Fragment my convergence

Mobile and digital is making everything possible, and breaking down boundaries between products, services and utility. And it is happening at speed.

This is not about media convergence. It's about something bigger. Things change. Things change so fast that sometimes, it's hard to see it. We tend to think about our businesses and our lives in terms of keeping up with change.

The New Convergence by Mitch Joel, ends on the question: what do you think?

I think it will go to pieces for a while

In that the world we've had for a few years now, with Google and Facebook dominating the web, and Apple driving mobile and apps forward is changing into a plethora of markets, devices, ideas and changes.

Kickstarter is one force driving that forward. Products like the Pebble e-paper watch sold for $10 million unseen, untested and with out reviews. It could have sucked. But it still got made and changed how a watch and a remote and a sensor display is viewed.

Sure it has a lot of potential for improvement, but compare the Newton to the iPad and add in innovation at a digital pace - and five or ten years down the road you might be able to "drag" any app from your main device onto one or more support devices, to show the data you need right now just right.

Platforms like Arduino and the Raspberry Pi are making the "somewhat smart" gadget even more affordable and providing a huge step up to total diy. We put up a Pi showing 3 twitter feeds on a dedicated screen, at a fraction of the cost of a whole laptop, and also a lot cheaper than trying to get a  better gpu. Because it was disposable, we might as well give it a shot.

Mobile is back in the trenches, Android gaining ground as the smart phones move into mass market and lower income brackets, and as the top of the line models outstrip the 5 for power, style and innovation. Microsoft still pushing, with some Nokia steam. Blackberry not so much in Europe, but die hards in the US pushing pushing. And Samsung? Making everything from TV to fridge, and a lot in between. Will they make a substantial move, or continue to play the horses?

And startups? With Amazon, Google, Microsoft and more pushing the cloud solutions onwards, upwards and all over every day, the barriers to entry are mostly about attention.

So, change is here.

It will be here for a long time.
It might not get faster - at least not on the same scale as the last two decades,
but it will certainly be stranger.

Urgency is a state of mind

Of course you need to click and get all of it from Seth Godin: Urgent, please read asap

That's what gets done, of course. The urgent. [...] The problem, of course, is that the queue of urgent never ends, it merely changes its volume as it gets longer.

Stay the path

Back? Yes, you need to finish up here, then on to the next post or the next feed. Then that other app. And then newspaper. Quickly back to the inbox, skim a few more messages.

Fire off a reply, forward another message and push the third into the todo folder. Not the urgent folder, or the current project. Just the todo. For those days that never come.

The daily uploads to YouTube are probably more minutes of video than you will watch. Same for the snaps on insta. Not to mention the number of newspapers and tv channels around the world.

There is no way you can see, read, understand or watch it all. FIlters and priority is a fact of life. No one is going to celebrate if you give it the extra 5%. They will just assume you have yet another 5% and continue to push things your way.

Me? 

I turned off my work email on the iPad since that is my main device for consuming news and secondary for books. Set up auto away mode on the phone, and if I'm off for more than a weekend I'll turn off push notifications on the phone as well. Made 8 subfolders under to do, all for storing ideas and links that might be useful, depending on which project actually has priority at any given time.


How are you swimming in the currents, playing with the flow and surfing the expectations?
#urgenttodo

-...and the sun will shine, and the rain will fall, and we'll be here, through it all ...

taxi, taxi driver - drive me a story tonight

The result - a "moving" piece

Sometimes the simplest question begets the most amazing results. And this interactive represents one of those cases.

The background (as retold to / on Source) was simple enough, but represents a novel twist on the "and why should I care" conundrum;

My goal was to give the reader the experience of being down $120 and needing to earn that money back

How do you do that? Well, step by step is a nice starting point - and having a "running" meter beneth the map is a great way to connect the real world taxi with the visuals in the story

     var line = new Polyline();
        requestAnimationFrame(function() {
          var point = getNextPoint();
          line.addPoint(point);
        });

And here-in lies the beauty of the simple done good enough:

Speaking of judgment: this code is super duper non-optimized. It could be several orders of magnitude faster by throwing in some clever tricks and caches. But the fact is it works, and it works across platforms. That’s the most important requirement you face in a newsroom!

Everything could be made better, re-factored  generalized. But often times having that luxury would take time away from the functionality at hand. Just like a piece of journalism generally reads differently from a novel, and a studio produced movie looks better than a snap of a goal in a football match. Given the right time and resources everything can be polished, but often good is good enough. And something new every day is even better.

[src, via Source]

Give me an L, an O, N

Map of the Week: London Typographica showcases crowdsourced images of lettering and typefaces around London. It uses styled maps to both provide a clean background to display their markers and to allow people to navigate to areas they may want to explore.

[src]

via Google Geo Developers Blog - love the concept, and the execution of the map itself. Also a big up for having made an app for gathering the images directly with geocoding included. They have even made two different styles for the map, overriding the default google zoom detail levels.

What i miss as a user is some sort of guidance - a path or five through all the images.

• How do I find all the A's?
• Where are all the serifs? 
• The block fonts? 
• The signs rather than the street art?

Apparently, there is something in the works - or at least the idea is there - one image had this;

Tags: lettering, caps

So, I'll check back in another couple of months (GGDB post from Dec-12), and keep playing with my little statue location info app.

Inspiration makes the future something worth waiting for

"...and you’re off to the manufactured normalcy races, where nobody wins because everyone goes to fucking sleep."

  W. Ellis 

Quote from a keynote he did in September 2012. So we are already in the future, looking back and forward again. Would have loved to seen it as a video, but well worth reading in full.

The main takeaway (for me) is about how we need ideas to push us to make reality. Slapping a Hello Kitty case on a phone isn't innovation. But making a phone so slimmed down it almost NEEDS a case to protect it is.

It is the wild ideas and visions from art, books, movies that push us to try to make a different tomorrow.

Kevin Kelly touched upon a similar vibe in the 20 years celebration issue of Wired, it is about spreading ideas and opportunity out globally, at scale. Change the world one byte at a time. And if you can envision a better tomorrow, then somebody else is probably impatient enough to try to make it next week rather than next year.

The same idea was a foundation for the Ridley Scott show "Prophets of Science Ficiton" on Science, covering greats like Jules Verne, Asimov, Heinlein, Clark. How reading their books prompted a lot of people to not only study science, but try to make it a reality. And preferably before someone else did it. Not enough to get to the Moon, it has to be first, fastest, longest.


Because, if we settle for JUST pushing the button 3px to the left, we risk loosing that drive, the competition and the dream of a new tomorrow.

I love to hate my blogger

Well this was strange, and crappy.

What is that? An official blogger app for iOS. Updated May 6th 2013. Yay for list and status. Yay for edit. Nay for only bold/italic choices for formatting. Nay for no visible way of linking or editing existing links.

Considering that the web version doesn't work at all with chrome for iPad, I guess it is a small step up -  but compared to the Wordpress app it is scary bad. Proof that blogger isn't something google sees much value in, and that they have a hard time getting something decent together for tablets in general and iOS in particular.

Which like Reader seems strange to me, considering that they want to organize the worlds information, having it first hand would seem like a good choice? But I guess they crawl a lot better than they do UX, and probably more efficient all around.


But onto the quote and link for the post proper - another archived draft, this one from right after New Years, and related to dieting:

Controlling what you eat is an interesting challenge, but not nearly as important as controlling how you think.

[src] via Seth's Blog

Reading bit by bit "this will make you smarter", a collection of short essays as answers, each about two full screens in the kindle app.

Quotes would go here.... On something more suited that a google product... Stay tuned (and yay for crappy html as well - total fail) 

I am my mind;

If you lead an organization, or have the sort of job that demands that you think about the world, these tools are like magic hammers. They will help you, now and through life, to see the world better, and to see your own biases more accurately.

[location 583]

Bias is one of the points brought forth, which ties into my other non-fic reading at the moment; Dan Ariely and a bundle of all three books. Considered jumping onto his Coursera offering, but the time just wasn't there, but finally reading all three books back to back is a good treat non the less.

Bias is the thumb that experience puts on the scale [ibid 1227]

Biases are there, we are wired into thinking some ways - but it is in part predictable, so we can, should, work with it. Not letting it go unnoticed in the autopilot lane, but taking a few minutes to reflect on why and how we assumed. Doesn't have to be a complete written expose, but checking yourself makes a lot of sense.

There is no absolute truth, since quantum states as we understand them contain probabilities all over the place. But also at a higher level, it is often more about storytelling than actual impact or 'fact'. A "causation web" rather than a pure and simple trigger for some thing, and then we try to influence various aspects of the web - based on what "makes sense" in our story, our reference frame.

Why do more than 40 percent of Americans think the universe began after the domestication of the dog? [ibid, 860]

Because it makes it easier overall? Religion puts things into place, makes for an overall narrative and guidelines that make a lot of sense.

Be nice, you will be rewarded, there is a Truth out there.

Does the timeline matter in the day to day life? Does it change how you would look at gas prices and environment? Taking something for granted or realizing that it is a (rather) finite resource built up over thousands of years, not likely to be around in the time of our grandkids?

But but but...

Think happy thoughts, it is a simple saying but a profound impact. How does it relate to bias? Is it the same thing, that we shape our world by our understanding and stories of it?

No, you can't heal yourself solely with (Jedi) mind tricks, but in a lot of situations your view impacts the process and the result in terms if how it makes you feel.

Energized or worn down.

Impossible or stretch.

 Same thing or not?

...and the sun washed out any hope of getting further for now - just as i realized that i've passed 500 published posts. it all adds up. given time, same as this post, third time the charm and out it goes on schedule in the morning...