Most are just rehashing information that spread by some other means. But that’s great, it means stories can be written without any burden beyond the writer having to read a little bit and type words fast. Many are written without the writer even having to think.
I’m completely serious in saying that.
There will be 25 stories about Google TV or something else tomorrow which will all say basically the same thing. Maybe one or two of those stories will have actual insight or information. Maybe none will. If any do, it’s the exception, not the rule.
As one of the most prolific tech bloggers over the period of a few years, I was just as guilty of this as anyone. I had a job to do, and I did it. And to be honest, I saw absolutely nothing wrong with it at the time. And if you did, you just didn’t get it.
But now I have more perspective. I was wrong.
In a field of public discourse in which 80% of everything is bullshit, the value of enlightened curation and filtration goes up exponentially. Not 80% but 10,000%. Siegler is inadvertently making the case for ‘know your curator’, while pulling down the pants of the tech blogging world.
I will leave aside any deep analysis on Siegler’s change of heart, now that he isn’t another racetrack greyhound chasing a plastic rabbit, but I will simply observe that he was in on the fix at one of the most prominent tech sites — TechCrunch — whose outsized personalities and dramatic style perhaps was a sort of legerdemain, intended to take our eyes off what was being written, and to make themselves part of the new gonzo tech news cycle instead of thoughtfully reporting on it.
Nitasha Tiku via Betabeat
“I certainly looked at GA when I was trying to find some office space, and certainly would consider it in the future, but I found it to be a bit…pretentious?” Mr. Root, who works out of the space, explained by email . “Unlike its Manhattan-based cousins, I’ve found people at The Yard to be just as talented but far more approachable. Maybe I’m just more comfortable with the Brooklyn vibe than the highly-caffeinated Apple-everything crowd in the city.”
“I don’t mean to be unfair to GA, they have accomplished something incredible,” he continued. “But The Yard struck me as more practical and comfortable.”
I guess it’s inevitable to make the comparison to General Assembly, but almost nothing is the same at the Yard: 100 offices, not open space, for example. And while Levy is having discussions with angels and VCs, the place wasn’t started and managed by them.
And I am — to say the least — ambivalent about the vibe at GA. I work out of Grind which has a totally different and more freelancer-oriented vibe, rather than a start-up dominated one.
The Future Of Money project at RSA, featuring David Birch who ‘argues that the financial crisis and technological innovation means it is time to rethink our approach to money’, specifically looking at cell phone currencies ad other new technologies.
via futuristlab, futuramb
Han Zhiwu wondered why the North African Desert Scorpion could survive Saharan sandstorms, living in the open, without even digging into the sand. He wondered how the chitin of the animal’s shell didn’t abrate, like rotors and propellers of aircraft do.
They used a laser scanning system to make a three-dimensional map of the armour and then plugged the result into a computer program that blasted the virtual armour with virtual sand grains at various angles of attack. This process revealed that the granules were disturbing the air flow near the skeleton’s surface in ways that appeared to be reducing the erosion rate. Their model suggested that if scorpion exoskeletons were smooth, they would experience almost twice the erosion rate that they actually do.
Given 430 millions years — a predecessor of the scorpion was the first land animal — its not surprise that something close to optimal for avoiding sand abrasion has evolved.
Apparently, there is a strong linkage between the way we perceive odors (and tastes) and musical pitch anf the intruments that make them:
via The Economist
Ms Crisinel and Dr Spence wanted to know whether an odour sniffed from a bottle could be linked to a specific pitch, and even a specific instrument. To find out, they asked 30 people to inhale 20 smells—ranging from apple to violet and wood smoke—which came from a teaching kit for wine-tasting. After giving each sample a good sniff, volunteers had to click their way through 52 sounds of varying pitches, played by piano, woodwind, string or brass, and identify which best matched the smell. The results of this study, to be published later this month in Chemical Senses, are intriguing.
The researchers’ first finding was that the volunteers did not think their request utterly ridiculous. It rather made sense, they told them afterwards. The second was that there was significant agreement between volunteers. Sweet and sour smells were rated as higher-pitched, smoky and woody ones as lower-pitched. Blackberry and raspberry were very piano. Vanilla had elements of both piano and woodwind. Musk was strongly brass.
It is not immediately clear why people employ their musical senses in this way to help their assessment of a smell. But gone are the days when science assumed each sense worked in isolation. People live, say Dr Spence and Ms Crisinel, in a multisensory world and their brains tirelessly combine information from all sources to make sense, as it were, of what is going on around them. Nor is this response restricted to humans. Studies of the brains of mice show that regions involved in olfaction also react to sound.
Taste, too, seems linked to hearing. Ms Crisinel and Dr Spence have previously established that sweet and sour tastes, like smells, are linked to high pitch, while bitter tastes bring lower pitches to mind. Now they have gone further. In a study that will be published later this year they and their colleagues show how altering the pitch and instruments used in background music can alter the way food tastes.
In this experiment, each volunteer was given four pieces of toffee. While they were eating two of them, a sombre, low-pitched piece of music played on brass instruments filled the air. They consumed the other two, however, to the accompaniment of a higher-pitched piano piece. Volunteers rated the toffee eaten during low-pitched music as more bitter than that consumed during the high-pitched rendition. The toffee was, of course, identical. It was the sound that tasted different.
A friend’s father was sick while I was in Ireland. The idea came of inscribing to him the copy of Synge’s works I brought with me on this trip and leaving it in the little library on Aran. The librarian wasn’t there — she only works certain days of the week — but a very pleasant lady, when I told her what I wanted to do, opened the door for me and loaned me a pen and let me sit there in a sunny corner.
I can’t say that I enjoyed parting with this book, which was partly why it felt right to leave it. “The Complete Works of John M. Synge,” 1935 Random House edition, the only one-volume edition I’ve seen that has all of his stuff — it’s worth finding, not just for the sake of having all the plays in one place, but because it reveals a lesser-known Synge — Synge the writer of powerful nonfiction pieces, “The Vagrants of Wicklow” and “In the Congested Districts.” He wrote some of the best Irish walking journals ever, and that’s not a narrow genre; perhaps only Heinrich Böll’s are as good. Before handing over the book, I re-read a favorite paragraph from “The Aran Islands,” where Synge describes men bringing horses ashore in their small sailing craft: “The storm of Gaelic that rises the moment a horse is shoved from the pier, till it is safely in its place, is indescribable.”
The other nice thing about a collected Synge is that you can read the rest of his plays, the ones that didn’t become as famous, but all of which have moments that are on a level with his best writing. The night before, after Chris had excused himself to do some work — it turned out he did have some duties, as night manager, it wasn’t all sleeping and pint-pulling — I walked down to the dock, which glowed eerily in the orange lights they keep on constantly there and read some of “The Shadow of the Glen,” the plot of which came from yet another tale Synge heard on the Aran Islands. A husband decides to fake his own death, in order to test the loyalty of his wife — he’ll spy on her from his slab, see how she behaves with the men who come to pay their respects. A tramp shows up by chance, and the woman takes a liking to him. During a brief, magical, cursed night, she sits talking to her new friend while the falsely dead husband lies there listening (multiple vectors of betrayal converging: take note, budding playwrights). The woman allows herself to dream about the life she’ll have with the money her old man has left her in a sock — not a grand life, but less boring and awful than the one she was living with him. When at last he sits up, revealing his ghastly trick, she’s so horrified that she doesn’t know what to do except prepare herself for death. But the tramp won’t let her think that way. “You’ll not be getting your death with myself, lady of the house,” he says, “and I knowing all the ways a man can put food in his mouth… . We’ll be going now, I’m telling you, and the time you’ll be feeling the cold, and the frost, and the great rain, and the sun again, and the south wind blowing in the glens, you’ll not be sitting up on a wet ditch, the way you’re after sitting in the place, making yourself old with looking on each day, and it passing you by. You’ll be saying one time, ‘It’s a grand evening, by the grace of God,’ and another time, ‘It’s a wild night, God help us, but it’ll pass surely.’ ”
It was reminiscent of Christy’s speech from the ending of “Playboy,” and of countless other passages in Synge. It’s the great discovery he made in his study of the Irish character — the idea of survival as an act of imagination. Against the unacceptability of the void, he pits the howl of irrational humor and the keen. He was too dignified to apologize much for his work to hostile critics, but he might have said, in response to the charge that he was aloof from the true rural Irish, that he shared their unforgotten paganism.
People said he made clowns of the peasants — there are still writers who complain that his dialogue wasn’t always true to real Irish folk speech, a criticism that manages to be correct while driving past his achievement, which was to go beneath them, into something even older and deeper, the Greeks. He possessed the mercenary instinct of the artist and sought not to capture the Irish language but to mine it for his English sentences. He had in him something of Gabriel, from “The Dead,” who when chastised for not wanting to visit the Aran Islands and learn his own native tongue, answers sourly, “Irish is not my language.” In his room here at the inn, they say, Synge lay on the floor with his ear to the boards, listening to the talk of the people below, making notes. Out of that stuff he made plays that caused riots in multiple countries.
Whatever comes next, after the crash, Ireland will make itself anew. If it’s smart, that is — if it doesn’t insist, like us, on desperately trying to crawl back to the conditions that made the bubble. A century after Synge’s last works were published, he may be the writer Ireland needs.
”- John Jeremiah Sullivan, My Debt to Ireland
Curation is the new engagement:
Josh Sternberg via Digiday
Curation is the vogue digital term for the ability to not only aggregate and distribute carefully selected information, but also to provide a unique voice on top of the original pieces of information. In the age of Twitter and Facebook, it seems like all the world is curators now. Brands want in on the action.
Brands are trying to establish themselves as trusted sources of information. Hop onto Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr, and you’ll see brands that gather up articles from all sorts of publications and push them out to their followers. For example, look at IBM’s Tumblr, A Smarter Planet, which is a stream of curated content focused on areas of Big Blue’s core competencies. Or there’s American Express’ Open Forum Tumblr (yes, Tumblr is apparently a good platform for curation) that has cultivated a business community online by providing relevant tools and information to help business owners succeed.
“If a brand is an expert in a certain topic, their reputation might make them a credible source of information,” said Neil Chase, svp of editing and publishing at Federated Media. “But if a company that makes toasters gives health advice, they might not be credible. If they’re sending out recipes, that’s a reason to trust them.”
There’s little doubt that brands can amass sizable audiences of their own nowadays. Show me a chief marketing officer who isn’t interested in an owned, earned, paid media model — often in that order — and I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. It’s been four and a half years since Nike marketing chief Trevor Edwards plaintively said, “We’re not in the business of keeping media companies alive.” Translation: We can build direct connections with audiences, thank you very much.
The devil is in the details. Brands aren’t set up to be publishers. They don’t necessarily understand the editorial process or have the stomach for the length of time it takes to build an audience. Take AmEx’s OpenForum, for instance. It took four years to get 1 million people aboard, and now it gets about 150,000 unique visitors per month. They have the resources to build and cultivate an audience others may not. Additionally, OpenForum was put on the shoulders of the end-user: small-business owners. These business owners are able to communicate and share ideas with one another, but they must be American Express Cardmembers. AmEx recognized the need to provide small-business owners with a connection platform and information that will help their business succeed.
“Brands have a content story to tell,” said Colleen DeCourcy, CEO of Socialistic, a social media agency. “Some brands have data and research they have gathered in the creation of their products that can be contextualized and turned into content — which can give them both real authority on the topic and some real ROI for their effort.”
Publishing content in 2012 can be immensely complex or surprisingly simple, depending on your approach. Curation straddles the line. It can be difficult figuring out not only what tools to use, but also what platforms and, of course, what content to share. The plus side is that once you do figure out how you want to curate — how it becomes part of your broader communications strategy — it’s pretty easy to establish a voice.
Steve Rubel, Edelman’s evp of global strategy and insights, suggests brands start by having an editorial point of view and deciding where the content will live — the brand’s site or aggregation sites like Tumblr or Pinterest.
“The best way to do it is to identify a high-interest topic that you want to be perceived as an expert in,” he said. “Curate that topic and provide some context around it. If you’re curating a lot of content in a topic area, over time that leads to expertise and credibility.”
A few points: a curator must be able to tell the difference between great and good work (‘content’), and have a strong and insightful perspective. Great curators are usually people that have been doing it for some time. This is not something you take up on Monday and find yourself Friday with tens of thousands of followers.
two interesting things in this article from Poynter:
1) “real identity” is described as “verified by Facebook”
2) “many news sites have been using [Facebook’s plugin] to verify identity… and raise the level of discourse”
I’m ISO any research that correlates “raising the level of discourse” and “real identity”. It’s for #hate.
HT the magnificent Meg Pickard.
In case you have suspicions about the ‘algorithms’ used by dating services, they are phony:
via CBS
Scientists worry that dating sites claim to use exclusive “matching algorithms,” which may be nothing more than a guessing game.
“To date, there is no compelling evidence that any online dating matching algorithm actually works,” Finkel said in a press release. [Finkel is the lead author in a study published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest.]
“If dating sites want to claim that their matching algorithm is scientifically valid, they need to adhere to the standards of science, which is something they have uniformly failed to do. In fact, our report concludes that it is unlikely that their algorithms can work, even in principle, given the limitations of the sorts of matching procedures that these sites use.”
Examples of mysterious algorithms include that of eHarmony’s - after a long questionnaire, the site sets you up on dates. You don’t actually get to chose. OkCupid has a formula that matches people based on specific lifestyle questions. Chemistry matches people based on their personality type.
“Developers of matching algorithms have tended to focus on the information that is easy for them to assess, like similarity in personality and attitudes, rather than the information that relationship science has found to be crucial for predicting long-term relationship well-being. As a result, these algorithms are unlikely to be effective,” said Finkel.
Is there really an algorithm for love, though? For as long as dating and relationships have existed, we’ve been trying to figure out a magic formula for love. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t exist.
It does allow people to quickly set up dates, since people have self-selected to be available. That’s all.
Amir Efrati reports that Google is close to launching a new product called “Drive”, a would-be Dropbox/Box/iCloud/etc competitor.
Before I left TechCrunch full time, I was hot on the trail of this project. Yes, Google had a Google Drive project that will killed off years ago, but a new one emerged last year and was being extensively used internally once again.
Last I heard, this new Google Drive was said to be much better than the one that was killed off (which was killed off because many thought it “sucked”). It included a web component as well as Dropbox-like software piece that runs on your desktop. Mobile will be key as well, obviously.
The most recent thing I heard supports what Efrati is reporting: that the prices are going to be more competitive than Dropbox.
It’s a commodity, so ultimately it should be built in to the operating system (on the device side) and approaching zero per month (on the server side). What is odd is that Amazon hasn’t launched a competitor.
AOL hires Rachel Fishman Feddersen as Chief Content Officer for failing Patch, whihc was acquires for $150M, and which is estimated to have lost $150M more:
Peter Lauria via Reuters
n">AOL Inc, which has been investing heavily in content to make up for declining revenue from dial-up Internet access, has hired an executive for the newly created position of chief content officer at its struggling Patch hyperlocal news network.
The company will announce on Wednesday that Rachel Fishman Feddersen will be joining Patch in the new role reporting to Jon Brod, head of AOL Local, effective February 14.
Whatever the outcome of this hire, Patch is the wrong model for hyperlocal, which isn’t going to be a bunch of zipcode-based journalism. Hyperlocal will have to be much more than an attempt to replace the now- or soon-to-be defunct local papers or TV news shows. It will have to be much more about creating a place for public discourse than reporting on public discourse.
Check out this post: Liquid: The Mobile, Social, Connected, Webbed World
Mathew Ingram builds on the Sky News Twitter Policy story, injecting some much needed cool-headedness:
Mathew Ingram via GigaOM
Although it doesn’t link to an actual document, the Guardian story quotes from the Sky News guidelines, which tell reporters not to tweet about stories if they are not “a story to which you have been assigned or a beat which you work,” and says that anything approaching breaking news must be sent to a Sky editor first before being posted. The policy says that retweeting other Sky journalists is fine — provided they are posting updates about a story to which they have been assigned — but it says Sky staff are forbidden from retweeting anything that hasn’t been posted by a Sky News account:
Do not retweet information posted by other journalists or people on Twitter. Such information could be wrong and has not been through the Sky News editorial process.
Twitter is the newswire now, for better or worseThis is even more draconian than the most recent example of a news outlet trying to lock down Twitter use — namely, the Associated Press newswire, which came out with standards for retweeting that not only mis-stated how the process works on Twitter, but also forbade journalists working for the newswire from retweeting anything without adding a comment to make it clear that they were not agreeing with the person being retweeted. The AP rules also strictly forbid breaking news on Twitter, which ignores the fact (as I pointed out at the time) that for many people the real-time information network has become the newswire.
In the long run, Sky News won’t slow the move to liquid media — where all the most important information is experienced in the locale of greatest flow, first — but it’s fun to watch the media giants stumble over their own feet.
- Elizabeth Spiers, Hiring! Betabeat, social reporters, commercial mortgages via spiersblr
I have to agree with Spiers, the editor of the New York Observer and BetaBeat: there is a decided tendency in the tech world to pull punches, or to never punch at all. Just consider the lovefest over the Facebook IPO.
Junddep Junnarkar and Jim Hu, AOL to buy Time Warner in historic merger - CNET News, 2000
In a stunning announcement, America Online said today that it will acquire Time Warner to create the world’s largest media company.
The new company will be called AOL Time Warner and will combine AOL’s online services with Time Warner’s vast media and cable assets. In a world where online services, media and entertainment are rapidly converging, the new company could have almost unparalleled resources.
“It is probably the most significant development in the Internet business world to date,” said Phil Leigh, an analyst at Raymond James. “If it hasn’t been evident to most of us yet, it should be obvious to us now that the Internet is about audio and video and not just merely text and graphics.”
News of the merger, the largest in corporate history, sent Time Warner’s stock up at “dot-com” speed, with shares rising $25.31, or 39 percent, to $90.06. The stock has traded as high as $78.63 and as low as $57.19 during the past 52 weeks.
AOL, on the other hand, rose early but ended the day lower, falling $1.88, or more than 2 percent, to $71.88. The stock has traded as high as $95.81 and as low as $32.50 during the past 52 weeks.
The purchase, an all-stock deal, amounted to more than $160 billion based on today’s trading prices. According to both companies, the new firm will have an estimated combined value of $350 billion.
[…]
Today’s deal also gives AOL access to Time Warner’s media properties such as CNN, Warner Bros., Sports Illustrated and many others.
The new company will have more than 100 million paying subscribers, including AOL’s dial-up customers and Time Warner’s cable and magazine subscribers, AOL chief financial officer J. Michael Kelly said at the news conference.
Steve Case, the chairman and chief executive of AOL, will become chairman of the board of the new company. Time Warner’s Levin will become AOL Time Warner’s CEO.
[…]
Analysts said that the Net landscape is likely to change rapidly over the course of the year as large capitalized Internet firms look to acquire media companies. Web portal Yahoo has a market cap of $107 billion—far greater than some leading media companies, including Disney, which has a cap of $64.19 billion.
“About 18 months ago, the feeling was that some of the media companies would buy Internet companies, but what happened is that the valuations got so reversed that it is really the opposite that is likely,” said Raymond James’ Leigh. “With 55 percent of the new company’s stock being controlled by AOL shareholders, I think AOL is in the driver’s seat. Today’s deal is psychologically a big step, and now it is likely that we will see others come along.”
For all those folks who forget how much of a world-beater AOL Time Warner seemed, and how well positioned it was for the broadband era just over the horizon.
The same is being said now about Facebook.
- Dave Winer, Scoble: I’ll go down with the ship via Scripting News
Facebook is the new AOL, despite the market cap. But it’s headed for a hard landing for other reasons than Winer is pushing. Facebook will fail because of the imminent rise of social operating systems — future versions of iOS, Mac OS X, and Android — which will break the Facebook monolith to bits.
