first of all, my last prediction-for-next-year was a little optimistic, as I was predicting what people in the echo chamber have since started calling ‘cloud computing…’ I predicted that we’d see a lot of online services that blur the lines between what is ‘local’ and what is an online ‘service.’ …let me just defer that prediction one year and add it to the heap of what I see coming this year. At least give me credit for making it my major prediction before the catch-phrase ‘cloud computing’ came to the surface.
I like many NPR programs. And this post about Weekend Edition’s mis-use of Twitter is just a way of pointing out a flaw in how one organisation is using Twitter so that we, and hopefully they (are you listening?), can learn from their mistakes.
Why would I want to be getting “personal,” direct messages from a media brand that wont respond to my own “personal” messages, when all of this is taking place via a platform in which I‘m already subscribing to a stream of anything that brand wants to say???
Arghh!!
read below if you want my introduction/thoughts on this video…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8AtVBQ8MBE]
This is an interesting presentation. It’s not told quite right for my taste, but it emphasizes how hard it is to see outside the current technology/media paradigm, mostly by showing clips from the early days of TV and computing… The similarities in the language between then and now are pretty stunning.
Very notable for me was a clip of Marshall McCluhan in the 1960′s speaking about how audiences want to feel included in media. Sound familiar?
Also touched on is McCluhan’s “Global Village” concept which will surely inspire much near-future reading for me. The ‘Global Village’ is basically a visionary concept to this day.
McCluhan, thanks to Peter Hirshberg, will probably become a new teacher of mine. At this rate, I may have a college level education by the time I’m 40 years old.
Really, I should say that Peter Hirshberg does a really good job in this presentaion compiling a lot for us to chew on in a short amount of time, even if it is all a little bit scatter-brained in my opinion. My preview notes don’t do justice to the ground covered. I couldn’t do better.
OH! He even touches on how the late 60′s, counter-culture and LSD may have influenced the birth of Open-Source and Personal Computing! Interesting stuff.
Peter Hirshberg is a veteran of old media as well as new, and now, new-new media (now just considered new)… The list of companies he’s been involved with is amazing:
And finally, don’t miss the cameo by James Burke who we all know (or should know) and love from the show Connections (about the history of technology and innovation). In the presentation, Peter Hirshberg shows a commercial in which Burke is a spokesperson for Apple, promoting “HyperCard,” a predecessor to HTML (HyperCard is not networked).
Hirshberg’s list of companies he’s been involved with is pretty impressive and includes some of my favorites, Technorati and Apple. Copied from his TypePad Bio:
Biography
Peter Hirshberg is a Silicon Valley executive, entrepreneur and marketing innovator who most recently served as president and CEO of Gloss.com, the major multi-brand beauty ecommerce business co-owned by Estee Lauder Companies, Chanel and Clarins. Launched in Fall 2001, Gloss features prestige cosmetic brands including Clinique, MAC, Prescriptives, Estee Lauder, Origins, Bobbi Brown, Stila, Chanel and Clarins.
Hirshberg served as Chairman of Interpacket Networks, the global leader in Internet Via Satellite, before its acquisition by American Tower Corporation in October 2000. From 1996-1999, Hirshberg was founder/CEO of Elemental Software, developer of the award- winning Drumbeat 2000 family of e-business web development software. Backed by Accel partners, AT&T Corporation, and Microsoft, Elemental Software was acquired by Macromedia Incorporated in September 1999.
During a nine-year tenure at Apple Computer, Hirshberg headed Enterprise Marketing, where he grew Apple’s large business and government revenue to $1 billion annually and helped lead the company’s entry into the online service arena. After leaving Apple, Hirshberg’s new-media strategy firm served clients including America Online, Microsoft, NBC Television Network, Estee Lauder, Pacific Bell and Silicon Graphics.
Hirshberg is a founder of Goodmail Systems, a board member of ICTV, and serves on the advisory boards of start-ups Technorati and Informative. He is a Trustee of The Computer History Museum and a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute. Peter earned his bachelor’s degree at Dartmouth College and his MBA at Wharton.
Comment I left on zaproot‘s episode 048 called Truth About The Pickens Plan …As of posting this, it hasn’t appeared on their site…
Here’s the Video I’m responding to:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70HFEHB6dag]
I love me a good conspiracy theory.
I’m interested to see the evidence of this water-grabbing thing spelled out as more than just a reference and passing the buck to one article in Tucson Weekly (which has no sources or links).
Are there other sources?
I’m not a Pickens supporter per se, but I am a Web2 fanatic who thinks the grassroots/marketing efforts of the Pickens Plan are amazing, both in design and success so far.
I’d like to see the evidence of this theory about the mid-western aquifer properly added to the Wikipedia article on the page for the pickens plan… Currently, it only mentions one source, which seems to be the same source as for this episode.
Here: http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Opinion/Content?oid=oid:113228
Maybe I’m wrong, and I definitely have no reason to side with a rich-ass oil guy…
I just want my skepticism to be smart.
Dates, Bill Numbers, and other data would really help.
The Wikipedia article, which anyone can edit, has none of this. It simply mentions the existence of this theory, which to me really makes it seem like a stretch since something so important seems like it would have some wikipedia back-n-forth going on.
Where is the discussion? If the people of the US are blind to this alleged water-grab, can you really claim the position of moral high-ground while attempting to make [ad-supported] content out of the issue without lifting a finger to actually get the word out via the wikipedia [or any other medium with any kind of reach]?
You guys aren’t even popular enough to have a wikipedia article for yourselves, yet you claim to be delivering an important message. I know it probably took a few hours at least to edit all that green-screen stuff with the pretty host bouncing around.
Who’s “Green-Washing” who? Are you helping humanity? Are you participating in the cloud? Or are you just trying to sell a cute actress to us while capitalizing on our guilt by using the whole “green” thing?
This is social media, people. If it’s true, add it to the wikipedia with sources!
If it’s “true” let’s expose it properly! I can’t wait to hear back from you. BTW, I love Channel Frederator!!! —Andrew
Kevin Kelly gave this talk at TED in 2007. It’s worth watching.
He touches on a number of things ranging from history of the Internet and Moore’s Law to the future ubiquity of Cloud Computing and Kurzweil‘s “Sigularity.“
He covers concepts like the Semantic Web, and the give-and-take between privacy and participation with relatively light language that any lay person should be able to understand. This is an interesting and entertaining little presentation. Thought I’d share.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDYCf4ONh5M]
Here’s my dilemma. I have a ton of bookmarks on my Del.icio.us account. I love using an online bookmarking system. But still, Delicious and others’ systems for organizing bookmarks don’t really help with a need I bet most users have: Tag-Optimization.
Del.Icio.Us Tags Gone Wild
On several occasions, I’ve set out to clean up my tags manually, but I’ve never made it very far. It’s just too much work.
Maybe the coming overhaul to Del.Icio.Us will ad some of these needed features, although somehow I doubt it.
I’ve heard of the MOAT (Meaning Of A Tag) Project, and perhaps this could save us, but like many other ‘Semantic Web’ projects, I haven’t found a way, as a lay person, to utilize it. At some point down te road, maybe someone will make a Delicious-MOAT-erizer Web-App that will clean-up-shop-by-proxy and make the metadata available to the Semantic Web.
I just heard about this from the Inside Silicon Valley Podcast from The San Jose Mercury News (the site of which, sadly, has no RSS feed metadata in its html head. Get it together, people!)
Anyway, this guy apparently made a fortune as a Texas oil man. Now he’s decided to spearhead a movement toward “energy-independence.” In a nutshell, he wants to shift our use of Natural gas over to transportation and replace its 20% share of electricity production with wind power by building out the “Wind Belt” with turbines. The result, he claims, would mean consuming about 38% less foreign oil. It would also mean cleaner transportation and electricity production.
Pickens has launched a totally kick-ass, Web2-savvy campaign to recruit online “foot-soldiers,” for his movement. He has already met with the “president” and says he also plans to meet with both mainstream presidential candidates “at the same time.”
He claims that the site moved into the top-1000 most-viewed sites in under three weeks, with 2.5 million hits and about a one-tenth conversion rate (people signing up to get involved, subscribing to get updates etc)!!! (three exclamation points!!!) In addition, he’s touring around giving “town-hall” meetings all over, and spending his money on TV advertisements.
Techno-Activism? Go to PickensPlan.com and look around. What do you think? I like seeing rich-ass people putting their dollars into making positive changes in policy and public perception (if that’s what this is (I’m the first one to admit that I’m no expert on what the best route to sustainable energy is)).
Whatever you think about the plan, you have to admit that the campaign is being smartly executed. He must have a great team working for him.
This video is an overview of his “plan” (the second is one of the TV advertisements he did, which sufficiently pulls on left-wing heart strings since it has plenty of imagery of smoke pouring into the air)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpQa-ibNOKM&NR]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2bOug1d20c]
Starting August or September, depending on the comments I get on this blog entry, I will begin ridding the street I live on of trash, Watertrough Road, Sebastopol, CA 95472. I imagine it will take me about a week of going out every day, for 2-4 hours on foot, and even occasionally picking some pieces of junk up with my minivan and hauling it to the dump or finding a way to recycle it. I want to clean Watertrough Rd completely of every last candy-wrapper and cigarette butt.
I would like to make a “movement” out of this. Let’s start here in West County, and the rest of the world can copy us.
I want to set up an infrastructure for helping other people do similar cleanup work along our country roads. Now that we have the internet, let’s put it to some good!
Please be interested in this. If you’re interested in helping in any way, please send an email to
sebastopolroads@gmail.com
Love,
Andrew A. Peterson, your neighbor.
Please Comment below to show your support!
A “Letter to Comcast,” but also, and more importantly, a letter to people who read my blog.
Source: TechCrunch
Plaxo has some really compelling address book synchronization offerings. Really, for me, Plaxo was sort of a mini dream come true as far as my personal data is concerned.
But I thought about it and I just don’t trust Comcast. They are limiting my access to competing media distribution channels, and they have a reputation for fighting against consumer interests, and perhaps even human interests, if you’re willing to step back and see the implications of the non-neutrality they are in favor of with regard to the Internet.
Comcast, you have an uphill PR battle in front of you. People like me will continue to think of your brand as representing pure evil until you start to prove us wrong. I don’t know how you’re going to do this, but making acquisitions that appear to consumers to be privacy concerns, given your already soiled trust with the public, isn’t the best thing to do right now. I’m all for socially curated media, and I’m glad if Comcast is working in that direction, but frankly, you’re in a position where you could really start to seem like the orwellian “Big Brother” Nightmare everyone is terrified of. Perhaps you should point all your guns at bringing IPTV into reality, or better yet, let’s see the real convergence between TV and Web that we all know is coming one way or another. Do that first. And why don’t you also try getting all the dark spots in the Net lit up! The South, you know? Let’s get those people online and you can sell them programming later. I know there’s not really a bandwidth problem, not when there’s 100 channels of “HD” programming streaming into all your cable customers homes 24/7. C’mon. Quit lying and cheating and stealing and start making some progress toward our common good. Or on the other hand, why don’t you announce the acquisition of an arms manufacturer. That’d help your company’s image.
I’ve deleted Plaxo’s software from my machine, and I closed my Plaxo account. Goodbye Plaxo. Really, an open-source version of the same type of thing would be better anyhow.
Update… this was actually news back in January. Coincidentally, today it was announced that Comcast is buying Plaxo. Goodbye Plaxo. Nice knowin’ ya.
Got the rumor tip from Scoble (there’s no real info there so don’t bother)
Plaxo? Are you listening? Keep doing what you’re doing, stay behind the scenes, work on enabling users to publish their own data, at will, in Semantic Standards as they become timely (now?) and stay independent of the little tug-of-war between closed, albeit increasingly API-enabled social apps. You’re better than them! Hang in there and you’ll be worth way more! Don’t turn to the dark side!
Competition for traffic will get everyone using RDF and Microformats soon enough… Semantics are like SEO 2.0… The next bandwagon everyone will want to pay way too much for.
Plaxo, you’re in the perfect spot to make money on this. Think Virtual Private Networks, Semantic Publishing to the Web, and Semantic Productivity Tools at home.
Seriously.
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