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Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail? One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans.
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LIFE: WHAT A CONCEPT! An Edge Special Event at Eastover Farm [8.27.07] Freeman Dyson, J. Craig Venter, George Church, Robert Shapiro, Dimitar Sasselov, Seth Lloyd
ReadWriteWeb on: 35 Ways to Stream Your Life
Josh Cantone, on Read Write Web has a run-down of a bunch of different ways to lifestream (link below). I don’t know about you, but I think that’s significant.
He also points to an earlier article (primer) by Rich McManus. It was reading some stuff by RIch about lifestyle aggregators that initially got me thinking of this and was a driving thought behind the stuff I did here at Nokia.
The great thing is that there is a large collection of ways folks are doing lifestreaming. With each one, we end up learning more about what works and doesn’t, increasing the chance of a big breakthrough (in the next 6 months?).
One other thing that Josh points out, is Jeremy Keith is one of the early explorers in this space. Interesting. I’d forgotten that.
Link: 35 Ways to Stream Your Life – ReadWriteWeb
It’s a pretty good bet that if you’re not making a Twitter or Facebook application, you’re probably making a lifestreaming application.
links for 2008-03-19
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Ah, this is one I will miss. [notified via Twitter]
links for 2008-03-18
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Every time a new and personalized insult!
links for 2008-03-16
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A toy whose job was to turn itself off.
Great essay by Kevin Kelly on Human Identity
Kevin Kelly has written a great essay on the current challenges to human identity, challenges from tech, society, and new knowledge.
I think this ties a lot into some previous comments I made related to emergence and the like.
Link: Kevin Kelly — The Technium:
A major theme of this present century will be the pursuit of our collective identity. We are on a search for who we are. What does it mean to be a human? Can there be more than one kind of human? In fact, what exactly is a human?
I posted the following comment:
A while back I had a thought about how things go from simple to complex, hopping to the next layer of complexity and then complexifying once more (the basic emergence thinking). It’s similar to SBJohnson’s Long Zoom and comments from Alex Wright on information architecture.
One thing that struck me was some sort of subservience to the network above – best exemplified by ants, who seemingly have subsumed their lives to the network at the hive-organism level.
Logically, I concluded that humans (who are clearly a network of individual cells who have subsumed their existence to the human-organism) must at some level subsume their existence to the network above them – society.
Sure we do that, sort of. But I get a feeling that current society is like the volvox to multi-cellular creatures. Or isn’t it?
And consequently, what _is_ the network next up that societies must be subsumed under?
But, in all this, I see what gives us humans the anxiety of identity is that we think we _must_ be individuals with free will. But as the network above us gets more complex (indeed mobile phones and the intarwebs are part of this) we refuse to turn ourselves into subsumed parts of a greater network. We try to have a global view or control of that network a layer up.
In summary, our identity was simply a construct as we solidified the strength of the organismal network. Now as we become ‘cells’ in the next network up, that network will force us to subsume our global views as we become parts in a network.
One more thing: Arthur C Clarke’s ‘Childhood’s End’ sort of is a story of humans stepping up into the next level and subsuming their identity.
links for 2008-03-15
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“Brik•O•Lodge is a coworking (link to: http://coworking.pbwiki.com/) space in Miami (location TBD) where the experience is designed to be social, creative and welcoming. It’s a café-like atmosphere combined with the collaboration and community of a
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Ecological Research on the Ancient Bristlecone Pines
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A clock that ticks off 84 years
Thoughts on the Journey of Mankind
A Long Now post pointed to a cool animation showing the migration of humans over the past 160,000 years, since modern humans arose in Africa.
There’s a lot the gets me thinking when I read about ancient human history, such as what was life like, or what did the world look, smell, and sound like.
The post references an event that made my head spin when I found out about it long ago – a massive volcano eruption that caused a 6 year extended winter and left an estimated 10,000 humans alive. That’s one heck of a bottleneck.
In ‘Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan suggested that our myths and fears of reptiles might be some genetic memory of the age of dinosaurs (there were only teeny mammals back then). But, that has always made me wonder what deep ingrained memory we might have from events 10-, 20-, or 100-thousand years ago. Might we have some sort of recollection of this massive volcano eruption, some memory encoded in our culture, way of living, or language?
And looking at this animation, I was reminded how much of the human population was along the coastlines. Yeah, I read that many time before, but seeing it in an animation made the point stick.
All this beach-combing reminded me of one of the many questions I have been carrying unanswered: ‘Why are children so in love with water – pools and beaches?’. Might the extreme psychic draw to play in water that children exhibit be to learn some sort of critical survival skill for a coastal species?
links for 2008-03-13
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[Great story] “That the boys can achieve in racing what they can no longer accomplish in most other sports is due to the efforts and empathy of an F1 general manager suffering brain tumors that robbed her of her own ability to walk unaided.”
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Geez these politicians run on a lotta donuts!
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[Via Carnival of Mobilists] “Headed up by Andrea Trasatti, of WURFL fame, Device Atlas is aiming to be “the world’s most comprehensive database of mobile device information” as well as the most accurate.”
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Oliver can’t say much, but what he can say is the amazing roster of people from Nokia and outside Nokia who are locked in a room for two days discussing the future of mobile devices.
links for 2008-03-11
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[Sure to be fun] “GoMo kicks off the week Sunday night March 30th at the famous Hard Rock Cafe with the GoMo News Blender. Our guests will be invited to a tour of the first mobile multimedia broadcast studio at CTIA inside a vintage Airstream. A bit of Am
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“The new feature is an activity stream of recent activities by all users on various social networks – blog posts, new photos, bookmarks on Delicious, Facebook updates, Twitter updates, etc.”