Ph34r th3 Riot and Women

"Pussy Riot aren't just on tour. They're on the run. When we meet in a secret location in central London, they make it clear that this interview is on condition of anonymity." Pussy Riot: "People fear us because we're feminists"

This is not a joke, not a game, it is deadly serious, and in many ways a "crime".

We should be 7 billion (and counting) working together to make a world for all, and lay the foundations for expanding off it.

Not be spending our time trying to put half or more on the bench.

Too young, too old, female, gay, colored, atheist, anarchist, 99%, lowlife, wasted youth or unemployed.
What ever the label, it serves to divide us, keep our minds in the mud of the past.

Just to put it into context, another piece by Penny red at the New Statesman; Emily Wilding Davison made the only choice she could bear

In old footage of the suffragettes, they look like a gang of angry bantams, flapping about in their outsized hats and ridiculous full skirts. The very word “suffragettes” sounds like the kind of fusty, village-hall girl band your auntie might sing in at weekends, rather than a revolutionary organisation whose members were prepared to die so that others might live free

This is the world we live in. Where everyday millions have to fight for what we took for granted. What should have been won generations ago, paid in blood and suffering, is still contested. Be it in the squares and mosques of Cairo, or on the sporting stage in Russia.

So why SHOULD you vote?

take a trip, down mystery lane

Large version

Or Diagon Alley at any rate. It certainly feels a bit like magic to use Street view at normal locations. But then they go and get something like this. From Warner Bros studios, so obviously they love the exposure. The details are amazing, guess you can really zoom in on the HD copy of the movies and read the book covers and more.

Make mistakes. All the time.

Quote and image from Chris Brogan this time around - on the willingness to be wrong;

"The amount of mental energy we expend by trying to be right all the time is a waste. I have come to learn that it’s a lot easier to be wrong from time to time, and that the process of being wrong can certainly speed up the finding of what it is that ends up being right."

[Be Willing to Be Wrong]

Part of a recurring theme here - failure is not a bad thing. Failure is bad if you don't use it for something. And it is better to "fail fast", than to drag your feet - or keep pouring resources onto sunk costs.

As long as you are open about it in the process as well; our best estimate is that.... based on what we can find today it .....

Decide how much time you have to make sure, then use your best judgement, launch, measure, change and do it again.

Don't go for perfect track records.
Go for always trying.
And always improving - if only by a little bit each time. It adds up.

Too good to fail?

Kicking off the week, and starting the autumn season with some thoughts on this piece by Seth on competence as a barrier to possibility. Basically considering that when we get good at something, we know how it is done and what the result should look like.

And just maybe because of that, it is easy to loose sight of the possibility of "creative mutation" or "successful failure"

Just like automation takes out the "handmade" feel in products?

Jaime Oliver used to say that he intentionally cut pieces at odd angles and assorted widths, just to retain that feeling of a personal touch. Smashing up the onions and the mushrooms a bit, so it looked like "real" pieces, rather than machine processed goods.

How easy is it to use an error as something to build on, rather than just something to be pruned out with out further consideration?

Chances are, if something is a bit off, it might trigger ideas that then lead to further changes and explorations.

But they could also just lead you on a tangent. So setting aside some time, rather than doing it every time is a good idea

Love the one you're with! For free.

Love the one you're with? Yes, it seems like a trite old love song. But is about trying to find the gold you have access to. Rather than dreaming of the Moon, you need to live on Earth a while longer.

Mitch did a short piece on motivation and work with a video talk by Dan Ariely included as extra bonus.

Mapping with lists

Cleaning out the gmail box as well, since all the old drafts and direct ideas are gone.

And what is more suitable then htan a post on getting ideas. The tools and the structures we can play with.

Story sketch - the forking election

Saw this tweet way way back, and RT'ed with the comment; there is a short story in that. 

@mwiik Thinking: In the future, candidates for president will advertise "fork me on github" #hacksociety

Not going to write out a full story, most likely, but wanted to get some ideas and hooks down here in case it feels right or triggers something else. Maybe something to pick up in time for NaNoWriMo, or just a fun fragment to look back at a while down the line.

title ideas

the forking election

one man, one fork

don't just vote, push

chars

bob - candidate 1, running for the incumbent party, wants to change it up, but unsure of how far his mandate will hold. Wants to use politico.code [PC] to explore the fringes.

harper - the upstart in the challenger party, pushing for a broader agenda. has a long stint as founder and tech lead behind him, before converting to politics. still dabbles in open source, to keep connected and credible. One of the first ten politicians to structure his platform on politico.code [PC] , and a strong supporter of the vote-platform auto integration

emma - current tech lead for voter engagement at the incumbents, has been an intern in one of harpers start ups, and also at [PC] before getting the current posting. Loves the tech chances the job offers, but unsure about the nuances in the politics of the party.

NN - political hacktivist, loves to challenge politicians on their lack of track record for voting along their stated platform.

scenes

bob office, emma and bob discuss areas suitable for wider testing on [PC] 

coffee shop - harper surfing blogs for ideas, new ad campaign, finds discussion with prominent political thinker X and NN, decides to "challenge" NN and his ilk in the campaign - "keep me honest"

(soundtrack; Count Basie, the kid from red bank, opening track on Complete Atomic Basie)

bob launches his [PC] effort just hours before harpers campaign kicks off, making it a feeding frenzy for talkshows, blogs and corridors

(soundtrack; Christina Aguillera, Fighter)

talk show - bob and harper face off, hangout style on boingboing - [PC] goes mainstream, signups skyrockets

challenger party first tier nominee hopefulls finds themselves sidelined, all the debates are about bob vs harper - with [PC]  taking center stage

the election sees record particiaption - both of "old school" voters who want their voice heard directly, and by the "new gen" of the [PC] involved activist coder voters

closing scenes, bob and harper watching the buzz as voting closes, blogs, feeds, dashboard from last minute [PC] suggestions

THE END 

Faster, bigger, better, MOOOOOOORE

Picking up the ideas from the last post on convergene and pace of change;
then again - like the brilliant The Pace of Modern Life shows, we have felt for a long time that the past was a lot simpler, the pace more bearable, the interactions more meaningful and deep.

Perhaps it is like Agent Smith implied in the Matrix, feeling a bit miserable and nostalgic is part of the core of the human spirit and our underlying "OS". We fill whatever time is available to the brim and then some, and then we look at change as something unnatural when it is the only constant.

Reboot?

Quick meta note; this should go out as post 26 for June, and 46 in total - making the first half of 2013 match the total for 2012 - meaning also that we are on good track to finish on par with the 06-08 run of around weekly post on average, at the very least.

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.

Music makes me take control

Bodum Pavina - double layer for extreme isolation and clear taste

Two things for inspiration and finding the flow - coffee and music;

The coffee has reached room temperature. The bitter bite reminds me that it is time to refill the cup again. Morning will not move forward without this action. Refilled I can once again type. Let the words pour forth with the hopeful goal of something worth keeping.

Like the post on toes in the grass, this one called Finding the Flow came up over the weekend, by another member of the rat pack of social and digital media - aka Media Hacks.

CC is clearly carving his own path, doing speaking and books, along with being a dedicated dad, rather than working for an agency. Pushing the podcasts every now and again, as another item in the content mix.

And that is part of the joy of reading his post, hearing his thoughts and reflecting on his questions.

He brings another view and vibe, kicking it up with the music, relaxing with a cup, and generally bringing a smile.

I've had a lot more fun with music over the last few months, after I (finally) got on the streaming bandwagon and subscribed to Wimp (similar to Spotify, Norwegian based rather than Swedish, paid only and more focus on blog and recommending music across genres, less cover bands)

Rather than having it as background while doing things, I've used it to explore new ideas and themes, and to have a jump back into years long gone - songs that played on the radio that never bought, artists that seemed strange at the time but grew into something more.

Not simply a tool to tune out and zone in, it has added a little bit at times when that was needed. And all for one less pint each month. While feeling sort of good that some of that money is being kicked forward.

Unnamed idea

"I know who I want to be. Do you? An important part of discovering / creating your own future is to find out, or plan, who you are going to become."

From the aptly named Untitled Essay - by the foul mouthed media hack extraordinare, Julian Smith. Currently making the world (or at least the US for now?) a bit of a saner place with Breather, basically a half way house between hangign in the nearest coffee shop and taking into an hotel for a full day.

It all seems so simple when people like Seth spell it out. Be the linchpin. Make the purple cow. Fly high towards the sun.

Yet it is hard enough that most people never do, try or imagine a reality like that.

Then there are books like the last manifesto in the Domino series. Flinch by Julien. Still free for Kindle thanks to generous sponsorships. And listed as "best books of 2013 so far" - despite coming out in december 2011....

Walk the talk, and those who can do - are perhaps trite, but in this case it fits. Julien took his own advice to heart, built a future he wanted and a service he felt improves the world a little bit every day.

Sure, Breather might fail, or it might be a tiny tiny niche even years down the line. But he stood up, faced the darkness, the voices inside and said; lets do this.

How large of a buffer do you need?
How many hours of planning, dreaming and doodling?
How many stories of "rags to riches" to make it better than playing the lottery?


Along with Pressfield, Flinch is on my re-read for summer list. And pushing content here five times a week on average is a step on the way to that end.


Then, come summers end?

...?

idea?
plan?
action?
ship?

Feels like clover

I read recently that the very simple act of walking barefoot on grass is a powerful and natural stress reliever.

Brogan post, via Pocket, The Business of Simple - and also testing a bit of typing with the touchfire, since it seems that the web version on blogger works passably well for basic use in chrome on the iPad. (Meaning I'll add in the links later, just doing placeholders and typing out the ideas for now)

With summer more or less in full effect the outdoors is an ongoing topic of interest for several blogs, this one resonated well with my own feeling of bliss sitting in the playground earlier as junior ran around enjoying life.

Walking barefoot in the sand or in high grass gives extra texture to life, reminding us of something more than just the digital grind and the laptop. It shifts around, it teases and touches us. Shifting but constant at the same time.

Looking in close at something so seemingly simple and uniform as sand is also a good way to appreciate complexity.

The myriad of small crystals that make up a simple handful is staggering.

A good way to test your digital camera, in terms of resolution, sharpness and stability. Get down there and discover the magic.

In a sense that is a benefit with the keyboard here as well, giving that little bit of tactile feedback during the typing, means that the speed is almost up to my normal typing on a smaller keyboard. With a bit of predictive type ahead, it works out reasonably well overall.

Minor gripe that I'm now typing unseen, behind the keyboard, had to do a double finger scroll to get back in screen, but still a lot better than any previous blogger iOS experience. Guess that says a lot about understanding mobile and tablet, and why Android is still filled with 3rd party "skins" on top and fragmentation like nobodies business. I mean, Samsung is releasing 3 tablets - using two differnt versions.

Snap your way around

There is no better way to change how you experience the place you live, than by getting out the camera - and going for a walk. And since I like a lot of others use my mobile as only camera, the first part is easy.

Stuck in time

The second part - the walking - might require a bit more effort. Hopefully summer will grace us with some suitable days, but if not - then a large umbrella and some boots will make the experience as memorable.

For some having a clear path is the best way to get to it. Personally I prefer the random stroll, letting the images build the story and the path.

Pick a place you often walk past. But stop there. Try to take ten snaps, at least five different subjects - right there. 

Then pick one of them as a theme for the next hour or so, and off you go.

Remember the "keeper ratio" - one in fifty might be the one to print and hang on the wall. Five can go on insta. Burn the others to a disc for eternity and beyond.

Post inspired by CC, namely the Wandering and Wondering;

Never forget that we don’t need a map to find our way. Yesterday, as I took my camera for a walk along the coast of Victoria, British Columbia I had no purpose beyond enjoying every minute of it.

Share a way, then I can find my way

[chris brogan] did a post called "Owners start with recipes";

I’ve made a mistake over and over again. I continue to believe that we don’t want recipes, that we don’t want leaders. But neither are true.

[...] If I don’t show you what I know, and if I don’t show you how to cook a “something,” you might not feel confident enough to first replicate that something, and then vary and create your own magical dish.

It feels so right when you read it like that.

Not everybody is an explorer.

We can't all make our own MVC javascript framework (or we shouldn't - but that's for another rant)

But at least some thing are better off with a bit of guidance.

I had played around with d3 a bit - but it was only with Scott Murray's brilliant book that I both sat down for some extended time - and got a lot of ideas for minor tweaks, and then put some into the wild, and got more ideas by seeing other projects. All because I knew I had the "basics" in hand should I need to reboot.

The book is both a contained entity, promising that you can get through it and on to your own playtime, and a natural progression - chapters and pages flow from the barest basics to fully working and useful examples

Also probably why business books will continue to sell well - there is always a need for some handholding, just getting a consistent story and a feeling of "overview".

Not to mention consulting. Having someone who tells you that "this is the way it is done in business A and market B" makes for a good starting point.

But for both books and consulting, the difference between wasted time and world class can be hard to spot - since it depends a lot on your own situation and level;

- how far along are you on your journey from reading the FAQ to writing it?

Some lines are there to cross, others to sharpen the image

The power of zero spend [src];

Rigidity is rarely your friend, but well understood boundaries make decision making a lot easier.

Two Seth quotes almost back to back, but they are from months apart initially. This also marks a push of the draft box into single digits. And that is a nice simile here - having pushed a lot of links partially out by lack of proper draft API, it was time to clean up the blog. Doing that by focusing on getting out at least 5 posts each week, and mainly by eliminating the backlog has made for a bit of extra structure and push.

Same goes for getting a project off the ground - set some (arbitrary) ground rules;

• we'll be testing 3 ideas at a time, but revise that to 2 if the differences are large enough during first runs
• each period will be more or less a week, so we have time to get data, make new ideas and run the numbers
• keep the numbers simple, and consistent - do initial comparison within each test, then combine and compare after 3-4 runs

SImple steps, but makes the difference between going all ad hoc, and being to rigid to flex out the time. 

Had a similar experience in terms of design constraints - a subcontractor just blew past the boxes that had been set up. But the end result was so much better, and inline with the actual goals (rather than the guides), that is will serve as a new template - at least for now.

Some boxes you play nice with, others you just rip apart, and use the shreds to pave a path forward.

But how do you figure out ahead of time which kind of box you are in?

i'm not young enough to know everything

- that's an Oscar Wilde quote taking the place of the title, having just heard it on Podcastle as I jumped off to get some thoughts in line here. Just realized the backlog and schedule was all out of content. But there are still a handfull of drafts to go - and then Pocket is filling up with good ideas and inspiration, so it looks like 2012 will be passed in terms of actual posts by the end of June.

Summer is a time of long afternoons stretching right into the night - half an hour to go for midnight, and still pretty light outside, a grey and rosy tint to the clouds. It is also a time for more reading of books on the Kindle in the sun, than skimming twitter and the web on an active screen like the ipad or laptop.

That might be why this quote is so suitable, from yet another Seth Godin post;

If you're upset that the hoi polloi are busy doing what you used to do, get better instead of getting angry.

Sure, you might feel entitled because you spent a lot of time (and perhaps a bit of effort) learning or getting access to things that were special - publishing a book, writing for a paper, designing visual or actual stuff - the list goes on. But now "everybody" can do it.

Doesn't mean they are going to be good at it.
Nor that they will be able to charge for it.

But it does mean that your nice little superior niche is busted wide open.
For some areas it means a lot more business - how many people make a living brewing coffee today?

For others it means a changing relation - being a wedding photographer amidst instagram and vine means you have to bring something more to the shoot, be it composition, scope or storytelling.

Just do it? Smarter, not harder.

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.

...and I'll be forced to tell you no lies

Picking up the thread from last post on "lies to children";

People mean well, especially friends and family, but they're going to give you bad advice. ... PS the irony of this post is not lost on me.

As often a great mind-bender from Seths blog - how he gives advice about people giving bad advice.

There is something so simple about it, how most advice is in a way bad, because we can only ever give advice based on our own understanding, and not the 'real' situation. Nor can we (most of the time) decipher and understand the drivers for someone else, really see where they want to go, who they want to be.

And thus, our advice is more or less a story about how we think the situation should be handled to reach the resolution that fits our narrative - not necessarily for ourselves, but our narrative of the current and future state of whomever we are talking to.

Does that mean we shouldn't give, or ask, advice?

Or just that when we decide what to do, advice and "seven ways of" or "top ten tips" should be a set of inputs to calibrate our path?

I'm certainly not telling...

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.