Clay Shirky provides an interesting rebuttal to David Progue's recent article - Put Down the Pitchforks.
The risk now is not that SOPA will pass. The risk is that we’ll think we’ve won. We haven’t; they’ll be back.
Google announced today a move to increase the social media, or social network content in it's search results.
"Search, plus Your World" is rolling out over the next few days. Personal results, profiles of friends and contacts; related people and places; and content from Google+ are all part of the new content we'll see in future search engine results using Google.
Slowing introducing the 'social' aspect of search has been a strategy google has taken since it's early introduction of Social Search in 2009. Now, with Google Plus vying for more social credibility and time, Google presents users with an array of content choices, and sources.
It will be interesting to see how people/users respond to the innovation in the next few weeks and months.
Found a few things; thought I'd share.
Copying Y Cobinator - Why and How, provides links to a detailed spreadsheet showing which startup companies recieved funding from which incubator and when
(See: Seed Accelerators and their companies spreadsheet - multiple tabs).
Incubators are a ghetto is a bit of a rant, albeit, a passionate and well laid-out caution from a startup developer - who, admittedly, I don't know (@littleidea - Adrew Clay Shafer).
Together some interesting food for thought regarding startups, funding and incubators.
...welcome back to the office; let's get it done in 2012.
Here's to fresh eyes in 2012!
New York Times article on the memi-fication of new sitcoms. An interesting discussion on how GIFs are reverberating in Internet culture. A snippet of the original article is below. (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/arts/television/parks-and-recreation-and-ot...)
Welcome to the meme-ification of the sitcom, a phenomenon in which the latest iteration of television comedy writing anticipates and includes the Internet as a secondary delivery vehicle right from the start. In the last couple of years a particularly digestible style of writing has emerged, well suited to various attention spans and bandwidths: on these shows, and also “2 Broke Girls” on CBS and “Man Up!” on ABC.
There’s a semi-intelligence to these sitcoms: smarter than traditional multi-camera, laugh-tracked shows, but less risky than single-camera progressive fare like “The Office” and “30 Rock.” The meme-ified series compose a new middlebrow, creative enough to alienate conventional sitcom fans and attract viewers in search of a challenge but not complex or jarring enough to be off-putting. (Despite its savvy writing “Community” on NBC is probably a hair too dense to fit this bill.) Their humor plays well for 30 minutes, but is also reducible and portable in ways that make sense online: punch lines are more like catch phrases that feel like Twitter hashtags, and scenes with celebrations, dances and odd body movements look hilarious when looped endlessly as a GIF.
Who are the new watch dogs?
The news industry has long been heralded as the fourth estate of democracy, but what happens to the cause of democracy when/if the newspapers go away?
Credited, fact-checking journalism appears to be under threat as traditional media outlets are increasingly overlooked for (often sensationalized) click-centric, traffic-seeking reporting in headlines and posts.
Snarky posts, and sensatinoalized headlines get clicks, but do the stories behind them tell an unbaised story? Do we need need an unbiased honest look at the world around us? Can we construct a new news industry where news is delivered with the same credibility (perhaps more) than before?
Who are, or will be, the new watch dogs?
Here's a lead; the Fifth Estate Oxford University, along with William H. Dutton, have some thoughts on where accountability in the new media landscape can come from.
Answer: We are.
I've been reading this book, Brain Bugs, lately. One early distinction made is that brains make associations and computers calculate numbers. The analogy, though, is one that likely will be extended throughout the book.
Here's an interesting snippet.
"As a species, we traveled through time from a world without names and numbers to one largely based on names and numbers; from one in which obtaining food was of foremost concern to one in which too much food is a common cause of potentially fatal health problems; ... Yet we are still running essentially the same neural operating system."
