hackr abt. quoted

Für mich ist eine der bedrohlichsten Entwicklungen der digitalen Kultur nicht so sehr die Tatsache, dass wir durch Algorithmen immer besser überwachbar und vorhersagbar werden. Nein, die gefährliche Pointe liegt darin, dass wir uns immer besser überwachbar und vorhersagbarer machen. Noch wirkt es wie ein Sketch, wenn Menschen mit dem Mittagessen warten, bis sie ein Foto davon auf Facebook gepostet haben, vor der Kneipe stehen bleiben bis Foursquare ihnen das erfolgreiche Einchecken bestätigt hat oder reflexartig die Kurzgedanken der digitalen Prominenz per Retweet auf Twitter weiterverbreiten. In diesen Fällen – und das ist nur die zur Karikatur überformte Spitze – machen wir uns zur Vorrichtung von Codes, Datenbanken, Clouds, APIs und neuen Meta-Medienkonzernen wie Apple und Google.

viralmythen

(abt. enter the zoosphere)

The iPad reviews are similar in that they focus on the “missing” features. Those missing features are typically available in a variety of unsuccessful competing products, which leads people to erroneously conclude that a successful product would necessarily have even more features!
I believe this “more features = better” mindset is at the root of the misjudgment, and is also the reason why so many otherwise smart people are bad at product design

und also

Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product — the rest is noise.

Paul Buchheit

Uninformed people need information and insight in order to figure out what to do next. They are approaching the problem with optimism and calm, but they need to be taught. Uninformed is not a pejorative term, it’s a temporary state.

Clueless people don’t know what to do and they don’t know that they don’t know what to do. They don’t know the right questions to ask. Giving them instructions is insufficient. First, they need to be sold on what the platform even looks like.

And frightened people will resist any help you can give them, and they will blame you for the stress the change is causing. Scared people like to shoot the messenger. Duck.

Seth Godin mit einer Art Universaltypologie.

The framing of the debate in advance of the availability of the iPad device has centered around control of the words “freedom, choice and health.” The reactionary forces claim the iPad will be detrimental to all three. Within minutes of the conclusion of Steve Jobs’s presentation, the swiftboating of the iPad was under way. Our freedoms are being curtailed; our choices limited and the health of the ecosystem is threatened. The iPad is a deviation from the one true path.

echovar zum iPad, dem puritanismus der debatte und dem iPotential.

(abt. sorry)

The deal constructs a world in which control can be exercised at the level of a page, and maybe even a quote. It is a world in which every bit, every published word, could be licensed. It is the opposite of the old slogan about nuclear power: every bit gets metered, because metering is so cheap.

Lessig via tc

The Net as a medium is not for anything in particular — not for making calls, sending videos, etc. It also works at every scale, from one to one to many to many. This makes it highly unusual as a medium. In fact, we generally don’t treat it as a medium but as a world, rich with connections, persistent, and social. Because everything we encounter in this world is something that we as humans made (albeit sometimes indirectly), it feels like it’s ours. Obviously it’s not ours in the property sense. Rather, it’s ours in the way that our government is ours and our culture is ours. There aren’t too many other things that are ours in that way.
…
So, if we’re going to talk about the value of the open Internet, we have to ask what the opposite of “open” is. No one is proposing a closed Internet. When it comes to the Internet, the opposite of “open” is “theirs.”

David Weinberger via Techdirt

So naturally the sociopaths are outraged that their control is being taken away. Newspapers, book publishers, television companies, ad agencies – their businesses are all failing, while Google’s is on the rise.
The thing that’s hard for the sociopaths to get their head around is that this isn’t because one of their rivals has outsmarted them – it’s just the march of technology.

Aaron Swartz via blogoscoped

schöne überlegungen von venomous porridge, getriggert durch das ende von favrd :

When something has a real scarcity, you value it more when you have less of it. But for a currency without scarcity, like Twitter stars, the function is inverted: the more you spend, the less it’s worth to others. In particular, the less yours is worth, since this currency comes with a name attached.

…

Simply put, I think what happened to Favrd was that a new crop of users appeared who didn’t know how to value the currency, and thus they inadvertently devalued it.

(ich kenne kein tool, das diesen umstand der devaluierung auf per user basis algorithmisch berücksichtigt)

The problem isn’t that Google’s being an evil monopolist. It’s that you used to be evil monopolists, and failed to invest in the quality of production.

The Anti-Google Counter-Revolution

When the market changes, you may be seeing all the new opportunities and problems the wrong way because of the solutions you’re used to. The reason so many organizations have trouble using social media is that they are using precisely the wrong hammer. And odds are, they will continue to do so until their organization fails. PR firms try to use the new tools to send press releases, because, you guessed it, that’s their hammer.

Hammer time

This sense of the cloud emerges when the number of things in front of us are too many to count. The things vaporize and form clouds. Here we move up the stack and relate to patterns instead of individual things. … But even before we begin to see patterns, we intuit the disposition of the cloud. We sense its energy, speed and direction; its density, the quality of its make up.

The Disposition of the Information Cloud

The problem with “everyone” is that in order to reach everyone or teach everyone or sell to everyone, you need to so water down what you’ve got you end up with almost nothing.
…
You don’t want everyone. You want the right someone.

Seth Godin über die meistens bescheuerte Obsession, den Markt von wasauchimmermanmacht auf möglichst alle ausdehnen zu wollen (und das video ist wirklich nett)

(dieses monotone schielen allein auf userzahlen und marktanteile ist übrigens auch das frustrierendste phänomene im webtechdiskurs)

The real crisis is in the DNA of the industrial economy — and it’s just as lethal as ever. Most businesses are socially useless. They’re about as useful to society (to paraphrase Gloria Steinem) as bicycles are to fish.

Is Your Business Useless?

Any sufficiently overheated industry will eventually resemble high school. High school is filled with insecurity, social climbing, backbiting, false friends, faux achievements, high drama and not much content. Much of this insecurity comes from a market that doesn’t make good judgments, that doesn’t understand how to reliably choose between alternatives.

The Rule of High School

Now consider an open mediascape. Here, there are a million blogs – or more – that are predictable, partisan, and pedestrian: soda. But the quality of information has already hit rock-bottom, and at the bottom, soda offered via blogs is just a substitute for a slightly different flavor of soda offered on shock radio. The soda anyone can now offer in an open mediaconomy isn’t that much worse than the soda that big producers already offer.
Here’s what’s different: the wine is of a higher quality. In an open mediascape, what is truly different is not the quality of soda, but the quality of wine.

The New (New) Mediaconomy

Hacking is most commonly associated with computers, and people who break into or otherwise subvert computer systems are often called hackers. Although this terminology is occasionally disputed, I think it is essentially correct — these hackers are discovering the actual rules of the computer systems (e.g. buffer overflows), and using them to circumvent the intended rules of the system (typically access controls).

Paul Buchheit mit einer Minitheorie des Hackens.

(er unterscheidet zwei serien: offizielle regeln – wie die dinge sein sollen – und eigentliche regeln – wie die dinge sind, realität – und die hacker gehen der realität auf die spur)

((natürlich nicht schlecht, wobei er als techniker naturgemäss noch an der ‘echten realität’ hängt und ein lacansches mapping (symbolisches/reales/imaginäres, mit dem hacken als ausdifferenzieren des imaginären, quick shot) gefühlsmässig noch fruchtbarer wäre))

But something else happened that wasn’t entirely expected: teams that had it basically wrong – but for a few good ideas – made the difference when combined with teams which had it basically right, but couldn’t close the deal on their own.

Epicenter über die Produktionsbedingungen der Netflix-Challenge Gewinner.

Economically, the print media are in the business of marking up paper. We can all imagine an old-style editor getting a scoop and saying “this will sell a lot of papers!” Cross out that final S and you’re describing their business model. The reason they make less money now is that people don’t need as much paper.

Paul Graham mit seinem September Sermon: Post-Medium Publishing

Intimate current personal information is also valuable for government security because it can be critical to taking security counter measures. Already in the UK, the previous two years of everyone’s email, web browsing, and telephone calls are becoming available to government officials at varying levels of detail.

Is intimate personal information a toxic asset in cloud datacenters? (radar über die kommende verarbeitung von privacy daten in der cloud)

At it heart Twitter is a flow – it doesn’t present an unread count of messages, just a list of recent ones, so you don’t have email’s inbox problem – the implicit pressure to turn bold things plain and get that unread number down. Instead, you can dip in and out of it, when you have time, and what you see is notes from people you care about.

Kevin Marks (exgoogler, war dort evangelist in der sozialabteilung) über die Theorie und Praxis von Twitter

(schwer zu komprimieren; neben dem flow auch noch zur nähe via gesichter (und also warum automatisierte tweets und deshalb wohl auch die kommenden retweets so stören), zu sozialen gesten, zum asymmetrischem verfolgen, und zu fragmentierten aber sich überlappenden microöffentlichkeiten)