Will the Real Issues Please Show Themselves?

This is hardly the first time the network news outlets have focused on irrelevant nonsense instead of things the American people ought to be caring about. It is also not the first time that creating smoke screen non-issues has been used for political advantage (Swift Boating).

I'm referring to the whole non-issue about a former pastor that presidential nominee Barack Obama had some association with in the past. The alleged problem? This pastor allegedly made strong statements during speeches that some might interpret as negative, racial, and perhaps anti-American. (Never mind that in our country, statements like this are protected, free speech).

Obama calmly reacted to this, basically saying "I have nothing to do with these statements, whatever they might be." But the media has not let go of it, trying to fan the fire. Have any of them ever bothered to show or play these speeches in context, or even analyze what these soundbites might actually be saying? Of course not. (All except one radio station, where it was clear this pastor was unhappy to have his soundbites taken out of context.)

Then the ABC Debate fiasco. Instead of helping us elect a president who can get our country out of a recession and deal with our Wars, ABC chose to treat it as a game show with inane questions like "Would you wear an American flag pin?" and more about this irrelevant pastor.

Here's a great parody of how the Lincoln Douglas debates might have been like today.

Seriously hoping whoever gets elected can bring us back to being a mature, intelligent country again. Reality TV shows are making us all stupid.

TED Talk: Purple Cows, and Being Remarkable To Those Who Care

Marketing expert and Author Seth Godin talks about the changing landscape of creative success. The old model was to spend millions on interrupting people with the message about your product, a product that is "safe" and appealing to the masses. The new model is to recognize that "the idea that spreads, wins" and that this idea must be remarkable ("easy to remark about"), different, not boring, and appealing to people who care ("otaku"). If you let these people work for you, you win.

(The R.I.A.A raises its hand.)

"But can't we sue them? I mean, come on. They're ruining our old business model, and this new one where we can bully them into paying up is pretty neat. And we save so much $$$ not paying artists--"

Seth Godin stands up, answering "Well you can, but you'll lose. People will either get their intangibles for free or they'll care enough to buy them, preferably from the source. And anyway, you're boring now."

"Aww man."

(R.I.A.A stands up, sulks, walks out as Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, and I escort him out, consolingly)

"There there, cartel. It'll be all right. Have you ever considered a new career? Prison management maybe? Or smoking ban enforcement? I hear that's big in Europe now."

(R.I.A.A smiles hopefully) Ohhh!

To be continued...

My Favorite SuperBowl 42 Ad

I've only been to a few Superbowl parties. The food & beverages & commercials are about the only thing interesting to me usually (although at this party, we also played Nintendo Wii® and Guitar Hero III too to liven things up.) This year, there were maybe two or three good commercials and this Coca Cola ad ("It's Mine!") with Thanksgiving Day parade balloons of Stewie (from Family Guy), Underdog, and Charlie Brown was the best, IMHO. Honorable mentions to the Tide To Go "My Talking Stain" and ETrade's talking baby ads.

Drums are the new Exercise Equipment Must-have

Scoot over, Nordic Track™. Step aside, Stair Master™. America's living rooms are tied of boring old exercise equipment taking up space, seldom used except on Sunday morning TV infomercials. Now there's Roland's V-Drum Lite HD-1 for that total upper AND lower body work-out combined with virtual rock-star training.

Lose weight while playing along to your favorite hits produced back when they used actual drummers. Tone those arms so that you can beat all your friends playing Rock Band™ on your PS3 & XBox. Or, if music is not your thing, use it as an avant-guarde techno sculpture center-piece.

Is Your Neighborhood Walkable?

Here's a neat website where you can find out whether your current neighborhood or one you're thinking of moving to is a good place for walking. Interestingly, my previous apartment in San Francisco is ranked 97. My current place is 91, which isn't bad for L.A. My parents house in Texas is a mere 27, because although the neighborhood itself is very lovely to walk around, there are no reachable businesses or restaurants nearby.

My Hero Larry Lessig on TED

A few years ago I had the pleasure of sitting next to him at a fund-raising dinner for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit group devoted to issues such as free speech, consumer rights, and excessive copyright law. Some books of his worth reading are "Free Culture", "The Future of Ideas," and "Code & Other Laws of Cyberspace."

Watch his TED speech here.

Personal Projector: Turn any flat surface into an Interface!

Wow. Nifty! Funky-looking control, but that's to enable the Vicon motion capture camera to do its magic. I can imagine a really high-powered one that lets you use the sides of buildings...

Facebook Applications & the Long Tail

For those of you not hip to these things, there is an Internet phenomenon known as Social Networks. They are basically automated personal website construction kits (like GeoCities was, back in the mid-90s) where your site is mostly limited to your "profile" template, combined with a list of your friends and tag clouds, which are a set of keywords (typically interests, music you like, etc.), which are then cross-indexed with those of your friends and everybody else.

Why, you might ask? Well, today's youth love to share everything about themselves. They don't care so much about privacy. And if you have a profile on such sites, you can search for like-minded people.

I became aware of this trend with Friendster. Friendster grew popular -- so popular that it's architecture was not strong enough to handle the load. Shortly thereafter, a new site arrived, mySpace, and people left Friendster in droves. mySpace is ugly, but it functioned well-enough that it absorbed much of Friendster's users and grew like wildfire. It added more stuff to do with your network.

And then it got bought by Robert Murdoch for half a billion dollars. Go figure. The younger brother of a smarter social network with health problems takes over the world. Then the prim and neat youngest brother could possibly do even better.

But not long after, Facebook arrived. It was lean and clean, and it was conservative about who was allowed to join it (invite-only), at first limited to college students. It began to offer MORE things to do with your network, but then it did something unusual -- it gave away the plans to its innards. Now anyone with some programming skill can develop his own "thing to do" on your network, to share with everyone on the system.

So over the last year or so, there have been thousands of applications developed.

Today I read an article about how 45 of these have more than 100,000 users; the rest have much less. 87% of the usage goes to just 84 of the applications! Considering that Facebook has an alleged valuation near $10 billion, I agree with the author that this ecosystem is "a Long-Tail with a vengeance."

Blog your Sketches

It was only a matter of time. First, blogs let you upload short text clips that folks can subscribe to. Then there were podcasts for audio and video. Now, there's sketchcasting, which basically combines those old playback animation tools (in Java or Flash) with YouTube videos.

Of course, this has been done the the hard way many times before, but now everyone can do it. It even lets you record live sound.

Adventures in Saturday Morning Kids Programming

Saturday Morning TV ain't what it used to be. Obviously, there was still commercialism aimed at kids back then. Boy, did I want Tobor: Robot Spelled Backwards, Big Trak, and an Atari ("Have you played Atari today?"). But if you're a girl today, here's what commercials you'll see during the "Kewlopolis" set of programs:

Barbie Fashion Fever Shopping Boutique Playset
(Shows a disembodied hand swiping credit cards over and over. "You never run out of money!" "Buy it!" "You can buy cool stuff!" "Buy It!")

Race To the Mall Set (Polly Pocket)
(An attempt to make Hot Wheels™ race tracks "cool" for girls)

Meanwhile, there's a show called Trolls. No, it's not a fantasy themed, Dungeon & Dragons show. There are these girl Trolls who complain about anything they don't perceive as cool (science, having to wear unfashionable clothes, etc) There are parent characters inflicting those things on them. Lots of "Whatever", "You're a loser", and other quotes you'll be glad to have your daughter imitating. The theme song is a generic processed pop female vocal singing "It's a cool thing. It's a hair thing. It's a big thing. Music, Fashion, Make-up." Huh. Very troll-like.

I kind of like Dance Dance Revolution, based on the exercising videogame. It's basically a dance contest show with a bias towards hip-hop. There's a "nerdy" host that self-effacing but likeable and can dance pretty well. The focus is on perfecting a skill, not on "being cool."

God, if I hear the word "cool" more than 5 times a minute again, I'm going to dress like a punk rocker.

Virtual Worlds On Your MySpace Page? Not Far Off...

The Web today is all about projecting your identity, connecting with your friends and strangers with similar interests, and sharing media with them. Tools have advanced to the point where it's trivial to upload and share photos, videos, text, animation and music to everyone and anyone. This is how we communicate today. Like songwriters have said for ages, we can say "I love you"* with a song (or electronic greeting card, or hilarious YouTube video). We don't even have to be its creator.

Now imagine what you could say by sharing a virtual world** with someone?

In recent months, toolkits have emerged that enable us ordinary people to build or customize 2-D and 3-D spaces and invite others to join in simultaneously. There's Multiverse, and now Metaplace, being developed by a San Diego company, Area, Inc.

The former is a downloadable (Windows-only) client that lets you load any virtual world out there made with it, and a free set of tools for setting up worlds to share. The latter (which to me is more interesting) is designed to be flexible enough to use web techniques (like RSS feeds, links, and good old cut 'n paste) to fit into web page-based applications like Myspace and Facebook. Here's a quote from their website:

Right now, there aren't enough good games, for example, and they all seem to be about elves in tights or soldiers in battle armor. Metaplace allows more diversity. Right now, there are lots of people who want to use virtual worlds for research, or education, or business, but it's just too darn hard to get one going. Now you can create a world in just a few minutes and start tailoring it to your needs. Basically, we wanted to democratize the process of making online spaces of all sorts.
...
We knew it was all coming together when one of our team made a game in a day and a half. And then stuck that game on a private MySpace profile. You can inherit someone else's world (if they let you) and use it as a starting point.

So get out there and start building worlds and sharing them with others.

_{* ... or typically "This is so funny!"
** ... or online game}

Behold! Customizable Animated Electronic Greeting Cards

Apparently, the online greeting card business is upwards of $80 million a year so far. There are gazillions of card sites these days. Most I've seen are not so much cards anymore, but animated or live action footage. More like "-grams" as in singing telegrams, candy-grams, etc.

The trend now is to allow user-customizable cut-out faces on prefabricated animations. The first one I saw is called Starring U from the JibJab brothers (who showed me in person. Whohoo!) But they are not alone, and probably not the first either! There is also the oddly-named Mushy Gushy site, which seems to have more prepackaged animations lined up already. The JibJab brothers are a lot more famous though, minor celebrities ever since their Flash-animated parody of Bush & Kerry singing "This Land is Your Land" hit the Net, seen by millions of people and landing them major TV talk shows.

May the best Terry Gilliam-esque cut-out face animated e-greeting card Web 2.0 website win!

The Bourne Ultimate Frisbee

My Israeli friend Danny from Sony and I saw The Bourne Ultimatum today.


Jason Bourne sends signals to a targeted journalist, in hopes of navigating him to safety outside the Waterloo train station.

Plotwise, this movie is about signals. The CIA sends signals to an "asset" (i.e. assassin) to hit targets. A CIA team searches for relevant signals that might reveal Bourne's location, be they cel phone messages, GPS coordinates of phones, trips taken, passports stamped, or visual clues from security video feeds. Meanwhile, Bourne sends false signals, even spoofing signals on behalf of CIA folks, using old passports, giving false meet-up locations, and doing his best to avoid sending overt signals of any sort. He also sends signals in specific languages, like when he calls the Spanish police as an obstacle against encroaching CIA gunmen.

Visually, this movie is about whiplash. Unsteady camera moves, insanely fast fighting choreography and editing, cars and motorbikes racing through skinny Moroccan and congested New York streets, all coming to rapid, neck-wrenching smashes against walls.

Well, neck-wrenching for everyone except Bourne, who had some pretty amazing training it seems. He can survive 10-story falls into water, 60+mph car crash impacts, cel phone-triggered explosives less than 10 feet away... Hell, he can even get a brand new mobile phone activated in minutes!

But overall, I thought the movie was tight -- most of the signals were clever, made sense, were well-motivated and didn't come from out of nowhere. In this surveillance world we live in, it's time we got used to having all our signals captured and potentially scrutinized (done East German Stasi-style gone high-tech). We need heroes like Bourne to remind us that fighting for privacy is a good thing, dammit!

"Stovepipes" and Culture

Global Province is a management consulting group with an enlightened viewpoint. In its Letters From the Global Prince section of its website, there are often eye-opening observations about the world around us. Here's a blurb about culture and the lack of communication between subgroups:

Stovepipes. We emphasize that culture is a mosaic, a quilt of widely different strands running through society. It’s not painting, or music, or spices, or a night at the opera, or rap—but all of these woven together and more. Today it’s inextricably global, for culture of any merit no longer respects borders.

It is a catalyst because of ‘stovepipes.’ ‘Stovepipes’ is consultese-shorthand that describes the structure of old-style companies where the different parts or departments don’t converse with each other very well. It’s an American Express where you may have to talk with 4 people—instead of one—when you want to find out about travel, or hospital insurance, or about the points on your credit card, because the company is so compartmentalized that the left hand does not know what the right is doing. It’s every telephone company where you are lucky to be able to talk to anyone (all the telecoms are very understaffed in customer operations, maintenance, and several other areas), and you may talk to as many as 5 people trying to discover your service options if you need to telephone Paris a great deal. The consulting firms themselves are full of stovepipes, and knowledge is not shared well between different practices.

That said, the ‘stovepipes’ that really matter in modern commerce are not those inside companies but those strewn through society and scattered about the world. Neurologists understand very little chemistry—an impediment to research advances. Boutique businesses have a primitive understanding of internet commerce—without which they cannot survive. The U.S. knows little about Indonesia, the world’s major Moslem country, and even less about the Bandas where Ms. Alwi grew up. The more complex the society, the more numerous its stovepipes.

Culture weaves together the world as it is, bringing together spices, the Bandas, cooking, New York, a host of media, and much more. It provides the neural circuitry along which ideas can move. Culture knocks down stovepipes, so that a society can become interactive.

The Ecstacy of Influence: A Plagiarism

I found this amazing essay about copying and creative works by Jonathan Lethem via BoingBoing. Make sure you read it all the way to the end.

In Theory, I'm Reading...

Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, Daniel Goleman

How we all (most of us) supposedly have a built-in Wifi-like system for dealing with the emotional state of other people.

Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter

Three gentlemen who, in their own ways (math, illustration, and music), dealt with abstract ideas such as self-referencing, loops, and self-creating systems (autopoesis).

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software, Scott Rosenberg

Imperical evidence as to why building software (a relatively immature Discipline) can be frought with frustration, even with some of the best engineers.

Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, Cory Doctorow

More cool science fiction short stories.

But in practice, I'm watching the HBO series Rome and the documentary, Scratch.

Google Gmail Marionettes!

Ahhh, Google. You keep impressing me. Now you have Geeks and Puppets coming together to demonstrate how the Gmail Email service can improve communications.

Previously, Gmail was invitation-only, but it has as of Valentine's Day, opened its doors to everyone. I highly recommend it over Yahoo! Mail Beta, a sluggish copy-cat. Although I have used Yahoo! Mail for years, the latest version is slowwwww and heavy if (like me) you have a decade worth of email. Gmail on the other hand, is nimble and has far better searching ability (it is Google, after all). I also like how its Chat client is built-in, unlike Yahoo which has a very heavy downloadable client with far too many features. Most of my friends are using Microsoft's MSN Messenger now (although the two are compatible) or Skype. A few are still using the ridiculous AOL AIM Instant Messenger. And fewer still are using the one that started them all, ICQ.

While we're on the subject, there are the Multi-IM clients, like the Mac-only Adium, the Open Source Miranda, and the popular Trillian.

All of these formerly smallish utilities are growing up to be mini-browsers; browsers are growing to become large applications. The eco-system on my desktop is getting a bit unruly! But I suppose that's the price to pay for a good competitive landscape. Otherwise, everything would be Microsoft.

Medieval Helpdesk Session

A monk learns how to use the new-fangled text storage technology, the "book" that is making his earlier parchment scroll obsolete.

From BoingBoing

Lessig's "The Withering of the Net" video

Fantastic-ly informative 39-minute lecture by Lawrence Lessig describing how it was Republican inititiatives back in 1984 that broke up AT&T's proprietary, exclusive control over the communications network up until then, enabling the Internet to grow to what it is today, and jump-starting the explosion of innovations in Consumer Electronics.

Intriguing Principles:

• The owner of the network does not have absolute control, meaning that layers can grow ontop of it
  
• The past does not get to dictate future innovators out of fear of competition.
  
• Device-makers are not liable for how users use their devices.
  
• Two spaces evolving, the Read-Only Internet, and the Read/Write Internet
  
• Apart from the "Berkeley-esque" reasoning that Read/Write Internet is better for democracy, Lessig provides the "Stanford-esque" reasoning that it will increase monetary growth exponentially larger than the Right-Only Internet.