Gadgetopia

Disconnecting Distraction: From Paul Graham, here’s a somewhat drastic, albeit unbeatable way to reduce Net distractions when you’re trying to get work done.

Maybe in the long term the right answer for dealing with Internet distractions will be software that watches and controls them. But in the meantime I’ve found a more drastic solution that definitely works: to set up a separate computer for using the Internet.

I now leave wifi turned off on my main computer except when I need to transfer a file or edit a web page, and I have a separate laptop on the other side of the room that I use to check mail or browse the web.

The problem with this, however, is that some people need to be connected to the Net to work. At Blend, we have to always be connected to our dev servers. To make this work, everyone would need to work locally, which may or may not work.

KNEECAM No.1 - the original Technoviking tape: I know this is old, but I still watch it every once in a while. For my money, it’s one of the oddest things on the Internet. I’ve never quite been able to figure out the context, other than it’s a rave in Berlin.

“Technoviking doesn’t dance to music. Music dances to Techoviking.” That, and the upside-down water, is just too much.

New Media Douchebags Explained: [Sigh]

How to blog, Twitter, podcast, poke, write on Facebook walls and become a new media douchebag.

Internet ‘96: A fascinating look at the Internet back in 1996. It wasn’t a greatest of places, actually. Many screencaps. McDonalds…wow.

I decided to peruse the Wayback Machine’s earliest archives to see what the internet looked like in 1996, when I was 14 and evidently had much less free time than I do now. Much to my chagrin, few websites from these early years have been successfully archived, and many of the best preserved ones were created by fast food and soft drink corporations because they were some of the earliest adapters of the internet.

With friends like these … Tom Hodgkinson on the politics of the people behind Facebook: This is a very long rant against Facebook, and social-networking in general. It gets deep into the politics of the founders and over-capitalism, and all that, but I was struck by this bit towards the beginning.

A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.

Facebook appeals to a kind of vanity and self-importance in us, too. If I put up a flattering picture of myself with a list of my favourite things, I can construct an artificial representation of who I am in order to get sex or approval.

The Internet sucks the soul out of the relating to people in general, but are the advantages worth it? The Internet allows a large quantity of relationships of less quality. Is it worth it?

Cyber Monday: I had no idea tomorrow had a name.

The term Cyber Monday refers to the Monday immediately following Black Friday, the ceremonial kick-off of the holiday online shopping season in the United States between Thanksgiving Day and Christmas.

[…] The term “Cyber Monday” is a neologism invented by Shop.org, part of the U.S. trade association National Retail Federation.[1]. It was first used within the ecommerce community during the 2005 holiday season. According to Scott Silverman, the head of Shop.org, the term was coined based on research showing that 77% of online retailers reported a significant increase in sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2004.

Deane is one who finds beauty in the code that defines a website, but here’s a guy, artist Brian Piana, who finds art in the layout of a website.

In my work I use deconstructed abstractions of actual websites to create new compositions in a removed, off-line environment. The layout, structure, and purpose of these sites directly inform the compositions and narratives of my work. Colors and shapes are governed almost exclusively by the original website’s design, and the linked pages of a single site are often included, providing a schematic of the site’s underlying architecture in my final composition…

I thought that was a pretty interesting take on things. I’ve been shopping for something for my office walls, and there are some things in Piana’s gallery that I wouldn’t mind using. Or it could become a DIY project… Hmmm…

via MentalFloss

Things Turn Ugly in the ‘Hacks vs. Flacks’ War: There’s a nice little catfight brewing over at Wired. When reading this quote, a “hack” is a journalist, while a “flack” is a P.R. person.

[…] Chris Anderson, the executive editor of Wired magazine, chided “lazy flacks” who deluge him with news releases “because they can’t be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they’re pitching.”

Chris Anderson, executive editor of Wired magazine, detests lazy publicists.

“I’ve had it,” Mr. Anderson wrote on his blog on Oct. 29. “I get more than 300 e-mails a day and my problem isn’t spam. … it’s P.R. people.”

After picking the fight, he then made it personal, posting the addresses of 329 unsolicited e-mail messages he had received and telling the senders that he had permanently blocked them.

It’s that last part that has people upset.

Way Too Good for Facebook or MySpace?: I knew it was going to come to this at some point — social networking sites are getting more exclusive. This article profiles aSmallWorld which is the apparent king of the elite social networking sites.

Membership in these networks, not unlike the exclusive country clubs where the rich and powerful hobnob, is carefully guarded. At aSW, only a subset of established members have the power to invite new users to join. In developing the site, founder Erik Wachtmeister rejected the prevailing Web 2.0 business model of attracting large audiences so you can sell ads to big brands. Instead, he confines membership to the relatively small group of people who travel in the same elite, often moneyed, social circles. “One’s network on the site is less useful if it is diluted by people you don’t know,” says Wachtmeister. His goal was “to create a private place where people could be much more forthcoming with information.”

Two points here:

1. Chris Pirillo sort of did the same thing. Sometime back he had a mailing list for entrepreneurs (it may still exist, I have no idea). I don’t remember what the joining fee was, but it was pretty steep. The idea is that the cost weeded out everyone but those who were very, very serious about doing business online.

   I wasn’t moved enough to join, but the idea was very attractive to me. I was envious of the discussions I assumed would take place inside. (For more on this general concept, see “Do we put more intellectual value on information we pay for?” and “The Quality of Free Discourse”).

2. Someone else — and I can’t remember who — said he thought it was almost dishonest to accept connections (“friends,” whatever) from just anyone. He was kind of a big shot, I remember, and his theory was this: “A lot more people ‘know’ me than I, in fact, know. By being selective and only making connections with people I do, in fact, know, I’m keeping the system honest.”

   I can’t disagree with that logic. I get LinkedIn requests from people I don’t know, or people with whom I’ve had one email conversation. The thing I always keep in mind is that with LinkedIn, they can ask me to introduce them to someone I know. Am I comfortable doing that? If I’m not, then I usually don’t accept the connection.

   The bottom line is this: of what value is a “connection” if there’s really no “force of relationship” behind it?

Elitist or not, you can’t deny that for some billionaire, there’s a lot more value in aSmallWorld than in, say, Facebook. Much like there’s more value for them to hang out at the country club than at McDonalds. They do business with people like them, so they need to go where people like them are, and the signal-to-noise ratio is high.

Geez, did I just write that? Maybe I’m just trying to kiss up so I can get in…

Pay To Play: Fair Price for Good Community: Josh Clark nails another good post today as he discusses a new “communal bike rental” program in Paris.

For 29 euros a year, you can “check out” a bike for 30 minutes whenever you need one. He discusses why the city of Paris specifically decided not to make the program free:

“You get what you pay for” has a corollary: “People behave according to how they pay.” By spending a little coin, a psychological shift happens. I become an owner. I expect that I’ll have access to bikes in good, unvandalized condition, and I expect that others will return bikes to their stations when they’re done. Because of those expectations, I’ll be that much more careful with how I treat the bikes myself.

So, so true. I’ve written about this before in a post entitled “Do we put more intellectual value on information we pay for?” I said this:

Do you put more value on information you pay for? Do you pay more attention to something you paid, say $5 for, than something you read for free on the Net?

[eBook PDFs on Amazon] probably have no more information in them than a well-written article on some development Web site. But are you going to pay more attention to them because you paid money? It strikes me that I would. If I paid $7 for an article about .Net datagrids, I’d print it out, and find some quiet time to read it and try the examples. Is it just me?

Another example of this —

I pay for LinkedIn, the business networking system. They have a new “Answers” section, and — as you would expect — it gets some spammish “questions” from time to time. People looking for jobs, people trying to recruit, people looking for outsourcing, etc.

I’m really uptight about flagging all those types of questions in the system. I get a little offended when someone craps up my nice, clean system that I pay for. I’m an owner, not a freeloader, and I have a vested interest in keeping LinkedIn in as good a condition as possible. I’m paying for it, so I have a tendency to pick up after other people to make sure my investment stays as nice as possible.

I’ve often thought about creating a Gadgetopia forum or community. If I did, I think I would charge a nominal fee for it — maybe $25 a year. Not because I could make a lot of money at that rate, but just because I think the participants that did pay would put more value on the information and invest more time in the community.

For years, MetaFilter charged new members $5. A small sum, sure, but enough that you weed out a huge group of people who just rack up free accounts for anything. I know that the $5 dissuaded me from joining, if only because I would have had to go track down my wallet, fish out my credit card, etc.

Free is, well, free. There’s no barrier to entry. And sometimes small barriers to entry can be good things.

How do I know this person? Through the Web!: Jon makes an interesting point here. There’s a whole category of people that you “know” via the Net only. You may have talked to them on the phone or met them in person, but the Web is “where” you met them.

Like other social applications, Facebook wants to know how you’re connected to people. So it asks: “How do you know this person?” and presents these choices […] The choice I usually want — “Through the Web” — isn’t available.

Geeks Will Not Be Silenced: Breaking: Digg Riot in Full Effect Over Pulled HD-DVD Key Story: Digg had a bad night tonight. Or a good night, I guess, depending on how you look at it.

The power of Web 2.0 is in full effect over at Digg, where users are revolting over Digg’s decision to pull a story (that netted over 15,000 diggs) and reportedly boot a user for posting the HD-DVD AACS Processing Key number, which would allow someone to crack the copy protection on an HD-DVD.

The front page of Digg consists entirely of stories flaunting the number or criticizing Digg for its actions. We’re not going to post the number, obviously, but there’s a screencap of the ensuing chaos after the jump.

Cats Can Has Grammar: This is a great examination of one of the current Net memes — annotating cat pictures — and why it has ended up the way it has.

If you spend any time at all observing net culture, then you’ll have been unable to miss the recent explosion in popularity of lolcats. This relatively recent phenomenon is the convention of taking pictures of cute animals, most frequently cats, and overlaying absurdist captions on the images.

Wikipedia has some more on the lolcat meme which I’m slightly embarrassed to say that I love. I love cats, which helps. I mean. come on, tell me this isn’t friggin’ adorable. Or this. Or this. I could look at these all day.

(Something else I find interesting —

I’m quite sure we’re going to get some comments like this: “I like cats too…under the tires of my truck [snort]”. This is fine — I realize not everyone likes cats. But here’s something that never fails to fascinate me: it seems you can’t just dislike cats quietly. If you don’t like cats, you must apparently threaten them with violence.

I don’t like dogs. They’re usually too big or too annoying, and they invariably smell like crap. But I have never threatened violence on a dog. They repulse me, and I’d rather they stayed the hell away from me, but I’m not going to couple that thought with… “or else I’ll run it over with my car.”

Think about that before you comment. And anyway, don’t the big plastic testicles hanging from your tow hitch need to be polished or something?)

Students give up social networks for Lent: This is just sad.

For some, it’s chocolate. For others, it’s coffee or cigarettes. But as this Easter approaches, some young and devout Christians are anxious to return to what they gave up for Lent: Internet sites Facebook and MySpace.

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us: I know you’ve heard of this video by now, and if you haven’t watched it, donate five minutes of your life right now. It’s brilliant, both in content and presentation.

I didn’t get choked up like Cory did, but I have to say it’s something else. The underlying message along with how the author presents and films it will reverberate.