dead media
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 [...]
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 design 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 have a different [...]
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 means? what’s [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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…
A Prehistory of Twitter
Every new media retrieves an archetype of a dead one. With the fuss over social presence at the moment, I recalled to how I first tried to achieve twitter. Twitter for me retrieves my very first blog which was nothing more than a log of msn messenger handles. And one point, there was even a semi-functional rss feed of this thanks to Michael Aird. Little personal moments at 80 characters or less (Twitter is generous by comparison).
A time capsule, after the jump:
Twittering the whispering revolution
Twitter is a massive signal. It’s still at least half kludgy, it’s nowhere near end-state but - the idea is going to be big. I’ve been thinking of this signal since in came across strongly in my Dead Media workshop at Lift07. But in just the last few weeks Twitter has so exploded that [...]
Vista’s DRM mistake, and the decline of Microsoft Windows
Microsoft introduces Vista to area bloggers, Nov. 2006
“Microsoft Corp. shares fell as much as 2.7 percent on Friday, their biggest drop in nine months, after Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said analysts’ forecasts for fiscal 2008 revenue for Windows Vista were “overly aggressive.” Microsoft shares tumble on CEO comments -CNNMoney
“A new study by Jupiter Research shows [...]
LIFTconference day 0: Dead Media Workshop
“McLuhan believed that all media forms are extensions of our senses, bodies, and psyches, in the way that a hammer is an extension of our hand and a book is an extension of our memory and ideas. As such, they intensify one thing in culture while obsolescing something else.” - The Imagination Challenge, pg 130
Today thanks to social media, other new innovations and 2.0 everything, we are at the point of explosion of new media in society. In the spirit of “the medium is the message”, how are/will these new media be transforming and being reflected in the structure of society itself, both in our social sphere as well as change to the nature and nvironment of work? (wow, there’s a sentence). This is the workshop I had the forture to lead at LIFT with a group of very bright people. But istead of just looking at the new media we examine these media through he lense of what they displace. What plethora of old/current media should we now consider “dead”. What are the historical precidents?
more after the jump…
Brilliantly, Norway makes iTunes (DRM) illegal
In a bold move against iTunes’ DRM, called Fairplay, the Norwegian Consumer Council has deemed it illegal in Norway, with France and Germany possibly following suit.
If only our policy makers had one iota of this imagination. The message Ottawa need to clue in to:
1. Digital protectionism is not how you promote culture
2. Digital protectionism is [...]
The revolution will not be tactile
Alex said something brilliant (as he sometimes does) the other day. He was answering a question from an architecht on the Imagination Challenge. Roughly, the answer went:
With each major shift in society there is something different in centre of the wheel that is driving the change. This time it’s digital and it’s social.
No, [...]
Thomas Purves
is an Entrepreneur and futurist for hire, lives in the great city of Toronto.
