dead media
Kodak update: when all else fails, sue the iceberg
A lovely visualization by Design language that’s been making rounds connects a couple dots from recent posts on this blog. Somewhat randomly, I had been musing both about how Kodak had the foresight to invent a “consumer” digital camera 35 frickin’ years ago and yet how did the whole camera industry completely miss the boat [...]
Dead media watch: the web is dead
Somewhere on a dusty shelf or storage box, I have this old issue of Wire Volume One two containing the strident prediction: “Tired: lynx, Wired: Mosaic”. Lynx is/was a text-only terminal app used for navigating a relatively obscure hypertext protocol, fancifully called the World Wide Web. NCSA Mosaic, was the first popular graphical web browser, [...]
Fax machines, and PDFs, kicking off the deadmedia watch for 2010
The fax machine was obsolete 15 years ago. When someone says “fax it to me,” I always feel like I’m being punk’d. A fax machine is nothing more than a printer, scanner and an obsolete analog mode that work together to waste time, money, paper and electricity. Documents that are faxed usually start out in [...]
Dead Media Watch #297 – Hyphens
About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. No one has time for the poor hyphen anymore. It seems to be going the way of the semi-colon semicolon into the club of beleaguered punctuations. OTOH perhaps it’s high [...]
In reality, SXSW Interactive 2009 was a long drunken wake for the death of print
[Last of my notes from SXSW, these on the recurring theme of death of many media, but one we may particularly miss, the death of books and long form fiction] The econoclipse has totally hastened the demise by digital soil erosion of the already shaky foundations of almost every old-media business model. And what’s crazy [...]
How the mobile web and “augmented reality” changes retail forever
At South by southwest interactive this week (SXSW) a huge theme was “augmented reality” the idea of, Amazon-app style, pointing your phone at any product to get more information -or a better price- online. We’re getting to a world where holding a mobile device means all of the potential knowledge and intelligence of the cloud [...]
The long slow death of Media
Internet usage isn’t killing TV; in fact, TV watching has hit record levels in the US. So why aren’t broadcasters rolling in fat autumn piles of cash? “An audience member was confused about how viewership could be up but ad revenue could be significantly reduced; top network execs patiently explained that just having eyeballs wasn’t [...]
Dead Media Watch: Polaroid film
So you may have seen the news that Polaroid is discontinuing Polaroid film. For all it’s greatness, that little 2.5 inch screen on the back of your digicam, has killed that old analog analogue. It’s a known law of media that all new new media must replace an old. But every new media is never [...]
Has Facebook killed blogging?
Have you noticed the blogosphere growing quiet? The pros and the a-listers and the corporate blogs are still at it as strong as ever. But tumbleweeds blow through the empty feed folders of personal friends. Flickr too is fading away. Maybe it’s just summer and we’re all outdoors, as we should be, instead. But I [...]
The Flavour of Cities – My deck from OpenCities
UPDATE: oh and my speaker notes are here on the slideshare page which might explain things a *little* more clearly. A great commentary by Edward on the discussion that followed (thanks!): “At the final session, insulated by a Creemore, it was interesting to think of as flavour as taste: in the look and feel and [...]
How Times Change (1908)
Technology, like any media, moves through society like a wave function. Starting with a ripple before ultimately cresting. [Detail from a larger image. From Shorpy.com, possibly the best website on the internet.]
Because media has a flavour
These are two exterior walls. They serve (roughly) the same physical purpose. They live across the street. 52nd street if I remember. B) is the north side of the brand new redesign of the the NYC MoMA A) is just another building of another century facing it across the street. Right across the street. They [...]
Is it just me or is Outlook archiving dumb?
Is it just me or is Outlook’s (and Exchange’s) insistence on “archiving” items and restricting the size of your inbox just stupid and something that must irritate and/or baffle millions of users? ‘Would you like to archive old items now?” no, I would not! How is an average user supposed to even know what that [...]
Voip (finally?) Getting Interesting
According to this piece at the inq Intel has a crack at computer telephony by way of the WSJ, Intel (of all people) is looking to finally deliver on the promise of voip. Voip for a long time has followed the all too common path of disruptive path of not really disrupting anything at all. [...]
Most interesting flickr photostream, 941 years on.
I bet it would have racked up lot of views and favourites since the twelfth century. If only they were counting. Check this youtube video for a wonderful animation of the Bayeux Tapestry. It strikes me how it reads just like the personal photostream of young William and his once fateful/adventurous summer trip to the [...]
Blogs, Dead.
Mark Evans pulled a few threads together for me [Has the Blogosphere stalled] citing statistics that show blog growth leveling off. Mark thinks as “factor could be the explosive growth of MySpace and Facebook, which provide people with the ability to write and share their thoughts without setting up a traditional blog.” Ironically, Mark writes [...]
Open Data more than Open Source Debates is What Matters Now
There’s a battle for openess going on these days, but it’s not the same as the old open source debate. The ability/openess to modify software is just not that important to most people. Statistically speaking, almost nobody modifies their software (though the few that do can sometimes create enormous value for everyone else – that much is still true).
What I worry about is the battle for open connectivity. The media and telecoms landscape is shifting and the connection providers are the new gatekeepers…. Much more after the jump.
How Tag Clouds Suck and struggling for an intelligent design of ‘Aboutness’
Some time long ago, back when the last of the compact discs still roamed the earth, when Web 2.0 was first shimmying it’s glassy, bubbly, lime-green flippery toe out out of that primordial soup of long-shattered dotcom dreams, there was, at that time, The Tag Cloud And the Geeks saw the tag cloud. And the geeks said it was good.
And boy they were wrong about that. really wrong…
Thomas Purves
is a technology executive specializing digital payment systems, a futurist and sometimes entrepreneur living in the great city of 
