mellowbeing - crafty, geeky and a new yorker.
I mentioned in an earlier post that I'd do a quick podcast review. This ties into "spending less time online".
Really, what does it come down to? Being efficient.
And nothing's more efficient than a podcast that will catch you up with the latest industry news in a few minutes to an hour.
The podcasts mentioned below are my current favorites. They range from general news to tech news to randomness to craftiness
(listed counterclockwise):
Sticks & Stringsa knitting podcast by an Australian bloke
You Look Nice TodayJournal of Emotional Hygiene with Merlin Mann as one of the 3 main guests
Knitters UncensoredHilarious trio based in Germany. Definitely uncensored.
This American LifeThere's a theme to each episode, and a variety of stories on that theme. It's mostly true stories of everyday people, though not always.
Craft.Rock.Live.Vickie Howell's podcast which lasted for one season. She has an interview with Greenday's lead singer's wife as well as other crafty divas.
NYTimes PodcastNews on the go: Front page news, NYT Tech Talk, Political Points: On The Presidential Campaign, Science Times, Only in New York
This Week in Tech: TWiTJoin Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, John C. Dvorak, and other tech luminaries in a roundtable discussion of the latest trends in high tech
That is all folks! Check out these podcasts when you have a chance. Let me know if you've converted to any of them :)
Labels: crafty, geekery, lecture, random
I attended this talk last month. Below is the description. The questions are what I jotted down. This is just food for thought. Enjoy!
Sponsored by the NYU Information Law Institute, Free Culture @ NYU, and ISOC-NY
What will come of the next decade on the Internet? We often take for granted the state of the net today, but there's no guarantee that it will remain this way. Will the digital future be dystopian, or is there a brighter outlook ahead than some may believe? Our panelists - thinkers and net visionaries, with backgrounds ranging from art, law, technology, politics, media, culture, and entrepreneurship - provided their perspectives on the future of the net, and engaged with members of the audience to further the exploration of what lies ahead.
Panelists: Lauren Cornell, Executive Director, Rhizome
Clay Shirky, Adjunct Professor, NYU ITP
Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia and Wikia
Tim Wu, Professor, Columbia Law School
Jonathan Zittrain, Professor, Oxford University, Visiting Professor, NYU Law
Questions Discussed:Is it a bright or bleak future for the Internet?
With the advent of user generated content, how do we manage to bring out the best information?
Is Wikipedia just a happy accident?
Does mob rule lead to a productive and useful knowledge base?
View the video archive
here.
Labels: geekery, lecture
Panel: Browser Wars: Representatives from Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera discuss why the hell they can't get along and figure out a standard.. or something like that
- IE8 will have Javascript debugging
- The Firefox founder created Javascript
- Javascript 2.0 will be coming out soon!
- There is no word if there will ever be a standard for having padding and margins be the same across browsers.. hopefully, it'll happen someday (IE8? maybe?)
Panel: Your Mom 2.0: Discussing how to make mom friendly websites
- Their generation asks "how?" We ask "why?"
- Basically, make your site understandable by anyone. This should hold true if you're a good designer to begin with. No one wants to go through several layers of links to get to the information they're looking for. And there's no need to "dumb it down" for a prior generation.
Went to the trade show and got lots of goodies. Talked to a few reps. Went to get dinner on the outskirts of Austin and saw the sunset while eating good ole Tex Mex. Afterwards saw the comedy show. Went to sleep far too late and had the most drowsy Tuesday..
All in all, visit Austin if you get the chance!! If you do, you *must* visit Magnolia Cafe. Ask for the breakfast burritos.
This is the conclusion of the SXSW reviews. Whew! That was quite a bit to catch up on.. if you want to read a highly distinguished review, go over to the
Banana Boy Productions blog to get the other side of the story :)
Labels: geekery, lecture, shows, travel
(photo from Wired.com)My notes: "Sucked"
All I remember from this talk was Zuckerberg saying "platform, efficient, community" and Lacy just crossing and uncrossing her legs while twirling her hair. I left 15 minutes before the end. Apparently, the crowd went a bit crazy when it was Q&A time towards the end. The best part was when it as mob rule and they gave her a lashing. Ah well.
Panel: Human Rights in Virtual Worlds: discussion about whether or not you own what you make in a virtual game- there is no such thing as group rights as of now. There's still work being done for individual rights online
- ULAs (User Licence Agreements) are not always as liberal as marketed
Should you own what you make? If it's on their server, perhaps it doesn't fall into "your" possession. Curious what the gamers in the audience think of this one.
Panel: Icanhascheezburger
We were promised free burgers. While we were inside the room, passersby ate our burgers :( I still can't believe the company staffs 9 full time employees - all off ad-based revenue from funny cat pictures!
Sunday was the most partied out night of all of them. Went to a pre-party for the Adobe Web Awards. Then the awards show hosted by Eugene Mirman. Lots of laughs. The 'ask a ninja' guy came out to receive awards for participants not present. Went to the Etsy/Threadless/Moo party - which sucked. It was crowded, hot and no movement space since there were 3 pool tables with active games going on at the time. Gawker party at Emo's: Met John Coulton who sings "Code Monkey". Bumped into Eugene Mirman there who let us know of his comedy show the following night. Then went to Blogger party and met Cheeseburger from Icanhascheezburger. Partied hard.
Most memorable moment at the Blogger party: Met an Irishman and asked where I should go when I visit Ireland some day. Instead of the usual way of making a list, he drew out an accurate map of Ireland's coastline and pin pointed the cities I should see. I love the geek way and not the 'normal' way :)
Labels: geekery, lecture, shows, travel
All in all, it was a great set of panels. Learned quite a bit here and there. Oh and there was Bloghaus which housed free beer, brownies, fruits and veggies all day at the conference. That may have been my favorite room there.
I don't want to bore you with all the details and I'm sure you can find long, well written explanations of the panels on professional blogs. Here, I'll just note what I found interesting from the ones I attended.
In true slacker fashion, I will write up the first day. More to come.
Panel: Horrible Ads: A panel with Jeff Jarvis and others discussing last year's worst advertising campaigns
- Rules #101 : When making an ad, make sure your audience can remember your brand name
- Don't mess with Wikipedia because you will be found out
- Don't make up socialibility where it doesn't exist (The Cisco "human networking" example)
- Vespa: Started a blog and let it die after a few entries. If you start it, finish it!
- Whole Foods CEO: Don't lie about your competition
- Whatever you do, don't insult your audience's intelligence
Panel: Steven Johnson & Henry Jenkins: An optimistic view on collective intelligence
- How is it that people find the time and devotion to fan sites?
- Most pink collar workers need high levels of expertise to get the job. Once they have it, they are only required to use a small portion of their knowledge at work. They then seek out respect and a reputation outside of the office - this is possible in an online space. Hence, the motivation for hours spent creating online communities
- Harry Potter has enabled kids to seek out larger text to read as well as learn about the legal process and fair trade when they try to publish their own works.
- There's a shift from "I" to "We"
- A large reason why Barack Obama is popular amongst younger voters: he is the stub in the Wikipedia entry and we are all filling out the entry together (interesting wording that caught my attention)
Panel: Voting
- "miracle of aggregation"
- In a betting market, there is a cost to be wrong. If there's something at stake, does a voter with a 'wrong' vote stay quiet?
- If you don't know enough about a subject, don't vote! (brings up the question of how informed are we as a society about the current issues and our presidential candidates' take on them)
Panel: Worst. Website. Ever: A complete riot. Some of the most hilarious moments at SXSW. Loved it.
- What makes a horrible website? It is: Inane. Derivative. Evil.
(derivative example: Facebook for Senior Citizens. Threadless for Pants - Pantless)
Sites presented: Presca.st, Flockd Up, HappyNetBox, Sickr, Mmomerce, PeopleIPO.
After this, we'd gone to Spaghetti warehouse. Because where do you eat the best Italian food? In Texas, of course. And how do you know it's the best? Your food has a tiny plastic Italian flag on it to remind you of the cuisine in case you'd forgotten.
Good times on 6th street afterwards. Got a cowgirl hat. :)
Labels: geekery, lecture, shows, travel
Some notes from the Microbranding talk (I just transcribed them this week)
Long Tail TheoryAccording to Wikipedia.org, "Businesses with distribution power can sell a greater volume of items at small volumes than f popular items at large volumes."
The chart displays sales rank vs. inventory. From what I understood it to be, there are a small portion of companies that sell quite a lot and the 'long tail' is a good majority of the shops but they sell smaller quantities. In order to be a successful microbranded shop, you'd like to be somewhere in the corner of the green colored area so you are selling a nice amount of items and can still keep up with inventory.
New international market: Japan
Why? Japanese youth likes American culture a lot and are big consumers of American products (although that's true for many countries, he only mentioned this one as an example).
Some ideas for a blogger
- Run a "free gift" post to get more viewers (and bring out the lurkers).
- Use Google Translate (done! I got this idea from the Bent Objects blog)
- Create 3 Main Topics for you blog, then 3 subtopics for each. That way, you'll have 9 topics total which should be plenty to work with ( I really should narrow down the number of tags I have ).
Some sites to check out
- www.shapeshifters.net (creative people social networking site)
- www.deviantart.com (artistic community)
- www.dismantleddesigns.com
- www.theblackapple.typepad.com
- www.squiddo.com
- www.englishcut.com
So while researching "Beatles algorithm" in my failed attempt to find some programmatic algorithm to a Beatles song, I discovered this great blog entry: Great Blogging Tips from the Beatles
I found it so awesome - it's written as if the Beatles had had a blog, what would it be like, what kind of thought would go behind it, what would their principles be?
The ones I found most appealing:
Strive for Continual Improvement
"I’m pretty sure if John Lennon was a blogger, his attitude would have been that if his post didn’t come up high in the search engines, then let Google fix their algorithm."
Dream Big - Change the World
And of course, All you need is love :)
Labels: geekery, lecture, photography
After heading out to Etsy Labs with
Haasome for the talk titled -
The Global Microbrand: Further Resources - I came to the realization that blogging in of itself is very powerful and immersing oneself into the web 2.0 emerging communities is very helpful in getting more involved with like-minded crafty people and the crafty fans.
Some tips on becoming a better blogger:
1)
Listen to othersSign up for RSS feeds for your favorite blogs and try to at least skim them every day if possible.
2)
Say something Write about whatever you'd like but make it focused, meaningful and of course interesting. I hope I'm doing this.. but I am going to try to make them more focused posts with more of a 'message' to each one.
While at the talk, someone asked how she should set up her shop. I can't remember now if it was Antonio or fellow attendees who mentioned to her that it could be set up as "collections". That week I decide to start knitting up for the Fall season since I want try to make the most wristwarmers ever (only second year selling heh). It wasn't intentional but I guess it was a subconscious choice to pick just one skein of yarn and work with it until it was finished.
And hence, the "Blue Collection" was born! I still need to sew in the leftovers and sew on pretty silver buttons but I figured I'd post about them now as a "before" picture so you can see the semi-finished pieces. If you'd like me to reserve one for ya, let me know :)
Labels: knitting, lecture
While I'm on a "techy" roll, let me take a few moments to recap what I did the evening of June 7th.
I went to work in the daytime. Left work early with coworkers to go on our very first drunken get together and had free pizza with every drink we bought. But that was an even luckier night - there was a spokesperson from a liquor company present so if we drank something with top-shelf liquor, it was free. So free pizza & alcohol. (You have to see
Crocodile Lounge) What could be better?
Showing up to a Google Event half tipsy, that's what. That night, I was meeting
Jessica to see Vint Cerf, "the father of the Internet", speak at Google's headquarters downtown (if you consider 15th street & 9th ave. downtown Manhattan". Apparently Google doesn't really allow people to talk about the actual events and content of the talk if it's not an official Google announcement. Welp. All I'll say is that there was some good empanadas, refreshing water, talk about geeks in a van driving around California, Mars and penguins. That's right. Penguins.
If you're in the NYC area, I'd recommend going to one of their events. It's a nice way to spend a low-key evening. Check out their
site for future events.
Labels: geekery, lecture, nyc
Last night, I attended a lecture at the Law School here at NYU held by a patent lawyer. And not just any patent lawyer. He's one of leading proponents of the Creative Commons (GPL) and is currently defending against Microsoft at the Supreme Court level. I was pleasantly surprised to learn this.
"The Empire & the iPhone: 'Technology Platforms,' the Commons, and the
Way We Live Now."
Eben MoglenProfessor, Columbia Law School and Director, Software Freedom Law Center
Monday, March 19, 8 PMSome notes I took:
the pursuit of "prosumer culture" - production & use of products by the same person
- Paypal decentralizes the traditional bank structure
- Youtube, myspace, etc. decentralize the music culture
Hours that Microsoft actually spends, as a whole, producing software in a week: 3.8 million
This is what he called "a microsoft"
- a few years ago, there were 468,000 programmers on sourceforge.net
- 10/hrs approx. per person per week
- about 1.4 "microsofts" on sourceforge
- about 1.6 "microsofts" in GPL entirely
so, who's producing more software? and who is spending more of their resources on advertising, middle management and twiddling of thumbs?Commons is motivated by politics; to fight against the incumbents after all the power.
Free software is a "cultural outlook" - universal knowledge is possible through sharing of resources - our own expertise.
So share. Learn about GPL and the Creative Commons. It's really up to us to figure out a way to not have everything patented
Labels: geekery, lecture, oss
