Welcome to Social Media Hell
Read morejonathanmoore: Augmented reality. 80’s style. Garnet Hertz’s video game concept car combines a car-shaped arcade game cabinet with a real world electric vehicle to produce a video game system that actually drives. OutRun offers a unique mixed reality simulation as one physically drives through an 8-bit video game. I’m having a hard time deciding if […]
Read moreMade-up words like ‘gamechanger’ get tossed around too often these days, but this Foursquare/AMEX thing feels like a gamechanger, at least for the LBS field.
Read moreThere’s something more than just retro going on here. It’s not just an empty nostalgia, I think, that makes 8-bit games really interesting. If you put them in the context of all human creative expression, there was a really short amount of time in the 1980s and early 90s where we tried to tell a story in this crazy way, with buttons and vacuum tubes where electron cannons drew dots on a screen one line at a time. There was this really special moment where forgotten great men used the newest tools they had to tell a story. A lot of times, it was the same men coming up with the story as writing the code, and if you look at that code, it’s incredible. So far afield of the end result, you might as well be looking at hieroglyphics or ancient scrawls on pieces of bone. But they toiled in solitude, creating what most dismissed as a children’s toy, and some railed against as the downfall of their children’s future, “rotting their brains”. These nerds struggled, not just to create a story, but to create worlds with just colored squares burned into phosphorous screens sixty times every second.
When I use Facebook I’m trading my data for their service. I’ve entered into this commerce perhaps unwittingly, but using the same mechanism humankind has known throughout our history: trading something of mine for something of theirs. So let’s guard our privacy by all means, but recognize this is a bargain and a marketplace we enter into. Consumers will grow more sophisticated about the nature of this trade, and adopt tools to manage the data they give up.
Edd Dumbill, Data is a currency (via infoneer-pulse)
Pattern is a web mining module for the Python programming language. It bundles tools for data retrieval (Google + Twitter + Wikipedia API, web spider, HTML DOM parser), text analysis (rule-based shallow parser, WordNet interface, syntactical + semantical n-gram search algorithm, tf-idf + cosine similarity + LSA metrics) and data visualization (graph networks). (via Pattern […]
Read moreFor the short term future, it’s likely that most of the “smart money” in the news/advertising business will continue to back ventures that offer 21st century tweaks on 20th century business models. But as the paywall movement fades into a footnote, ad-dependent start-ups like TBD fold into obscurity and cheap cons such as Demand Media collapse like pyramid schemes, an opportunity emerges. Who will imagine the ways to convert reported information into valuable data products? Who will fund the development of the tools that make such products possible and profitable?
Dan Conover, Advertising is not enough
TrojanWire 