A lot of information

This is a great video I saw via Influx Insights with a ton of information on how technology is impacting our lives, enjoy:



Hopefully, I will get to posting more regularly for the 0 people who are clamoring to read my ramblings.

Infinite Jest

About a week ago I must have hit my head on something very hard because after reading this post by Jason Kottke I decided that I was going to read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I am a very slow reader taking on a 1,000+ page book with over 100 pages of footnotes is a pretty big undertaking, but I am going to make an effort. There is a group that already started and are blogging their summer of reading Infinite Jest. They can be found here at Infinite Summer. I am going to try and follow their blog posts as I hit their milestones.

Here is DFW doing a reading of one of his essays to give you a good idea of his style:

Hyping The Hype Cycle

I wanted to write a post about the Gartner Hype Cycle, which I saw it posted on Advertising Labs's blog but as I was reading their post I saw this curious link in the post. Basically, Gartner doesn't want anyone to post the Hype Cycle Graph without paying for it. This seems like a silly decision. Without people posting and talking about the Hype Cycle Graph how would Gartner sell the full report. I think a freemium model would be best here as the Hype Cycle Graph would get people interested and if they wanted to know more they would buy the whole report, which I am sure talks in much more detail about each point on the graph.

The point on the graph that has me most excited is Augmented Reality which I first found out about when google launched Android and now that the iPhone has GPS and a compass it has made possible things like an AR Twitter app featured in the video below:

I think this is the beginning of some potentially cool applications and it will be really interesting how game publishers take advantage of this technology. There are already scavenger hunt type race games like Urban Dare and the Great Urban Race so it will be interesting to see how these evolve as Augmented Reality apps become more mainstream.

the never ending question...

...What is twitter? Every time I visit my family, in between eating and Aidan and I playing with my iPhone, we start talking about technology and its impact on society this question always comes up. They all get blogs, podcasts, and some of the other aspects of web 2.0 but twitter seems to confound everyone. The "In Plain English" series from Common Craft does a great job of simply explaining twitter as a utility.

But the strength of twitter goes beyond what is explained in the video. Twitter's open platform has allowed people to develop using the API. Twittervision is a perfect example, it allows you see all the public tweets visualized on a world map. Twittermagnets is an application developed as a crowd sourcing poetry project.

Twitter also allows for great data mining and there are a ton of tools can help visualize this. There are lots of ways to see what people are saying but one of my favorites is Cursebird which shows all the tweets that have curses in them and which curses are the most often used. Apparently, I curse like a bad golfer which is not very good assuming good is cursing a lot.

Twitter also allows you to follow some really smart people who are not tweeting about them mundane happenings in their lives but rather interesting stuff they are passionate about.

• Steven Johnson - Writer/economist
• Malcom Gladwell - Excellent writer and generally smart guy
• Mark Cuban - Owner of the Dallas Mavs and winner of the Yahoo! lottery, oh and really smart guy
• Saul Williams - Talented musician, writer, and actor

There are a lot more famous and non famous people that great to follow and you can follow your friend and know exactly when and how many times they went to the shake shack.

Ray Kurzweil

There is a documentary coming out about Ray Kurzweil called The Transcendent Man that looks really interesting mainly because Ray Kurzweil is an amazing and fascinating person. He is one of the people who deserves the title of Futurist. Over the years he has made a lot of predictions about how technology will evolve and change the way we live and most of what he has written about has come true. His predictions for the future seem amazing and unfathomable but based on his track record it is pretty clear that he thinks on a different level than the rest of us. This is one documentary I will definitely check out:

Swooning

Swoon is a street artist who primarily deals with creating amazing looking cutouts (like the one below) that are very multi-layered almost telling a story with each work.

Well now she is taking her art to the waters. Last year she worked with a group that created "Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea" that was an interesting work that sailed down the Hudson River as a performance piece.  The video below shows the culmination of what they did:

Well now she is taking this idea on the road, well the river, making collaborative art pieces that sail down rivers and engage the local people who live in the area. They sailed the Mississippi River and now are on the Adriatic Sea from Slovenia to Venice. This seems a bit too hippie for my tastes but I like the general idea of it and am a fan of Swoon mostly because of stuff like this, this, this, and this.

Qik and Facebook

(image found via mashable)

Qik just announced that they are lunching a instant uploading videos to facebook via facebook connect. I really think this is going to be a big deal especially once iPhone activates video. Qik has already shown they can create a pretty good iPhone App via jailbreak (see my video's here).

Also, I was talking to a co-worker about FB and he said something to the effect of how, over the years, he has seen all the next big things go down in flames and that was the reason he wasn't on FB. I tend to agree that several years ago there were a lot of social networks that started strong but went down in flames. I think one of the biggest reasons that happened was they tried to make money off of the product too quickly without really solidifying strategy. This tended to alienate and annoy their users. FB has had some negative feedback on some of their changes (the most notable is beacon) but I think most of their changes have been for the best and following the trend of feed aggregators like FriendFeed. And now with FB connect they have created something really powerful with and I really think they are being smart by trying get FB almost as a default platform. If you are a small company, what better way to engage with your customers than through FB, a network they are already highly vested in.

As for Qik if they can get live streaming to FB that will be a game changer and will bring mobile video broadcasting to the forefront and if at that point the iPhone does not embrace video Apple will leave the door wide open for a device that can shoot quality video with same the functionality of the iPhone (I really doubt the latter will happen because Apple has always been able to gauge the where the market is headed and move quickly to that path...and I love the iPhone so it can do no wrong).