Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.
At about 00:47, it’s The Nature Conservancy meets Fight Club meets Facebook in 2018.
(Hat tip: reflectionof.me)
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From the category archives:
Digital
“In retrospect, [Managing Director of FT.com Rob] Grimshaw said it was a ‘huge mistake’ for publishers to give away their product. So why did they?
“Grimshaw said newspaper publishers realized they did not understand the Internet, so they hired Internet experts and ‘let them do whatever they wanted and whatever they said was the right thing,’ he said.”
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Steve Rubel posted late last month about his dissatisfaction with RSS (”RSS today feels slow and it’s clear its best days are behind it. Feed reading, like blogging, feels ‘very 2005′”) and his yearning for a hybrid between RSS and Twitter. Twitter lists have killed RSS for him, but he still wants some filtering of the unfettered information firehose.
What’s interesting about the post are the comments — virtually no one there has moved away from RSS. A lot are moving back to it. Many are, if not abandoning Twitter, increasingly cognizant of its deep limitations as a technology for comprehension, versus one for the provision of notification.
I run a group blog that includes a daily curated content feature, and I’m setting up another one on my own. I can’t imagine doing them without RSS. Whatever Twitter can be, it is fundamentally reflexive and reactive — to the news, to your thoughts and queries, to your lifestream. It does not facilitate publishing, as much as we want to save microblogging as a distinct genre.
Now, you can’t talk to RSS, you can’t build a career around witty brevity using it, and God knows Google Reader gets a D for usability. But it is far less subject to the relentless beating of time’s waves than Twitter or Facebook. You can use it for a deep dive as well as skimming. You can read something published a week ago; you can save in a meaningful way; you can use it at the speed and shape of your own life, which I always thought was the point of technology. I don’t want a Twitter feed of Andrew Sullivan, which just flattens his ideas and their variety and their browsability, by which I mean their publishedness — I want Andrew Sullivan’s blog. (I also want the Times in the morning in paper, spread out on my kitchen countertop; and then later as an iPod Touch app, telling me what happened later. Both are technologies, you know — but both are far less subject to the whims of brute chronology.) All this seems obvious; and yet we now live in an age in which very smart people like Rubel talk about abandoning perfectly good technologies just because they feel old.
In the end, we might be able to chalk this up to the peculiar affliction of the social media expert. What Rubel might be getting at is that it’s too much trouble at this point to curate content through RSS, and that he trusts his colleagues’ and friends’ recommendations more than he does a raw feed. That’s fine for social media, the discourse around which has turned into a bizarre festival of novelty, braying punditry, self-helpishness, hucksterism and echo chamber, with a dash of utility (Rubel being a notable, highly useful exception). It’s not suitable for ideas, or soccer, or just about anything else.
Posted via email from Bob Lalasz: Surplus to Requirements
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You never know which Dani Alves is going to show up — the good elf whose free kicks are sprinkled with fairy dust, or the bad elf whose crosses sail into orbit (or dent the Stamford Bridge Shed trying), who flops and whines and collects yellows like baseball cards. But in a match of boy sprites (Messi, Xavi, Kaka — even Ronaldo seemed a little smaller, just a bit more feminized than usual), it was the mischievous good elf Dani who finally slew the dragon, making Ibra appear like the right call after all. That and Puyol, putting his body in front of every bullet fired. He can’t run, but he sure can catch up.
Seriously, though, Real looked very dangerous for about 20 minutes, and then disappeared. Manuel Pellegrini whipped out an Arsene Wenger protractor during the press conference to prove that Real was the better team. Barca will certainly need more than two points lead going back to Madrid in April — but ask Messi, Pique, and Abidal which team blew more bunnies in front of the goal mouth. It was Real at its best this year versus Barca at not nearly its best, and if you can’t get the result under those circumstances you should not say anything at all.
BTW: New hashtag on Twitter: #fillinginforray, started by The Run of Play. Because Ray Hudson was apparently replaced by someone whose brain had been completely hollowed out by bovine spongiform encephalopathy and then stuffed like a turducken with cliches. And he didn’t mention crickets once, perhaps because the game was too important. But not too important for GOL TV to show us their 30-second “exclusive camera shots” of players warming up along the sidelines while the action was going on.
(Image credit: foxspain/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)
Posted via email from Bob Lalasz: Surplus to Requirements
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Seth Godin: The reason they want you to fit in…is that once you do, they can ignore you.
Posted via email from Bob Lalasz: Surplus to Requirements
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At this point, Seth Godin is the equivalent of a horoscope. (Actually, I prefer Holiday Mathis.) Workplace angst is a renewable resource, and the Godin daily post exploits it, addictively — a chiding, bracing shot of bravery that turns out to be purely theoretical, vanishing five minutes after your first visit to the reconstituted coffee machine. But at least you don’t have to pay for it, right? Or go outside to Cosi?
And so a guru is born — sententious, hortatory, with a quasi-spiritual edge and a tone just short of condescending. Or maybe it is condescending, and that makes it more appealing, because you hate yourself too much not to crave his disapproval. Sort of like Hugh Prather back in the day. It’s morning again, and there’s another shot of Seth, perfect for that early morning clarity before the to-do list, when you really feel like you could break away and become…like him.
He’s written some classics — Be Careful of Who You Work For will rip you open every single time — but lately his writing just sounds like something Seth Godin would say, for fear of saying anything else and spoiling the franchise. Like he just decided to combine the last four things he saw online into a post, just to see if he could do it and still sound like himself. The Luddite insistence on sticking with Typepad, that Gandhian, ostrich egg of a head that just screams (or is it gleams?) “thinker” — suddenly no longer cute. Suddenly annoying. Funny how quickly that happened.
The uproar in the non-profit marketing world over his screed a few days ago against the timidity of non-profits is just dying down, and more diligent professionals than I have taken him to task. Suffice it to say that it’s breathtakingly dismissive and shallow and arrogant — everything Seth Godin was not supposed to be.
A tiny problem with the subsequent debate is that it’s still too much about the eternal breast-beating of non-profit marketers and not about the hypocrisy of Godin. There’s a video (above) of Godin talking with Tom Peters about social networks and media. In it, he says point-blank that Facebook and Twitter are worthless to business, a “useless distraction” to the business of building real relationships.
Fast forward to this week, and here’s Godin on his blog, frothingly mad at the failure of non-profits to penetrate the online space, saying that getting Dugg and being in the top 100 of Twitterers are ultimate measures of relevance and courage for charities. I’d like to show him the time-spent-on-site for the average Digg and Twitter referrals to my company’s site and blog…but they’re so small, he couldn’t see them, even with those big Swifty Lazar glasses of his.
And I shouldn’t have to show them to Seth Godin, anyway, right? Wasn’t he the evangelist for deep interaction? When did he get sloppy? When did he start posting about putting aside righteous indignation and then, a few days later, indulging in it so much? Was it all just another sell job? (Well, of course it was…)
There’s another video, too, from the same conference, in which he says something fantastically useful about the ethic of blogging
It doesn’t matter if anyone reads it. What matters is the humility that comes from writing it. What matters is the metacognition of thinking about what you’re going to say.
Close your eyes, and you can almost remember what it was like to hear Seth Godin saying stuff like that. And you believing it.
Posted via email from Bob Lalasz: Surplus to Requirements
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