bootstrapping.net

Dan Hill keeps amazing me.

We’re all weird people. Just too bad so much of our culture has been based on the illusion that we’re all normal.

Stewart Brand notes from a Long Now presentation by a Bush Whitehouse insider.

Meanwhile in the world the US has a severe “credibility deficit,” especially with the people in other nations. He said that his organization, The Rendon Group, has done detailed research on how the United States is perceived in Islamic countries. The universal message from Muslims was, “You look at us but you do not see us.” As for whether they felt positive or negative about the US, three groups emerged. Those who had some direct or even indirect contact with American people felt largely positive about the US. Those with more distant contact thought of the US only in terms of its corporations, such as McDonald’s, and had a more negative view. Those with no contact at all thought of the US strictly in terms of its government, and had the most negative view of all.
“This is the key,” Rendon said. “The strength and credibiliity of the American people must be reflected in our government.”

What we’re doing with person to person media is connecting. Real connections, people in conversation. Between individuals, between individuals representing organizations, between individuals across the globe. In a way that our mass media system never was able to - and wasn’t designed for by no means.

Interesting taxonomy he outlines. No connection=The view as the state. Somewhat of a connection=The corporations. Those with a deep connection=Individuals.

Could it really be that simple?

A much more nuanced take on feedreader rss subscriptions. Being able to look at one’s subscriptions over time, pause subscriptions, see one’s identity/interest shifts over times based on aggregated tags of the posts of the individual blogs or seeing a digg/techmemorandum view of subscriptions i’ve paused/said goodbye to but still want to be alerted when something really happens.
Anyone seen this explored?

i summer-cleaned more than 50 subscriptions out of my feedreader.

reboot7 had somewhat of a theme called “new models”. An observation that what was changing wasn’t the technology, but the models of how the world works. The perspective that is changing. The belief system that is changing. The culture that is changing. It’s not old models on new technology, but new models on the existing technology. I’ve never been able to articulate this very well - and the theme never shined through reboot7.
Now i found this writeup by Stewart Brand of a Brian Eno/Will Wright talk that is about some of the same.

“Building models, said Wright, is what we do in computer games, and it’s what we do in life. First it’s models of how the world works, then it’s models of how other humans work. A significant new element in computer games is the profound command, “Restart.” You get to explore other paths to take in the same situation. Eno: “That’s what we do with everything I call culture, everything not really necessary, from how we wear our hair to how we decorate a cupcake. We try something, surrender to it, and are encouraged to imagine what else might be tried.”

Anything worth exploring more - got pointers to existing thinking on this subject?

You work hard and set big aims of contributing something to the world - and then you get your 75,000 (210.000 now!) views of fame as the guy who demonstrates how to open a bottle of beer with a bottle of beer for Make. Something everyone knows how to do in a beer-drinking culture, something truly pervasive globally (as some of the hundreds of commenters around the web also have stated).
Good to know that your contribution to society at least will be that a beer-drinker or two will have learned an easy way to open their beer (tip: it really is easy and and takes 2-3 seconds and not as long in the video where the joke was an make/instructables like instruction video).
And interesting that you can sit in Helsinki and open a beer or two, someone pulls up a cameraphone and a couple of days later 75,000 people globally have seen it - interesting times…

Did a 5 minute, 30 slide sprint (PechaKucha go home!) presentation about language and change at the CustomerMade conference some time ago. The presentation is here as an pdf - all though a bit of the meaning probably isn’t in the slides.

It’s a little more than 5 years since this blog started - which in itself had been a long journey towards getting there from having internal blogs, blogger.com test accounts, etc.
Recently i’ve been a lame bad blogger - haven’t really been able to mix a pretty hectic work life and a pretty hectic family life with being a good blogger. But i’m feeling like the blog energy is coming back…

The Danish national broadcaster have started working with the danish version of wikipedia on their sports-section. A really good idea to promote having the staffers of the national broadcaster contribute to Wikipedia - and having them promote wikipedia to their users. A great way to put the assets of the public service broadcaster (employee time and user attention) into the commons with Wikipedia.
What’s interesting is that it becomes really difficult to describe such a collaboration. Two sentences from DR’s website. “DR SportsWiki is a unique and brand new collaboration where we aim to get the users to collaborate in creating a good product”. “DR SportsWiki is done in a partnership between DR & Wikipedia - and especially between the users of the two sites.
To begin with the object “DR SportsWiki” doesn’t exist a part from one page on Wikipedia - it isn’t something in itself but just a page on wikipedia linking to some other pages. Also it really isn’t unique since anyone else could start promoting wikipedia contribution to their employees and users. Also it isn’t done in partnership between DR and Wikipedia - but in partnership by users.
In terms of the danish Wikipedia they’re running a special DR-skin on some of the pages on the wikipedia wiki - a first to me at least, but could have been done before somewhere in a local wikipedia edition before. A slightly worrying trend.
I salute DR for the effort, but call on them to clean up their language to reflect the new reality - there is no them and us (users vs. Wikipedia/DR), there’s only us - users. And to contribute honestly and directly to wikipedia instead of framing it as a special version of wikipedia or as their own wiki.
Difficult stuff.