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You Need (Clipse, Led Zepplin) by Xaphoon of Chiddy Bang.

Fri 20 Nov ∞ PermalinkComments (View) | Digg|Del.icio.us|Reddit
hrrrthrrr: Internet Vices by Patrick Moberg

hrrrthrrr:

Internet Vices by Patrick Moberg

Fri 20 Nov ∞ PermalinkComments (View) |Digg|Del.icio.us|Reddit

The future of our highway system!  Love watching things like this - good inspiration to keep looking forward and advancing [what seem like] absurd ideas.

Sat 14 Nov ∞ PermalinkComments (View) | Digg|Del.icio.us|Reddit
Rose Bowl bound. This was the scene after OSU beat Iowain overtime from where Dad and I were sitting.

Rose Bowl bound. This was the scene after OSU beat Iowain overtime from where Dad and I were sitting.

Wed 04 Nov ∞ PermalinkComments (View) | Digg|Del.icio.us|Reddit
Net Neutrality at it’s worst.  Thanks to @danbuczaczer for the discovery.

Net Neutrality at it’s worst.  Thanks to @danbuczaczer for the discovery.

Tue 27 Oct ∞ PermalinkComments (View) |Digg|Del.icio.us|Reddit

I saw this once before, a little while back, but was reminded of it again today thanks to Rishad Tobaccowala.  Good motivator.

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Blueprint III $4.99 on imeem.  That’s undervalued if you ask me.  Buy! Buy! Buy!

Thu 01 Oct ∞ PermalinkComments (View) |Digg|Del.icio.us|Reddit

Watched most of this 80 minute video from Google’s developer conference earlier this year on Monday and applied for an invitation, of course with all the talk today about the first “wave” (no pun intended) going out I thought I’d throw out my two cents:

1) My first thought was, “Man, this is starting to look a lot like Facebook,” followed up by “Facebook is in a much better position to do this and succeed than Google.”  Why?  Well, because they already are.  Facebook has almost always been about real-time, personal collaboration.  Whether it’s sharing, tagging, organizing, and commenting on photos, posting status updates, or sending invites, the 300MM+ users of Facebook have been enjoying a lot of the Wave features for a while.

2) I agree with the talking heads that this is a leap forward, but more of a symbolic leap, not a material leap. It’s another sign post, and significant simply because it’s Google, that all personal data, relationships, communications, content will be universally linked, organized and accessible.  It is another step towards the irrelevancy of terms like “online” as there will soon be no such thing as offline.

3) This affirms that Google is scared about the real-time, personal data that Facebook has in droves and Google covets.  But I don’t think Wave will get them there as I think it will be widely viewed and used as an email enhancement rather than a real-time social tool.  Some of the advancements, however should have gotten Facebook’s attention and I assume they’ve been looking at this since March/May (whenever it was originally announced) and have engineers working on tweaks to its existing service making collaboration easier and richer.   Once they do, Facebook, though pushed by Google as they often are, will not lose too much ground on this front.

4) Bigger picture: This isn’t about Google trying to become like Facebook.  Hell, I don’t think Facebook even cares about being Facebook anymore. The aim of both companies has to be much loftier if they’re to succeed, and that is, namely, to own all of your real-time personal data.  Period.  And if Wave does, as is assumed, become the bridge that merges Gmail, Docs, Voice, Blogger, etc. and do so elegantly and in a way that doesn’t seem like a new service or tool but rather just sort of sits in the background and enables all of these intertwined, cross-platform, cross-service personal connections while on the backend mining all of that data to be sliced and diced and served up to marketers… then all of a sudden the whole notion of online social networks becomes irrelevant.  Ultimately Wave is about one thing: laying pipe.  In the information age whoever owns the pipes and keeps the data flowing, wins.

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“Media Fast”, an audio version hastily done in the form of my personal hero, Ira Glass.

Fri 19 Jun ∞ PermalinkComments (View) | Digg|Del.icio.us|Reddit

Media Fast

Last weekend I decided to fast, to abstain from, media - all media - for a week.  A funny thing happened, namely, my wife an artist and teacher knows media better than I do, a media professional.

In my first day of the fast I was home all day with my son, it was too quite and I was fasting from media - which obviously means no TV.  So I turned the radio on to NPR without hesitating, not even having a tinge of guilt that I was breaking my fast.  Radio, especially the nearly commercial-free NPR, did not seem like media to me.

Neither did books (e.g. the Bible, the first form of mass media?) or facebook or tumblr or flickr or vimeo.  In fact, anything that I could control and didn’t overwhelm me with advertising fell squarely in my ‘not media’ bucket and was therefore permissible.

It didn’t take long before my media-sensitive wife (whom I would never have said of before this accidental personal ethnography experiment) called me out on everything I was doing.  She even called me out for using apps on my iPhone.  And I couldn’t turn on the Wii.  Anything that transmitted data in digital or analog form was off limits as far as my wife was concerned - all of it was media.  And she’s right, technically it is all media.

But what I found interesting was that it all didn’t feel like media.  Without knowing, I had some pretty clear subconscious assumptions of what media is and isn’t:

Media Is vs Isn’t

* Mass (Magazine) not personal (Tumblr)

* Controls me (TV) rather than controllable (iPod, streampad)

* Professionally produced or mass produced video of any kind regardless of distribution means (TV, Hulu, DVDs)

* Advertiser saturated (101.9FM) versus advertising-free (NPR)

(Side-note here is that honestly all of radio didn’t feel like media to me, for the above to be true it means I would have felt okay watching WTTW the local public broadcast station.  I didn’t because it was on TV and anything displayed on the TV is instantly “media”.)

* Impersonal (Mass) as opposed to personal/social (Facebook, Twitter)

Other Observations

* Newspaper’s truly didn’t feel like media, which is fascinating because you can’t get much more old school, mainstream media than a local daily, so they were recycled.

* Fasting from media in the information age is nearly impossible just as fasting from industrial produced goods in the industrial/post-industrial age is

* It’s an interesting excercise and had unexpected outcomes - something anybody interested in this merging of people, technology, content, brands should try for themselves and see what happens

* This idea of what feels like or doesn’t feel like media is something I had no idea existed in me (and safe to assume everybody) and is powerful in that it shapes the way I interact with the information, alters my mindset and expectations… my feelings, misguided or not, dictate the rules of engagement for me, peers, content-producers and advertisers.  And I’m sure what feels like media to me is very different to the guy down the street, my mom, my brother, a co-worker… etc.