Let’s Go Signal Farming

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You are neck deep in signals.  You followed a couple of them to read this. Some are handled automatically by your tools.  Others are ignored.  A few of them actually span from one system to the next.  And the best signals probably require you to interact at least partially with the content in order to make the bigger decision: TL;DR!  I’m going to continue my rantings on internet news (Skip back to Part 3 if you like) by breaking down these signals into the simplest bits I can think of: Who, What, and Where.

Who is the most important signal to most people.  And most systems are built on it.  Facebook has friends.  G+ has circles.  Twitter has your follow list.  Your email program has an address book, but anyone can send you a message, and most people probably read the vast majority of email sent to their address (provided it passes a bayes filter).  But none of these systems know anything about each other. Effort spent organizing your G+ circles is wasted in twitter.  This is a shame.

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In the Plex by Steven Levy

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I’ve always had a lot of respect for Google… one of the only other web properties who’s name became a verb on-line besides the one I built.  And I also like Steven Levy. I keep my print Wired magazine in the bathroom and…  you can figure out the rest. Once, many years ago I even had dinner with him and Hemos in a little hole in the wall restaurant in Tokyo. He’s a smart fellow… although I don’t think he really writes for me exactly: his writing actually makes a lot of the things that I deal with comprehensible to a wider audience. I feel like if I wanted to explain something to my parents, I just need to find the Levy article about it, and they’d grok it and he’d save me the trouble. So I was looking forward to In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

It came recommended by a few friends (one of whom works at Google now. Name withheld to protect him, but I’ll give you a secret hint: It’s Hemos.). I was a bit disappointed in that I don’t think I learned much about the search giant… but that’s probably because the vast majority of events covered in the book were probably already Steven Levy articles in Wired, or at the very least, covered in countless Slashdot stories and submissions. So much of the book wasn’t really new to me, but it’s well written, fast paced, and it does a good job of trying to string together and reconcile the startup Google of the 90s to the pre-IPO Google of the early naughts, to the modern Google: an internet behemoth struggling to maintain its identity, nimbleness and innocence, while dealing with real competition from Facebook. Continue reading →

Finally, A Watchable Version of Dora

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As a parent, I am constantly forced to use television to distract my children for brief (extended) intervals so that I can work (play video games).  There are a plethora of wonderful (terrible) options for me on a handful of education (unwatchable) children’s channels.  At any given moment, there is one show that is the *it* show, which will cause my children to beg for it for hours on end.  I try to carefully steer this towards movies or shows that I can tolerate.  High on my list of forbidden programming is Dora the Explorer.  Frankly, any show that has those obnoxious pauses where the cast waits for the child to do something drive me insane.  Maybe it’s because the kids never actually do the intended action.  Or maybe it’s just because it a cheap way to pad out the programming.  Or maybe I’m just dead inside, without feeling or emotion and I’m sick of pausing my video game.

Anyway, back to Dora.  This video killed me.  It is definitely not appropriate for your children.  They just can’t handle the explosive awesomeness. But it appears that someone besides me has been subjected to far to much of the world’s most annoying explora’.

Quality, Quantity, Speed (Pick 2)

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You’ve heard it before: Fast, good, or cheap… Pick 2.  This applies to most anything, but it is especially true of the information on the internet.  Every site that you encounter is making a trade-off between a triangle of quality, quantity and speed.  Every publication values these points differently.  And each user does as well… and they end up migrating towards the site the fits their needs.  As I continued my apparently on-going series of ramblings on rethinking internet news  (Part 1) (Part 2), I realize that this control is out of the hand of the users, who are forced to choose their sources because of how each publication shaped their triangle.

First, lets talk Quality.  I’m wrapping a lot into this little word… and every site measures this differently.  Quality might refer to the nature of the writing.  Things are spelled correctly and parse out grammatically properly (please note: CmdrTaco.net is not one of those sites!)  Innovative and interesting ideas are proposed.  An informed discussion is occurring. But it’s far more complicated than remember to dot your T’s and cross your I’s. Continue reading →

Messing Around with iOS 5

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iOS5 has a bunch of fluffy bullet points to pad out the feature list in a presentation deck, but it’s got a few improvements that make it worthwhile and appreciated update even for those of us with no plan to upgrade to a shiny new 4S.

I haven’t been able to test out iCloud yet, but since that was the big upgrade this time around, I’ll have to defer my commentary on that functionality until later, but I can speak to a few other things.  The first and most important is the upgrades to Notifications.  They work as advertised: pull down and see what’s up.  You can also swipe from the lock screen.  It doesn’t appear that app updates are necessary: I’ve got notifications from apps already despite them not having iOS5 specific ports, although this seems a bit inconsistently applied.   This function alone makes this upgrade essential to me, of course Android users will laugh.  This nicety has been there all along.  What will be interesting now will be seeing what apps exploit the system… and what new applications are possible with this vastly improved UI available.  Continue reading →