Monday, November 29, 2010

When You Die In ‘Real’ Life, Who Will Keep You Alive On Twitter?

I started thinking about this kind of stuff when a young women I knew through the International Adoption community died of cancer in her early twenties. She had become a friend on Facebook and her presence remained; curated by her former fiancee and, perhaps, some of her closest friends.



It was eerie, yet I didn't want to let go of her either. Since then my uncle has died, as has a friend and business acquaintance. I 'unfriended' the latter, as I didn't know him that well and never met his family, but it made me feel a little creepy - like I was abandoning him. I know it's absolutely crazy, but I can't help the feeling.



At any rate, this blog shares an interesting take on what happens to us in the social media (i.e. cyberspace) world when we shuffle off our mortal coil and return to that great supernova in the sky. At my age, I'm beginning to think far more seriously about this stuff than I have before. How about you?


When You Die In ‘Real’ Life, Who Will Keep You Alive On Twitter?

I started thinking about this kind of stuff when a young women I knew through the International Adoption community died of cancer in her early twenties. She had become a friend on Facebook and her presence remained; curated by her former fiancee and, perhaps, some of her closest friends.



It was eerie, yet I didn't want to let go of her either. Since then my uncle has died, as has a friend and business acquaintance. I 'unfriended' the latter, as I didn't know him that well and never met his family, but it made me feel a little creepy - like I was abandoning him. I know it's absolutely crazy, but I can't help the feeling.



At any rate, this blog shares an interesting take on what happens to us in the social media (i.e. cyberspace) world when we shuffle off our mortal coil and return to that great supernova in the sky. At my age, I'm beginning to think far more seriously about this stuff than I have before. How about you?


A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

This is a very cool compilation of just about every type of graphic and chart that can be used to get a point across. No matter what type of data you're conveying, there's almost certainly a method here that will help you convey it clearly. Perhaps some are a bit pedestrian, but they are tried and true; many having stood the test of time.


Thursday, November 25, 2010

Today is, regardless of its deeper meaning wrt colonialism, racism, and Imperialism, a special day; perhaps the most meaningful of all our American holidays in terms of family. It's a secular holiday, which I consider special - absent any religious significance that isn't common to everyone. I just want to commemorate it with a quick recognition of everyone I have, and have had, the opportunity to connect with. Thank you. http://amplify.com/u/ggpt

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

When I grow up I want to be a superhero with a German car. #photo

You go, Grandma!!

Amplify’d from www.mymodernmet.com

Grandma's Superhero Therapy (18 photos)

A few years ago, French photographer Sacha Goldberger found his 91-year-old Hungarian grandmother Frederika feeling lonely and depressed. To cheer her up, he suggested that they shoot a series of outrageous photographs in unusual costumes, poses, and locations. Grandma reluctantly agreed, but once they got rolling, she couldn't stop smiling.



Frederika was born in Budapest 20 years before World War II. During the war, at the peril of her own life, she courageously saved the lives of ten people. When asked how, Goldberger told us "she hid the Jewish people she knew, moving them around to different places every day." As a survivor of Nazism and Communism, she then immigrated away from Hungary to France, forced by the Communist regime to leave her homeland illegally or face death.



Aside from great strength, Frederika has an incredible sense of humor, one that defies time and misfortune. She is funny and cynical, always mocking the people that she loves.

Read more at www.mymodernmet.com
 

Nice Guide to Using, as well as the Pros & Cons of, Dropbox

Some useful stuff in here on how to get the most out of a Dropbox account, whether the free one, or one of the paid ones that provide more storage. There are also some tips and tricks and links to further reading.

Amplify’d from www.makeuseof.com

The First Unofficial Guide to Dropbox [Save PDF or Read Online]

by Justin Pot on Nov. 22nd, 2010

You’re at the coffee shop. You need to access a file that has information about your work, but as you attempt to find the file you realize that you’ve made a mistake. You saved the work on your desktop computer, but you only have your laptop with you. You have no way to access the file.

Enter Dropbox. This program acts as a “magic pocket” which is always with you and contains whatever you place in it. Put a file into your Dropbox and it’s on all of your computers and mobile devices, really handy if you own multiple devices. But there’s more to Dropbox: you can use it for file sharing, backing up your data and even remotely control your computer.

If you’re not using Dropbox yet, you should be. Lucky for you our new MakeUseOf manual “Using The Magic Pocket: A Dropbox Manual” is now available for download.

It’s informative, easy to read and, like all of our manuals, completely free.

Download: Using The Magic Pocket: A Dropbox Manual

Read now online on Scribd

See more at www.makeuseof.com
 

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Systems Savvy. Heaven Is Where You Find It?

My latest blog post. What is your definition of work. I don't go into it too deeply here, but mine may be radically different from that of many.


Thursday, November 11, 2010

Why Connecting Matters - andrewpwilson's posterous

This seems like a human analog of the Network Effect. It also seems somewhat analogous to gravity. The more massive a body, the more likely it is to accrete matter from its surrounding space. Connections work that way as well.



Whether it's physics or economics that best explain what the author is talking about, there's no doubt having lots of "useful" connections increases the number and quality of transactions you can or are likely to be involved in.


Monday, November 08, 2010

Content is, indeed, King!

Great article on the triumph of content over form. Thanks to George Dearing for pointing it out.

Amplify’d from www.theatlantic.com




Dylan Tweney




Dylan Tweney
- An award-winning writer specializing in technology, science and business, Dylan Tweney is a senior editor at Wired.com and publisher of tinywords, the world's smallest magazine.







The Undesigned Web

nts and political parties communicated to the first mass audiences.


Message and presentation were inextricably intertwined, with the latter lending power, impact and even meaning to

Design reigned supreme in the 20th century, when it was an integral part of the way artists, publishers, governments and political parties communicated to the first mass audiences.

Message and presentation were inextricably intertwined, with the latter lending power, impact and even meaning to the former. Not for nothing was Marshall McLuhan able to say, with gnomic brevity but not a little insight, "the medium is the message."

But in the 21st century, Internet standards have successfully separated design and content. The two live more interdependent lives, sometimes tightly tied and sometimes completely separated from one another.

The message is now free from the medium.

It's that separability of design and text that has led to the third wave of the web, in which readers (or what some would call end-users) are in control of how the content they are reading looks. And, as it turns out, many of those readers like their designs to be as minimal as possible.

As Jaron Lanier perceptively observed in the introduction to his recent book, You Are Not a Gadget many -- if not most -- of the readers of any text in the 21st century are not people. They are machines: Google's web crawlers and indexing engines, for instance.

Even humans have different motivations and needs. Sometimes readers will want to engage with a particular story in the calm, uncluttered space an iPad affords, with no distractions and with the content front and center. Other times, they may want to read things -- as we increasingly do -- in the midst of a busy hub of data. That should be the reader's choice, not the publisher's. To facilitate those decisions, as well as the widespread distribution of content via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flipboard and a hundred other tools used by readers today, publishers need good information design as well as clean visual designs.

The Undesigned Web will facilitate critical thinking, sharing of information, and the wider dissemination of knowledge than has ever been previously possible. That's because it will be easier than ever to separate content from the, ahem, bullshit with which it is frequently cloaked: Distracting photo spreads, advertisements, backgrounds, faux-official layouts and logos, and the like. It will be easier to tweet, retweet, blog and reblog content, adding layers upon layers of discussion and criticism while embedding it into new social contexts.

In this new world, the end of design -- by which I mean its purpose, its goal, the end toward which it aims -- is to make content easier to parse, both for humans and for machines.

Read more at www.theatlantic.com
 

Sunday, November 07, 2010

Resistance is, indeed, futile

If you're a Star Trek (or, as my father used to call it, Star Drek) fan (especially TNG), you should appreciate this article. I lead with mostly the pics, but the article is also fairly insightful, IMO.

Amplify’d from searchengineland.com

Back in 1996, the now defunct Boardwatch Magazine had a classic cover depicting Microsoft and CEO Bill Gates as the Borg. For 2010, we’d like to submit some more modern candidates: Google, Facebook and Apple.

The article below assumes some knowledge of the Borg from Star Trek. Never heard of them? Nasty creatures that “assimilated” everything into their “collective” society.

The Google Borg

The Facebook Borg

The Apple Borg

And Microsoft…?

Maybe Resistance Is Futile!

Read more at searchengineland.com
 

Friday, November 05, 2010

Alternative News Media Websites

Tired of all the old news sources? You know, the ones that don't really tell you much of what's going on and dwell on the sensational to the detriment of real reporting and analysis. Well, here's a nifty list of alternative media you just may find useful. You're welcome.