Altacircle

If you think of all of the types of civil dissent — marches, protests, sit-ins, occupies — this one is a new one for the mix.   Given the mess of a piece of legislation going through Congress, it is great to see the tech and internet industry mobilize a bit.

Self induced denial of service?

It is clearly effective since every major media outlet has picked up the story and generally put in on page 1, err, the homepage, err, the top of their feed.  Given how easy it is to contact your members of congress online, it isn’t surprising a change to Tumbler resulted in 80,000 calls to representatives.  Be interesting to see wikipedia’s response rates.

Of course as a reader of Cory Doctorow and supporter of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, it has to be said the issue is a complicated on.  Forcing DNS edits, allowing persecution of host sites and removing of links definitely seems like classic bad work in Congress.

And just at a time when the industry is making buying videos and magazines easy enough to provide real revenue and the ad industry is getting organized to turn the digital pennies everyone is complaining about into digital dollars that can support publishers as well as independent artists.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/technology/web-wide-protest-over-two-antipiracy-bills.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=global-home

Lifestreams.

I’ve just been reading an article in the WSJ about David Gelernter, a professor at Yale that published a book called “Mirror Worlds” in 1991.  In it he talks about lifecasting, which is effectively what happens when a series of objects are organized according to time.  As the article points out:

A lifestream is a way of organizing digital objects—photos, emails, documents, Web links, music—in a time-ordered series. A timeline, in essence, that extends into the past but also the future (with appointments, to-do lists, etc.). Facebook, with its “wall” constantly updated with postings by you and your friends, is a lifestream. Twitter’s feed is a lifestream. “Chatter,” developed by Salesforce.com for internal use by client companies, is a lifestream.

And this of course has implications for the future:

Web browsers will become stream browsers. Users will become comfortably accustomed to tracking and manipulating their digital objects as streams rather than as files in a file system.

There is no question being rid of the “file system” wouldn’t be a such a bad thing, but it will require people to give up on their property instinct. 

Think about music, although it developed through live music — ie “experiences” — it shifted to owning albums and CDs.  Music collections defined people.  Of course radio was available and what station you listened to also showed your style, the real focus was the collection.  The act of finding the music, buying it, listening to and sharing albums, and displaying it. 

With “personalized radio stations” and services like Spotify that focus shifts to curated playlists instead of collections.  Aside from the impact on music stores, it actually shifts how people think about ownership.  People are asked to revel in the demonstration of skill of putting together a great playlist of say 1920s early jazz, but there is no property there.  It is the shift from being an art collector to being an art curator.

Now of course being released of the burden of managing harddrives full of photos, documents and presentations would probably be welcome.  And if you take the concept to objects we all lease our cars, rent our houses and replace the random objects we lug around with us with temporary displays that demonstrate our personality at the moment. 

All nice but don’t we have 3,000 years of being taught the importance of property ownership?

So on Friday night, after 3 weeks+ of trial and error, research and failed attempts I finally was able to hack my Nook Color and turn it into a full Android tablet.  Thank you Barnes & Noble for making a beautifully designed piece of hardware and making your Nook Color software available as an Android app which is what makes it possible to go for a full overwrite of the tablet software rather than the alternatives.
What did I learn?

• The android development community is amazing.  There is a ton of threads, instruction and patches to work with.  In fact it was actually too much for mere mortals like myself with limited time.
• There is definitely room for a 7″ tablet in our lives.  Riding the train with all of the ipadders it is easy to see the popularity but if you are carrying a laptop, and a phone, an 11″ tablet is overkill.
• RSS feeds matter.  Barnes & Noble and Amazon have to understand there is SO much content out there they can’t expect to fully control the publishing process.

How did I make it work and be stable?
The answer wasn’t putting Android or CM7 on a bootable SD card, couldn’t get that stable and realized I wouldn’t want to boot into the Nook OS once I could get to my books and magazines.  It also wasn’t wasn’t doing a “Auto-Nooter” upgrade adding Android Market to the BN Nook Color OS since the Nook is being updated regularity.
The answer was to use the Cynogenmod 7 Build 177 version of Android and it is a reasonably recent build but not the latest nightly upload.  Then the last “signed” version of Google Apps (8/28).  Big thanks to XDADevelopers and this guide in particular.

Remember the AT&T “You Will” campaign from the 90s? 

It is the one that everyone got upset about because AT&T expected us to send faxes from the beach.

The ads also promised such radical things as getting directions from an in-car GPS, buying concert tickets from a cash machine, and tucking your baby in via video call.  Perhaps we need to recognize near future fiction can come true.  Whether or not AT&T is the company bringing it us is another question.  And then there is Tom Selleck.

AT&T 1993 “You Will” AdsTechnorati Tags: AT&T, Near Future Fiction, Advertising

This is a must read for MBA and VCs everywhere. Smart, humorous and insightful.  The cynical entrepreneurs take on the effects of VC funding — particularly the big money all entrepreneurs are supposed to dream of, is great.

And the fact that it takes place in parking lot of dead WalMart is even funnier.

Cory Doctorow
Other People’s Money
Cory Doctorow 10.15.07, 6:00 PM ET

Gretl’s stall in the dead WalMart off the I-5 in Pico Rivera was not the busiest spot in the place, but that was how she liked it. Time to think was critical to her brand of functional sculpture, and reflection was the scarcest commodity of all in 2027.

Which is why she was hoping that the venture capitalist would just leave her alone. He wasn’t a paying customer, he wasn’t a fellow artist–he wanted to buy her, and he was thirty years too late.

Original Forbes Article

Just listened to an interesting Guardian tech podcast about interactive fiction or online storytelling.

Wired editor Frank Rose has written a book called The Art of Immersion.  Whether it is classics like the way Lost built such a convoluted story that fans were driven online to discuss it, or how Mad Men fans built twitter characters like Betty Draper.  But both of these are extensions of a serial (or somewhat serial in the case of Lost) traditional series.

More interesting to me are the experiments that change the fundamental base story.  This means not taking a series online like The Spot (1995-97), but more stories that are part generated by an online community.  

Online Caroline (2000) – Early experiment using database-driven, templated responses to a video story.  Although the site is down, there is a lot of commentary still online.

Such Tweet Sorrow (2011) – Great British remake of Romeo & Juliet set in modern day UK, but told through twitter over about a month.  Because the characters are in a public forum, fans were able to riff off story lines and engage directly with the characters.

Frank – Art of Immersion

Not a bad video — albeit like a lot of corporate futures, more attention is put on the technology then the characterization.  And the music is diabolical.

A Day Made of Glass… Made possible by Corning.

I’ve been reading — or actually listening to — a lot of Cory Doctorow’s work on the train and two short stories just had me entranced.

The first is this one about a dystopian world where Google starts helping the NSA with search. Specifically search for terrorists.  In classic Cory Doctorow fashion is goes over the top on what the government would be interested in and find the ability to act on, but it does prove a point. 
More interesting is the idea that you could put someone under suspicion based on the ad that are served to their profile, rather then actually having access to the profile.  That is really funny.

Monday, September 17, 2007
Scroogled (by Cory Doctorow)

Cory Doctorow wrote this Creative Commons-licensed fiction story for Radar Online magazine.

“Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him.” –Cardinal Richelieu

“We don’t know enough about you.” –Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Greg landed at San Francisco International Airport at 8 p.m., but by the time he’d made it to the front of the customs line, it was after midnight. He’d emerged from first class, brown as a nut, unshaven, and loose-limbed after a month on the beach in Cabo (scuba diving three days a week, seducing French college girls the rest of the time). When he’d left the city a month before, he’d been a stoop-shouldered, potbellied wreck. Now he was a bronze god, drawing admiring glances from the stews at the front of the cabin.

Four hours later in the customs line, he’d slid from god back to man. His slight buzz had worn off, sweat ran down the crack of his ass, and his shoulders and neck were so tense his upper back felt like a tennis racket. The batteries on his iPod had long since died, leaving him with nothing to do except eavesdrop on the middle-age couple ahead of him.

“The marvels of modern technology,” said the woman, shrugging at a nearby sign: Immigration–Powered by Google.

“I thought that didn’t start until next month?” The man was alternately wearing and holding a large sombrero.

The U.S. government had spent $15 billion and hadn’t caught a single terrorist. Clearly, the public sector was not equipped to Do Search Right.

Googling at the border. Christ. Greg had vested out of Google six months before, cashing in his options and “taking some me time”–which turned out to be less rewarding than he’d expected. What he mostly did over the five months that followed was fix his friends’ PCs, watch daytime TV, and gain 10 pounds, which he blamed on being at home instead of in the Googleplex, with its well-appointed 24-hour gym.

He should have seen it coming, of course. The U.S. government had lavished $15 billion on a program to fingerprint and photograph visitors at the border, and hadn’t caught a single terrorist. Clearly, the public sector was not equipped to Do Search Right.
 More

I love our industry.  The trends, the repeating nature of the trends, and the constant repeating nature of how agencies react to the repeated trends.
To see Havas embrace social media and technology by hiring Coleen DeCourcy is great.  Every large agency should embrace social media and technology.
My question is the hyperbole of the quotes and the commentary.  Maybe I just need to stop reading ad rants!

http://www.adrants.com/2011/01/havas-jumps-on-social-media-bandwagon.php

Of their decision to acquire Socialistic, Havas Worldwide CEO David Jones said, “Our industry used to be just about having the best talent. It’s now about talent and technology. Socialistic combines one of the most brilliant digital talents in the world – Colleen DeCourcy – with cutting edge technology. I’m really looking forward to what this start-up will be able to deliver for our clients to keep them ahead of their competitors,”

And there you have it. The advertising industry will no longer worship the creative superstars who developed The Big Idea. No. The future stars of advertising will be the geeks. The technologists. The IT guy in the back room of the agency who used to watch porn all day long. Yes. The people we called when we had a virus on our computer or couldn’t get our laptop to connect to the agency’s WiFi will now be called upon to develop branded applications, iPhone apps, custom APIs.

It’s not Don Draper’s world anymore, people.

Technorati Tags:  Havas, Social

There is a lot of talk of Digital Media these days. 

Urban trend spotters call out the growth of iPads and smart phones and Minority Report outdoor displays that great you by name.  Newspaper owners and TV networks are in a panic about digital pennies replacing traditional ad dollars as their viewship numbers decline.  Parents are convinced their children are turning into twitchers because they spend so much time with their game controllers. 

All of this misses the point:  It isn’t about media, it is about culture.  Digital Culture replacing traditional ways of doing things. 

Once someone learns how to e-mail, Facebook and IM, we shouldn’t be surprised they don’t want a landline anymore.  It’s human nature not to like to wait, so why expect people to be happy waiting for the news or their comedy show, and as much fun as Monopoly really is, with The Sims you are really building something.

The point is there have been a number of books and articles written about Digital Culture and it is probably time we went back to them.  The Cluetrain Manifesto from 1999 to the Economist cover article quoting “Power at Last” to Microsoft’s recent campaign about “The New Busy.” 

It isn’t about marketing needing to have digital extensions or coming up with a new banner ad format — it is about understanding how our culture has picked up hacker culture, embraced it and that changes everything.