February 2007 Archives
There has recently been a surge in online consumer activism, notably in banks and utilities [via Slashdot]. This phenomenon was innevitable, something related to the growing powers of online governmental petitioning (as covered in last weeks Economist [sorry, paid or subscriber article]). I'm very curious to see what happens with this stuff in the coming years. Will customers and constituents be able to have any kind of influence? How will this effect free markets, capitolism, etc.
UPDATE
Also see the JetBlue debacle... And how collective customer action brought about the first airline Passenger Bill of Rights:
JetBlue.com: bill of rights
CNN coverage
consumeraffairs.com coverage
Two big [nerd] news stories hit the blogs today. The first is on Edison allowing use of their infrastructure to support a Wi-Fi network. The second is Skype's plea to the FCC for opening up the Telcos. Infrastructure is becoming more important every day - and the walled gardens we currently have to suffer through are strangling innovation, and really, hurting the consumers. These two, along with other, more pervasive measures like FON's Starbux killer are a great sign of more open times ahead.
starbuckification (n) : the congolmeratization of urban (and suburban) landscape, architecture, and experience, with seemingly kudzu-like properties of choking off local, indie, and mom-and-pop business, authentic and placed culture, etc.
I can't even find a decent fucking cup of coffee what with all the starbuckification going on in NYC
see also Duane-Readeification...
Personal computers are not fancy and powerful glorified televisions. Mobile phones are not tiny and powerful glorified personal computers. Lois Kahn insisted materials inherently wanted to be something, to serve a specific purpose - "a brick wants to be an arch"... Is more powerful broadcast media distribution really the future for the internet? And why is this the best thing for mobile devices?
The Times [uk] article linked below looks at a survey determining a lack of interest in mobile internet among youths. There are no young power-users for the mobile internet. Why? Because mobile internet... sucks. There is no killer app. The phone interfaces are all terrible for anything other than making calls, and even that simple function lacks in many designs. Bandwidth is lacking, connectivity is slow, privacy issues are terrible, mobile browsers are weak, and 99% of websites just don't cater to the small screens of mobile devices.
full article [via MocoNews]
NYC in the snow is a pretty amazing phenomenon. The city becomes dirty. Not just aesthetically dirty, but messy. Having a car in the city, and parking on the street makes this glaringly obvious. Bloomberg's decision to maintain alternate side street cleaning (and ticketing!) during yesterdays snow met with great unpopularity. Well, our beloved mayor just recanted, voiding all tickets issued yesterday for street cleaning. Go democracy! Nice to see politicians actually listening to their constituents these days.
I rarely visit YouTube.com. My YouTube experience exists mainly in exposure to embedded content - the use of YouTube as a media storage platform. And I'm fairly certain most internet media consumers are like me.
The social components of YouTube just don't do it for me. This might be partly due to the interface, which in my humble opinion doesn't encourage social behavior. YouTube's design is too clean, too empty of feeling. Groups, Channels, Categories... I feel a certain forced redundancy.
To me, the power of YouTube is in the platform. This aint no MySpace for video.
Tacking on commenting, channels, and messages doesn't make something social.
I'm even curious as to how effective a platform YouTube is. The blogosphere was recently in a tizzy about some prominent YouTube posting Athiest getting his account wiped. For a service with the slogan 'Broadcast Yourself', this just seems a little shifty.
This post has absolutely nothing to do with anything technical, scientific, political... But I really like all things snow.
Cities get a little crazy in any substantial amount of snow.
The streets are obviously less crowded, and everything gets this surreal muffled quality to it. The frozen rain/sleet/hail of this morning was even stranger - the phenomenon of particles hitting pavement actually audible. I can hear the eary sound of shovels scraping sidewalk from my apartment, right now. I hope my car is okay.
PolarFox, my thesis, now has its very own domain. Please thank johnny internet squatter for the silly .info instead of a normal .com. Such is life.
What in God's green Earth is a PolarFox, you might ask? See below for most recent elevator [to the Moon?] pitch.
The average person's media consumption habits are predictable. Individuals tend to reinforce their current beliefs, at most expand the scope (in a rather limited fashion) rather than explore completely new areas, biases, territory. This concept is called polarization - and I think media polarization is a bad thing on the individual level, and a terribly dangerous thing on the group, the aggregate, the societal level. The staggering wealth of information and resources available to the average media consumer does nothing to help them avoid media consumption polarization - in fact doing the exact opposite, even limiting the average consumer to mainstream media (MSM) distribution channels.
My thesis (PolarFox) will explore a number of issues surrounding media consumption biases and polarization. PolarFox will provide a tool to allow individuals an opportunity to escape from the stagnation that can often arise from polarization. The proposed app requires no abnormal action from the individual using PolarFox - the process is transparent and pervasive. PolarFox will force individuals to consume media content that they would otherwise be ignorant of, or consciously [or unconsciously] ignore. This introduction of diversity is paramount in the current climate of information saturation. The future will bring about more and more tools that enable people to search and parse through the vast wealth of available information. The current trends of recommendation systems do not allow for true exploration, they provide links to content that would be of interest - both in subject and bias. These systems place a premium in banality. Revolutionary content is only found in passing internet memes, a powerful but unreliable and unpredictably subjective distribution method.
After over a week of thinking about this whole Mooninite situation, I've come to a few conclusions. First, and most obvious, the reaction in Boston was [and is] entirely overzealous and irrational. Menino and the city of Boston had to play a little political football, and a couple guys got screwed. Perhaps using my better judgement, I won't go into my reaction to the politics here.
GRL [the Graffiti Research Lab], the inspiration behind the LED blinkies, posted a response to the media circus, denying any affiliation. More, GRL called the Interference inc project "more mindless corporate vandalism from a guerilla marketer who got busted" as if they [GRL] were in some way more rightous in their electronic art pieces. This has sparked all kinds of thoughts about the pop art world, and graffiti. When I was a kid, painting walls was about leaving a mark, getting up, getting over, and was very much about being unsanctioned. Graffiti requires some amount of deviance, from the law, and from society. In my old ways, I still want graffiti to have a permanance, or at least a semblance of permanance. So I'm calling GRL out, because accepting commisions and a residency at an art institution for techy street art is no less commercial than Johnny Geurilla Marketer throwing together a couple LEDs for a niche cartoon.
My distaste for mainstream news is growing at an alarming rate. The major news channells handled the mess in Boston in a supremely inethical fashion. Inethical meaning inflamatory. The news reporting industry needs to change. This is growing more and more obvious. I did rather enjoy the interview with the two Mooninite geurillas.
I wonder what will happen with future instances of similar work. I wonder if geurilla marketing will get banned. I wonder if electronic art will be banned. The amount of press AquaTeenHungerForce got in this cluster-f*ck is easily worth 2M, in my opinion.
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."
- Ben Franklin
