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.