The Power of Transparency

I’ve been meaning to post on this for a while now. In December, Chris Anderson, (editor in chief at WIRED magazine and author of The Long Tail, which I first mentioned here back in ’05) posted on what transparency in mass media might look like. One of the pithiest summaries of its application to the Web is

THEN: We control the site. Editors are gatekeepers.

NOW: We share control with readers. Editors catalyze and curate conversations that happen as much “out there” as on our own site.

Now, over at Collision Detection, Clive Thompson is throwing out a call to participate in an article he’s writing for WIRED. It’s about, and uses the form of, open, transparent journalism.

Add this to the forthcoming MIT/Wharton collaborative book, We Are Smarter Than Me
and you have, if not a movement, at least a very exciting set of experiments.

iHysteria

OK, I’d be the first to admit that the just-unveiled iPhone is pretty sexy; I was instantly struck by the smart phone technoporn of it all. Come on, though, the write-ups are a little over the top. what are they serving at MacWorld, Kool-Aid?

Interesting analysis of the business model from savvy Jack Schofield’s technology blog at The Guardian. It’s work reading the whole post, but the highlight when it comes to considering relationships between Apple and other service providers besides Cingular?

“In particular, some network providers aim to make money from selling high-priced music and movie downloads direct to their mobile phone users. It’s a safe bet that the iPhone (like the iPod) will be incompatible with those services, and iPhone users will get their content from Apple instead. (Update: the iPhone gets its music via a PC or Mac, not over the air.)

In other words, adopting the iPhone means a network is obliged to hand over to Apple some of its most profitable business opportunities. In doing that, it will also reinforce Apple’s monopoly of the copy-protected download market.”

Given how irritated many people are about Apple’s DRM with iPods, it will be interesting to see how this plays out….

Convergence Culture

Convergence Culture, by Henry Jenkins, is next on my list of books to read. According to his blog, it’s about the relationship between media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence” (More below)

Now, I haven’t read the book yet, but it sounds intuitively intriguing. Still, just today, I was thinking that we are becoming a very skillful culture at relational thinking, and at creating the kinds of technologies and tools that foster links, relations and so on (whether those are links between people, things, or concepts). And yet it feels like an astonishingly unoriginal time. I don’t mean just at the pop culture level of rehashed fashion, and copycat television. I mean, when was the last time you read a book, say, that felt like an actual bracingly original thought? As much as I’m looking forward to reading Convergence Culture, for instance, and as smart as it sounds, it’s a book whose thesis is about a new way of conceiving of relationships between things. What I wonder is, in spite of the benefits of all these cool collective tools, whether we’re losing something important along the way.

OK, here’s (some of) the rest of Jenkins’ description:

“By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted. Convergence is a word that manages to describe technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes, depending on who’s speaking and what they think they are talking about. In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms. Right now, convergence culture is getting defined top-down by decisions being made in corporate boardrooms and bottom-up by decisions made in teenagers’ bedrooms. It is shaped by the desires of media conglomerates to expand their empires across multiple platforms and by the desires of consumers to have the media they want where they want it, when they want it, and in the format they want….”

fun fun fun

David Pogue’s blog pointed out this site
You use the pen by holding down your mouse button and making a curvy line from top left to bottom right. Then click the PLAY icon!

Cold War Fun!

Via boingboing, here’s an interesting bit of social and technological history. Animator Ward Jenkins’ blog has scans of a 1962 Fall Out Shelter handbook. Interesting how there was a whole industry built up around consumer apps of emergency tools. I guess they had to wait until the Y2K scare to sell them again….

A New Look

Here’s a cool tool: Worldmapper creates maps that morph the relative sizes of the world’s countries according to various measures (eg, rates of HIV infection, tourist destination, numbers of passenger cars…) A great visual demonstration of international disparity. Surprising, too, how ugly a lot of the maps are…some parts bloated, others withered and skinny.

S.A.D songs say so much

My picks for seasonal affective music to accompany the long winter nights ahead:

The Awkward Stage, I Love You Hipster
Elliot Smith, Between The Bars
Candi Staton, You Don’t Have Very Far To Go
K-Os, Sunday Morning
The Streets, Stay Positive
Camera Obscura, Country Mile
Beck, Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime

Any you’d care to share?

Kid Koala

looking forward to the animated video for Kid Koala’s new album, Your Mom’s Favourite DJ. Here’s a trailer

ARGs

My piece on Alternate Reality Games and the new young adult novel/ARG “Cathy’s Book” is up at cbc.ca

I did shadow players at Toronto’s TorGame: Waking City for a bit, but really, it just gave me more of an appetite for playing ARGs. I wonder though, who has the time to play some of these games? They seem so complex.

Marky Mark

Quote by Marcus Aurelius for those bad, procrastinating days:

Begin – to begin is half the work, let half still remain; again begin this, and thou wilt have finished.