Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, a great post by Clay Shirky

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.


[...] This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

Update: See the Video



See also:
What Newspapers and Journalism Need Now: Experimentation, not Nostalgia

Location Based Publishing and Services

Geocoded content is transforming our Web. By adding geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude) to our media, we can help others find it through location-based search engines and web maps.

The tools for publishing geocoded media are more accessible and widespread than they've ever been, and we are finding all sorts of ways to put our content on the Map.

Paper: From a Distance: Mobile Phones as Live Broadcasting Devices

Live broadcasting using a mobile phone is one of the newest ways we are applying technology at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo, Japan. A mobile phone can provide live broadcasting capabilities for museum galleries, school classrooms, community centers and even fossil sites. With the right kind of equipment; namely, an audio/video port on the phone, this type of broadcasting can be simple to set up, dynamic and spontaneous. Common concerns regarding resolution quality and phone charge expense are not onerous, compared to other modes of information delivery. The image is good enough to allow people to communicate clearly. Also, communication charges are a pittance compared to the cost of transporting a lecturer to a venue. Phone broadcasting is an opportunity for interactive activity that allows different groups to defy spatial constraints. We provide details on several recent telecommunication experiences with links in Japan and abroad.

See also:
Kahaku Museum with QR Code
John Lennon Museum with QR Code

Community: Points as motivation

Make Social Networks Pay: Recast Ads

That means the ideal next generation of global mobile social assets will look something like YouTube + Facebook + Skype + PayPal, Morgan Stanley forecasts.

Zip Code Radius Search using MySQL

The death of serendipity

I think that the key challenge in entertainment in the near future will not be the delivery of enough of a content long tail to make on demand services work for people (critical for the burgeoning on demand TV services), nor the navigation systems that will help unite people with the stuff they already know that they like. But tools that reintroduce serendipity into our entertainment lives, tools that help us discover the stuff we never knew we were interested in.

I pretty much agree that the more personalized and targeted services we get (last.fm, amazon etc.), the more we long for serendipity. Humans probably need a good balance of both.

Earlier today, I had a similar thought: why would I want to hear something similar to Deixa*, if I really love this one song. I don't because I precisely love this 3 minute song for it's uniqueness.

* DEIXA (Baden Powell, Vinicius de Moraes)
Album: Vinicius & Odette Lara, Elenco, Brazil 1963

Hier der QR Code:



Danke an Oliver von Transformer Mobile

Zurzeit arbeiten wir gerade an einem "Location"-Projekt und dabei habe ich mich von der japanischen Sprache inspirieren lassen.

Die "Location"-Frage ist DOKO, d.h. Wo?

Die jeweiligen Seiten, die auf das DOKO, d.h. das Wo? eine Antwort geben, teilen sich immer in drei Bereiche auf. Diese könnten mittels Farbe (von Dunkel zu Hell?) abgestuft werden.

KOKO , d.h. Hier (Here)
Ort und wichtigste Informationen zum Ort

SOKO, d.h. Dort (There)
Orte in der Nähe, immer von KOKO aus gesehen.

ASOKO, d.h. Noch weiter entfernt (Over There)
Hier sehe ich den Footer mit Favoriten, Neuen Locations usw.

How to Fix Venture Capital by Umair Haque

That path is simple: true, durable radical innovation, backed up by something today's venture industry is missing in spades: a deeply felt sense of purpose; the courage, hunger, and commitment to stay the course.

Let's revisit the spectre haunting venture capital. Why aren't there more Googles?

The answer's very simple. Because every company that had the potential to be economically revolutionary over the last five years sold out long before it ever had the chance to revolutionize anything economically.

Think about that for a second. Every single one: Myspace, Skype, Last.fm, del.icio.us, Right Media, the works. All sold out to behemoths who are destroying, with Kafkaesque precision, every ounce of radical innovation within them.

Now, I agree with Fred. Equity capital markets are myopic, beancounterly, and soulless. But it’s not venture’s job to fix those problems. The real problem is internal: structural inertia and risk-aversion.

[...] There’s little turnover in the actual pool of venture investors or venture funds, especially relative to the pace of innovation. And, that, in turn, means that the venture industry is fast becoming an old boys club: one big boardroom mostly full of guys with the same perspectives, beliefs, and incentives.

And so what's happening isn't surprising. The dynamics of old boys clubs are almost deterministically predictable: they fight tooth and nail against risk, against the radical, against any kind of change to the status quo. They're great at "monetization" - cutting deals - but the last thing old boy's clubs are good at, unfortunately, is sticking up, come hell or high water, for innovation. From music, to publishing, to food, to autos, the outcome of locked-down boardrooms has been innovation stifled and suffocated.

See also:
We Need A New Path To Liquidity

Hier mein Vortrag anlässlich des Plakat & Media Kongress in Düsseldorf:
Innovation QR-Codes, Interaktion am Plakat wird messbar (15.6 MB, ppt)

Siehe auch:
Anmeldung via QR Code


※ Bilder: Jan Chipchase, JumpMobile, several from Flickr, Kaywa; Videos: Sevenload, YouTube

Mossblog

U.S. should stop calling slow DSL ‘broadband’
I recently spoke at a conference on Web video held at the Finnish embassy in Washington, and sponsored by Beet.TV. In this excerpt, I spoke about several obstacles to the web’s emergence as a replacement for standard TV, including the very slow bandwidth that is marketed as “broadband” in the United States.

Via Vowe.net

The Gamer Disposition

• They are bottom-line oriented.
• They understand the power of diversity.
• They thrive on change.
• They see learning as fun.
• They marinate on the “edge.”

Here Comes the P2P Economy