IdeaFestival

Napoleon and His Watch

Napoleon figures frequently in New Yorker ads, but, in the December 18th issue, he regained the big time that was once regularly his.  There, on the back cover, the famous conqueror is shown in youthful (and romantic) profile, as he campaigns in Italy in 1796.

The ad, however, proudly reads “Napoleon Bonaparte, from 1798, a client of  Breguet’s.” To make its point Breguet, a renowned French watch company, engages in anachronism: the ad shows  a multitask chronometer (four faces), far moved forward in time from Napoleon’s era. 

The only portrait in which Napoleon cozens up to a time piece is an 1812 portrait of the then emperor in his study, where a wall clock, just hanging off his left shoulder, reads 4:00 a.m., certainly suggestive that he was conscious of the importance of the passing hours.

With or without a Brequet time piece immediately accessible to him, Napoleon, as military strategist, knew that success in battle depended on both space and time. “Space we can recover, but time never,” he remarked in an oft quoted epigram.

Of course, as we moderns miss an airplane connection, we need no reminders from over the grave or from the rear cover of  the New Yorker that time can only be grasped once.

Ray Betts

Second Life: "v-business"

IBM strategist Irving Wladawsky-Berger describes his experiences with Second Life, suggesting that commerce, having largely accommodated itself to e-business, is now on the verge of v-business. BusinessWeek's Stephen Baker, who sent me to strategist's blog in the first place, suggests that IBM's push into virtual reality is far more than public relations. Virtualization is a method for prototyping partnerships that might work out the inevitable kinks in complex business relationships - before the hand shake.

Wayne   

Hugs and misses

What do the new Pew study on blogging and Mata Amritanandamayi, a woman who is estimated to have hugged 21 million people in the last 30 years, have in common? I think both seriously get the human drive to be known.

Wayne

"Screens"

The venerable New York Times announces Screens, a new blog covering online video - on whatever screen it may appear.

"Screens" will find, review and make sense of all those senseless new images: web video, viral video, user-driven video, custom interactive video, embedded video ads, web-based VOD, broadband television, diavlogs, vcasts, vlogs, video podcasts, mobisodes, webisodes, mashups and more.

Wayne

Blogging, we'll understand it later

The "I-was-wrong-about-blogging" confessional is required writing from serious people these days. And Reason columnist Matt Welch obliges, saying new media hype got the better of him at one time.

I take his point.

Fortunately for me, the really hairy stuff never made it from my head to pixel and print.

Like the printing press, books, radio and the television, blogs reflect the people behind them. Personal media is a tool with subtleties that I'm learning as I go along - and organizations ignore it at their peril - but the medium doesn't miraculously call forth previously hidden virtue.

Jim Griffin, according to Bruno Giussani, expresses a sentiment from Marshall McLuhan that also applies here:

'We never understand the media of our time. It's like the air we breath, we can't get the context for it. We can't perceive the field from within the field. We will only know our media through the rearview mirror', understand them through history.

Bearing that in mind, my current thinking is that hyperlinks don't subvert hierarchies, they expose them.

Which, for for a quietly competitive guy isn't all bad.

Hat tip: Arts&Letters Daily.

Wayne

Technorati Tags: blogging, virtue

Wealth of Networks: blog exchange

TED Blog references a seminar hosted by the group blog Crooked Timber on the Yochai Benkler book, Wealth of Networks. It looks very interesting, particularly since he replies directly to the analysis of his work from others.

Crooked Timber (use the link above) provides a snapshot of the exchange. Here is the .pdf.

Alas, it's on my reading list.

Wayne

Technorati Tags: cognition, creativity, epistemology, innovation, Yochai Benkler, social networks

When does data become literature?

In objecting to Kevin Kelly's dream of a modern day Alexandrian library freed from physical restraint, a technology-fueled learned utopia, a place for all "knowledge, past and present," Nicholas Carr asks a simple question: when do "snippets" become literature?

As he has done repeatedly, Carr also makes plain the gulf between a number of very smart people these days - between those with faith that technology, more than just changing us, can somehow makes us better, and those, like Carr, ever the skeptic, that do not.

What Kelly is really suggesting is that the process of literary synthesis - which might also be called the process of reading - can be mechanized and automated, made radically more efficient through the application of computer technology. It can be accelerated to net speed, as the mindlessness of the crowd replaces the mindfulness of the individual reader, as the cut-and-pasting of snippets replaces the slow accumulation of paragraphs, as search-fueled link-hopping replaces contemplation.

Replying in the comments section, Kelly disagrees that he's utopian and presents technology progressivism as enlarging choice, not grasping for human perfection.

Given our tendency to choose the bigger feature set I'm not persuaded that choice in this context is a virtue because, when it comes to data, we're gluttons. We may choose data, but literature in my view is a far different thing. It chooses us.

Wayne

Technorati: Kevin Kelly, Nicholas Carr, great literature, design, emergent

Hyperlinks don't subvert hierarchy, they expose it

Among people that think about the Web there is disagreement about whether a revolution has occurred. It's rooted in the belief among some that hyperlinks in general and web logs in particular signal something entirely new about the World, that something fundamental has changed -- and changed for the better.

Clay Shirky returns to this theme in his posting, Powerlaws: 2006 Dance Re-mix where he responds to a rather sentimental post from Doc Searls, another thinker about the digital community, who  wants to subvert blog hierarchies, the so-called A-list of web log writers who have reached a certain status. Searls:

I have this idea that the blogosphere is the one place in the world — or perhaps an entirely new world, or a part of a new world, created on the Net — where there is no need for class, for caste, for gates or keepers of anything.

Shirky rejected the notion of a classless Web in his 2003 essay Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality:

[P]ower law distributions tend to arise in social systems where many people express their preferences among many options.  We also know that as the number of options rise, the curve becomes more extreme. This is a counter-intuitive finding - most of us would expect a rising number of choices to flatten the curve, but in fact, increasing the size of the system increases the gap between the #1 spot and the median spot.

His take: "Freedom of choice makes stars inevitable." Asking whether it's fair or not is in some sense, beside the point. Physical laws just are. The only revolutionary choice is opting out of the system altogether.

I might have agreed with Searls in the recent past. Now, I've come around to the view that, at least when it comes to the material we (freely) consume, the digital world recreates the off-line reality -- if that reality could be mapped among competing suppliers and consumers of media. The digital media frontier is new and necessary -- media suppliers, which incidentally includes you and me, need to pay attention -- but it's not revolutionary in the sense that old value systems have been swept aside. Fair or not fair, hierarchies develop.

Hyperlinks, do however, expose our choices. More importantly, though, they expose our choices down the Long Tail, the portion of the power curve that trails off at much lower amplitude to near infinity. That space is now available to be explored, aggregated and, with skill, hard work and a break or two, capitalized.

Wayne

Technorati tags: Clay Shirky, Doc Searls, revolution, hierarchies, new media, power curves

 

Rocketboom goes long on video shorts

Heather Green at Blogspotting writes that Edward Andrew Baron, co-founder of Rocketboom, appears on the podcast Cutting Edge to talk about the video log. From the BusinessWeek promo:

Andrew Baron, co-founder of the Rocketboom video blog, chats about the state of advertising on video blogs, his company's deal with TiVo, and its decision to sell advertising through eBay. He also discusses the strength of short formats and his surprise at how quickly traditional media has jumped into video online.

Rocketboom is pioneering the business of video logging. Here's the link to the podcast.

Wayne

[update:] I'm getting my eyes examined checked fixed.

Scrolling democracy at Digg

MIT's Technology Review provides its take on Digg, the intelligent browsing service where registered users bookmark the news and rate the news bookmarked by others. The result is an egalitarian community of readers who praise or pan the day's headlines with their choices. Now non-registered users can get a peek at the action as it happens.

Digg has unveiled some radical improvements to Digg Spy, a page that shows a scrolling list of the stories people are digging (and dissing) in real time. When you go to Digg Spy, you are essentially watching democracy in action. You'll see the new pages just submitted to Digg, the pages people have just dugg or commented upon, and also the pages they've "buried" or removed from the queue due to irrelevance or duplication.

Digg Spy provides the raw intelligence for swarm intelligence or emergent behavior -- a high-level property of complex systems. A global search of Digg using the terms "Emergent" or "Swarm" woudn't provide much evidence, though, that participants are terribly impressed with their themselves.

The MIT article also includes a link to "Dynamics of Digg," which goes into a little more detail on the community and its participants.

Wayne

Technorati tag: Digg