Technology Archives - Page 23 of 144

How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet

“I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.”

Source: DNA/How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet

Still a good read from Douglas Adams (16 years later).

The Reddit Revolt and Social Silos

The sudden revolt has thrown one of the world’s most popular sites into chaos. It wasn’t immediately clear why Taylor, who joined the company in 2013, was fired. But the response by moderators was as swift as it was ruthless. Within hours, the moderators of /r/IAmA took the subreddit private, effectively shutting it down. That started a cascade of moderators shuttering dozens of subreddits—/r/askreddit, /r/todayilearned, and /r/pics among them—that is still growing, crippling a site with some 160 million users. Many more subreddits, including /r/science, have expressed solidarity with Taylor but remained open.

Source: Reddit Is Revolting | WIRED

Reddit is in a state of turmoil from the firing of a popular staffer as well as a continual breakdown of communication from company officers and subreddit moderators. Reddit itself functions primarily due to the hard work of popular and niche subreddit moderators who laboriously spend time curating and improving the experience of the “internet’s front page.”

What’s interesting to note here is that moderators from hundreds of subreddits are using this as an opportunity to voice their frustration with how the company supports and enables them to do what they do. There’s also ongoing questions and antagonism between community leaders and the company’s new CEO due to her attempts to limit harassing and defamatory posts by users.

Reddit’s distributed model lends itself to such rebellion. Similar things happened to Digg when it began its decline, which gave Reddit a boost of audience. There are cautionary tales of dozens of forums undergoing similar events and eventual departure of key users and members as well.

What does this mean for other social silos such as Facebook or the post-open Twitter or Google+? In my mind, one of the key benefits to the path that Facebook has taken with making key features into standalone services or apps (Messenger, Pages, Instagram, Whatsapp etc) or Twitter with Vine is that these social networks are now more insulated from being left behind due to a mass exit based on inner turmoil.

Much like NASCAR fans decrying the sports’ and associated tracks’ latest announcement asking for Confederate flags to be left at home and, passionate people who feel entitled due to a conception of buy-in can feel betrayed and threaten to leave. Social spaces on the web are built to fail, and companies have to both diversify and continue to attract a membership that is comfortable with evolution.

The problems with ebook subscription models

Way more people watch TV and movies and listen to music than read books or magazines. That’s why we’re starting to see that Netflix is Netflix, Spotify is Spotify, and ebook and magazine subscription sites are, well, something else.

Source: What Scribd’s growing pains mean for the future of digital content subscription models » Nieman Journalism Lab

You have to be careful of those romance novel readers.

I’ve been fascinated by the concepts of ebook monetization since self-publishing and ebook publishing became a bona fide option for mainstream publishers and authors. It’s one of the reasons I’m excited about what Merianna is doing with Harrelson Press and the ultimate direction we’ve mapped out there (more on that later).

However, it’s clear that a subscription type model from Scribd aren’t the best way forward. The ebook industry is a weird and complicated beast as companies from Google to Apple to Amazon have discovered in their various attempts to become the “Netflix” of this respective market.

Regardless, publishers are going to be the ones that have to change and adapt to make sense of this newish form of reading and producing/consuming content. We’ve seen how the music industry seemingly collapsed during the last decade when singles become the prime selling vehicle, replacing albums. Now, we’re seeing a period of consolidation by the major labels and partners such as Apple or Spotify to allow for the labels to make the most profits from agreements while artists are paid fractions of a cent per streamed play. That will change as artists figure out the game and we see more Taylor Swift’s pushing their weight around the industry.

I don’t think we’ll see a similar contraction / consolidation in the book publishing universe because the tools for making and consuming books are more democratized and the industry is ripe for disruption.

Going Indie

Amen.

And nah, one-person shows are still viable.

Daring Fireball: ‘The Big News Sites Still Rule’: “My take is that if you’re going to go indie, you need to stay lean and mean. You don’t have to stay as lean and mean as I have — I have no employees, and to date, no one else has ever written a word for Daring Fireball. In fact, a one-person show might be too lean to get off the ground today.”

Amazon Baby Food @meriannaneely

What do you say, Merianna? Baby Harrelson’s first baby food from Amazon? Have to get kids started young in their consumption silos!

You May Soon Be Able to Buy Amazon-branded Milk, Cereal and Baby Food | TIME: “The online retailer is planning to expand its private label lineup into groceries like milk, cereal, and baby food, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. The newspaper also reported that Amazon filed for trademark protection in early May for more than two dozen categories under its existing Elements brand including coffee, soup, pasta as well as household products like razor blades and cleaning products.”

Google Photos and the Price of Free

Google Photos

I’ve gone back and forth on the Google privacy debate over the years, but I’m really excited about them spinning out their Photos product into a standalone “app” that now basically undercuts Apple, Flickr, Microsoft etc and makes me very tempted to kill my expensive iCloud subscription that I keep for hosting photos…

Google Photos’ Unlimited Free Storage Could Clobber Apple’s Expensive iCloud | TechCrunch: “Google is often criticized for not ‘getting’ humans. But Photos ties together some its most powerful technologies so it doesn’t have to. Storage, editing, organization, and search all happen automatically. There’s no need for manually moving files, correcting colors, tagging subjects, or rifling through reams of pictures.”

Both my personal and work accounts are on Google Apps as well. I’m pretty much of the opinion now that Google software + Apple hardware = best prosumer experience possible.

Sapphire Apple Watch Screens Can Crack

Ouch…

Apple Watch sapphire screen cracked: Accidental drops can break screen | BGR: “My friend was actually more worried than I was that something might have happened, but I reassured him that everything would be fine, as this Watch model has a sapphire display that’s shockingly difficult to crack. Then I picked it up from the ground to show him that the sapphire screen has survived the drop unharmed.

Boy, was I in for a surprise.”

Handing Off Podcasts via Overcast

I was listening to a podcast on my iPhone via Overcast on the way home (my pregnant wife needed a milkshake at 9pm after all). I plugged in my headphones when I got home and was going to continue listening to the podcast on my phone as I usually do when I try to squeeze in a few minutes of work at night before bed on my main computer.

I’ve recently purchased a new Macbook Pro in the last week or so, and I’m still discovering things that I had heard of but hadn’t realized yet. Instead of going to my desktop to work on some logos with Illustrator, I decided to try out the Macbook since it runs Adobe apps just fine.

When I flipped it open (with my headphones on and still plugged in to the iPhone playing a podcast via Overcast), I was surprised to see this small item in the Dock:

Overcast and Main Window

I was surprised to see Overcast using Apple’s much touted but overlooked new “Handoff” component to its ecosystem (as part of a wider initiative known as Continuity).

While I try to avoid lock in to one physical or software system (I still use and love my large Windows desktop for heavy graphics work and I keep my Moto X plugged in and try to use it at least once a day but that’s dwindling), I keep finding myself pleased by things that Apple is getting right on the hardware front. Their software and approach to the “cloud” is still behind but with things like Continuity, it looks like they are getting better and better at that in the post-Jobs era.

Kudos to Marco Arment on Overcast. It’s a battery hungry app, but that’s because I use it so often on my iPhone. It’s a beautiful piece of software, and little surprises like being able to handoff podcasts between my phone or iPad to my Mac without skipping a beat is pretty magical. It’s the little things.

Card Cataloging and What Comes After Google

I was always in the 900’s as a kid and teenager…

000 – General works, Computer science and Information
100 – Philosophy and psychology
200 – Religion
300 – Social sciences
400 – Language
500 – Pure Science
600 – Technology
700 – Arts & recreation
800 – Literature
900 – History & geography

Then I got to Yale and they used the Library of Congress system and I was all sorts of messed up for a few months.

And now we have Google. Better?

In some ways yes, in some ways no. Cataloging knowledge has been a human pursuit since the beginnings of writing in Sumeria. I wonder if we will keep turning that over to the algorithms or if whatever some kid in a basement is working on now that will eventually replace Google will return us to human curated cataloging of knowledge?