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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. And tweet us links!
Look at This Lady’s Amazing 3-D Printed Selfie – Wired
Artists take up 3D printing as the latest medium for self portraiture. The artist’s statement resonates with some of the themes we are exploring in the book: “I wanted to explore our transition between both the material and immaterial world and the traces we leave…With 3-D printers, we are no-longer limited by our screens, the digital world begins to merge and integrate itself into physical existence.”
Senate Committee Listens to Bitcoin Experts, Expresses Open-Mindedness – On Bitcoin
This does a good job summing up the week’s news around how the US is approaching new developments in Bitcoin. Namely, comparing it to the early internet, and echoing the importance of not stifling innovation with overly restrictive policy.
Trying to Outrace Scientific Advances – NYTimes
Almost Human, which premiered Sunday night, draws inspiration from existing DARPA technology and deals in social robot relations. And my fellow Berkman fellow Kate Darling (Media Lab researcher mentioned in the article) is talking about her robot ethics work Tuesday live streamed at 12:30 ET.
You Are Your Data, And you should demand the right to use it. – Slate
I propose a “right to use” our data, arguing that ownership and property rights framings don’t quite cut it. This follows on some of my thesis work on the Quantified Self communities interests in their data.
Every good story needs a hero. Back when I wrote The Search, that hero was Google – the book wasn’t about Google alone, but Google’s narrative worked to drive the entire story. As Sara and I work on If/Then, we’ve discovered one unlikely hero for ours: The lowly banner ad.
Now before you head for the exits with eyes a rollin’, allow me to explain. You may recall that If/Then is being written as an archaeology of the future. We’re identifying “artifacts” extant in today’s world that, one generation from now, will effect significant and lasting change on our society. Most of our artifacts are well-known to any student of today’s digital landscape, but all are still relatively early in their adoption curve: Google’s Glass, autonomous vehicles, or 3D printers, for example. Some are a bit more obscure, but nevertheless powerful – microfluidic chips (which may help bring about DNA-level medical breakthroughs) fall into this category. Few of these artifacts touch more than a million people directly so far, but it’s our argument that they will be part of more than a billion people’s lives thirty years from now.
Read MoreTwo 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:
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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 MoreThat 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.
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.
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