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).

City Planning

I am a bit of a nerd for good city planning, I guess that is one of the many reasons why I love NYC. This beautiful big city is probably this country's greatest example of city planning. From Central Park to the Brooklyn Bridge to Rockefeller Center to (my one of my favorite places) theHighline. Well now in Brooklyn the city is working on extending the Brooklyn Bridge Park on the pier south of the bridge. Below is a rendering of the design:

And this video was part of a segment on WNYC's Brian Lehrer show called Cityscapes where they have been looking at different aspects of NYC and how it has evolved.

These types of projects add to the greatness of the city and make it livable.

The music industry...

"Industry rule # 4080 record company people are shady, so kids watch your back 'cause I think they smoke crack. I don't doubt it look at how they act."

- A Tribe Called Quest, Check The Rhime (one of my favorite songs)

Now that I am tangentially working in the music industry I feel justified to comment on the industry as a whole. In the past week I have seen and heard some interesting things that are very telling on the state of the industry. John Mellencamp was on Fresh Air with Terry Gross and he said something interesting when he was questioned about letting Chevy use his song, out of context, as an anthem in their commercials. He said it was an experiment for him, which he was disappointed in mainly because of the way they used the song but he said he thought Chevy was a better record label than than any label he has dealt with because they delivered everything they promised. This is a sad statement on the way the labels treat the artists which ultimately translates to how they treat consumers.

The other interesting thing that I saw are kind of related. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails did this really interesting interview with Digg's Kevin Rose for a show Digg recently started called Digg Dialogg. The interview overall is pretty long but there are 2 questions (the first and the 3rd) that really get to the heart of the irrelevance of the major labels assuming you are not trying to be a huge pop star. Rezner offers up different ways for independent artists to make the labels obsolete.

NIN has offered up their music for free and experimented with lots of other distribution models. Now they are coming out with an iPhone app that looks very interesting if you are an NIN fan (see video below).

This seems like something an really smart way for a band to engage with their fans. This is something the labels should be doing on an aggregated basis for all their artists or better yet collectively create a singe app so that people can fully immerse themselves in their favorite music. But sadly I don't think the labels are even close to thinking along these lines.

Tracking via Social Media

Recently, a luddite friend of mine, who finds my frequent updated and posts on facebook a bit much, discovered my twitter feed and said:

"I always thought you were a little carried away with the Facebook updates...then I saw what you do on Twitter. Oh my."

It is my guess that he has recently discovered twitter based on what has been what has been in the news (here and here). My response to him was "Yeah I also use Qik, the share feature on google reader, and one or two other social tools. I like being social without the burden of actually interacting with people" but that is not the point of this post. In my new job one of my minor roles will be to help define how the company uses social tools and trying to track what is being said.

There are several ways to track what others are saying about you and any discussions going on. Search.twitter.com has a great feature called "trending topics" which lists out some of the top topics people are tweeting about. TwitterDeck is also a great tool to monitor all things twitter. Robert Scoble talks about how he uses Twitter in this Kyte video (it is a bit long and meandering but it will give you a good sense of how someone super connected keeps up):

I also recently learned about the rooms feature on FriendFeed which aggregates all feedback from several sources. I haven't started using this but will set it up tomorrow and see how it works.

Social media are allowing anyone to easily monitor and respond to anything that is being discussed about you. I wonder what this will do to public relations people I am sure the tech savvy ones will be able to pick up lots of new business, while the ones who ignore all the different tools available to the average person will suffer.

wow pretty awesome street art

Found via PSFK.

Newspapers

Mark Cuban posted an interesting idea for a way to save the newspapers from their slow collapse. The basic premise is that newspaper or for this matter any content provider would close their content to the general public but provide it to anyone who cable or satellite provider subscriber and they would. The cable companies would pay a nominal fee for this exclusive content. Overall, this is an interesting idea but I am not sure if it is really executable especially with the growing ubiquity of open wifi networks. Also, I am not sure if I want to give cable or satellite companies more power as what content they can or will provide. This week On The Media had a 3 good stories directly related to this topic that are definitely worth listening to:

The first is about a micro payment service called Kachingle that is trying to generate revenue for newspapers by having people willingly make a small payment for the content they consume. This sounds interesting but I am not really sure how many people would sign up for such a service or if they did sign up I am not sure how many people would refill their account:

The second story is about how comcast, the nations largest cable company, restricted what some of their subscribers were doing online under the guise of QOS:

And lastly, the third related story is a discussion about the ramifications of the demise of the newspaper industry and if it is worth saving:

Personally, I do think newspapers especially investigative journalism (on all levels local, national, and international) is very important and needs an outlet. It is debatable if newspapers are the appropriate venue for such journalism but that is, in my opinion, the only reason newspapers need to be saved. The biggest problem seems to be that the newspaper industry has been extremely slow to adopt to new technology and make necessary changes and modernizations in printing and distribution models in order to remain efficient and profitable.

40 Degree Day

The other day it was more like a 67 degree day and it reminded me of the scene above from my favorite show of all time, The Wire (if you are sensitive about street language don't watch the clip, if you already watched the clip and are sensitive about street language sorry about that and don't be so sensitive they are only words). If you have never watched it please do it is like reading a great novel all 5 seasons are absolutely thrilling. During the absolutely beautiful day I had lunch at the shake shack and then sat and enjoyed the a couple of hours of leisure time at the Madison Square Promenade, which has done wonders for the once crazy intersections of Broadway, 5th Ave, and 23rd Street. The video below was being shot while I was out there and I decided to take a timelapse photo series, which thanks to my new Mac Book was a 5 minute project to put together.

 

New Job

I accepted a job as Director of Customer Acquisition @ Dada Entertainment a online mobile content and music retail social network. I know there is a lot going on there but it is an interesting business model and the social aspect seems like a no brainer for music but I have not seen anyone doing this. I guess MS is doing something similar with Zune and their "welcome to the social" but I never really dug into it to really know what the social part of Zune was beyond sharing tracks from Zune to Zune.

I have done a bunch of customer acquisition work on the agency and client side and so this should be a fun job as it is in a small environment and with a cool product (see here for a better view into the product). They have also been keeping a company blog which gets periodically updated with top 10 tracks downloaded and major company announcements. During my many interviews there was a brief discussion about adding more to the blog which hopefully I will be able to help with. 

The new gig starts in 2 weeks on Monday March 2nd (unless my background check doesn't come out clean; insert Taliban joke here). In the mean time I will be reading more of stuff like this:

The Marketing During the Recession series of blog posts from TrendWatch. (they are up to #6 and while I think most of these rules seem pretty standard good business practices it is always good to focus on the fundamentals especially during tough economic times.

The Freemium Business Model several blog posts from Andrew Chen, a really smart and interesting blogger. Although, the freemium model doesn't directly apply it still gives a good view into how others are building and growing successful business online.

Also, Blog Maverick, Babbling VC (side note I went to HS with Paul we sat next to each other in AP Physics and Trig he was smart back then and is still smart), GigaOm, Scobleizer and Darren Herman have all had interesting posts about start-ups and business in rough economic times. 

I would imagine my poker and basketball consumption will decrease while my cookie consumption will probably remain constant hopefully I can increase my running and start doing some morning runs especially as the weather starts to get nicer. 

Finally Done With PC

Yesterday my trusty Sony VAIO, which was ruined by windows vista, started its decent into crapping out. I was playing some online poker and was pretty deep in two tournaments when all of a sudden the computer just shut down. So i quickly turned it back on but realized that it was running off the battery even though it was plugged in. I unplugged it and tried a different outlet to no avail. At this time I noticed that I had about 2 hours left on my battery and if I was going to go real deep in either of these tournaments 2 hours was not going to be enough time. (This is the most I will ever talk about poker on this blog especially boring hand details like this) About that time I got QQ in the small blind with a middle position player who shoved about 10 big blinds all in I called and I was off to the races against his AK. The flop and the turn were all low cards and he hit one of his 6 outs with an Ace on the river. Oh well that didn't cripple me but put a pretty big dent in my stack. Several hands later I have QQ again in 2nd position when the under the gun player makes a standard raise. I decide to shove all my chips. It folds around to the big blind and he shoves in as well, he and I have about the same chips. The original raiser tanks for a while and decides to make the hero call with A10 of spades. The big blind had a weaker Ace. The flop brought 2 spades and the lovely turn brought a spade giving the guy who made a really bad call for most of his chips the nuts, knocking me out. In the other tournament I was short stacked and shoved with it was folded to me in the small blind with J9 suited and the big blind woke up to 66 and he held. So now I was out of the both tournaments with only about 1 hr and 20 min left of the battery so I shut it down. In the morning I tried to play around with it to see if there was anything I could do but no luck so I decided to go tot he Apple store in SoHo and get a Mac Book. I thought about the Mac Air as there was a refurbished one on the Apple site for $1000 but decided to get the regular Mac Book. There are 2 models and I decided on the cheaper one since I am not really doing a ton of high powered  computing. So far it has been a pretty smooth experience but there are minor things I am going to have to get use to since I have been using a PC all of my computing life. I can't with until google releases chrome for a the Mac as I think it is a faster and smoother browser than safari or explorer. Everything else has been pretty slick. I created a movie with some photos I took from my flight from LA to NYC at take off. See below:

From now I guess I am now one of those "Mac" people. Now I just need to figure out how to get all the music, photos, and other files off of my dying VAIO and on to my shiny new Mac.

Brand Tracking in a Web 2.0 World

Brand tracking has always been an Ad Agency function that is shrouded in a bit of mystery. Now it is more than ever important to know how people perceive your brand and what kinds of conversations they are having about you. For small start ups who can't afford an agency to track brand perceptions there are several DYI ways to get a good pulse on what is being said about your brand. 

Ice Rocket blog search has a great function called Big Buzz that will give you a running timeline of anything that is said about your brand. People are also using Twitter to track what people are saying about brands, below is a map of tweets about brands during the Superbowl (found in the NY Times)

Facebook groups are also a good way to see if there is any positive or negative discussions are happening about your brand. Ultimately, you have to be vigilant about about keeping a finger on the pulse otherwise you will be caught off guard when something good or something bad happens.

Objectified

Gary Hustwit directed Helvetica a pretty good documentary about the history of the classic font. Graphic designers and font dorks were out in mass to see it. Now Hustwit is working on a documentary all about objects we use everyday, our relationship with them, and the people who design them. The trailer below looks great and features Jonathan Ive, who is the lead designer at Apple. Ive is the brains behind the iPod and the iPhone.

I am not a designer but have always appreciated industrial design. It is funny how good can go unnoticed because things work like they should but bad design can make simple objects and tasks difficult. (get ready to jump on my iPhone worship train) The mobile phone market was exactly this, most if not all mobile phones were really difficult to use and the functionality was either severely crippled or nonexistent but the iPhone was the first real mobile phone that took design seriously and made it easy to do simple tasks.

I can't wait until this movie comes out. I guess I will be one of those design dorks filling up the theater.

The Best Place in NYC

Several years ago I became obsessed with the Highline, an elevated train track on the west side of Manhattan that use to service the meatpacking district but has not been in use since 1980. There are a lot of reasons why it is one of my favorite places in NYC. I have been up there, trespassing as it is private property, several times and have taken a lot of photos. My most recent venture was in early August and I was able to get some good pictures of the construction transforming it from an abandoned railroad tracks to a fantastic park. Below is a video of how the park will be constructed.

Here are a bunch of other videos that go into detail about the history and the evolution of the Highline. Also here is a slideshow of the final design.

This post start when I saw this post on the highline blog offering a great aerial photo as desktop wallpaper. Generally, I hate wallpaper, of the wall variety and of the screen variety but this one is great and is up on my computer. I may take another venture up on the Highline next weekend and take some more pictures showing the progress of the construction. There is one thing I hope the designers do not remove and that is all the great graffiti that has built up over the years. The wall below is right below 23rd street.

Here is a large view. This photo was about 15-20 photos stitched together using a free photo stitching software so please ignore the stupid watermarks.

Copy & Paste and Qik

I decided to Jailbreak my iPhone again. I originally did this pre app store launch in order to get some really interesting 3rd party apps on my iPhone. When the app store was launched I didn't feel the need to have my phone Jailbroken as I was pretty happy with all that was/is available via the app store. But there are 2 apps that I have been reading about that made me want to jailbreak again. 

The first was "Clippy" an app that adds copy and paste functionality to the ".?123" menu on the virtual keyboard. So far the couple of times I used it, it works pretty good. The only annoying thing is that it obscures the area where you are typing slightly but this is a minor annoyance. The second app is the Qik app which allows you to broadcast a live video stream. Below is the quick test video I did yesterday (excuse my messy apartment):

Qik also allows you to send out a message via twitter that you are broadcasting live and so your Twitter followers can go to Qik and see what you are doing. This is a pretty cool feature that would get more people engaged. During my test it didn't seem that my audio was working but as you can see/hear in the video above it seems to be OK. The second test video was at my computer shooting my live feed giving the window within window etc. effect.

Friday I am going to go to the Queens Museum to check out an exhibit on a full model of NYC and I will broadcast via Qik. If you care to check it out I guess the best way to know when it will be live would be to subscribe to my twitter feed.

Friends We Like

Friends We Like is a site that showcases interesting/creative people (see site for info for upcoming show). There most recent video featured Ellis G. who does amazing chalk shadow outlines of objects around the city (the site also features a video with Ellis G.). I first saw his stuff on the Lower East Side in February of 2006 and more recently I saw some of his work in a gallery (I can't remember which one, was gallery hoping with a friend). Below are the pic I took with my shitty Nokia 8801.

Pretty Cool Projection Technology

For the most part Out Of Home Advertising is pretty bland but the technology below could actually make it interesting and worthy of people stopping and looking on with interest. Easy Web is the company that has created this technology. They use 3D mapping technology to get the shape of the building and then are able to do some pretty amazing/creative thing:

Found via PSFK

Awesome Vacation to Japan

Japan from Eric Testroete on Vimeo.

Via Ed Cotton

Palm Pre

I am and have been a huge fan of the iPhone and how it has changed the game in the mobile world. Well 2 years later (which is about the development time for a device so it looks like the devices we are seeing are directly influenced by the iPhone) we are finally starting to see other devices that are starting to rival the ease of use and functionality of the iPhone. When Google launched the Android platform upon first site I knew that a simple, flexible, and elegant mobile platform and every device not named iPhone should utilize. 

Now Palm has finally launched a device and a platform that will give the iPhone and Android a run for its proverbial money. Most of what I have seen (see 4 videos below for demos) has been pretty impressive. There are things that the Palm Pre does that the iPhone will definitely need to do better. The biggest is how the Pre can integrate different applications allowing the user to simply just use the device rather than worry about which app they are using. The best example is whether you are IMing or Texting or MMSing you use the same interface so if you and it stays all as one conversation if the person you are talking to jumps from IM to Text. It also integrates all your contact info one spot so you can easily jump from e-mail to IM if you see the person you are e-mailing is online via IM.

I know a lot of people will also love that the Pre has a full physical QWERTY keyboard but as for me and my fat thumbs that is almost a non starter. I can't stand physical keyboards. I love the iPhone virtual keyboard and the software because I don't have to be super accurate with every keystroke and the software corrections is fantastic. Also since I can't spell to save my life it works great for me.

Ultimately, the more competition in the smartphone category we have that are at this level will be great for consumers. The iPhone opened the door and changed the game and showed consumers that mobile phones don't have to be tedious to use. I just hope the iPhone will start to integrate some of these features into the next firmware update because some of this stuff just makes sense.

Part 1 goes through the hardware of the device in detail:

Palm Pre demo, part 1 from Dean Takahashi on Vimeo.

Part 2 goes through some of the User Interface:

Palm Pre demo, part 2 from Dean Takahashi on Vimeo.

Part 3 goes through some of the applications and the flexibility of the platform:

Palm Pre demo, part 3 from Dean Takahashi on Vimeo.

Part 4 shows how the platform integrates applications:

Palm Pre demo, part 4 from Dean Takahashi on Vimeo.

Vintage Print Ads

A flickr set of fantastic Print (newspaper and magazine) Ads:

Reanimated Dead Poets

This is fantastic. Some of my favorites are:

"If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!"

This was quoted in one of my all time favorite books Once A Runner by John L. Parker Jr. incidentally this is being republished by my friend Byrd.

Wow I don't know much about Sylvia Plath other than that she killed herself at the age of 31 but this poem is pretty powerful. There is more of her there.

There is a lot more have fun exploring.

Jeff "Staple" Ng talks Design

Jeff Staple started Staple Design, The Reed Space, redesigned Fader Magazine, and has done a lot of interesting design work. In the video below @ the PSFK Conference Asia 2008 talks about his principles of design and how he got started.

Netflix, LG, and Broadband TV

LG is putting out a new series of TVs with a direct broadband hookup and with this they are entering into a partnership with Netflix. Netflix has been partnering with everyone and their mother to extend their reach and make it as easy as possible for their customers to be able to download movies. I think more TV manufacturers will come out with broadband enabled TVs and the movie industry should embrace this as much as possible as well as these Netflix partnerships. It would be great to be able to pay to watch new release movies via this type of service. 

While I was at Verizon I would let anyone who would listen know that I thought the best thing for Verizon to do was buy Netflix and really push the broadband portion of the business. I also though they should have bought TiVo and use their software as the FiOS platform. 

Below is a good interview with Reed Hastings the CEO of Netflix who talks about their broadband strategy. All in all I think Netflix has done a great job at creating a broadband strategy and pushing it through as much as possible, now I just home the studios and content providers follow along.

Change Part 2

Anohter great video by Lawrence Lessig outlineing the problem with our political system.


Change-Congress.org

2009 Predictions

Inhabitat, a pretty interesting design blog, compiled several predictions for 2009 that are well worth reading. The major focus of the blog and the predictions are around green/sustainable design. I have seen lots of discussion that the focus of 2009 will be on disruptive start-ups and I think that the green economy will be the disruptive technology that will start to explode this year. 

Another prediction for 2009 will be the impact of the iPhone on the business market as well as the beginning phases of cloud computing.  Apps like Soonr are going to revolutionize how people interact with their work environment.

The last major trend I see for 2009 may be a bit of a chicken or egg thing and that revolves around netbooks (light-weight, low-cost, energy efficient computers with the minimum requirements to run web based applications) and cloud computing.  There has been a ton of chatter about the netbook market (see here, here, and several mentions on the GDGT podcast). While some (Sony and Apple because they put such a premium on their brands) think it is a race to the bottom consumers will have much more to say. As this market grows the reliance on the cloud will also grow. I really think with the economy in its current state consumers and business are going to be looking for low cost ways to upgrade/maintain their technology and what better way then push everything to the cloud and cheap no frills computers. 2009 will be an interesting year as green/sustainable and economic forces come together and start to change the way we use and look at technology. 

Lastly, 2009 is also going to be huge for my friends Jeff and Jenny. Jeff is hitting the live poker tournament circuit hard and his level of play is at an all time high and so I can see him winning/cashing on several of his trips. Best of luck Gamblero!! And Mrs. Gamblero is putting the finishing touches on her first record and preparing for tune up gigs here in NYC for the next month and then off to London get her album out in front of the industry executives. And as I stated before I am sure she will be fantastic* but I just don't understand why she keeps drawing me so brown (I mean I know I am but I feel like OJ on the cover of Time see second pic here**and third pic here**).

*even though she still has not let me hear any of her music...hint fucking hint

**Comment if you want to hear the stories behind each of those pictures or feel free to make up your own

Some Time Off

I took some time off from blogging for several reason. The first and foremost I wanted my Sir Issac Newton post to prominent for a some time.  I know a lot of atheists but almost all of them still celebrate Christmas mostly because that's what they have done since they were children and I was hoping that they would think twice about the meaning of that day. I know it is seriously pompous and overbearing of me to think my meager words would change anyone ideas/opinions but where religion is concerned I will keep trying because I really think smart people who don't believe in religion should change their childhood habits.

The other reason I took a bit of a hiatus was that there wasn't much to talk about in the new media/tech world. The one beacon of light has been GDGT, for now a weekly podcast by Ryan Block and Peter Rojas both former editors at engadget. Since the site has not officially launched they are focusing their efforts on the weekly podcasts (some of the recent topics ranged from Apple Year in review, MS Year in review, Android round table, Netbooks wrap up, and much more). It will be really interesting to see what direction they take GDGT because they say it will not be a gadget review or technology blog. 

Peter, not too long ago, launched rcrdlbl a project designed to change the record label model. The basic thought process was to distribute the music free but use advertising as a revenue generator.

I will keep this post short as I am coming down with a fever and need something to eat.