Googimal Farm
Posted on | August 6, 2010 | No Comments
If you have born witness to the the relative positions of Apple and Google with regards to the open-ness of their respective mobile platforms (or any information platforms, for that matter), or read my personal thoughts on open vs. closed, you may be interested then, by Eric Schmidt’s recent comments on the state of personal identities manifest on the internet at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe:
“The only way to manage this is true transparency and no anonymity. In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it.”
If you blinked, you might have missed the implication that Google sees the entire internet becoming in essence a “closed platform” where online profiles, software, essentially everything is “signed” in such a way that it can be traced back to an actual human being. You may remember the term “signed” from such mobile platforms as Apple’s iOS, frequently criticized by Google and tech-heads the world around for it’s authenticated and closed platform.
One can debate the definition of the term “transparent” in this context – and Apple’s eco system certainly isn’t (then again neither are Google’s advertising or artificial intelligence algorythms) – but it certainly appears that Schmidt is conceding predicting that the route Apple has taken with its iSystem is the route that the entire internet will follow in years to come. To my thinking Google would like to see its gAccounts become the de-facto internet passport, much as an AppleID is the passport to media and iDevices.
Google also tossed its lot in with Verizon this week in an effort that, if satisfied, will drastically change the way information has been transferred around the internet since we conjured it back in the 90s. By cutting a deal that would give Google’s internet traffic priority over other internet traffic delivered through Verizon’s pipes, Google is advocating diminished opportunity for would be web-startups and entrepreneurs. If Google was an infant-startup in the year 2010, their own opportunities would be stifled by what Google the 2010 megalith is currently trying to achieve.
Computer scientists and thinkers have said for years that the rise of an authenticated internet was inevitable, and I don’t have a problem with that. In it, as with everything, things are lost and things are gained.
Since its rise, Google has excelled at two things since their rise: Effective web searches and advertising (they also do some other things well, but mostly things they’ve purchased from other companies). The later can be defined many ways, but it is essentially an art of manipulation, sometimes deceitful, sometimes not. I’m not here to pass judgement, but only to observe that it now seems that Google’s success with the latter is far greater than their well-honed ability to provide smart search results.
Google: Don’t Be Evil
Google: All websites are created equal, but some are more equal than others.
Jailbreaks and iHeartaches
Posted on | July 29, 2010 | No Comments
The internet is abuzz this week with the U.S. Copyright Office’s ruling that consumers in the United States have the legal right to over-ride software that ships on their mobile devices, this to the objection of many manufacturers including Apple. While much has been said about the ruling, I’ve read very little in the way of actual implications – what will actually change as a result of this ruling?
As a tinkerer of the highest-order, I applaud assertion of this right (though I completely fail to understand how the same office would defend a corporation’s right to patent the workings of a biological process that has been occurring in my body since birth – my legal right to fiddle with the functionality of a technology product I purchase has been reaffirmed, but not necessarily the right to tinker with organic creations of my own body – but I digress). That said, I think the actual real-world implications for most iPhone owners are next-to-none.
Despite a bit of lip-service to the contrary, Apple doesn’t really care about jail-breaking. The iPhone has been on the market going for four years, and curious users have been hacking it the entire time. The implication isn’t that Apple is capable of completely preventing hacks and has chosen not to – there is no such thing as a completely un-hackable technology product – but the simple reality is that it is probably easier to jailbreak an iPhone in 2010 than it is to install Windows 7 on the average PC. It’s just not that hard. Say what you will, but Apple employs a handful of competent of engineers who could have, at the very least, made it much more difficult to crack the phones, but for four years have done precisely nothing (save a single software update that disabled hacked phones briefly, and not necessarily intentionally) to that end.
All they’ve really done is stated that they consider the practice illegal. For a company that is known to pull-no-punches in court, in four years they have not issued so much as a slap on the wrist to anyone for jail-breaking a phone. And that’s an “anyone” that includes dozens of businesses who have pioneered the practice of cracking the phones and selling them into a full-blown-worldwide-for-profit enterprise.
They have never interfered with a consumer’s actual ability to perform the hack, nor have they attempted to hold anyone responsible for doing it. Compare this to their reaction at, say, the theft of a prototype, and it becomes hard to argue that they actually care one way or the other.
For the record, and as Apple themselves have pointed out, there are a few reasons why jailbroken phones are undesirable from the carrier’s (AT&T) perspective – and if you ask me, that’s probably where Apple’s entire position on the topic originates. The common assertion that a person should have the right to install whatever they want on a device they own is hollow – it’s a device the shares resources (ie, phone networks) with other people, and so common welfare standards prevail – just like they do on roads, where rules define what you can and cannot do to your car and still continue to drive it legally.
The New York Times quotes Mark Janke, who runs a jailbreaking forum:
“I was really concerned for a while,” Mr. Janke said. “People were worried about running jailbreaking Web sites or being prosecuted for bringing their jailbroken phones into the Apple Store.”
The ruling, he said, was “a big win” for jailbreaking fans.
So, this is a big win because people no longer have to be worried? Worried about what, precisely? All the nothing that’s been going on? Another gem from the NYT piece is the assertion that all iPhone hobbyists want is a little more freedom:
But iPhone hobbyists say they simply want to have free range to use certain features and programs on their phones that Apple has limited or failed to offer.
For example, one popular unapproved application lets users sync their music and video clips with their computer over Wi-Fi, without using a cable. Another enables tethering, or the ability to share the iPhone’s Internet connection with a computer, something for which iPhone owners are supposed to pay AT&T an extra $20 a month.
If by “freedom” you mean “freedom to steal” – then perhaps this ruling does go a long way. I’m not fan of AT&T’s tethering pricing either – it’s a racket – but if the best argument presented to justify why consumers should have the ability to crack their phones is so that they can steal service from AT&T, I think the debate about “freedom” is headed in the wrong direction.
There are plenty of reasons (mostly green or plastic) why Apple doesn’t care – selling more phones is good for business. The market for locked iPhones is already saturated in the United States, and internationally they can’t keep up with demand. My guess is that Apple is betting that the majority of those purchasing jail-broken phones are simply people who can’t get a legitimate one for whatever reason, but will probably replace their illegitimate phone with a legitimate one when the opportunity presents itself. In short, outside a small contingent of die-hards, most jail-broken iPhones serve only as an advertisement to their user for the real deal, the gold standard, the legitimate iPhone. Selling two iPhones is better than one. If you further believe Apple’s stated claims that they don’t actually profit much from sales of apps, they would have even less of a reason to be concerned with phones being jail-broken, because it literally doesn’t effect their bottom line once the phone is out the door – unless you’re thinking about bottom line benefit they see by not having to service or support a phone that is out of warranty as soon as its purchased (and jail-broken).
Tags: copyright > ipp > jailbreak > tethering
Go App Yourself
Posted on | July 12, 2010 | No Comments
Google announced over the weekend that its new Android application development tool (“Google App Inventor”) would be available this morning. It’s a move that adds an interesting and potentially very significant layer to the bloomin’ onion of mobile application development. It solidifies the notion that Google is betting long-term that their open development model, which allows (now quite literally) anyone with even a passing interest to develop apps and run them on their own device, or presumably to share them with friends. Google gets a front-row seat to see what people want and what people come up with when left to their own devices, potentially very valuable knowledge, incase you had any questions about what Google is really after (put simply, every bit of information they can possibly collect about your behavior and information).
The new development environment provides a visual toolbox of different phone and mobile device functionalities, which can be dragged, combined, and arranged by programming novices to achieve new functionality. Google is hoping that not only will the masses continue to buy apps, but that they’ll start to develop their own. Will this usher in an era of Apps2.0 and an explosion of user-content generated apps that will leave established developers and software publishers grimacing as the attentions of their loyal customers are distracted by a flood of arguably lesser quality but with a much broader arrayed set of specifically targeted functionalities, as in the way that traditional print and online publications have seen their audiences dwindle, drawn to blogs tailoring to very specific interests?
Potentially, it could be game-changer huge. As with so many things, the timing and positioning are critical, and I’m of the mind that it is both a bit premature and that Google may stumble when it comes to positioning. There is a certain contingent (well represented in the Android customer community) that is sure to embrace this ability immediately – and let’s face it, it’s a pretty cool idea. I think anyone who shares the sentiment that computer science and technological advances should promise to make ever increasingly complex operations accessible to casual users would see this as a significant step in the right direction.
Apple has specifically shunned the approach though, reserving the ability to program its mobile devices for those experienced in traditional programming languages and application design patterns. Apple argues that if you aren’t aware of certain things (like which processes cause a battery to drain quickly, or the inability to recognize when software you’ve written is hogging resources and memory), you can’t effectively program a mobile device and deliver a good experience. Whereas Google assumes a use-at-your-own-risk approach, Apple attempts to control the experience of using their device even when said device is running 3rd party applications.
Watching these two strategies unfold is going to be fascinating. I’ll reiterate the idea that I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game, at least not to the degree that the desktop wars were. Neither Apple nor Google may ever achieve the percentages on mobile devices that Microsoft achieved on the desktop, although it’s also entirely conceivable that either could. With so much of the world’s mobile market territory unclaimed however, I think the current primary focus is on building awareness of platforms, and while though specter of a battle looms, both companies have a lot of growing to do before they will actually have to battle it out for each others customers.
I wouldn’t rule out the notion that Apple will eventually deliver a rapid application development tool for iPhone and iPad, enabling similar functionality. Their mobile Bento database software already allows for custom databases and information strategies implemented by end users, though it’s hardly equivalent to a development tool. It is important to remember, however, that Apple has been in the OS business for a bit longer than Google, and the first thought that occurred to me while reading the description of App Inventor was that it sounded like the grotesque love-child of Bento and Apple’s “Automator” software, which allows non-programmers to document and automate certain application processes on desktop Macs. Automator actually is a well implemented system that allows casual users to build little applications – there are plenty of crucial differentiators (Bento cannot, for example, tell what that your device has changed orientations), but to a casual consumer, a description of Apple’s Automator might very well be mistaken for Android’s App Inventor. Drag, drop, and you’ve got your own solution. The only problem is that Automator has been out for a few years, and while I’ve seen some it do some nifty things on the Macs of my friends, very few people have ever heard of it, and I’ve never met a non-geek who wasn’t scared stiff at the idea of writing their own automator apps. And that brings me to my conclusion, which is that most people don’t actually want to write apps. I could be wrong, and I think the right tools might go a long way to change this over time, but for the time being, looking over the App Inventor documentation, I can’t see this system as it stands compelling very many people who aren’t already avid techies.
Best case scenario: A new era of mobile apps and innovation ushered in by those who haven’t studied at MIT or Standord, political outsiders-if-you-will, forever changing the landscape of what people expect and want from apps (hint: simple is the answer, but Apple already has simple, and they built it with the best and brightest of the establishment).
Most likely scenario: A few cool apps from the handful of people who play with the tools, and a never ending cascade of PowerPoint presentations reinvented as Android apps.
Which way do we turn?
Posted on | June 9, 2010 | No Comments
Greetings from Chicago. After two days and fifteen hundred miles, I’ve confirmed a few long-held assumptions about the quality of food served alongside American highways, but, to date, no revelations about the broader state of technology in America.
Revelations aside, the role of technology in a life-on-the-road has been interesting, and sometimes frustrating, to observe. The 45 minutes during which the iPhone could not acquire a GPS location fix, and was subsequently useless to point us in the direction of the interstate were some of the most frustrating on the trip so far. It’s hardly a new concept, but a simple a reminder that the magic and promises held by technology are still very fallible as compared to, say, a printed map. The trouble we eventually encountered after a day of everything working properly stood in such a marked contrast that it resulted in undue frustration. Wrong turns and misdirection have been a part of road trips for as long as there have been roads, but after a day of perfect direction and orientation, there was a profound subconscious assumption that we could rely on this incredibly powerful system whenever we wanted. The simplicity of operation and function only stood to make it worse – how could something so simple just “not work”?
There are other frustrations in looking at scenarios that could so easily be benefited by use of mobile technology but aren’t. A frivolous example perhaps, but in navigating our way around America’s Roller Coast, (and by “navigating”, what I really mean is “waiting in line”), we couldn’t help but note the signs posted at the entrance to each of the dozen or so coasters announcing the respective wait times – 45 minutes for this ride, an hour and 15 for that ride – and wondered, why isn’t there an app telling us which rides have the shortest waits, and how to navigate to them?
At breakfast with our fellow guests at Ray’s Bucktown B&B, the iPad being used by one of the guests to read the morning paper was the topic of conversation both at the table and in the kitchen, with guests and staff curiously peering and asking about how well the owner liked it, and, might they have a touch? The proud owner was happy to oblige, and, as is so often the case, offered a resounding recommendation to all interested parties.
I proceeded to have a conversation with the owner and his partner (both teachers visiting from San Francisco) about the potential impact of the device in classrooms at different levels. That’s an article for another day, but for the moment, suffice to say that, two months and two million units after its introduction, the buzz surrounding this device is still palpable.
Next up: iOS 4 and the new iPhone, iAds, and what the publishing industry could stand to learn from the mistakes of the record and film industries in moving to digital distribution models.
Hello, America.
Posted on | June 7, 2010 | No Comments
On the road this week in the Penguin miniCooper. Details on the state of the nation and it’s technology to follow.
Publish this, immediately.
Posted on | June 3, 2010 | No Comments
Given my long-standing and more-than-just-professional-though-still-fairly-tangential ties to the publishing industry, I’ve read with interest a number of articles that attempt to deconstruct the challenges and opportunities facing the sector in the post-Kindle paper book market.
Of note is that very few of these articles strive for a measure of journalistic objectivity, though I suppose in fairness some are clearly labeled as editorial. None-the-less, the iPad seems to have established a reputation as quite the divisive consumer device in terms of the responses it elicits – you love it or you hate it, but at least in the tech or publishing communities, you probably have an opinion, and if you’re voicing it in words (in web or print), it’s probably not a mild one. Skipping over just why that is (for now), I’d like to take a look at a few of the issues touched on by two articles in particular, one of which appeared in Publisher’s Weekly several weeks ago and brought to my attention by a literary agent, and another that appeared in Wired a few days ago.
Both articles echo similar sentiments – hardly unique ones at that. Setting aside waxing about bygone eras, it quickly becomes a matter of a publisher wanting a standard platform to distribute their work on, and further one that isn’t propriety or locked-in to the whims of any specific distributor or 3rd party (ie, a scenario demonstrated by Amazon with the Kindle or Apple with the iPad). Publishers are (of course), concerned with loosing “control” of their content as it starts to seep out into the world on these devices. They’re observing an extremely immature and accordingly fragmented market and are concerned both that the fragmentation will either persist or worsen (which it will in the short term), or, alternatively, that it will consolidate onto a single device which doesn’t suit the interests of the customers publishers. Just exactly what is an eBook? If your goal as a publisher is to bring a work to market, are you required then to conceive of distribution channels in a dozen formats and encodings? Setting aside the fact that this is exactly what they’ve done with printed books, it’s still a good question. I consider myself fairly well informed, but if someone walked up to me on the street and said, “What format should I publish my e-book in?”, I’d be hard pressed to give a simple answer.
These are legitimate concerns, and publishers have good reason to keep a careful eye on the developments afoot . These are times of momentous change for media companies, and there is little doubt that some if not many of the established players – centuries old behemoths, mind you – won’t be around when the dust has settled. On the other hand, scads of brooding basement writers of both literature and the software code will not only be around, they’ll be basking in fire-hydrant flows of revenue of that have been left gushing behind the fallen behemoths. While I appreciate solid editorially culled and curated content (and it’s not going anywhere, by the way) as much as the next humanoid, these are companies that have consolidated, merged, and compounded their power for years and years. At very least, I’d like to see (and not just in the publishing world) an opportunity for those whose work has merit but hasn’t met with fancy of the ad-and-marketing-department at Publisher XYZ to sell some books and stick it to them. That’s the promise of free markets and meritocracy, and yet I see a very real disconnect between that promise and the publishing industry as it exists today. Write a great book and you may get it published if the ad team can position it properly – that’s the MO, and there are a few industry heavy-hitters who I won’t name but who have literally just reasserted this, in the face of the coming storm. In music, iTunes has given smaller record labels, if not equal footing as the the majors, a viable platform for international distribution that is unprecedented. Perfect? No. Better than what we’ve had? Yes.
The PW article reads more-or-less as a line item indictment of the closed nature of Apple’s platform (there is perhaps even less sympathy for Amazon). I’m not going to focus on Amazon, because, quite literally, at the moment I don’t see them as relevant to the discussion beyond comparisons to what others are doing. As it stands, the Kindle is a piece of history, not the future (I anticipate that to change, but not today or tomorrow). I appreciate the Kindle for what it is and the practicalities it affords in terms of making books portable and accessible. I criticize it for adding to the complexity of file formats and needlessly complicating delivery/distribution methods, but ultimately I don’t think it really adds anything to books other than a higher degree of portability. The iPad adds these things and a whole lot more.
A Letter from Steve
Posted on | June 3, 2010 | No Comments
Perhaps you are already familiar with my thoughts on the state of closed vs. open platforms. Despite thinking that there’s not necessarily anything wrong with the persistence of closed platforms (iPhone or otherwise) in 2010, I do have concerns about Apple’s position as gatekeeper in what has become a leading platform in social media consumption. I voiced my concerns in a letter to Steve Jobs – and, as is so often fabled, I received a response a few hours later. Following is my letter and his response – I was shocked to detect what I consider a rare glint of acknowledgement that he’s not thrilled with the way things are:
Hi Steve,
I’m a customer of many years now – I’ve worked as a Mac systems administrator for a handful of clients here in New York, and I also develop for iPhone and Mac. Thank your for the work that you do, I consider myself very fortunate to be alive in our time, and to witness the richness of our lives deepened by technology – and nobody has progressed this like Apple.
That said, I must to add my voice to the growing chorus of displeasure at the way Apple is conducting itself with regards to content approval on the App Store. I have no gripe with the notion of a closed platform where code is signed and people are who they say they are. The technical requirements that apps be functional and non-malicious to achieve distribution are fantastic. My qualms are with the notion of “a moral responsibility” to police the content.
With all due respect, the imperative of a “moral responsibility” – at least one determined in a context that is manifest by a sole entity, subjectively and omnipotently – simply does not square with the notion of a company that lives at the nexus of liberal arts and technology. Liberal arts implies reasoning, ration, a tacit acknowledgement that, unlike sciences, there are questions with answers more complex than a simple yes or no, and further that these answers can be dragged out into the light of day, examined, argued against and defended. You yourself have acknowledged that mistakes have been made – but claiming that such mistakes have been “corrected” is insufficient. It’s not a matter of correcting the “mistake”, it’s a matter of correcting the system that produces such mistakes.
In a thriving information eco-system, there will be different ideas of what is “objectionable”. One needn’t look very hard at history to establish that majority opinion on such matters is a poor guide – a point underscored by Apple’s own positioning and support of specific political causes in the United States in past years. In the absence of clear guidance to the contrary, one can only assume that subjective decisions about what constitutes “objectionable” content at Apple is being made behind closed doors, quite literally according to whims that are up for review only after media outcry. Am I wrong? Please say so, publicly.
Ultimately, my opinion – something I offer to you as both a consumer and a shareholder – is that Apple should be concerned with delivering its customers the best user experience on the planet. Given the nature of our time and your products, that experience is often the delivery of information. If you behave as if you have a moral responsibility to look after the content of that information, then you assume that moral responsibility and bear it moving forward. I see that as very dangerous from an operational perspective, frankly, and I think it’s only a matter of time before someone charges Apple with responsibility for content in an approved app that ultimately gets out of hand – and I’m sure you’re aware that if “mistakes” have been made, they’ll be made again – in what context, nobody knows.
At it’s core, my gripe is that when it comes to overseeing content and making morality calls, the position that “porn isn’t allowed ” and that “porn” isn’t defined (in essence, “I know it when I see it”) is horribly misguided. One man’s art is another man’s porn. Like it or not, if you want a device that delivers the world – and that’s what I want – the whole stinking beautiful world of humanity, broken down into bits and bytes and delivered to the *best* device in the world – well, that happens to be a world that is full of ideas and notions that some people find objectionable. In the truest tradition of liberal arts, I’d like the opportunity to explore those ideas and notions myself, and I’d like to do it on my iPhone.
Regards,
Isaac Schmidt
And the response, three hours later:
Other institutions like The New York Times do indeed have rules and limits, some of which are decided “behind closed doors”. We are new to this, and need to learn from others like these who have had a century’s more experience than us. Sorry if our rambling and mistakes bother you sometimes – they bother us too. We are doing the best we can (no one has ever faced this exact situation before) and learning the fastest we can.
Sent from my iPad
Tags: app content approval > liberal arts > Steve Jobs email > technology
My closed-source heart.
Posted on | June 3, 2010 | No Comments
Let’s review concepts: A closed platform, for the purposes of our conversation, is one in which a product developer limits the ability of a user/owner of that product to do literally anything and everything the owner might wish to. If an iPhone was a house, and you bought that house, there are certain rooms that you as the owner are forbade to enter, to peek at, to even acknowledge the existence of. Theoretically only the developer of the property has full access, and what’s more – the developer can modify these limitations over time, such that, theoretically, a door that was open to you on prior occasion no longer is. And there is nothing you can do about that – if you try to go in to that room again, you’d be breaking the law according to that fine print you never bothered to read but still signed-off on.
It’s daunting, and the tech community has decried both the concept and plenty of companies for “closed” platform practices over the years. Apple seems to illicit fairly irrational criticisms on the topic given the widespread practice, but much in the way they also seem to attract an irrational cult like following amongst another subset of users. Regardless, closed platforms are found everywhere in the modern information society, and the respective merits of open-vs-closed are ever increasing and accordingly increasingly debated. Most recently the topic of open information as it pertains to biological engineering and synthetic biology is being discussed.
I’d take the house analogy a bit further, but I can’t, and I’ll explain why: It’s not well suited. While in theory, once you’ve bought a house, it’s yours to explore and do-what-you-will-with, the reality is that its not so simple. You can’t do whatever you want because almost anywhere you might have bought a house in the developing world, municipalities, localities – or more broadly “society” – places limits on what you can do. You can’t replace your concrete frame with straw, for example, if you live in forest-fire prone area, because if you did, then your house would become a potential threat to other houses on the block. It’s not up to code. In a lot of areas, people choose to live in communities and neighborhoods where the rules are set not just by local government and block associations, but by private companies. Should you choose to live in a private gated community, you may not be allowed to not mow your lawn.
In drawing arguments against the closed nature of the iPhone OS, many of the open-and-angry-mob favor analogies that feature simpler products with arguably more frustrating scenarios. Cory Doctorow, for example, compares an iPhone to a dishwasher in a recent Publishers Weekly article. If you buy a dishwasher, the logic goes, you can do anything you want to it (assuming it’s inventive and positive of course). Hook the hot water to the cold water inlet, steam a fish, do whatever! It’s yours. On an iPhone, on the other hand, not only are you not free to do either of these things, it would actually be illegal to even try (in my dream life, perhaps abandoned on a tropical island in an unknown parallel universe, the survival of myself and my group of friends will be depend on our ability to sufficiently cook a fish we managed to capture, and I will proudly pull out my iPhone and pronounce: “There’s an app for that, and I wrote it”).
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Tags: Android > Apple > closed > Google > iPhone > open > platform > Steve Jobs
What is this?
Posted on | April 20, 2010 | No Comments
Hello. Given my general lack of motivation to promote or publicize this site, it’s probably a fair assumption that you either know who I am, or that you arrived unwittingly, lured by the siren song of a code snippet or technology-related-witticism dangling below the results of a major-search-engine result listing.
In either case, I welcome you, traveler of the internet. Welcome to my world of technological oddities and peculiarities, of self-defeating argument mechanisms and the slowly turning cogs in a wheel I’ve been attempting to reinvent since achieving latter stages of mental cognitive ability and reason (I estimate this to have occurred in the mid-to-late 80s). Most recently I’ve been trying to invent it on the iPhone SDK.
This rather unremarkable slice of internet-cum-soapbox is home to my semi-personal/semi-professional (let’s say “business casual”) blog – a database of rambling ruminations, incoherent speculations, diatribes, and in some cases actual productive contributions in the form of example projects I’ve worked on and related tutorials or guidance.
In all seriousness, for many years (I can’t say I’ve resisted the temptation, because I’ve never been tempted) I’ve avoided the notion of keeping a blog. No need to cite specific reasonings or justification as I’d be happy to adopt any excuse you’ll consider adequate. I’ll go one step further and state unequivocally, this isn’t really a blog (you can leave now if you’d like). I don’t plan on updating it that often. I’ll never approve your comments. By some counts, I’m now actively contributing to that which I’m so often keen to criticize as the ever-mounting problem crisis of information overload. At what point does the sheer quantity of words and pictures diminish our ability to concisely determine the answers to our questions? To expose us to compelling and challenging ideas that actually merit our attention? Is there real detriment in allocating memory and publishing (for eternity) the arbitrary and endless thought chains not only of the deserving celebrities, but also of regular people?
These and many others are questions I won’t be answering (actually, I might, and there are good answers).
What I do intend to provide you, dear reader, is an occasional accounting of the things I’m doing with technology sciences and the thoughts I’m having on broader trends and their social implications. I’m hardly prepared to suggest that I have any of the answers, but given the age we live in and that the venue for debate of these topics is, for better or worse, the blogosphere, I suppose that in order to fully participate in that dialog, I must establish a platform to do it, and one that stems beyond the conversations I have with clients (Clients: Do not fear, for you I will always reserve you my choicest cuts of insight, know-how, sarcastic banter and billable hours).
Because I’m embarrassingly late to the WEB 2.0 party (despite the fact that I already said, I’m not in it), I’m going to cheat a little and back-date a few posts – this is not entirely disingenuous as I have documented and written on a number of topics and projects over the past year, in anticipation of what might have been. Instead, you get this.