August 2008
53 posts
So, what will really happen to the mainstream... →
After this period of fragmentation and user generated content hysteria that we’re experiencing now, I think we’ll see a regrouping of sorts. Not 3 major broadcast stations or 2 national newspapers, but dozens or hundreds of media hubs in narrower content areas. It’s already happening with aggregators, for instance.
Media authorities will never go away, in whatever shape they...
10 Words To Help You Kick Ass at Scrabble →
If Everyone's Talking, Who Will Listen? →
Genuinely bothersome — an authoritarian, anti-democratic, and vaguely environmental (information consumption tax?!) argument against information overload. I know our current state of data overdrive is an adjustment that we’re all working to acclimate to, but come on, is the generation gap that bad? Please let this be a blathering satire.
“That, I’m afraid, is essentially game over.”
– My current favorite iPhone app, Noah Witherspoon’s Tris, has been downloaded over half a million times, but it’s facing the inevitable cease-and-desist from The Tetris Company for various and sundry rights violations. Like the Scrabulous escapade, it will be interesting to see how this...
“If our machines are coddling us into idiocy, the right reaction is to bristle....”
– Lawrence Downes, “Mister Jalopy Wants to Make a Better World” via NYT
Make Good Work, Do Good Deeds. Be Awesome.
ronen-v:
life now has a tagline
“So there they were: one young person who had lost the capacity for solitude and...”
– From William Deresiewicz’s “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” which has been popping up everywhere in my links lately. A former Yale English prof, Deresiewicz rails against the evolution of elite institutions from intellectual, idealist havens to social status factories....
What I Did at AdMonsters
Recapping the entirety of AdMonsters would be an exercise in exhaustion as it was packed with information, conversation, and inspiration. So, I’ll just paste my part below — a distillation of the takeaways from a discussion session that I led on the challenges particular to small ad operations teams.
This stuff isn’t just relative to ad ops, though, it applies to any sort...
Moment of Silence
From my suitemate, Lauren, word that one of Yale’s most beloved and good-humored undergraduate professors, Bob Dunne, passed away this weekend.
His highly popular intro course on Computers and the Law and advanced seminar on Intellectual Property in the Digital Age, including the 10-page paper on Sealand that he advised me on, were some of my favorite academic wanderings in college.
...
“Expediters are not really there to see to it that a customer’s order is...”
– Joel Spolsky, “Good System, Bad System”
“Starbucks is great at operations research. It wouldn’t have become the...”
– Joel Spolsky, from his article on self-defeating business operations, “Good System, Bad System” in Inc. this month
Muxtape Shuttered; Nobody Surprised →
(via jdel) “Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.” Hah.
Why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it... →
zachleary:
The good news is that we take in more data than any previous generation in history. The bad news is that if any of that data is longer than 2 pages or 60 seconds it gets lost, it has nowhere to land.
Yes. This digital information race, while amazing, is starting to feel like a giant game of 52 card pickup. A constant scurry to pick up chaotic bytes of knowledge, scattered always...
KAIZEN →
Continual, systemic improvement
“We’re approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision,” said Tim...”
– Please tell me this is just a feature article to get some sympathy to the streaming music movement. Can’t bear the idea of Pandora disappearing, either the functionality or the brand. It would be something like the death of Napster — though not as sorrowful or revolutionary obviously...
“For years now I’ve thought that the prevailing modern aesthetic of clean...”
– [via Times Online]
On GrAd School →
loggedminutes:
There are certain industries where going to grad school has no real benefit.
Hmm, totally agree, and I’m betting the number of industries for which that’s true will just continue increasing over time. Our generation and the kids below us have some real opportunities to change the way society measures competency…
The TSA tells it like it is
Whether or not this new carry-your-laptop-through-security-without-taking-it-out-of-its-case thing is going to be as easy breezy as they say in this post, the TSA continues to slowly humanize themselves with their corporate blog. It’s nice to see them acknowledge that, hey, they think some of this shit is absurd, too.
Grab your Facebook status updates
Speaking of RSS (hah!), if anyone is wondering how to grab the feed for their Facebook status updates in the new fangled layout, here is a direct link to your very own Status Page. Just scroll down to the subscribe link at the very bottom and copy that location. You’re welcome.
Eh, but feeds are dead anyways
The Internet is lamenting Google’s gobbling of Feedburner’s ad network (FAN), but is this really something to cry about? I think not:
1) The namechange is really just the final phase of an ongoing rebranding that necessarily happens when one company eats another. A corporate consistency thing. The monetization opportunity is not going away.
2) But while the opportunity may not be...
For most people, college is a waste of time →
Contrary to this WSJ article, I don’t agree with the idea of turning all college education into vocational preparation — but I have had some resolute conversations similar to the part where Murray parodies the inflated importance of the college degree —
First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is...
Space shuttle launch, as filmed from a passing... →
“In the entelechy of the acorn lies the oak.”
– (Doing lots of reading on maximizing potential and am having one of those late night cyber research obsessions with Aristotle’s concept of ‘entelechy.’)
Define: ENTELECHY
1. Perfect realization as opposed to a potentiality
2. In philosophies, a vital force that propels one to self-fulfillment
[via Far Out Art]
“For if you are alone you are completely yourself, but if you are accompanied by...”
– From the depths of da Vinci’s scrawled notebooks [via this article on eccentricity]
(n)eveready →
Those brilliant “spikes” from the Radiohead photos? They’re super-thin LED displays running solely on battery power (and maybe some day on solar power) — throughout the entire show.
Starting from scratch as an adult, do I have a... →
I have often wondered this myself. Archery, target shooting, and curling are the suggested vehicles to late-blooming Olympicdom in this thread.
