Results tagged “jayz”

Some great responses to, and extensions of, the things I've been writing about lately

• In response to Forking Is A Feature, Rafe Colburn offers up The cultural implications of forking, rightly pointing out, "Linus Torvalds didn’t set out to change the culture of open source software when he created Git. He was trying to efficiently manage the work being done on the Linux kernel."
• On a more personal level, Sumeet Jain talks about his first fork as a visceral experience. It's easy to talk about the abstract impact that forking has on culture, but far more profound to talk about the personal elation it can inspire. "When I saw that my tiny sliver of the open source pie was forked, I felt like I’d just shared in one of those excellent post-discovery high-fives."
• Building on The Facebook Reckoning, Alexandra Samuel wrote The Accidental Online Society, which I found extremely thought provoking:

  It may be fine for the market to pick the winners and losers of the next round of IPOs: for us to vote with our (virtual) feet in choosing whose particular worldview or neuroses will be part of our daily Internet use, and thus to decide which platforms and communities will thrive. But a “vote with your feet” policy is not a great basis for shaping a new set of cultural norms, particularly when so few people feel empowered to make conscious decisions about how to spend their time online, let alone see themselves as shaping a new online society.

• About a year and a half ago, I wrote about launching Last Year's Model. To my delight, the idea is still going strong, and others have explored similar concepts with more focused execution such as the Revive smartphone:

  [U]nlike other electronics, the revive smartphone was developed with re-manufacturing, re-use and recycling in mind. ... The phone itself is designed for easy disassembly allowing it to be recycled easily or simply upgraded through replacing different components. By combining this with simple software upgrades, users can continue to repair their phone rather than throw it out and buy a new one.The concept also includes a membership system that rewards users for keeping their phones longer. ... The backside is covered in a brown leather to reflect the lifespan of the device.

• That idea of using leather harkens to a key fixation of mine about digital devices: They should break in instead of breaking down. If our mobile devices are about rock and roll, they should be about leather and denim, materials that get better with age, instead of pricey, precious materials that demand reverence from us. I want a device that i own, not one that owns me. It's been almost five years since I first wrote about this type of design as a great way to compete with the iPod/iPhone/iPad juggernaut, and there's still nobody trying that hard, as Joel Johnson illustrates in his great explanation of why he loves costly, flawed, but still endearing wooden iPhone case.
• Interestingly, many of the lessons in Hospitality and Process are recapitulated more succinctly in this Forbes interview with Warren Buffett and Jay-Z. I've linked to the print version to minimize revenues for the sad-sack magazine that's given a platform to Dinesh D'Souza's idiocy, but this piece is actually worthwhile, and while it purports to be about the financial acumen of these two honorable gentlemen, it's more clearly a story about simple leadership.
• Finally, if you liked the diagram of the creative process outlined by Danc in his post I linked to in Hospitality and Process, then you'll be happy to know he's hung out his shingle as Spry Fox. Spry Fox follows a deeply collaborative model, where they don't bring all the talented people who build games on staff, but instead rely on a more networked concept where talent assembles for the duration of a project and then are free to work together again in the future. That's exactly how we put together the team we collaborated with at Activate to work on Gourmet Live, and it seems like it's going to become an increasingly popular way to attract the talents of extraordinary people in a way that both fosters collaboration and recognizes that true talents deserve a high degree of flexibility and control over their work and careers.

Blogging is that machine where you can put in a dime and get out a quarter.

• I've been ruminating about radio a lot lately (more on that later), but one of the most pleasant radio discoveries of late has been XM Radio's 80s and 90s stations, as well as their "20 on 20" pop hits station. Imagine my delight when I found that AOL Radio is streaming them for free.

• Let's see: Free Jay-Z concert, cute pictures of Shiba Inus, and gratuitous Prince references. Andrea Harner's blog is apparently what I would get if I commissioned a blogger to make a site for me. For the rest of you, BuzzFeed will be more to your taste.

• How to share your event on Google Calendar. Shouldn't the microformats çrew be automating this stuff for all of us?

• Michael Arrington's taking some time off from TechCrunch. One of my main criticisms of the site has always been that he's just a youngster in blogging years. Take it from those of us who've been around for half a decade or so -- this whole "I'm quitting!" thing is only the first step in a bigger cycle. After you quit once or twice, you have to get in a big flame war, post an embarrassingly personal item to your site, have a grandiose Third Anniversary blog post, coin a catch phrase, and have your last name turned into a verb before you can even consider yourself a serious blogger. On the other hand, "TechCrunch is a new kind of publication" so maybe I know nothing.

• I like the Wired cover story on LonelyGirl15, especially because they embed a number of relevant YouTube videos into the story. But how come the it's-not-porn-we're-journalists photo shoot video isn't on YouTube, too? It'd be a great promo for the story!

• "Feature" has many definitions. It can describe a full-length movie or a particularly prominent or compelling article in a magazine or newspaper. Alternately, a feature is an individual bit of functionality in a software program or application. What do I think of Jeffrey McManus' blog post? It feels like a feature.

• So maybe Gracenote (formerly CDDB) isn't evil after all? I love anything that challenges the conventional wisdom, especially when someone's gotten a bad rap. Good reporting, Eliot Van Buskirk! I'd been accepting the received wisdom about this company for years, apparently unfairly. Do we have a tech equivalent term for "urban legend"?

• There's pubic hair dye now. So you've got that going for you. One color is called "Brown Betty", which I thought was a type of baked good.

• Microsoft and Yahoo endorse Google's sitemaps format for describing your website. I love when there's this kind of informal collaboration, as in the underrated nofollow initiative, as well as my long-time favorite robots.txt.

• That Sitemaps.org site should probably have a sitemap at some point.

• S.R. Sidarth in the Washington Post: "I am macaca".

Allen's actions that day stood out because they were not representative of how I was treated while traveling around the state. Everywhere I went, though I was identifiably working on behalf of Allen's opponent, people treated me with dignity, respect and kindness. I cannot recall one event where food was served and I was not invited to join in the meal. In southwest Virginia, hospitality toward me was at a high point.

I don't mean to belabor the macaca point, and the story is much more nuanced than it seems, but I hope all the slobbering politicians, regardless of political persuasion, take away a simple lesson from this: If you fuck with Indians in America, you will lose control of both houses of Congress.

• George H.W. Bush thinks one of the causes of political incivility is bloggers. He's right.

• I'm going to be on Cranky Geeks again. Seems to me the show's gotten a lot better since their blog switched to Movable Type. And I get to talk about the Wii and Vox, two of my favorite toys! Hooray.

• In case you missed it, you should watch the "I got a brown Zune" movie at the end of my last post. It's the finest film you'll see all year, or your money back. You'll also find yourself saying to yourself, "I got a brown Zune!" over and over.

• I really liked the Jay-Z ad for HP until I'd read the Slate piece about the campaign:

Though they were just as expensive to create as the TV ads, HP opted not to buy television time for these spots. According to Roman, this was the plan from the outset. HP decided that Web ads have become radically more effective of late, and thus that it's worth it to spend money on high production values.

I feel so manipulated! Eh, fuck it. I like the ads anyway. Three dimensional stadium rendering!