Reinvention

Kids love to role play. Donning a pirate hat, my friend’s young son regularly sticks me in the ribs with a plastic sword and demands that I “walk the plank.” His sister puts on a flapper dress and asks for a smoke (she’s six). I’d be concerned, but for the fact that growing up my pals and I played Cops and Robbers in Central Park, acting like tough guys that we weren’t.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that children look to reinvent themselves online as well as offline. However, I was surprised to learn that 34% of the total number of internet users aged 3 to 17 visit virtual worlds, according to eMarketer. In just three more years, it’s projected that over half will. 

There’s no map of this strange new playground yet, but here’s some of the zipcodes: dizzywood, zwinky, club penguin, webkinz, empire of sports, planet cazmo, xivio, whirled, pixie hollow, ourworld, and habbo.

Where there is no First Amendment

Today, veteran reporter Barry Bearak tells of his experience in Zimbabwe where he was arrested for the offense of “gathering, processing and disseminating the news.” 

Bearak explains that Mr. Mugabe maintains “a veneer of democracy [which] is important to his image” and so allows civic groups to meet and discuss ideas but only ”so long as their messages fail to reach the masses.” There is a line in the sand there that journalists apparently constantly assess. We should honor their brave efforts to inform us. They do so at their own peril.

Moreover, let us raise a glass to Thomas Jefferson, who said “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”  If not for our Founders’ believe in freedom of speech and of the press, we might not be blogging today.

eBay LongTail anecdote

Thanks to GG for including this info in his book…

The first item posted on eBay was by founder Pierre Omidyar: a broken laser pointer.  When someone paid $14.83 for it, Omidyar contacted the winning bidder to explain he was actually getting a piece of junk. The buyer replied, “I’m a collector of broken laser pointers.”

If that’s not an example of the LongTail, I don’t know what is.

FYI- I tried to use WayBackMachine to find the original post, but alas, it’s not cached.

I won’t be a twit, will twitter.

Rosie raised the question in her post “I will Twitter” on Rosiethethird’s Weblog, why anyone would care about Twitter.

I have also felt that it seems like “overinforming an underinterested audience.” Of course, I don’t SMS either. That’s because I dial the phone–it’s just easier (I’m all thumbs) and with a phone call there’s no time wasted with a bunch of back and forth. But the real point is I don’t call my friends to tell them I’m going to the supermarket, or that I’m on a plane, or hey sucker…don’t you wish you were with me skiing in Aspen right now (no, I’m not really there, but you get my point). So why would I Twitter them?

I know lots of people are into it, but it seems pretty pointless to me. Well, it did until I read about James Karl Buck. The story reminds me of 1978 movie, Midnight Express, about a man caught smuggling drugs out of Turkey who is thrown in jail and essentially disappears due to a less-than-modern legal system. Buck (who seems to have done nothing wrong other than being than a bystander) may have suffered the same fate, but for the fact that he Twittered “ARRESTED” and those that followed his feed made calls to send in the Calvary and get him out. Social media quite possibly saved his life.

What’s interesting is Buck said he really hadn’t used Twitter much before the incident. I’m pretty sure he’s glad to have created an account so he could use it when he needed to. Maybe he was a Boy Scout and remembered the motto, “be prepared.” I don’t think I’ll be Twittering from Starbucks to tell you all about the herbal tea, or from the Metro platform to say the trains are running late, but I WILL get set up with an account to dash off a life-saving message, in the event such an unexpected turn of events happens to me. Whoever sees my plea, just don’t forget to get me out by calling for help. No offense, but I don’t think most embassies follow your Twitter feed.

Will the real computer innovator please stand up?

Steve Jobs may be too busy experimenting with IBM’s bleeding-edge ”racetrack” technology at the moment to think about low-tech market opportunities that exist for Apple. But Lilyanne, you’re in luck. Some clever folks not-at-Apple have solved the problem you raised in “Apple - We Need Some More Innovation!” on your blog Odetobernays.

There’s the electronically-controlled height-adjustable computer desk from details, a Steelcase company. I think this is a great idea, as well. My back hurts from sitting hunched over my laptop all day. Better posture is just a little interior decorating away! The design is pretty mod looking, so we’ll get office style points as a bonus.

But why stop there? Stand-up computing is catching on outside the office. It’s possible to social network while getting a workout on the treadmill–with the Netrunner. That way, new digital friends found on MySpace or Facebook will wonder (if eventually met face-to-face) just how someone can stay in such good shape given the amount of time that goes into eating and drinking while social networking.

I agree with you that a portable stand-up desk is a cool idea. But I’m thinking “portable” as in easy-to-move from office to home, or livingroom to backyard BBQ. Maybe I’m just not coordinated enough to appreciate the idea of full-time-on-the-go-laptop-use.  But for those (maybe the same ones who text message while driving) who want it, it is possible to walk and compute. But it’s not for me. Neither is this privacy accessory…after all, I want to show off my Apple MacBook Air, not hide it.

 

Sweet Nothings

Sometimes the Universe just creates weird cascades of seemingly unrelated, but obviously connected events. Most people call these curious anomalies “coincidences.” Deepak Chopra will tell you it’s Synchrodestiny and it’s not random. Moreover, if you just pay enough attention, you’ll see that it isn’t that rare either.

I’ve been paying attention, and while I’m not sure what it means, I can tell you that I’m having a cupcake synchronicity event.

First, a dear friend–who promised a cake over a year ago and never delivered–arrived on my doorstep a few days ago to redeem herself with 12 of the most del.icio.us baked goodies on the planet. Now it’s true that anything with lots of butter and sugar will rate highly in my gastronomic-fun-meter, but I do say these were truly first-rate. Second, Shari on her Bloggin It In blog talked about her adventures in the field with her “Cupcake Tasting Again and Again” post. I take issue with Georgetown Cupcakes being the best in town. Nay I say. It’s Cake Love on U Street. There are no finer. Third, an actress friend who insists upon calling all the men she knows “Cupcake,” gave me a jingle on my cell today. Three of ANYTHING makes a trend! I should get Deepak on the phone and let him know that I get it.

Here’s two tidbits I bet you didn’t know:

1. The Brits, as they are wont to do, have a better word for it–fairycake.

2. Cupcakes are bigtime in the blogosphere. There’s actually a http://www.cupcakeblog.com. This blogger is so into cupcakes that s/he has tried making them with wasabi and sake (I’ll hit the local sushi-joint, thanks). More amazing, there are more than 53,000 blog entries that have to do with cupcake.

Cross-Cultural Exchange via Blogging

There’s always someone in the supermarket checkout line paging through the National Enquirer. I wonder if the (UK) Observer, or Le Monde (English language version), or the South China Morning Post for that matter would get equally perused if they were put on display in this high traffic area. I’m not selling subscriptions mind you, but it begs the question…do we care about the perspective of the people that live in Europe, South America, Africa, and all the way on the other side of the planet?

It got me thinking about my own media consumption. Most of the input about international events and viewpoints that I get comes from domestic newspapers, magazines, and television. That’s one interesting observation. Equally significant is the fact that these sources all filter, edit, and position things in what is purely a unilateral communication. Briefly stated, I’m not getting a very worldly take on the world, and it’s my own fault.

None of us needs a monster satellite dish in the backyard to get raw direct feeds from far away places. We can “open the spigot” and get unfiltered, unedited, and unbiased news from the blogosphere. Similarly, we don’t need a short-wave radio to connect with a total stranger in a foriegn country to ENGAGE in a two-way, unmoderated exchange of news, ideas, and information. Global internet adoption, having evolved substantially in the last few years, changed that. Scoble and Israel inspired me to start looking for new places to learn and interact.

What I found (from an admittedly limited effort) is it may not be so easy to find foreign viewpoints. Global Voices, who describes themselves as a source of country-categorized international blogs that “aggregates, curates, and amplifies the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore,” doesn’t seem to know where their bloggers actually are. I checked out Germany and got blogs from a Kyiv-born blogger living in Moscow, a Peruvian-Colombian of unknown location, and a Danish-Puerto Rican living in New York. I didn’t learn anything about German views, but I sure got excited about the diversity and would like to dust of my passport and take a trip to one of their hometowns!

Maybe I was being too adventurous, so I figured I’d take my lead from “Blogs and National Cultures.” That didn’t turn out any better. The “impressive blog of Michel-Edouard (M.E.) Leclerc” is, as you may have guessed, written in French. I don’t speak French and neither does the Google translation software.

So I didn’t get much of a cross-cultural experience out of researching this blog post, but all is not lost. I did find out that things have changed a bit since Naked Conversations was published. Blog Census shows that Catalan and Spanish now are the language/s of over 200,000 blogs, four times the number of just two years ago.

This says it all…

“Blogging is thinking in front of others.”

-Michel-Edouard Leclerc, as quoted in Naked Conversations

Virtual face lift

I’m a “noob,” a new arrival in Second Life.  And for no particular reason, I look like an animal. Yup, this is one unusual place.

SL is a mystery to me, so I bought some books on the topic. When I’m planning a trip to an exotic location, I usually get the guide books first, and this time is no different. I like to have a lay of the land before I head out.

So if you too are going exploring, here’s one warning from The Unofficial Tourists’ Guide to Second Life by Carr and Pond: due to glitch in the software, when you go from one place to another in Second Life, rare though it is, you can be “Ruthed,” or unintentionally turned into an avatar of an old lady (who’s name is, you guessed it, Ruth).

Maybe the first thing to do when looking around SL is to find a good plastic surgeon…

No excuses for being shortsighted

Babak Parviz, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at University of Washington, and colleagues have invented a contact lens with bionic capabilities.  While still in the testing phase, this little piece of plastic can put images such as websites, email messages, spreadsheets, and video games right in your field of view while you continue to look around at the natural world. Forget colored contacts…this is going to be the height of corneal fashion.

There may even be a way for the embedded chip in the lens to take information from the surface of your eye and create a dataset that could be analyzed to evaluate your health. Futuretech, here we come.