Here I am messing around with Tumblr

72 million people with 500 million voices I’ve been trying...

Fri, 10 May 2013 08:40:00 -0400

72 million people with 500 million voices

I’ve been trying to find a way to understand and explain some of the non-obvious ways in which it matters that our formerly only-bricks-and-mortar customers are online and connected. This clear statement by Jared Cohen helps.

Cohen, co-author of The New Digital Age with Google’s Eric Schmidt, was recently asked a question about the degree to which technology will undermine autocratic regimes in the future. Cohen replied,

…Let’s take a country like Iran. 72 million people, roughly 25% of the population connected to the Internet. When everybody in Iran is connected - - everyone has a Gmail account, everyone has a social networking account, every one of them has various voice-over-IP services that they use… The population of Iran in the physical world may still be 72 million people, but in the virtual world it may look like half a billion people. And this presents a serious problem for the regime in Tehran: how do they account for 500 million voices online that are coming from the same 72 million people?

Video and event information: Book talk with Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen [quote starts at 5:00]

"it’s always good to filter the high-minded prognostications of the middle-aged through the..."

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 10:32:59 -0400

“it’s always good to filter the high-minded prognostications of the middle-aged through the inattentive ears of the young”

- Alistair Croll: What makes a great startup

"Ideas are tools for thinking with."

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 10:29:33 -0400

“Ideas are tools for thinking with.”

- - Tim O’Reilly, Who do you want your customers to become?

And I love that dark bird you hold in your arms. Courtney...

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:06:00 -0400

And I love that dark bird you hold in your arms.

Courtney Johnston.

(from the NZ Digital Forum, 2012, at 28:30, here)

"Forget innovation: focus on being good. Most products out in the world are not very good. You rarely..."

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 09:22:00 -0500

“Forget innovation: focus on being good. Most products out in the world are not very good. You rarely need a breakthrough to improve things, beat the competition, or help people suffering from a problem. If you carefully study the problem you’re trying to solve, you will discover many clear ways to make it better. That’s the best place to start. If you solve a problem for customers that makes them happy and earns you money, do you really think they will care whether it’s innovative? They just want their problems solved. If you cured cancer conventionally, would patients refuse, saying, “But it’s not innovative!” Of course not, so don’t worry. Use the workman-like language of people who are later called innovators: problem, prototype, experiment, design, and solution, instead of the jargon of breakthrough, radical, game-changing, and innovative. This keeps you low to the ground, and prevents your ego from distracting you away from simply making good things.”

- Forget Innovation

From Scott Berkun’s The Myths of Innovation, p. 163

"When the fruit bat Pteropus allenorum was finally described by scientists, it was already extinct...."

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 12:43:00 -0500

“When the fruit bat Pteropus allenorum was finally described by scientists, it was already extinct. One specimen of the bat was shot in Samoa in 1856, skinned, stored in alcohol, and shipped to the United States. It spent the next 153 years, inconspicuous and ignored, on a shelf in the Academy of Natural Sciences in Drexel University. When bat specialist Kristofer Helgen visited the museum, he immediately recognised that it was a new species. Sadly, it was too late. There are no fruit bats in Samoa nowadays, so the jar on the shelf represents our only encounter with this now-extinct animal.”

- Inconspicuous and ignored

From “New” species gather dust on museum shelves for 21 years before being described, Discover Magazine, November, 2012. Via Ely Wallis

"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a..."

Sat, 17 Nov 2012 08:22:00 -0500

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped in pavement and weedy lots and jump heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonics, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,” and he would have meant the same thing.”

- Opening paragraph of Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck, 1945.

I was writing something this morning and I had a sudden hunger to hear these words in my ears. The forward momentum of them. This book means a lot to me.

books.google.com/books?isbn=0140177388

"My own way of thinking is very conservative, very linear and not particularly imaginative, but if I..."

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 07:31:00 -0500

“My own way of thinking is very conservative, very linear and not particularly imaginative, but if I look for things in different places, sometimes things happen.”

- Christopher Walken, creative process

Christopher Walken, as quoted in Christopher Walken Isn’t as Weird as You Think by Jessica Gross, New York Times Magazine, November 9, 2012.

"N.B.A. scoring champions are, as a rule, weirdos and reprobates and in some cases diagnosable..."

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 07:24:36 -0500

“N.B.A. scoring champions are, as a rule, weirdos and reprobates and in some cases diagnosable sociopaths. Something about dominating your opponent, publicly, more or less every day of your life, in the most visible aspect of your sport, tends to either warp your spirit or to be possible only to those whose spirits are already warped.”

- The Freak Zone

The opening sentences of A Basketball Fairy Tale in Middle America By Sam Anderson, New York Times Sunday Magazine, November 8, 2012.

The first paragraph ends:

it’s a near-solid roster of dysfunction: sadists, narcissists, malcontents, knuckleheads, misanthropes, womanizers, addicts and villains. While it’s true that plain old N.B.A. superstars do occasionally manage to be model citizens (cf. Tim Duncan, Grant Hill, Steve Nash), there is something irredeemable about a scoring champion.

A) I love some of these words - - the language. (Misanthropes! Reprobates!)

B) I’m interested in the character traits - - the state of mind cultivated, sought, by highly creative people.

"People don’t care about your book,” I remember Brian saying to me. “They care..."

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 10:59:34 -0400

““People don’t care about your book,” I remember Brian saying to me. “They care about the Internet itself.””

- From It’s Not About You: The Truth About Social Media Marketing by Tim O’Reilly, October 2, 2012.

“Brian” is Brian Erwin, who helped Tim understand the difference between allegiance to a brand, and allegiance to an idea, back in 1992.

"At its core, the social revolution allows people to consume what they want, when they want, and..."

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 10:54:16 -0400

“At its core, the social revolution allows people to consume what they want, when they want, and largely on the recommendation of friends and other non-professional influencers. Attempt to graft old models onto it and you are doomed to struggle; find models that are native to the medium and you will thrive.”

- “…friends and other non-professional influencers.”

From It’s Not About You: The Truth About Social Media Marketing by Tim O’Reilly, October 2, 2012.

"Ken Garrison: When I was telling my wife about what I was going to be talking with you about, she..."

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 10:27:00 -0400

“

Ken Garrison: When I was telling my wife about what I was going to be talking with you about, she had a naïve but kind of profound question, which is “Why are you doing this? Why are you trying to archive the entire world and the entire internet?”

Brewster Kahle: It’s really based on an analogy, if you will: that it seemed to work in other times - that the idea of having access to the collective works of humankind has been a win. So, we all look back to the Library of Alexandria. And by going and pulling together the works from all over the world and translating them then into Ancient Greek, they were able to come up with fantastic discoveries. They knew how big the world was. They knew it was round. They knew how big it was within a couple percent. Euclid authored “Elements,” which is what it is I still studied as geometry in high school. So, fantastic things can come of it if you can leverage the works of other people. And the reason why I got involved in the whole area of building the library back in 1980 was just kind of on that analogy and the thought that technology allows us to do this and it seems like a good thing to do.

”

- “Having access to the collective works of humankind has been a win.”

Interview with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive from WFMU’s Radio Free Culture, October 9, 2012.

This is new to me - - goes a little deeper on what aggregating and translating content in the Library of Alexandria actually accomplished.

http://freemusicarchive.org/member/jason/blog/Interview_Brewster_Kahle_on_Radio_Free_Culture

"…someone puts his eye to a crack in a fence, he sees cranes pulling up other cranes,..."

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 07:04:00 -0400

“

…someone puts his eye to a crack in a fence, he sees cranes pulling up other cranes, scaffoldings that embrace other scaffoldings, beams that prop up other beams. “What meaning does your construction have?” he asks. “What is the aim of a city under construction unless it is a city? Where is the plan you are following, the blueprint?”

“We will show it to you as soon as the working day is over; we cannot interrupt our work now,” they answer.

Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. “There is the blueprint,” they say.

”

- There is the blueprint, they say

The city of Thekla, From Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.

"By the Spring of 1998, Jonathan was 13, and his ambitions were growing. He had glimpsed the..."

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 11:35:12 -0400

“By the Spring of 1998, Jonathan was 13, and his ambitions were growing. He had glimpsed the essential truth of the market: that even people who called themselves professionals are often incapable of independent thought…”

- “Professionals are often incapable of independent thought”

This quote, this assertion in this context, hit me like a lightning bolt 11 years ago and has rung in my head ever since.

From Jonathan Lebed’s Extracurricular Activities - New York Times, 2001, about a young boy from New Jersey who figures out that he is just as capable, in fact more capable, than established professionals at analyzing stocks. He makes about $800,000 in 6 months of trading, and as a result he is prosecuted by officials from the Securities and Exchange Commission who are both mystified by his very existence and evidently threatened by his implicit challenge to The Way Things Are Done (which, we have learned throughout a decade of financial crisis, is often a nonsensical house of cards).

Michael Lewis’s article, written for the Sunday Times Magazine, brilliantly teases out the excruciating ironies - - the abject conflict - - between new and old ways of thinking about expertise and authority.

- - -

“Eventually, the Bloomberg News Service commissioned a study to explore the phenomenon of what were now being called “whisper numbers.” The study showed the whisper numbers, the numbers put out by the amateur Web sites, were mistaken, on average, by 21 percent. The professional Wall Street forecasts were mistaken, on average, by 44 percent. The reason the amateurs now held the balance of power in the market was that they were, on average, more than twice as accurate as the pros — this in spite of the fact that the entire financial system was rigged in favor of the pros. The big companies spoon-fed their scoops directly to the pros; the amateurs were flying by radar.”

- - -

“It occurred to no one that the public might one day be as sophisticated in these matters as financial professionals”

- - -

“Even a 14-year-old boy could see how it all worked, why some guy working for free out of his basement in Jackson, Mo., was more reliable than the most highly paid analyst on Wall Street. The companies that financial pros were paid to analyze were also the financial pros’ biggest customers…. A year later, when the Internet bubble burst, the hollowness of the pros only became clearer.”

- - -

“At length, I phoned the Philadelphia office of the S.E.C., where I reached one of the investigators who had brought Jonathan Lebed to book. I was maybe the 50th journalist he’d spoken with that day, and apparently a lot of the others had had trouble grasping the finer points of securities law. At any rate, by the time I asked him to explain to me what, exactly, was wrong with broadcasting one’s private opinion of a stock on the Internet, he was in no mood.

‘Tell me about the kid.’

‘He’s a little jerk.’

‘How so?’

‘He is exactly what you or I hope our kids never turn out to be.’

‘Have you met him?’

‘No. I don’t need to.’ “

- - -

“As soon as they encounter archival content, they become...

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 09:22:00 -0400

“As soon as they encounter archival content, they become researchers”

I came across this in one of my notebooks while I was preparing for the Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki last week. It’s from a presentation by Peder Andrén at the European Cultural Commons workshop in Warsaw last October (2011).

Peder is with the Swedish National Archives, and was talking about his focus on end-user experience with the APENet project (Archives Portal Europe).

Who are the users of archival content? Well, our users are not just browsing through, looking for media consumption. As soon as they encounter archival content, they become researchers. Even if they only want to know the name of their great grandmother, or the previous owner of their house, they are entering the process of creating a story. A history.

[40:50 in this video: http://youtu.be/5ibxKP5JPYo?t=40m45s ]

In the video you can see how blown away I was by the beauty and simplicity - - the truth - - of that statement.

[Update 2012-09-27 at 12:19pm EDT: Informants tell me that researchers at the Swedish National Archives must purchase subscriptions to access archival materials. I’m chasing down the details…]

Swedish Open Data Badasses Exchange between me, @arkland_swe,...

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 12:23:09 -0400

Swedish Open Data Badasses

Exchange between me, @arkland_swe, and @jacob_wang about Swedish open data/open heritage work

Lars: Well, we try to *do* thing. And surprisingly often you become a badass by just trying to do things

Jacob: Blablabla. You DO stuff some of us are merely talking about. Soon though, we’ll join the ranks.

Mike: Jacob - - tell us one specific badass-y thing our Swedish Humanities brothers and sisters have done that you admire.

Jacob: They have aggregated 4.2 million objects from 40 ors, content that is available through their open API - - BOOM!

Jacob: Lars, tell him how many objects you have delivered to Europeana - it’s like 100 times more than DK [Denmark] have.

Jacob: And Lars, tell Michael how many views you’ve had on Flickr…

"You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by..."

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 09:11:36 -0400

“You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by Science of Nature.”

- Paul C. Lauterbur, Nobel prize winner for his original research on magnetic resonance imaging. His seminal paper was rejected by the journal Nature in 1973. Quoted in Kevin Davies article “Public Library of Science Opens Its Doors.” (Found via Scott Berkun’s The Myths of Innovation , p.54.)

"Rational thought clearly counseled the Trojans to suspect a trick when they woke to find the entire..."

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 09:01:10 -0400

“Rational thought clearly counseled the Trojans to suspect a trick when they woke to find the entire Greek army had vanished, leaving only a strange a monstrous prodigy beneath their walls. Rational procedure would have been, at the least, to test the Horse for concealed enemies as they were urgently advised to do by Capys the Elder, Laocoon and Cassandra. That alternative was present and available yet discarded in favor of self destruction.”

- From Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly, about why governments do things that are clearly contrary to their own self-interest. p 380

At the Rijksmuseum, knowledge needs to be shared From a...

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 12:54:00 -0400

At the Rijksmuseum, knowledge needs to be shared

From a 2012 interview with Taco Dibbits, Director of Collections, Rijksmuseum

[Starting around 2:50]

The Rijksmuseum is all about images. We want to share these images with everybody using the Internet. The technology is in fact about sharing. Of course, you design your own websites, create your own Facebook account, but in the end it’s all about sharing.

That’s why we have decided to put free to use, up to date information in the best available quality on the Internet. So whatever forum you’re on or what you’re looking for, you can download and use it as you like. The museum is about inspiration, learning, and knowledge. The Internet provides inspiration, when you are able to zoom in and touch the screen. In the museum, you’re not allowed to touch the collect, but on the Internet you are. On your iPhone you can magnify or reduce the museum’s collection, which is very inspiring. You can print them in the highest quality on your bedcover or in a booklet; the possibilities are numerous.

Knowledge needs to be shared. The Rijksmuseum connects people to art and history and that connection, that exchange of knowledge, is of the utmost importance to us.

We have over a million objects in our collection, of which 200,000 can be found on the Internet. We employ over 450 people so it’s impossible for them to know everything there is about our collection. We invite people to have fun with our collection, to get inspired, but also to share their knowledge with us. If a person in India has information that is important to us, he can share this with us and at the same time with the rest of the community. This is why the Internet as provider of knowledge and source of inspiration is crucial for humanity and as such one of the most important inventions in history.

Thanks @LizzyJongma !

"The text message and the exclamation point are made for each other, and I’m glad they finally found..."

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 17:03:48 -0400

“The text message and the exclamation point are made for each other, and I’m glad they finally found each other…They’re both one-note forms of communication, without music, without connotation and atmosphere, but they do have their uses. To me, there’s no more shame in filling text messages with exclamation points, three at a time, if necessary, than there is in using strings of expletives while arguing politics at an Irish pub.”

- Walter Kern, on text messages and exclamation points

From Talking (Exclamation) Points, by Aimee Lee Ball
New York Times, published: July 1, 2011