‘So, forget Jesus’

Do generoso Skull,nu

What Information Was, por David Weinberger

Post foda  do Ethan Zuckerman, que assistiu a palestra de David Weinberger e, generoso, escreveu um belo relato:

more about “What Information Was, por David Weinb…“, posted with vodpod

David starts with the provocative question, “How did we become the information age?” We’re moving out of that age and into a new one, one we haven’t named and don’t even understand yet. So we’re at a good point to reflect on this closing age and ask, “Why did information become the central metaphor?”

Despite the fact that we’ve reconsidered huge aspects of our culture in terms of information, we’re extremely bad at answering the question, “What is information?” Weinberger cites Ronald Day, who mentions that he’s discovered roughly 200 definitions of information. There’s a technical definition for the term, but that’s almost never what we mean.

Essa parte aí de baixo é muito foda, tem muito do conceito de filtro.

Information scales. Information allows corporations to grow to new sizes. But the secret of the information age is that information works by reducing the amount of information – you simplify individuals to the simple categories you decide are important. Information helped companies only because we made the decision to strip things down.

Uma contraposição foda!

Bits are about reducing distinctions to the simplest possible states – black or white, yes or no. They simplify. The web, by contrast, is a web of links. They agree, they amplify, they endorse, they denounce, they connect. Those links aren’t as simple as on and off – they build an enormously complex and intricate world, an abundance of rich, linguistic human intentions.

Nessa parte a parada começa a degringolar.

Descartes solved the mind-body problem, culminating a long tradition in western philosophy. He explains that we live in mental images, not just in the real world. It’s a lonely view of the world: each of us live by ourselves, in our own mental images of the world. In that space, communication has to be the act of communicating a worldview into another person’s heads. This is, “strictly speaking, a pathological, schizophrenic metaphysics.”

Weightless Economy, por Samuel Bowles

Não sabe quem é Samuel Bowles? Eu também não sabia, mas olha o que o Yochai Benkler acha do cara:

Yochai Benkler introduces Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute as his “intellectual hero” referencing his ability to apply a completely different set of intellectual tools to problems, switching tactics each decade.

Então, agora que voê já sabe que o cara é bolado, saiba que ele foi dar uma palestra e, para nossa sorte, o Ethan Zuckerman, outro maluco foda demais, estava na platéia e fez um relato da conversa.

The big idea behind Bowles’s recent research is that some of the fundamental laws of economics – notably Adam Smith’s invisible hand, may not work in the “weightless economy – the economy that can’t be weighed, fenced, or conveniently contracted for.” Rather than being based on material wealth, knowledge-based economies are based on embodied and relational wealth. In these economies, individual-posession based property rights are difficult to enforce, and socially harmful to enforce.

As Smith speculated in “The Wealth of Nations”, the property rights revolution contributed to the wealth of states. It emphasized unambiguous ownership of land and resources. But now the most important resources – information and ideas – are difficult to own, risky to pursue, and wasteful if not shared. Strong property rights might not be the best strategy for allocating resources in this environment.

Information, suggests Kenneth Arrow, is a fugitive resource. There are contradictions between private property and information acquisition and retention.

Ashton Kutcher e sua lucidez

O cara agora é um empresário. E dos bons. Duvida?

“Entertainment, really, is a dying industry,” says Kutcher. “We’re a balanced social-media studio, with revenue streams from multiple sources” — film, TV, and now digital. “For the brand stuff, we’re not replacing ad agencies but working with everyone to provide content and the monetization strategies to succeed on the Web.”

“If we in this industry don’t figure something out, we’re going to go the way of the music industry and be cannibalized by the Web,” says Kutcher. “It’s really a war to make money.”

“When I have a conversation with someone and they say, ‘I’m not worried about monetization yet,’ that scares the shit out of me”

“You cannibalize this business” — he waves at Hollywood — “a profit-positive business that trades at a decent multiple, and you’re just going to put people out of work. And these folks are counting on just figuring it out. And if they don’t, we’re fucked! That’s not okay.”

Sobre agências:

“For years, the ad business has been happy to have a completely ambiguous accounting system that they’ve been monetizing off,” he says, referring to Nielsen ratings. “Now that the Web offers a slightly more granular dollars-and-cents audience-acquisition metric — now they’re going to get completely granular about how they’re getting money?”

“Katalyst is a merger of three industries,” he goes on, settling into an unexpectedly credible argument. “A piece of us is connected to ad agencies. Because we get the complex overlay of the social Web, we know how to engage an audience and how to make entertainment for the social Web. And we know how to gain and activate and retain an audience. So we create social networks for brands.”

Marc Andreessen, sujeito que entende do riscado, explica o sucesso da empresa de Kutcher:

“Katalyst is way out on the leading edge in terms of thinking this stuff through,” he says. Katalyst steps into the gap left by ad agencies that gave up on the Web after the dotcom bust. “Banner ads aren’t going to cut it,” he says. “And media companies have not been creative or aggressive about making products designed for engagement marketing. Now that’s changing, giving brand advertisers a new way and reason to buy.”

Chester French e uma singela aula

Que do caralho! Nesse vídeo aí embaixo, o vocalista conta por 6 minutos sobre o aplicativo criado pela banda no salesforce.com.

more about “Chester French e uma singela aula“, posted with vodpod

Chester French is a rock band that has built an application on the Force.com platform. That’s compelling for the simple fact that when a rock and roll band develops its own application, you know that the market is seeing a far wider adoption than it has ever before.

Even more, it’s an important reminder of the advantage of building your own applications over complete reliance on a social network that does not give you access to the customer information that you have developed on the platform.

It’s a problem that doesn’t just plague rock bands. A hosted platform can be a bit of a trap. Often, you do not own the data. Application platforms may not be as open as we’d like but you own the information and it can be exported .You can’t say that much about Facebook, which is lacking as a business platform simply because you can’t export your own contact information.

Via RWW

Sobre o alfabeto nos dias de hoje

I think our alphabetic system of writing may be doomed. It doesn’t work well with realtime communication. That’s why people are forced to use all sorts of abbreviations and symbols – the alphabet’s just too damn slow. In the end, I bet we move back to a purely hieroglyphic system of writing, with the number of available symbols limited to what can fit onto a smartphone keypad. Honestly, I think that communicating effectively in realtime requires no more than 25 or 30 units of meaning.

Em tempos hypados, um bom autor é necessariamente um bom provocador. Juro que hoje não posto mais nada do Nick Carr.

“Even ‘free’ has a price”

Lá vou eu bajular o Nick Carr de novo.

Da mesma forma que o post aí de baixo tem as melhores linhas já escritas sobre o Google, o texto que originou esse post trata o conceito de “free” de uma forma muito foda e que eu ainda não tinha lido por aí. E ainda esbarra em um conflito de interesses bem interessante. O texto tem como ponto de partida uma experiência do Nick, que comprou um aparelho de Blue Ray que se conecta a internet e viu seus hábitos se transformarem. A TV foi deixada de lado, e o conteúdo que ele assistia na telinha ele agora busca na internet. E por um preço bem menor, quando não de graça.

The communal mode of TV viewing isn’t gone, but it’s becoming less common. As screens proliferate and shrink, and as the Web allows us to view whatever we want whenever we want, we spend more time watching video alone. That’s one funny thing about the Internet: it’s an extraordinarily rich communications system, but as an information and entertainment medium, it encourages private consumption. The pictures and sounds served up through our PCs, iPods and smart phones absorb us deeply but in isolation. Even when we’re together today, we’re often apart, peering into our own screens.

Television companies, desperate to protect their sources of revenue, are trying to figure out ways to control or at least influence the shifts in our viewing practices. If a transmission company like Comcast — although it owns a few cable stations, Comcast’s main business is providing cable TV, Internet and telephone service — were to own more of the programs it distributes, it could, at least theoretically, wield more power over how that content reaches viewers. In buying NBC Universal, for instance, Comcast would gain a stake in Hulu, which NBC owns with ABC and Fox. It could impose limits or even fees on the shows streamed through that popular Web site.

Such opportunities reveal the conflict of interest that’s built into the TV business. The companies that supply us with pay-TV subscriptions — not just cable operators like Comcast but telephone companies like AT&T and Verizon — also tend to be the ones that provide us with Internet service. By blocking or slowing certain Net transmissions, they could shunt us toward their own programming and prevent us from viewing alternatives, particularly free ones. If my Internet provider degraded my Netflix signal, I would almost certainly go back to watching more cable programs.

Como sempre, uma boa conclusão:

The smartest, most creative TV shows, from “Deadwood” to “Mad Men” to NBC’s own “30 Rock,” tend to be the most expensive to produce. They have large, talented casts, top-notch writers and directors, elaborate sets and generally high production values. If the changes in our viewing habits stanch the flow of money back to studios, producing those kinds of programs may no longer be possible. In their place, we’ll get more junk: dopey reality shows, cookie-cutter police dramas, inane gab fests. The vast wasteland will become even vaster.

Even “free” has a price.

Google, por Nick Carr

Na moral, esse maluco abusa do direito de ser foda.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Rollerblading math whizzes who launched Google, may not look like your average business tycoons, but they stand firmly in the tradition of the great American industrialists of the last century. They’ve brought the ethic of speed, automation, and efficiency—the ethic of Henry Ford’s factory—to the work of the mind. What is Google but a lightning-quick assembly line for knowledge? Before the two Stanford buddies invented their miraculous search engine, finding facts and other information was drudgery. You traipsed through the corridors of libraries. You pored over journals and magazines. You read books. Now research is a breeze. Three billion times a day we ask Google for advice, and 3 billion times a day Google replies with a neatly arranged list of suggestions. It takes about a second. How could we live without Google? The fact is, we couldn’t. In just a decade, the Internet search engine has become as deeply embedded in our personal lives and in society’s routines as the internal-combustion engine. But has Google made us any wiser? Probably not. As we zip between snippets of information online—click, click, click—what we sacrifice is the kind of deep thinking that comes only to the calm, attentive mind. Unlike old-fashioned libraries, the Googlized Web offers no quiet corners for rumination and reflection. An assembly line exists to be in motion. Page and Brin brought the Internet economy back to life after the dotcom disaster. Their intellectual legacy will likely be equally momentous, if less laudable.

Em um único parágrafo o maluco escreveu as melhores das muitas linhas que eu já li sobre o Google.

Vida longa para o Nick Carr.

Twitter e alguns dados

Texto do caralho escrito por Brian Solis. Muitos dados, e todos extremamente pertinentes para entender melhor o Twitter, em especial a queda no número de usuários, assunto de vários posts escritos por aí que eu não vou lincar aqui.

Many argue that experienced Twitter users are simply migrating to desktop and mobile applications to participate in the conversation stream. With the help of Dan Zarrella, we documented that upwards of 41% of all tweets were sourced from Twitter.com with TweetDeck and UberTwitter following with a paltry 6.6% and 4.4% respectively.

The problem isn’t publicity.

Every day, millions of people are introduced to Twitter through traditional media, online chatter, and business marketing campaigns. In July VMS, a media intelligence company that monitors news coverage on television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet, estimated that Twitter received $48 million of free media coverage in June 2009 alone. Online, Twitter received 2.73 billion impressions, with Television contributing to 57% of the PR value, newspapers 37%, and magazines 5%.

Malditos suecos

Muito foda!

Via