Lausanne, Switzerland If you are on the continent this March, my friend Stephanie Booth is organizing a conference in her lovely hometown of Lausanne (a short train ride from Geneva) on “Going Solo” and freelancing. Looks like it will be excellent, I know people have been thinking of organizing something similar here for a long time. Tickets are on sale now.
UPDATE:Here is Stephanie herself announcing the conference on the main stage at Lift08, embedded video ~4.5min
Mark Evans writes that he’s almost done with facebook. He’s not the first or the last to grumble about the blue book (see my post for example on “attention viruses”: Facebook Fatigue, it’s Spreading?.
As Mark says, is the facebook honeymoon ending? A certain schadenfreude [twopointoh-denfreude?] in me would like to claim it so (damn that Zuckerberg, so rich and so young).
Certainly, the “open” application platform (open crapplication platform?) has nearly been facebook’s downfall. A grand experiment in which Mr Z has learned that if you do freely open up your wildly successful internet platform to thousands of pointless, self-interested, attention seeking crapplets, that – like some epic biblical plague of digitally-winged attention locusts – tens of thousands of self-interested, attention sucking crapplets will rapaciously attempt to take advantage of your success. Who knew?
My facebook page looks as though seized by a grand mal craptileptic fit in spam factory.
Meanwhile, it gets worse, you just can’t hide on facebook anymore. Every ‘slackjawed acquaintance’ you’ve ever known is poking you now, biting you like a zombie or worse. Some of these people don’t even have any proper geek cred at all (the horror). I joke, but there is known problem of managing facebook if you are a highly popular person.
So anyway, the real nerds are going back to Twitter. [I don’t know where the actual popular people are going]
Twitter is safe. For one it does a lot less, so it’s as yet uncorrupted. And, lets face it, it’s really only the nerds who are on Twitter so far. Twitter is mostly interesting for who’s not on it (and it’s handy that you can discretely un-follow people if need be) and for the special culture and secret @ # language that has grown up around it.
I like twitter a lot, but know that facebook is working hard to put the wrong bits of toothpaste back in the tube, and will be doing a lot to, no doubt, be twice as big in 2008. And if the alpha geeks are turning away from facebook, maybe this means they’ve actually exactly hit it right, and made something everyone else can use.
When twitter too, jumps the shark chasm this year to general popularity, I’m sure the flighty geek-set be on to something else by then anyway. Mixin anyone?
You can add me on twitter here.
You can add me on facebook here.
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 a perfect replacement, some particular character or ‘flavour’ of the old medium is always lost. This is why we have nostalgia, and how we use old flavours to trigger old memories and emotions.
This is also why dead media are a rich vein for the exploration of new media, for there is another rule that says: Any new media must retrieve an archetype (or flavour) of a dead (or more than one) dead media.
Just the other day, someone took a great polaroid of Michele and I, dancing (ok slightly goofy/maniacally) at a friend’s party. A perfect frozen moment now gracing the fridge. I’ll post the picture here when I get a chance. Just as soon as I can snap a photo of if with my digicam.
In the meantime, remember the polaroid kids, remember to stock up, and Shake it, Shake it like a polaroid picture.