ferrous mashups
A great thing about a bike is that it comes with major user rights. Public display, public performance, sharing with friends, adaptations, derivative works, mashups — you’ve got the rights. Alabama folk artist Butch Anthony took advantage of this wonderful freedom to create a vibrant design for a new bicycle rental kiosk at the corner [...]
Tagged: review
localism in news reporting
Localism is now attracting considerable attention in media business strategy. Stephen Gray of the Newspaper Next project observes: It’s becoming a truism these days that “local” is the core value proposition for newspapers. The reasoning goes like this: With tons of national and international news and other non-local content available free online, “local” is the [...]
Tagged: news
a cold morning for cycling to work
Natural gas helps to keep people warm.
social networking success
Dogs and cats are probably more important than Second Life to the future of the internet. While major media have hyped Second Life, the number of concurrent online users of Second Life rose above 20,000 for the first time on December, 29, 2006 (oddly, “peak concurrency” reportedly was 25,000 about a week later). The CEO [...]
case study of trade-off between control and distribution
In the Reformation, decentralized communication of Luther’s thesis contrasted sharply with highly controlled Catholic Church communication.
Tagged: content
challenges for citizen journalism
Persons live in specific places. Citizen journalism potentially can support local events and build community. I’ve tried to make some contribution here, here, here, and here. Below I document one of my failures. The rules for citizen journalism aren’t clear. Many organizations need to think about such rules. The challenge, it seems to me, is [...]
Tagged: news
a theatrical exploration of Shakespearean sense
In Shakespeare’s time, controversy raged about the values of words, images, and actions. Is God’s word meant to be proclaimed in liturgy, or is God most effectively encountered in personal reading of scripture? Can images and physical gestures support communication with God? Authorities across the sixteenth century suppressed physical practices of worship, white-washed interiors of [...]
Tagged: review, Shakespeare
unsocial non-networks
Most blog posts did not include any links. A recent study selected 44,362 blogs in a way biased toward finding linked posts. Among all 2.2 million posts in those blogs in August and September of 2005, 98% of the posts had no incoming or outgoing links.[1] This isn’t a matter of A-List bloggers exclusivity or [...]
systematized personal recommendations
User-to-user recommendations within a large online retailer’s recommendation system generated a very small share of sales. With keen business sense (see Netflix) and with praiseworthy regard for the common intellectual good, this retailer allowed some experts to analyze freely a large database of its users’ recommendations and to publish publicly their analysis. The database includes [...]
suffering from bad design
Imagine sitting inside a car on a blistering hot day, with the windows rolled up, without air conditioning, waiting 20 minutes for the car’s security system to reboot after you placed a call to roadside assistance. That’s a bad distribution of control logic. A human confronting exceptional circumstances is likely to be better able to [...]