Monthly Archives: April 2010

Beyond the iPad

Posted on by
Reply

Doc Searls’ fantasy for the iPad involves interactivity with the everyday world:

“Take retailing for example. Let’s say you syndicate your shopping list, but only to trusted retailers, perhaps through a fourth party (one that works to carry out your intentions, rather than sellers’ — though it can help you engage with them). You go into Target and it gives you a map of the store, where the goods you want are, and what’s in stock, what’s not, and how to get what’s mising, if they’re in a position to help you with that. You can turn their promotions on or off, and you can choose, using your own personal terms of service, what data to share with them, what data not to, and conditions of that data’s use. Then you can go to Costco, the tire store, and the university library and do the same. I know it’s hard to imagine a world in which customers don’t have to belong to loyalty programs and submit to coercive and opaque terms of data use, but it will happen, and it has a much better chance of happening faster if customers are independent and have their own tools for engagement. Which are being built. Check out what Phil Windley says here about one approach.”

Stephen Fry on Steve Jobs and the iPad

Posted on by
Reply

Of all the early reviews of the iPad, this one by Stephen Fry soars above the rest for me. During his visit to Apple HQ, he gets time with Jonathan Ive and Steve Jobs. Fry is shameless and open in his love of all things Apple reminds me of the decision to buy my first Mac.

“We are human beings; our first responses to anything are dominated not by calculations but by feelings. What (Jonathan) Ive and his team understand is that if you have an object in your pocket or hand for hours every day, then your relationship with it is profound, human and emotional. Apple’s success has been founded on consumer products that address this side of us: their products make users smile as they reach forward to manipulate, touch, fondle, slide, tweak, pinch, prod and stroke.”

On Steve Jobs:

“For some, his personal magnetism is almost of a dangerous, Elmer Gantry kind.”

Jobs on Life and Career:

“I don’t think of my life as a career,” he says. “I do stuff. I respond to stuff. That’s not a career — it’s a life!”

Fry’s hand-on review of the iPad:

“It is possible that the public will not fall on the iPad, as I did, like lions on an antelope. Perhaps they will find the apps and the iBooks too expensive. Maybe they will wait for more fully featured later models. But for me, my iPad is like a gun lobbyist’s rifle: the only way you will take it from me is to prise it from my cold, dead hands.”

[via @jonzissou]

Religion and ego

Posted on by
Reply

Brian Hines finds it strange “that religiosity is so often associated with humility, selflessness, and lack of ego. Actually, the religious impulse is highly egotistical.”

How would religious belief be affected if it was known that our sensations of being connected with, of under the care of, a higher power were entirely contained within our own personal mind/brain?

The mystical and spiritual experiences would feel the same. But no longer would we believe that we were contacting a transcendent divinity. We couldn’t claim a special relationship with some supernatural being, because that “higher power” would be us.

An expanded us, to be sure. An us that encompassed normally untapped areas of the mind/brain. An us that wasn’t as split, searching, anxious, uncertain, and self-doubting as we are now.

This would eliminate a lot of unnecessary religious egotism. No one would be a member of a chosen people, or a special beloved of God. We’d all just be human beings, having human experiences, making the best use possible of our human psyches.

I’m grateful we live in a country where it’s still okay wonder and write about such things. And yet, any candidate fo higher office who dared make such a connection between religion and ego would be toast.

Principles for reporters & bloggers in a networked era

Posted on by
Reply
From Paul Bradshaw, Online Journalism Blog. Mr. Bradshaw’s post has lot of useful links that I did not include below.
  • To verify & contextualise what’s online
    • Because finding things to publish isn’t difficult – for anyone.
    • Because the voices that stand out online are those that dig behind the statistics, or give meaning behind the headlines.
    • Because curating context is as important as curating content.
  • To digitise what’s not online & make it findable
    • Because in a networked world, information that’s not online is, to all intents and purposes, for most people hidden.
    • Because journalists have always sought to bring hidden information to a wider audience – but in the networked era that’s no longer a one-way process. SEO, tagging, linking and social media marketing are just as important as publishing.
    • Because online, information has a life of its own: adaptable, aggregatable, mashable.
  • To empower communities & make connections between
    • Because the web is a tool as much as a channel.
    • Because journalists have always been generalists whose strength is in making connections between diverse areas – in the networked era that role is reinvented as a connector.
    • Because serving communities sometimes means looking out as much as looking in.