One of my oft-repeated memes for my trainees – and, not coincidentally, the reason behind the very name of this blog – is that as we move further into these uncharted digital waters, what we need more than more information is better filters for the ever-increasing torrent being directed at our frontal lobes. So imagine [...] [...more]
One of my oft-repeated memes for my trainees – and, not coincidentally, the reason behind the very name of this blog – is that as we move further into these uncharted digital waters, what we need more than more information is better filters for the ever-increasing torrent being directed at our frontal lobes.
Way, way back in the early personal computing days, I remember having a conversation with a fellow geek. He was talking about the latest advances in floppy disk technology; and yes, these were still the old 5 1/4″ floppy disks that actually, well … flopped around when you waggled them in your hand. Not that you wanted to do that very much – the thin plastic disk inside was prone to slip around and maybe even crinkle a bit.
Anyway – we were talking about how the amount of data you could store on such a disk was about to increase from the then-standard 360K disks were almost due to an upgrade, so’s they could store 720K.
Wowie-zowie. And then … some day in the near future (his eyes grew distant, focusing on such a massive, magical shift in storage technology) … “You know what comes after that?”
His voice grew hushed. Almost reverent.
“A megabyte!”
At the time, I was writing programs in BASIC to be executed in the 16K space available on our old TRS-80s. I was impressed. With a megabyte of storage … wow. The possibilities were endless.
Skip to this news. With the sheer amount of content streaming down all these here Intertubes:
In terms of pure data center traffic around the world, traffic is
projected to go from 1.1 ZBs in 2010 to an estimated 4.8 ZBs in 2015,
four times the amount. 4.8 ZBs is a hard-to-imagine number, so Cisco has
quantified it to equal 66.7 trillion hours of streaming music at 160
kbps, 15.5 trillion hours of standard-def web conferencing or 4.8
trillion hours of online streaming 720p HD video.
…the need is going to be ever-greater for The People Formerly Known As Journalists to filter that torrent. To use their human judgment to identify what is important and worth paying attention to from that which is not.
Or, as Clay Shirky, so eloquently puts it:
Web 2.0 Expo NY: Clay Shirky (shirky.com) It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.
Once again, I’m using the social media-aggregation tool Storify to work up a story using the Twitter feeds of reporters & protesters on the scene. This time, it’s in Tahrir Square, where the confrontations between the police and the citizens (fed up with the emerging military dictatorship) are taking a darker turn. <a href=”http://storify.com/DaveLaFontaine/tahrir-square-nerve-gas-rumors-cause-panic” target=”_blank”>View [...] [...more]
Once again, I’m using the social media-aggregation tool Storify to work up a story using the Twitter feeds of reporters & protesters on the scene. This time, it’s in Tahrir Square, where the confrontations between the police and the citizens (fed up with the emerging military dictatorship) are taking a darker turn.
It turns out that they were perhaps using some kind of new tear gas – one that is invisible, but that still stings like a sonofabitch. If you’ve clicked the link above, you were taken to a page of clinical data from autopsies of British soldiers killed by gas in WWI. Grim, grim reading. Basically, the gas causes chemical burns all over your body, and you die from choking on the ragged, torn-up lung tissue that you cough up as you drown in your own blood.
Yeah. Fun times. There’s a reason we as a species have reacted with horror at anyone using these kinds of chemical weapons ever since.
Anyway, the rumor mills flew into hyperspeed on Twitter & social media, and you could see the rise and fall of the meme (fostered by a Twitter account purportedly belonging to Mohamed El Baradei) of chemical weapons use.
I’ve lived in the LA area for more than 20 years now (gulp!), and this is the first time I’ve ever actually gone out on a whale-watching cruise. The impetus for this trip was a visit from my Tennessee-based sister, who wanted to go out on the water. Since it’s November, and actually going out [...] [...more]
I’ve lived in the LA area for more than 20 years now (gulp!), and this is the first time I’ve ever actually gone out on a whale-watching cruise. The impetus for this trip was a visit from my Tennessee-based sister, who wanted to go out on the water. Since it’s November, and actually going out to the beach would involve parkas & scarves rather than bikinis, I figured this would be a nice compromise.
It turns out that it was a very unusual experience – we saw two species of cetaceans that are quite rare – especially as close to shore as we found them.
First, there were the Risso’s Dolphins – big honkin’ beasts. Seriously. I’ve swum with the familiar bottlenose dolphins, and been intimidated by the sheer strength of a 500-lb critter that is made out of pure muscle & gristle. Touching a dolphin while you’re swimming is a lot like putting your hand on the hood of an idling 18-wheeler.
A pod of Risso's Dolphins - these guys look like mini-whales. They're white and gray, rather than the familiar battleship gray of their bottlenose kin, and much thicker around.
You just get this deep, thrumming sense of power.
Next, just as we were about to go in (and about time, too, as most of the passengers were starting to turn a little blue), we heard the long, extended “PFFFFFFttttttt!” of a whale breaching about 100 yards away. Turns out it was a couple of Sei Whales (pronounced “Say Whales,” although I kinda like thinking it’s French “C’est Whales”) who were in about 60-80 feet of water. Which is unusual, because if a whale this size actually stood on its head, it could wave it’s flipper out of the water, like a little kid in the shallow end of the pool.
The video is a little shaky, because I’m shooting it with a long zoom from a handheld Canon 60D from the pitching bowsprit of a catamaran, as we chase after the whales.
We were all just ecstatic over seeing these giant creatures moseying along. The best we can figure out is that they eat krill & small fish, and the unusual water temperatures this year, that have also brought so very many Blue Whales so close to the coast, also have attracted the Sei Whales … maybe the same thing that’s brought the Risso’s Dolphins in?
Norwegian company Norli Libris introduces nonsensical “eBook” publishing model Quick Hit: Saw this on BoingBoing, followed it over to Applied Abstractions, and just couldn’t resist commenting on it, for 1) the benefit of my international students, who might wonder WTF is up with this and 2) to keep me from yanking out my own hair [...] [...more]
Norwegian company Norli Libris introduces nonsensical “eBook” publishing model
Quick Hit: Saw this on BoingBoing, followed it over to Applied Abstractions, and just couldn’t resist commenting on it, for 1) the benefit of my international students, who might wonder WTF is up with this and 2) to keep me from yanking out my own hair by the fistful. The idea is that consumers will have to buy digital books not as downloadable files, but on cards called Digi Short, which will be inserted into the back of customized (i.e. DRM’d to death) Kibano Digi Readers.
Apparently, the one advantage would be that said “books” would thus be exempt from VAT in Norway, although the list price will be the same as a download.
Nut graf:
The Norwegian publishing and bookselling industry, an astonishingly
backward group of companies when it comes to anything digital, yesterday
introduced a new concept for e-books that, even for them, is rather
harebrained. They want to sell e-book tablets where you can buy books
not as downloads (well, you can do that, too) but as files loaded on
small plastic memory cards, to be inserted into the reader [article in Norwegian].
This preserves their business model (though they can probably stop
using trucks and start using bicycles for distribution). According to
their not very convincing market analysis, this is aimed at the segment
of the book buying market who do not want to download books from the net
(but, for some reason, seem to want to read books electronically.)
This is such an awful, awful, CueCat-level thinking approach to digital distribution. The whole point of having a mobile device like the iPad or Kindle or Nook is so that you can do instant purchases & consumption of content. You walk past a poster advertising the new blockbuster action movie, now available as a Blu-Ray or for download – you know you’re going to have an hour to kill on the commuter train on the way home, and you missed the movie in theaters, to you decide to splurge. Out comes the tablet, button is pushed, movie is set to download in the background as you continue walking to the train station/subway/hovercraft depot.
Hint: You want to ENCOURAGE your customers to make impulse buys of your content, rather than make it tougher for them & thus allow time for second thoughts to creep in.
Making the public buy, collect, sort & carry with them little plastic cards with books on them? Good God. It displays the desperate attempt to keep the content all within the walled garden; if we can’t sell dead-tree editions or shiny little discs (goes the thinking), well, maybe if we just shrink it all down to credit-card size, we can keep people having to pay us for physical objects. And as long as the Big Publishing controls distribution, pricing & availability of a physical object, well then, all the old rules still apply.
People will not carry around little cards with books as data on them, slotting them in and out of a tablet reader. And even if (via some alien mind-control ray that bathes the Earth in Luddite Stupidity) they do, a thriving business will soon spring up, dealing in the blank pieces of plastic that can then be filled with the data.
The media business is no longer, and never will again be about, the control of big belching factories that churn out physical copies of stuff that gets trucked from A to B and then put on shelves. It’s about paying attention to every other step that used to lead up to that point. You know, all the stuff that newspapers and TV stations and movie studios and record companies ignored, and is the reason so many of them are in trouble.
That is, concentrating on creating something wonderful. Useful. Delightful.
It makes me sad to see that so many companies are still thinking in terms of how to defeat the digital revolutions, rather than on how we can use the web to do so many totally new, amazing art forms.
UPDATE: The initial reports (see the fact that this was a “Quick Hit”) seemed to indicate that it was Digi.no that was doing this. It turns out that it is a company named Norli Libris, whose attempt at rolling the clock back has elicited comment from other bloggers, as well as the mighty EnGadget. I thus fixed the attribution & links at the top of this post, and added a graf explaining more about Norli Libris. Thanks to @sigvald for pointing this out via Twitter (and to Google Translate for helping me decipher the Norwegian story on this.)
…in the courtyard of the Institute for the Digital Future of Journalism I’ve got great video of everyone having a blast, experimenting with the new guerilla-style video production tactics I’ve been teaching them — I showed them how to use the front and rear-facing cameras on their iPads to shoot video. Here, they are working [...] [...more]
…in the courtyard of the Institute for the Digital Future of Journalism
I’ve got great video of everyone having a blast, experimenting with the new guerilla-style video production tactics I’ve been teaching them — I showed them how to use the front and rear-facing cameras on their iPads to shoot video. Here, they are working on producing “establishing shots” using whatever equipment is available to you at the time; in this case, it means holding the iPad up in front of your face and doing slow 360s, talking to the camera, so the audience can see for themselves what the landscape around you looks like.
They absolutely loved their brand-new iPad 2s. It was like seeing little kids getting handed Magic Mirrors. They were polite enough for most of the day, but about mid-afternoon, I just lost them in the wilds of the App Store. Also - I will never understand how the Ukrainian women manage to walk down these uneven, treacherous ancient cobblestone streets in stiletto heels.
I also taught them the basics of shot selection, framing, the Rule of Thirds, and some basic stuff about editing and shot sequencing as a means to create emotion. It was about a semester’s worth of material crammed into a one-day lecture, but at least I opened them up to what is possible, and where they can go to try to learn more on their own.
This is still a beautiful city, even if the sky in unrelenting slate gray, and the wind from Siberia knifes right through you after the sun goes down…
At night, the streets of Kiev are filled only with the rumble and clatter of Dr. Zhivago trolley cars, and the whistling north wind. The architecture here is like the people; kind of battered, but still full of character. Resilient.
I haven’t gotten to see as much of this city as I would like; I’ve always been working too hard, or pretty much exhausted & creaking from the demented flight schedule it takes to get here from Los Angeles. Still, the little I have been able to discover on my own has been delightful.
This time around, my students arrived in my classes with significant New Media skills. Some of them were already creating infographics, and this girl is already ghost-blogging for big financial companies. As you can see, she is quite determined; meanwhile, behind her, another of my more active and vocal students gasps in horror at the convoluted assignments I have inflicted on the class...
One of the greater joys of this class was seeing my students help each other out. When they got stuck with some of my more technically challenging exercises, they reached out to each other, and shouted advice back and forth across the classroom.
There is no better feeling for me. I am only here for such a very short time; I keep wishing that I had an entire semester to really reach deep into these young people, to help them draw out their skills & refine them. But seeing their willingness to follow me down these strange multimedia pathways, and to help each other out along the way … leads me to believe that they will continue to help each other out after I am gone.
Yet again, I use this blog as something of a mad scientist’s laboratory, to show off how to use the latest social media tools. This time around, it’s the social media aggregator/publisher Storify. [&lt;a href="http://storify.com/DaveLaFontaine/practice-stories-at-mohyla" target="_blank"&gt;View the story "Practice Stories at Mohyla" on Storify&lt;/a&gt;] [...more]
Yet again, I use this blog as something of a mad scientist’s laboratory, to show off how to use the latest social media tools.
Because surfing the Internet is like drinking from a firehose, David LaFontaine braves the torrent to tell you what trends and technologies to gulp down, swirl in your mouth, or spit out.
