In @AshleighGardner’s session about reading/social media/location I proposed that Foursquare comes up just short of perfect by not letting me check into content in a meaningful way. I can say I’m at Jimmie Simpson Park but how do I tell you I’m there on a bench reading the latest issue of The Believer? And how do I find where other readers of the same magazine, or even the same issue, settled down to read? Conversely, how do I know what’s being read in my vicinity? In the age of the ebook, how will anyone know that I’m reading frickin’ Pynchon?
When will the crowdsourced catalogue of LibraryThing be overlaid on the crowdsourced map of Foursquare?
@NicholeMcgill asked why anyone would do this. Took me a couple days to formulate an answer. It’s the same one I give to doubters of Foursquare and Twitter: wait until 3 of your friends are doing it then see how you feel.
Further thoughts from @RJWheaton in an old (*sigh*: they’re all old, these days) post from Datachondria.
Watching Olympics coverage at my in-laws’ while muddling through a cold. Observed through a mucusy haze a few things:
The provincialism of CTV is astonishing.
Vancouver’s weather is governed by capricious spirits.
I have no idea what I’m watching.
I’ve been obsessing lately about one of the principles espoused in The Brothers Heath’s excellent book Made To Stick: approximately, it’s that you’ll be heard best if you listen to yourself with the ears of your audience.
With extremely rare exception there are no sports announcers covering the 2010 games who are bearing this principle in mind.
Just now an announcer said, by way of “offering some perspective,” that mogul skiers move at up to “10 meters per second”. I have no idea what that speed means without picking up a calculator. So much for perspective.
What the announcers do talk about is whether so-and-so’s “program” was “technically challenging” and how “solid” their landing was while at no time speaking to the audience as if it’s the first time they’re seeing human beings do some of these things, which for many of us it undoubtedly is.
(Nature documentaries seem to understand this far better than presenters of sports. I guess because the participants are non-human it’s assumed that the audience needs some help making sense of what they’re seeing.)
Take the luge. For macabre reasons it’s in the spotlight these days. But does anyone understand how this sport works? Don’t most of us suspect it’s not really a sport at all, but a horizontal rebuttal to bungee jumping?
But we also know that we’re probably missing something. We know it’s bad to slow down. We know it’s hard to see what your heels are pointed at when you’re lying on your back. We’ve all tobogganned.
Among the things we don’t know is whether you can steer one of those little sleds. And it’s not clear how weight and height aid or hinder a competitor. We don’t know why some lugers come out of turns cleanly while others rattle against the sides of the track. How to tell when one is luging well or poorly is so elementary a thing that we almost fail to notice that it’s entirely obscure.
But wouldn’t it be cool if there were a channel (even if it’s just an alternative audio track on existing channels) that covered sports with commentary that informed the viewer of the principles at play? I’d seek out coverage of unfamiliar sports (cricket, anyone?) if the announcers told me how to watch what I’m watching.
How do the rifles in biathlon work differently from a conventional hunting rifle?
Why do mogul skiers all have those bands on their knees?
What the hell is going on in figure skating?
Why not let informed audience members contribute the audio track as a sort of real-time audio blog? Let fans recruit and train new fans. Feed curiosity and grow the sport. You can’t make an aficionado in an hour but you can convey an illusion of understanding, and that’s enough for us dilettantes.
I love that my non-twittering friends are now not only privy to my tweets (a dubious privilege, indeed) but able to respond at length without having to join Twitter themselves.
Not only this: they’re now able to converse with one another in the course of commenting. This is gold. When they said Buzz was like writing a message without a “To:” I wondered initially how that was different from Twitter or a Facebook update. I get it now.
With Buzz I can do what I thought I’d be able to do with Wave before I used it and got confused, frustrated, and finally bored.
I haven’t checked on my Wave account in months (has it been months?) but I’ve checked in on Buzz a dozen times already, not counting the emails (are they emails?) that alerted me via my Android phone that someone had commented on something in Buzz.
Of course I’ve checked in a bunch of times: it’s email. We all have email. Specifically, we all have Gmail.
If Wave has failed to take off it’s because it’s
in need of some enterprising gang (Basecamp, can you hear me?) to build a killer app on top of it so we don’t have to Wave in the raw and
requires another signup and the inconvenience that comes with migration.
By anchoring in Gmail, Buzz removes signup and migration pain in one step. And it’s got just enough functionality to make it interestingly messy, but not enough to overwhelm.
Buzz isn’t perfect right now but I won’t get into my quibbles with it because they’re boring, obvious, and probably already fixed and being tested as I write this. And I won’t say “this will fundamentally change email” because prognostications are just as boring as complaints.
But I will say that I think sharing stuff on the internet with my friends just became a little bit easier and therefore made the internet a little bit more fun.
That’s another problem — and I’ve heard about it so many, many times from Microsoft employees: Most every technology decision must be justified by some data point.
Google. Microsoft. Both have a data-driven cultures but one is functioning and one isn’t.
You could conclude from this that Google is destined for the same-fate as Microsoft — analysis paralysis. It is only a matter of time. But I am keen to see if Google can overcome this problem. Instead of having a bun fight with metrics, I wonder if improved data-flow within teams — that ambient awareness you get from twitter — can mitigate this outcome.
I’ve been living the startup life and have come to terms with no longer being able to “comp last year”. It’s a game of grow, grow, grow, where sheer volume and customer headcount matter only slightly less than fussy old concepts like margin, and rather than comp last year by 2%, you’re aiming to be 2 orders of magnitude bigger by next year because there is no last year, and even if there was it’d be a sure sign of trouble if you could use last year to tell very much about what’s going on now.
A year after starting this blog (and a month into my new job) I’ve resolved to roll up my sleeves and learn how to deal with data.
Also, when my boss asked me for figures including median and standard deviation I got sweaty palms and goobered up my company iPhone.
So I bought a book; my usual stress response when confronted with my own ignorance. It’s an O’Reilly (my first, I think) from their “Head First” series, which seems to be geared towards impractically-educated people such as myself who are thumbing through night school course catalogues but not quite convinced that this subject is worth the scheduling commitment or risking entanglement in group assignments.
I worked through the first chapter last night (it was good, but you really do need a pencil handy). If I knock off 2 chapters every week I’ll be done before March.
The New York Times is featuring a rather empty article about data in retail whose thrust is basically more data = more opportunity. Uh yeah. The trend I am seeing with retailers — and my visibility here is more limited than it used to be — is an analytics or CRM vendor sells a retailer a data package that is tailored just enough for the purchase to make sense to the company’s executive but the package isn’t tailored enough to yield any intelligence to make better decisions. The mid-level users that need the intel are left saying WTF? That is an old management pattern but seeing it happen hurts my insides because the opportunity is really amazing but is being fumbled so badly. Creating a data-driven culture has to start with the analysts. Hopefully they know what to ask for.
Your browsing history can be used to tell a lot of things about you. We are just beginning to see a raft of applications that leverage your history to provide a better web experience. One firefox add-on that I have just stumbled across is Wikipedia Diver 4.o. It tracks the research you have been doing on Wikipedia and gives you a granular info viz of your history. (http://thejit.org/)
Maud Newton references Richard Brody on the centrality of the director in Cahiers Du Cinema versus the centrality of the author in the Paris Review interviews of the same period.
Brody observes that “portable” recording devices (which weighed about nine pounds then) made these conversations possible, and wonders about the effect of technology on our “expectations for information and aesthetics” generally.
The expectations-for-information-and-aesthetics bit caught my attention. As we have said here before on Datachondria new forms of technology are linked to new forms of criticism. The supercut is only one such example. Now if only we could learn how to use these tools we would be laughing.
In this blog, I write about the world of online music discovery and recommendation. I look at the tools available to help people find music. I examine some of the issues that can make music recommendations go bad. I also write about things that I find generally interesting including programming, data visualization, playing games, and (of course) music.
At the first MESH conference, Chris Messina was enthusiastic about the future of the browser. Page, page, back button, address bar, page, bookmark, page. Surely we could do better? The shuffling paper metaphor needed to go.
Every since hearing Chris, I have been keen on seeing the browser evolve. In the embedded video, the folks at Adaptive Path put forward one possible iteration — the browser as data manipulator.
I’ve been living the startup life and have come to terms with no longer being able to “comp last year”. It’s a game of grow, grow, grow, where sheer volume and customer headcount matter only slightly less than fussy old concepts like margin, and rather than comp last year by 2%, you’re aiming to be 2 orders of magnitude bigger by next year because there is no last year, and even if there was it’d be a sure sign of trouble if you could use last year to tell very much about what’s going on now.
