Note: Somehow this post was deleted from my CMS. I am reposting it now.
Two of my favorite companies in the world are Twitter and American Express. I have literally dozens of good pals at both. So this is said with love (and a bit more pointedly at Twitter than Amex, which is just one of many advertisers I’ve encountered in the situation described below. And Amex is one of the most innovative marketers on the planet, so again, much respect).
But here goes: I’m seeing too much image-heavy promoted tweets in my feed when I first come to the service. Here’s a picture:
Read MoreUbiquitous Video: Why We Need a Robots.txt For the Real World
Last night I had an interesting conversation at a small industry dinner. Talk turned to Google Glass, in the context of Snapchat and other social photo sharing apps.
Everyone at the table agreed: it was inevitable – whether it be Glass, GoPro, a button in your clothing or some other form factor – personalized, “always on” streaming of images will be ubiquitous. Within a generation (or sooner), everyone with access to mass-market personal electronics (i.e., pretty much everyone with a cell phone now) will have the ability to capture everything they see, then share or store it as they please.
That’s when a fellow at the end of the table broke in. “My first response to Glass is to ask: How do I stop it?”
Read Moreelse 11.11: “You can’t let the algorithms take over”
That Goddamned Blue Bird and Me: How Twitter Hijacked My Mind – New York Magazine
On the occasion of the IPO, a thorough contemplation of the ups and downs of writing and thinking with Twitter. “Collectively, the people I follow on Twitter — book nerds, science nerds, journalists, the uncategorizably interesting — come pretty close to my dream community.”
NSA Files: DECODED – The Guardian
The Guardian puts out a great multimedia package about what the NSA revelations mean to individuals, including descriptions about metadata and the real scale of a “three hops” network.
More than 200,000 Minutes of Engagement, and Counting
Some of you may recall “Behind the Banner,” a visualization of the programmatic adtech ecosystem that I created with The Office for Creative Research and Adobe back in May. It was my attempt at explaining the complexities of a world I’ve spent several years engaged in, but often find confounding. I like to use Behind the Banner in talks I give, and folks always respond positively to it, in particular when I narrate the story as it plays.
I realized yesterday that I didn’t know how many people had actually viewed the thing, and naturally as a creator I was curious. So I pinged my colleague at Adobe, who of course are analytics pros, among many other things. What came back was pretty cool: The visualization has been viewed nearly 50,000 times, with an average time spent of well over 4 minutes per view. That’s more than 200,000 minutes of engagement, or more than one-third of a year! It’s certainly got nothing on the Lumascape, but it’s neat nonetheless.
Read MoreA Metal Gun, Made from Digital Bits
One of the artifacts we’re considering for our book is the 3D printer – not only the MakerBot version, but all types of “bits to atoms” kinds of conversions. The advances in the field are staggering – it is now possible to print human tissue, for example. Every so often, however, there’s a milestone that brings things into dramatic focus. That’s how I felt when I saw this story: First 3-D-Printed Metal Gun Shows Tech Maturity.
The company behind the gun, Solid Concepts, has a federal license to make guns, so what they’ve done is not illegal. Rather, they argue in a blog post, they want to prove the efficacy of the approach they’ve taken. A firing test seems to prove them have.
What I find fascinating about 3D printers is the how they tie together a physical object with a digital description. More as we get into this chapter, but for now, just worth noting the milestone.
else 11.4: “Where’s the rage, man?”
As always, if you want to keep up with what we’re reading/thinking about on a weekly basis, the best way is to subscribe to the “else” feed, either as an email newsletter or through RSS.
It’s…A Marketing Barge?!
(image CBS KPIX) The #googlebarge meme has taken a very strange turn.
A rather welcome diversion from our industry’s endless NSA revelations, the enigmatic barge floating off Treasure Island had been widely assumed to be a floating data center of some kind. But today a local CBS station is reporting that the massive box is custom built for….marketing. No one suggested *that* when I asked for wild speculation yesterday. Answers ranged from “a place to store Google’s cash” to “a hide out for Microsoft’s next CEO,” but “a seaworthy rival to Apple’s retail stores”? Nope, no one was that drunk on Halloween.
From the CBS story:
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Poll: What’s On the Google Barge?
(image USA Today) I’m fascinated by this “Google Barge” story. It reminds me of the Google container stories of years past, which first sparked all manner of speculation, but turned out to be pretty mundane – a portable, water cooled data center, as I recall.
But their appearance in the San Francisco Bay, as well as off the coast of Maine, is laden with the echoes of science fiction blockbusters. As in alien spaceships mysteriously appearing over major capitals around the world.
It may be that this latest apparition will turn out to be hopelessly uninteresting. That’s certainly what most folks are speculating. But what the heck, it’s Halloween, so why not speculate wildly for a moment: What might be the purpose of these barges? What’s inside them? And why are they here, now?
Read Moreelse 10.28: “Merging with the technology”
Artists Take Up Digital Tools – NYTimes
“Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital” at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York explores 3-D printers as tools for new art. “In recent years I’ve seen a shift in thinking from ‘What can the machine do?’ versus ‘How can I use this as part of the tool kit to achieve what I want to do?’ ” The New Yorker has a nice slideshow.
There Is No Difference Between Online and ‘Real-Life’ Dating – NYMag
The line between online and offline is blurring as we all use the internet as a tool for meeting and staying in touch with people.
What Do Drones Mean for Humanity?
(Image) One of the “artifacts” that Sara and I are paying close attention to as we work on the book is “the drone.” Drones ply the liminal space between the physical and the digital – pilots fly them, but aren’t in them. They are versatile and fascinating objects – the things they can do range from the mundane (aerial photography) to the spectacular – killing people, for example. And when drones kill – well, what does it mean, to destroy life, but to not be physically present while doing it?
Until today, drone warfare for me has been a largely intellectual concept: I followed the political and social issues closely, but I avoided emotional engagement – most likely because I knew I hadn’t quite worked out my point of view on the ethical issues. But after reading Matthew Power’s Confessions of a Drone Warrior, I can no longer say I’m not emotionally involved.
The article profiles Brandon Bryant, a retired Airman trained to pilot Predator drones above Iraq and Afghanistan. Bryant’s story frames all that we’re struggling with as a nation, as citizens, and as human beings when it comes to this new technology. As Powers writes:
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