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Great post by Seth Godin on so-called dead media. In fact it is so great I am reposting it in full:
Bring me stuff that’s dead, please
RSS is dead. Blogs are dead. The web is dead.
Good.
Dead means that they are no longer interesting to the drive-by technorati. Dead means that the curiousity factor has been satisfied, that people have gotten the joke.
These people rarely do anything of much value, though.
Great music wasn’t created by the first people to grab an electric guitar or a synthesizer. Great snowboarding moves didn’t come from the guy who invented the snowboard… No one thinks Gutenberg was a great author, and some of the best books will be written long after books are truly dead.
Only when an innovation is dead can the real work begin. That’s when people who are seeking leverage get to work, when we can focus on what we’re saying, not how (or where) we’re saying it.
The drive-by technorati are well-informed, curious and always probing. They’re also hiding… hiding from the real work of creating work that matters, connections with impact and art that lasts. I love to hear about the next big thing, but I’m far more interested in what you’re doing with the old big thing.
Only when a technology settles into the swamp of daily culture and starts composting, only then can interesting things start happening with it.
This awesome infographic (courtesy of Mahendra Palsule from Techmeme and Skeptic Geek) – illustrates perfectly how a business based on exploiting the long tail in its field will always beat older (and more established) business practices. A mere 11 years ago Blockbuster had the chance to buy Netflix for peanuts, but instead it completely ignored what Netflix and its ilk portend, probably believing (commonsense) that a brand name and a global distribution chain are an unassailable bastion. A defining mistake. What Netflix did to Blockbuster, Amazon did to Borders and a myriad of smaller booksellers. The cloud is winning.
The current cloud computing landscape, divided into private/enterprise providers, public platforms, and the hybrid cloud – the infographic illustrates revenue, employees, and market capitalization. The result is a very interesting comparison – i.e. FB vs Amazon vs Twitter.
This is the prezi from a lecture I gave on convergence.
This is my prezi for a class on digital game studies.
And so the theater continues – Julian Assange lost his plea against extradition yesterday, and although his lawyers are expected to appeal, it seems that he is heading north soon. What is truly amazing in all this is that throughout the entire odyssey (which involved a 250 000 pounds bail) he has not been officially charged with anything – he is merely wanted for questioning, you see. It is all based on a system of arrest warrants for which the phrase ‘guilty until proven innocent’ morphs into ‘guilty because…just because’. There will be many more high moments in this court drama until, in the end, it all quietly disappears from managed perceptions.
Below is a selection of useful articles on WikiLeaks:
Cracks in the wilderness of mirrors – Pepe Escobar
US embassy cables: The job of the media is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment – Simon Jenkins
WikiLeaks vs. the Political Class: Why they hate Julian Assange – Justin Raimondo
WikiLeaks’ Marketing Strategy: A Stroke of Genius – Gary North
The moral standards of WikiLeaks critics – Glenn Greenwald
Jean Michel Jarre is that rarest of creators who will always remain ahead of their time. This track was made in 1978 – one year after I was born, and is probably the first piece of music I ever heard. My father was listening to it on a tiny tape player, and the recording was a copy of copies, a chain of copies spanning the iron curtain. A message from a future that never came.
I just discovered Jolicloud – an open source, Ubuntu Linux based operating system made for the cloud. Apparently the original version – 1.0 – was made entirely with netbooks in mind, though the latest version I am downloading now – 1.1 – is hardware neutral and should run on anything. I am planning to run it in dualboot with Windows on my Hp Mini as a start and see how it goes from there. The access screen looks beautiful, with intuitive functionality and zero hints of the Linux beast under the hood running the OS. Start screen>
Update: I am writing this through Jolicloud on my netbook – the install is fast, smooth, and probably as painless as it can get. First screen asks to connect online, which is what one should expect from a cloud OS. The layout feels a bit like a cross between Ubuntu and Android, which makes sense to me. With cloud connectivity it should all be about speed and smooth experience, so I decided to test that by streaming music and doing a couple of other things simultaneously. So, while I am typing this I am listening to Henry Saiz streaming through the SoundCloud player app, while also running Prezi in another window for good measure, and the overall speed and experience make me a believer. I haven’t tested things like connecting to projectors or corporate wifi, but from what I see so far Jolicloud is a win.
This little graph from IHS Reseach has been making a lot of noise around the interwebs in the last three days. The message is that app store revenue is growing all over the board, in some cases quite dramatically, which is ultimately just another proof that the trend away from the desktop and towards the cloud is real and getting stronger. Android Market revenue grew 861.5% year-over-year – read that figure again. Of course the Android revenue is still puny compared to what Apple is making on its apps, but the other important figure is that the Apple App Store lost 10% of market share over the same period. With the three-way competition between Samsung, HTC and Motorolla for control over the Android hardware market only heating up, these figures can go only one way for Apple.
To make things even gloomier for Apple, Eric Schmidt just announced at MWC2011 that Android has 300 000 activations per day and rising, that YouTube apparently gets 160 million mobile views per year, and that ChromeOS is definitely coming this year. I will probably have another post with more on that speech.