Garrick van Buren

“The idea that authority is best transmitted by a coarse-grained gesture like linking is bankrupted by the sheer volume of gaming that is emerging.” – Steve Gillmor

Back in the early days of Cullect – I was trying to figure out a way to programmatically provide a meaningful excerpt of an article. In the end – I decided that any solution would just be trying to guess which words and phrases were meaningful to any given reader. It’s easier to not guess – and our brains are really good at scanning for interestingness. So, to give your internal scanning as much info as possible – Cullect displayed everything it could.

It feels like more publications are showing less; headline, link, maybe an 1 sentence excerpt. Twitter & Delicious being the worst offenders. Facebook, Pinboard, and other publishers (traditional & otherwise) are fast followers.

I’d like to see more publishers display more by default – not less. Most of them are already making editorial decisions on placement – let’s go all the way. If this really is the most important story of right now – why are any other stories even visible?

like tl;dr but for talking.

“Other people might love the Walmart, but I’m loving you.” – Tammy Thingelstad

“Now that it’s so much easier to produce a product in the small and market a product in the small, and now that it’s so beneficial to offer a service to just a few, with focus and attention, perhaps we need to rethink the very goal of scale.” – Seth Godin

We all make mistakes that are overlooked before we hit publish.

I’m always thankful when you point out my typos and other mistakes. That’s one of the reasons my contact info is on every page.

Heck, wiki systems are even have error correction is baked into their DNA.

This morning I spotted a typo on a BBC.co.uk article.

While there’s sharing badges all over the page – there’s no obvious link to contact the author or anyone else at the BBC to remove the extra ‘a’ in this specific article. I can’t even tell who wrote the article.

Clicking the ’email’ and ‘printer’ icons obviously won’t help. Do I click the Facebook icon? The Twitter icon?

From this, it’s clear that ‘social media’ has transformed into a secondary broadcast distribution system – rather than a way to engage with readers to create a higher quality product.

I’m writing this here not to call out the BBC specifically – as the typo was fixed as I was writing this – but to raise a question about outsourcing the customer relationship to a distribution company.

“Time to check out Samsung, I guess; Apple seems to think they’ve got a really good product.” – Chris Rhodes

and more McLuhanisms from Marshall McLuhan .com

“People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.”

“The road is our major architectural form.”

“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

“This information is top security. When you have read it, destroy yourself.”

“Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.”

“Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.”

“Today the business of business is becoming the constant invention of new business.”

After much hemming and hawing. I picked up an Android phone this week.

It feels like settling. It solves a couple short term problems – but overall, it doesn’t really move the needle.

Additionally, I’m reminded of something I wrote 2 1/2 years ago.

“After years of hauling multiple toolboxes from rented apartment to rented apartment to rented apartment, what I really needed was a better understanding of how use use these tools.”

“The corkboard shrugged.”

“The DisplayCabinet presents itself as a glowing ring on a side table. Placing items in the ring pops out relevant information about them. We started with keys and a wallet as it is typical to store these on a side table and doesn’t involve changing the users normal behaviour.” – Dan W. Williams

DisplayCabinet from bashford on Vimeo.

Added Bonus:

“Seriality is a serial connectivity browser plug-in that enables web pages to communicate with microcontrollers via Javascript. Seriality is physicality for the Web.”