Archive for June, 2009
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Real Men Don’t Twitter
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on June 10, 2009 by admin in Technology
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009Is Twitter a vast nation of sheep led by a handful of loud-mouth marketers and celebrities?
Take any large group of people, say, a cocktail party. Inevitably, there will be one or two loudmouths that draw a circle of listeners, while most people wander and mingle, maybe forming small, more civil two-way conversations. In my view, this remains Twitter’s biggest obstacle to broader adoption: it’s a huge herd of sheep. 80 Percent Of Accounts Have Fewer Than 10 Followers, or as this Harvard Business blog puts it, Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets. The article also points out that Twitter reverses the usual social network pattern in which men mostly follow women they don’t know, and women follow women they do know. Additionally, since Twitter is mostly a one-way broadcast medium, it draws a tremendous number of multilevel marketing and tech guru types who spam the system. I’ve been saying for a while that Twitter would max out somewhere around the number of Blackberry users, who number around 21 million users as of May 2009. These numbers seem to indicate Twitter is at least leveling off, and guess what? It’s just under 20 million users. I chose this number a little arbitrarily based on the idea that Twitter is such a perfect fit for mobile device users. I personally have used Twitter as an MLM tool, as mentioned above, but otherwise would only find it useful if I worked with a large, mobile work force of some kind. For personal use, it just has little appeal. Don’t listen to me though, Twitter to your heart’s content. In fact, here are 10 tools to help you do it better. Do you use Twitter? I’d love to hear about how and why.
Copyright Law Isn’t All It’s Quacked Up To Be
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on June 9, 2009 by admin in Popular Media
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009It’s someone’s birthday today, but we’re afraid to tell you more because of a bunch of Mickey Mouse Copyright Laws
It’s someone’s birthday today. I’d love to tell you about it, but I’m not sure if the use of his name (clue: he’s a duck) is a violation of trademark or copyright law. You see, the individual in question is a property (and you thought slavery had been abolished!) of a large media company that regularly protects its intellectual property with considerable aggression. Back in 2005, I got intrigued with the copyfight movement and created a couple of parody products on CafePress – the CopyReich Shop , which pretty heavy-handedly pointed a finger at the RIAA and MPAA’s fascist behavior, and the Copyfight Shop, which poked fun at the Creative Commons license. I suggested them for BoingBoing.net, and got this reply from Cory Doctorow: “This stuff is funny, Ian! I’m uncomfortable with the Nazi stuff, though — I’m a believer in Godwin’s Law and worry that the discreditation that accrues to its violators would outweigh the humor. Sorry.” I guess I was too edgy for the edgy. Oddly, CafePress didn’t mind the images, although recently they wouldn’t let me use these images. Maybe they’re anti-gay. Who knows. In any case, something that’s often overlooked when people discuss copyrights is who they were intended to protect, and what their purpose really was. In the United States, the government gave itself the right to copyright material ostensibly to: “…promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” (US Constitution, Section 8, Clause 8). The idea being that if a creative person could gain an exclusive financial benefit from their creation for a time, there would be plenty of motivation to create wonderful things that would benefit mankind later, when these creations entered the public domain. In my opinion, this has all been completely perverted by the copyright extension act to protect the profits of corporations, at the expense of the individual. What do you think? Below are the images from the CafePress shops.
Monday Morning Meticulously Mapped Out?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on June 8, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Monday, June 8th, 2009Axis if we care. Our plot to disrupt the day you’ve carefully charted for yourself involves graphic depictions of death, birth, crime, and…Wikipedia?
Do you ever feel overwhelmed with the information and sensory input at your disposal these days? We’re here to help. Overwhelm you more, that is. In our ongoing plot to derail your Monday morning, we’ve touched on fleshmaps, facebook maps, why Ian can’t get a date maps, infographics, flowcharts , and million dollar graphics. So you’d think we’d be done, right? But no. Here we have 50 more examples of ways to visualize data, brought to you by WebDesignerDepot.com. Of all of the examples presented, I probably found TuneGlue the most useful; it visually cross-references musical artists and their work in a very simple interface, with Amazon links. By the way, a lot of those tools in that link made pretty graphs, but were in most cases visualizing things normal people don’t care about. And there’s definitely a flaw in the plan when a graphic actually makes it harder to understand complex information rather than easier. So check out 5,000 years of Middle East history in 90 seconds, or BreathingEarth, where you can watch deaths and births in real time and ponder your emissions. Even better, WorldClock displays everything from oil consumption to US crime stats in real time. And lastly, have you ever wondered what Wikipedia would look like if it were in book form?
Does God Really Hate Fags?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on June 7, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, June 7th, 2009And in a world in which rape is part of the manufacturing process for cell phones, do we maybe have more pressing issues to discuss?
 If I didn’t know better, I might be inclined to think this man were gay himself |
One of the only things I really want in life is to understand people, and to be understood. I think this is true for many of us. Understanding is a lot like love, and I feel safe in saying, therefore, that all many of us want is to love and be loved. When you have a lot of love and understanding, you usually find some peace, and if you put the three together, you get a great tune like What’s So Funny ’bout Peace Love & Understanding. Lately though, I’ve felt a little frustrated around two topics that come up a lot in social dialogue: God and homosexuality. On the God topic, I get frustrated because I feel like spiritual beliefs are something you share when someone asks you to do so, not something you run around screaming about. I just never see much of anything good happening whenever anybody actively expresses their beliefs about the origin and meaning of human life before it comes up through simpler conversation. And likewise, although I have close friends who pretty much cover all the gender orientations, I don’t really care much whom you want to have sex with unless you and I know each other and it’s somehow germane to the conversation. I’m just tired, really tired, of people telling me whether they believe in God or not when I didn’t ask, and people proclaiming their beliefs on homosexuality, whether they’re hatemongering freaks like Fred Phelps, the bent Baptist behind the “God Hates Fags” movement, or just a friend trying to further their civil rights in an obviously socially immature country. And all of this, it seems to me, has a simple basis: a kind of emotional immaturity that drives people to put the contradictions of life that they can’t accept into polarized perceptions Read the rest of this entry »
Tanks For The Memories
[ Comments Off ]Posted on June 6, 2009 by admin in Politics
Saturday, June 6th, 2009Tiananmen, 20 years later. Maybe we could learn something about social change from the Chinese.
The man in the iconic photo here should be a reminder of the fact that those who rule only do so because the masses let them.It rarely occurrs to most of us, but the only thing that makes a rich man rich and a poor man poor is a social contract. Through more elaborate manipulations of social contracts, the rich man may persuade other men to align their beliefs with his, which gives the illusion of power, but this is simply another social contract. Which is why it astounds me that in difficult economic times, when many people are in fear daily that they may not be able to keep their homes or feed their children, or indeed are homeless or hungry, that other people continue to live in luxury. This is perhaps most appalling when those “other people” are the people we’ve elected to manage our civil and economic affairs, and they happen to be failing miserably at their jobs. What keeps this decomposing social fabric together? Our complacency and acceptance, I guess. This might be a good time to remember the bravery and fortitude of those who were involved the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 which lasted several months and were finally put to an end by the Chinese military in early June 20 years ago. When was the last time we saw this kind of self-respect and action amongst the populace of the United States? Probably not since 1776 or so. Boston.com has some great photos looking back at Tiananmen, 20 years later.