Bookmarks for November 5th through November 6th

These are my links for November 5th through November 6th:

  • Networked Society ‘On the Brink’ – I favorited a YouTube video: In On The Brink we discuss the past, present and future of connectivity with a mix of people including David Rowan, chief editor of Wired UK; Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr; and Eric Wahlforss, the co-founder of Soundcloud. Each of the interview…
  • Don’t Give Your Users Shit Work – This is why I was never fascinated by Google+ and its concept of Circles. You have to go through entire sub-communities of your friends and drop them into arbitrary groupings. That sounds like shit work to me. What happens if I get really hammered with a Business Acquaintance and he becomes a Close Drinking Partner? Do I move his circles around? What happens if we hire him? Is he a Coworker and a Close Drinking Partner? The last thing I want to have to worry about is continually micromanaging another facet of life. This is important, since Google+ Circles is allegedly about privacy, and if you don’t continually cultivate your circles, you could inadvertently send out the wrong update to the wrong subset of contacts.
  • tools that lubricate human communication – omenti– All of these tools are windows into something much deeper –  us and our desire to communicate. I would bet a lot that we are much closer to the beginning than the end of a period of great change.  The Industrial Revolution took about one hundred and fifty years and we’re only about fifty years into the current revolution.
    From my vantage point I don’t see the younger generation as being more adroit simply because they grew up in a new world.  They were surrounded by different tools and defaulted to them making them their own, but these tools will change.  The term digital native is popular, but I don’t see the process of change as abrupt with people on one side or the other of a divide — a rich continuum of tools has been emerging.  Some will replace old modes of communications entirely and some will serve niche groups differently.  And there are surprises when very old tools prove to be much more robust than imagined.
  • Don’t Send That Email. Pick up the Phone! – Anthony Tjan – Harvard Business Review – Email is one of the greatest productivity contributors of the past two decades, and social communication platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have fundamentally changed and positively enriched the means and reach with which we are able to interact. Yet we have to recognize when such digital channels cannot substitute for a live conversation. Email and social networking modes of communications have created a generation of casually convenient new connections, and even helped us deepen existing relationships, but they can rarely replace the real world
  • Information dis-intermediaries are new hackers – discourse and notes – Broadly speaking, there is nothing new under the sun. Broadly speaking, the original curation technology was the very telephone switch with which the hackers tinkered. And here we are now, decades later, tearing down old filters to build new ones. Broadly speaking, however, there is still a difference between Morse code and the Internet, and innovation that happens in little steps, with little perfections and improvements, before too long reaches a point where evolution is seen as revolution with hindsight. The hacking that is happening in information and disintermediation, the themes in transactional efficiency described herein, and the three enterprising symbols at the forefront of these movements, will merit revisiting at some point in the future. The work these three have undertaken is much bigger than we may now realize.

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