Nobody cares about your bookmarks (Damnit)

Posted on March 12, 2007 by Thomas Purves

What is it with people dumping their bookmark feeds into their rss? Sure there’s a lot of good theoretical reasons to have social bookmarks, and rss feeds thereof. Some people even really like Del.icio.us. Similarly, one of the holy Grail’s of enterprise social media is to feed off of a whole network’s bookmarks (and especially the tags) as a way to amass and track a sort of “collective intelligence” of the swarm. but…

I know you think your browser history is thrilling and everything but, why, why in your main blog feed? If these links aren’t even worth enough of your time to craft a simple blog post to explain why they’re important, and if you’re not flagging these specifically for me, why then am I being subjected to these bookmarks?*

It’s just link barf people. please stop?

Or, if you feel you must social bookmark, just have the courtesy to make it a separate feed (and see how many readers you get).

*worst offenders are those who just dump in links and tags with no commentary whatsoever. If you’re one who actually makes use of the description field to add some brief editorial then I let you off with a milder scolding. If there was such a thing, a properly designed human-readable bookmark feed would include only the bookmarker’s description of the link, and not display the URL the tags, title and other stuff that’s just noise.

Posted in Archive, Uncategorized | 20 Comments

Twittering the whispering revolution

Posted on March 10, 2007 by Thomas Purves

twitter

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 we really have to start talking about it. Now, Twitter Inc. could just be the first signpost, but the signal itself is a monster.

I don’t know what to call this phenomenon that encompasses “status-casting” the facebook status, twitter, jaiku, what we used to used to the msn messenger handle for (poor msn messenger, once huge in Canada, now all but a dead media…)

When we were talking back at the Dead Media workshop we asked, twitter – what will it kill?

consider this: Will Twitter kill blogging the way sms messages “killed” voice conversations?

And what’s so great about being pervasively bombarded with short cryptic blurblettes from everyone you know what the most random intervals? The reason why, is that twitter is an incredibly lightweight way to suck in the momentary “context” of everyone you know (scratch that, of every geek you know) with only a slight distraction cost. hint: the key is to get twitter onto your gtalk and/or mobile device.

It’s like socially, your field of awareness just grew by 3 sizes.

It’s funny how, while everyone assumes that the killer app is always a richer medium that, oftentimes , it is the lowest bandwidth new media that end up killing. Just as sms, “kills” voice calls and hell, how we’re all still wondering why we don’t have videophones for 30 years now?

Even rss is like this, it’s a medium designed to filter out all nonessential (mostly visual) input down to the essence of the desired signal itself. The river of news. Please, just the facts ‘mam.

This thought ties back to my theory on all media. Media is what we use to leverage our scarce time, physicality and immediate context. Our time, place and capacity for sensory input is finite, but our attention has plasticity. Through media, the more we can compress each signal coming at us (in the traditional definition of the word signal) the more capacity for aggregate attention that we gain.

Now go learn to stop worrying about the fuzziness or the inadequacy of any media to capture all meaning – and learn to appreciate this as media’s greatest enabler.

Significance for the Enterprise? Is just beginning.

Posted in Archive, Business, dead media | 5 Comments

Dragging the futurists into the future: a Beal xml feed

Posted on March 10, 2007 by Thomas Purves

Ivory and other colors Tower

Shhh, can you keep a secret? There’s great minds at work in a tower, located high aloft the downtown of this very city. In fact, though you’d almost never guess it, the Beal Institute for Strategic Creativity publishes presentations from their weekly Thursday show and tell. There’s some great stuff in there! And kuddo’s to the Beal for graciously opening all this insight/foresight to the public. If only it were easier to access. This ain’t blogging (though they’ve heard of it i swear) you have to turn through layers of flash and their posts don’t allow commenting, trackbacks, particularly easy linking or -until now- any way to subscribe by rss.

So I hacked together a little rss feed for you:

http://feed43.com/bealinstituteweekly.xml

It’s a screen scrape, so it’ll work until the next time the site layout changes.

Of that, I am entirely confident they’ll come-to at some point and replace the current flashtastrophe* with a proper public web presence (that even engages the public perhaps). In the mean time though, you can make do with this lightly hax0red feed. enjoy!

* Term thanks to Jay of Radian Core (if you ever need a great site designer)

Posted in Archive, Uncategorized | 2 Comments