Drowning by numbers

Creative interactive agency JESS3 (@jess3 on Twitter) designed and animated this neat "State of the internet" video for the JESS3 lecture at AIGA Baltimore in Feb 2010. They specialise in data visualisation and it shows.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

When I grow up I wanna be an old woman

How to live to 100: "Overall, centenarians are the fastest-growing demographic group across much of the developed world and here at EHM we have taken a look at factors which can influence an increase your expected lifespan, so maybe you too can reach that grand age of 100."

In short:

1. drink green tea
2. be outgoing
3. eat nuts
4. floss
5. do not smoke
6. embrace new technology
7. have a baby later in life
8. take more holidays
9. lie in
10. drink a little wine
11. laugh

But I don't floss. Need more good advice? Everybody's Free (to wear sunscreen) is a classic.

Picture credit: iStockphoto at Thinkstock.com. Title from: When I Grow Up [YT] by Michelle Shocked.

Parenthood

I love my children to bits, but sometimes I can relate to this penguin mommy in Pierre Coffin's 2006 animation classic. Or as they say in Dutch: Soms kan ik ze wel achter het behang plakken.

My 10 year old Disney princess daughter, on watching this: "You would never do this, now would you mommy?" My 13 year old son: "Then why don't I have a little brother?"

Living in the intersection of privacy, anonymity and identity

In an interview with CNN, imageboard website 4chan founder Christopher Poole says anonymity on the Internet is becoming an endangered species: "People are just putting loads of information about themselves [on Facebook, Twitter, etc], and we're becoming very comfortable with sharing very intimate details about our life. " Poole, who was known in his own community as moot and only recently revealed/confirmed his real name, thinks this is a frightening trend.

All posts on 4chan are anonymous, and many are deleted shortly after they're posted. The anonymity, Poole explains, allows for open and honest discourse, although he admits it gets very explicit at times. It's exactly the same as what happens at Chatroulette, the one-on-one anonymous webcam chat.

Reminds me of what Cluetrain Manifesto wrote ten years ago about global (online) conversations: "[People] communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked."

Poole was 15 when he started 4chan; the Russian guy who programmed Chatroulette is 17. The average social network user is 37 years old. I think these two young guys are far more aware of the stakes of living in the intersection of privacy, anonymity and identity called "public internet".

Image source: TwitterVenn. Found at Four Ways of Looking at Twitter.

Only Robinson Crusoe had everything done by Friday

Procrastination from Johnny Kelly on Vimeo.

Turtles all the way down

Stephen Hawking's 1988 book A Brief History Of Time starts like this:

"A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.' The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?' 'You're very clever, young man, very clever', said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down!'"

Source: Turtles all the way down - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Picture from one of my favourite blogs: Black and WTF.

Looking for snow loving bloggers

I love blogging but I dislike snow. Which is why I'm one of the jury members (and not one of the participants) of the recently launched www.bloggerwanted.be contest. For this contest, Sony is looking for a snow freak who's willing to go along with a bunch of fanatic snowboarders to Sony Mountain Hollywood (in Gargellen in the Austrian Alps) as their blogger in residence. Nice to have: one winners will get a Sony Bloggie HD Camera and a Sony Vaio.
The winner is picked on 18 March; the snowboarding trip is 3-10 April. Picture credit: Goodshoot for Thinkstockphotos.com.

This one goes out to @applefanbe

For Gil Plaquet, the CSS to my HTML.

Temple Grandin on Different Kinds of Minds

Temple Grandin is a doctor of Animal Science, a professor at Colorado State University, a bestselling author, and a consultant to the livestock industry in animal behavior. She is also a person with high-functioning autism and I admire her greatly for her work in autism advocacy.
She was also one of the speakers at the TED 2010 conference. I'll embed the video here as soon as it's available, but here are some notes from Highlights fro TED 2010, Friday at BoingBoing.
Temple Grandin describes herself as a visual thinker ("I have a huge internet trunk line for graphics."), but overall sees three kinds of autistics:

1. Visual thinkers: art, design, industrial design, photography
2. Pattern thinkers: mathematicians, programmers
3. Verbal thinkers: journalists, stage actors

The third one might look a bit weird, but Ms Grandin explains that she "had to learn social skills like being in a play." . Just like my 13 yr old son, really, who's still trying to figure out how to work around the challenges of living with Asperger's. He's doing fine so far, but I can't help but wonder how later in life he will use the way he thinks to become really good at something (a passion, an expertise, a job). Right now I'm tempted to think he's more of a verbal thinker. If you've seen my #shitmysonsays Tweets you'll agree he's got a unique, wacky sense of humor and he really enjoys making people laugh.

Back to Temple Grandin. Her speech is a fascinating and refreshing view on (mainly high functional) autism and a huge difference to that creepy 1998 The Lancet paper that linked the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism. I still can't believe it took The Lancet 12 years to realise how damaging (and in my view, moronic) that idea was. You can't blame people for trying to figure out what causes autism, but I'd rather focus on ways to make life easier for people who interact with e.g. autistic children. Ms Grandin is right: teachers don't know what to do with, for example, the high functional ones. Mainly because these children are all different, and often clueless about what to do with their abilities, their limitations, their talents and their life. Grandin sees "nerdy kids who aren't social, not being led towards science." And that's a shame, because as she stated: "The world needs different kinds of minds to work together."

Rich media can kill you

C.R.A.P.A.D.S. - Council of Responsible Advertisers Promoting Accepted Digital Solutions's team of Lab Techs "click your banners all day to ensure they are performing to their peak Clicks per Banner potential. They also perform janitorial responsibilities as required." Keeping banners stupid and simple - a refreshing thought. More good wholesome advertising wisdom in this YT movie:

“Flattery is a counterfeit money which, but for vanity, would have no circulation”

Today I learnt about the soon to be launched micropayment service flattr. At first, it looks mostly like a crossover between a donate button and peer-to-peer payment. In their own words: flattr aims "to revolutionize how people pay and get paid for content on the internet."

Flattr.com - How Flattr Works from Flattr on Vimeo.

Pity the video stops just when it gets interesting: "With a flatrate fee, you can flatter them." Flattr appears to be a flat fee subscription service. In an ideal world, this would be a package included in your ISP monthly fee or even your last.fm/flickr etc premium account, with the end consumer deciding with each click how the money should be devided among the content creators.
The content creators, by the way, are presented as creative individuals, not as e.g. (record) companies or (magazine/news) publishers. I'm also wondering whether or how they will enforce "flattring" for content: will flattr users who don't click, still be able to read the article, or listen to the music as often as they like? And will there be a connection between how often you flattr and how often you're able to "consume" the content?
If this works, it will start a really interesting debate.

The title is a quote from French 17th-century nobleman and author François de la Rochefoucauld.

We're never letting go

Wonderful stop motion music video for North Carolina folk-pop trio Bowerbirds. Last.fm describes their music as leafy, fluent and marked by wonderfully skilled songcraft and bucolic imagery. The music video is a perfect fit.

Bowerbirds "In Our Talons" from Alan Poon on Vimeo.

The praying mantis couple remind me a bit of the couple in Ultravox' 1984 Dancing with tears in my eyes. When the world falls apart, all you can do is hold each other and kiss.
From the lyrics:

Youre in our talons now, and were never letting go.
Youre in our headlights, frozen, and no, were not stopping.
You may not believe, but even we were scared at first.
It takes a lot of nerve to destroy this wondrous earth.

Roa: street artist obsessed with animals

Found at Flavorwire: Belgian street artist Roa. He lives in Ghent, Belgium but if you look at his work he seems to get commissions from all over the world (London, Moskou, Wasaw, even an exhibition in Paris). But not from Belgium, apparantly. With a few exceptions, like these rats sleeping somewhere in Brussels.
Have you seen his work anywhere in the streets? Know of any other locations?

Thinkstocking Thinkstock

Some say that googling Google could break the internet. Binging Bing works, so does Twittering Twitter (some people do just that: Twittering Twitter, all day long). So I was quite confident when I took my chances and asked for "Thinkstock" stock pictures in the just launched Thinkstockphotos.com. It came up with 39,549 results:

They were clearly prepared for this. From the press release: Thinkstock offers millions of select royalty-free images, vectors and illustrations from the industry’s leading content providers: Getty Images, iStockphoto and Jupiterimages. The collection combines both user-generated content and professionally art-directed images ensuring Thinkstock provides a genuinely diverse range of concepts and subjects with original and creative interpretations.
By the way: for a while I thought that stock photos were named after a guy called Robert Stock. Just like Google PageRank is named after Larry Page. I only recently found out his name was really H. Armstrong Roberts and that he started the whole concept of creating stock houses back in 1920.
Photography, and consequently the use of images made by photographers, have changed a lot since then. It's only logical that stock house have now moved entirely to the Internet as their main distribution method, recruiting both professional and amateur photographers from around the globe.
In the meanwhile, the thin line between professional and amateur photographers has become virtually non-existent.

Self-Employed Entrepreneurs: don't get lonely

Anybody can become a consultant. And it's not just on the U.S. market that the economic crisis is sometimes forcing people to "go solo". Some sound advice from WSJ.com: "Cutting-edge expertise is vital to long-term professional health. Successful consultants don't let their skills coast, even for a short period. There are simply too many consultants waiting to take their work.
Typically, consultants keep their edge by attending workshops or training courses. But the most successful often add another key element to their training: They teach—whether at a regional business college, through university continuing-education programs or through workshops given by professional associations."
My guess is: it takes about one year of freelance consultancy of project management work (doing just that) before you lose your edge. Running projects and finding new ones is a completely different mindset from the one you have in a company. The big trick to keep track of emerging trends and technologies is not to read thousands of rss feeds every day, but to feel embedded in a network of people you can exchange ideas with.

Picture credit: flashfilm via Thinkstockphotos.com.

What path have you taken?

In 1970, my birth year "the Nobel prize for Literature that year went to [Soviet and Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Nobel Peace prize went to [American agronomist, humanitarian] Norman E. Borlaug. The Nobel prize for physics went to [plasma physicist] Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén from Sweden for fundamental work and discoveries in magneto-hydrodynamics with fruitful applications in different parts of plasma physics.
The sensation this created was big. But it didn't stop the planets from spinning, on and on, year by year. Years in which you would grow bigger, older, smarter, and, if you were lucky, sometimes wiser. Years in which you also lost some things. Possessions got misplaced. Memories faded. Friends parted ways. The best friends, you tried to hold on.
This is what counts in life, isn't it?"
I found this text about my birth year enormously depressing. Turning 40 in a couple of months doesn't help. Maybe it's because of the path analogy: it burdens you with a number of heavy preassumptions:

1. You can take a wrong turn and end up doomed.
2. You can pick a wrong leader and end up doomed.
3. You're convinced you picked a wrong turn or a wrong leader and can't help looking back: What if? You bump your head, trip and get behind schedule. In other words: you're doomed.
4. On the other hand, you can imagine people walking with you for a while and hold your hand. That's nice.

Which analogy for life would you prefer? A swim in the primordial soup? A fart in a bottle (make sure to go with a big bang)? Or a ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in your hair?

I want the internet to look like Matt Damon

Over the years, internet has been visualised as the information superhighway (as introduced by Al Gore in a 1978 meeting of computer industry folk), cyberspace (in William Gibson's 1982 story Burning Chrome), the metaverse (in Neal Stephenson's 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash), the Net (in Irwin Winkler's 1995 American drama film with Sandra Bullock), the Matrix (in Larry and Andy Wachowski's 1999 science fiction action film with Keanu Reeves), "a series of tubes" (U.S. senator Ted Stevens in 2006), or even “an enormous, hulking Tootsie Roll pop" (Popular Science Blog in a June 18, 2007 post). But what if it really should look a whole lot more like Matt Damon? Baffler - What Does the Internet Look Like?: "The problem isn’t really that we don’t know what the Internet looks like. It’s that what it looks like is so horribly ugly (...). I wish the Internet looked like Matt Damon. (...) With nothing but a handscan (read: a few keystrokes) and a bank account number (an IP address), he accesses the multiple identities that he has strewn around the globe like the little pieces of ourselves that we leave littered around cyberspace. (...) In the Bourne trilogy, Matt Damon is the Internet. He is mobility; he is the point of connection; he is search-optimization. He’s a Bing zombie, without the zombie part."
Wow.

Spam in my kitchen

Once in a while I dream about having Star Trek technologies available in my home. In the video below you'll see an implementation of Augmented Reality that looks an awful lot like Star Trek's Holodeck.
It's like waking up in a nightmare: with Augmented Reality, even our kitchen would try to spam us.

YouTube - Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop: "The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it. A film produced for my final year Masters in Architecture, part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality."