Persistent conflicts within your organization might not be chalked up to personality, or culture, as you may think. It could be that discord is the natural outcome of the way the “game” is structured.
For nearly eight years I worked at a small cable network, and the entire time, to varying degrees, the were some tension [...]
To a product manager, user “love” is not just a nice thing, it’s a tangible strategic victory. It means a user, even if presented with an objectively “better” product or a lower price, may be hesitant to abandon your product. A switching friction is introduced into the equation, a friction which involves issues of identity, [...]
What makes you feel less bored soon makes you into an addict. What makes you feel less vulnerable can easily turn you into a dick. And the things that are meant to make you feel more connected today often turn out to be insubstantial time sinks – empty, programmatic encouragements to groom and refine your [...]
Twitter can be viewed as an infinitely overlapping structure of reverse panopticons, with each participant at the center of his/her own universe, with no visibility outward back to the people who are watching them. There is no “conversation” per se (without a tedious, forensic reconstruction process), as each participant is experiencing and responding to a very different messaging landscape. In such a chaotic landscape, shared norms (a key component of a “community”) cannot emerge. For example, if I follow a bunch of dirty-mouthed comedians (as I do), I might easily get the sense that the ethos of Twitter is wild, profane, and uncompromisingly edgy. But then when I comment in kind, I may well shock the sensibilities of (say) the internet development professionals that follow me. Now multiply this dissonance by the number of individual nodes in the network, and you have a custerfluck of epic proportions, with millions of people shouting together, alone.
Unix had a shell language. DOS had a batch language. Lotus 1-2-3 had its macro language. Emacs is a programming tool as much as it is a text editor. We have gotten out of the habit of making programmable end-user products, but they are still just as important today as they were a couple of [...]
The assumption that the TV networks = “content” is untrue. The nets filter, finance, package and promote the content. they aren’t Mike Tyson, they’re Don King. Not Vincent Chase, but Ari Gold. The big play everyone in the middle of the food chain needs to fear (everyone that is except for production companies and consumers) [...]
We are all many. Whether you call them “masks” or “hats” we all have several we shuffle through each day. Not only are we interested in consuming different categories of content, but we are interested in creating content in different categories as well, thereby presenting specific facets of ourselves to the sundry social spaces we each occupy. To that end, Twitter should implement some notion of “personae”, in recognition of this idea that each of us are (perhaps subtly) different things within different social contexts, and might like to preserve the separation of those spheres in our social media.
If it’s optimized for a search engine, it’s *not* being optimized for me. I want my content to be HIO – human intelligence optimized.
Inspired by Jen Corace’s facebook status update:
“Jen Corace is watching battle of the planets, g force…they’re fearless orphans people!”
I present a song I made 15 years ago, based on a recording of my dad and I playing battle of the planets 31 years ago. I’m old.
Here is “you’ll see little birdies.“ There are about 15 [...]
Am loving this analog pixel art using crayons by Christian Faur. What I first read as an approximation of digital glitching/artifacting, in the form of patterns of off-color pixels thrown in throughout, turns out to be a steganographic cipher, hiding messages within the images. Each image has a letter/color mapping key at the bottom left.
I [...]