Garrick van Buren

I love this play. It’s simple, counter-intuitive, executed with nonchalants.

thanks Mark J. Perry

Years ago, I heard a story of an American barred from crossing into Canada because the Canadian customs agent interpreted the American’s intentions not as recreation, but as work. The American didn’t see it that way, nor did he have employment papers, and he reversed course.

“Q: Is there going to be legislation or IRB regs to prevent paying people under the minimum wage?”

The above question is in reference to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. But I think the question can be asked to a number of things we regularly do for others gratis. Here’s 7 quick, off-the-top-of-my-head items that could be considered ‘work’ yet millions of people perform gratis daily.

• Updating Facebook, Twitter, watching TV, reading the newspaper, etc (doing work for advertisers)
• Editing a Wikipedia entry (doing the work of editors)
• Tagging a photo in Flickr or Delicious (doing work of librarians)
• Checking in on Foursquare, Gowalla (doing the work of the US intelligence community)
• Linking to websites (doing work for Google)
• Assembling flat pack furniture, etc (doing work for retailers & manufacturers)
• Separating our trash (doing work for the waste sorting machines)

If any of these tasks were re-characterized as work – in the regulatory sense – I suspect these companies’ value propositions and the corresponding ecosystem of marginally legitimate co-horts would also crumble.

Perhaps it’s time we trade information privacy, sketchy secondary use, and non-paying nano-jobs for a smaller internet.

Or perhaps the joke is on all of us for expecting that working for free – even a little bit – can create significant lasting value. For if it did – would Twitter, Facebook, and the like need to resort to advertising to keep the servers running?

Sure, I can understand and appreciate their need to reduce transaction costs, but without the option of turning users into either customers or vendors – it smells like something more distasteful than share-cropping.

Update 11 Nov 2010:
I’ve been asked for clarification on my point (much needed, yes, I know). Here it is:

Technology makes it easy to divide large chunks of creative, organizational, and knowledge work into extraordinarily thin slices. Thinner than can effectively be performed by a computer. Thinner than can be reasonably charged a market wage for. Taking on this work is detrimental in two ways; it diffuses the innate desire to create larger more significant creative work and it serves someone else far more – but not significantly enough to compensate in any meaningful way. Unless you count distracting you from yourself meaningful.

Elsewhere:

“When they say you get to use their social network for free, look for the hidden price. It’s there.” – Dave Winer

8pen is another attempt at bringing touch-typing to mobile devices

If you listened real close – in the video – you hear the narrator mention ‘handwriting’. That’s both why 8pens approach is pointed in the right direction and why this version of it misses the mark.

Selecting individual characters is terribly tedious.

Seriously, these things are COMPUTERS!

Electronic little brains that know all sorts of things about how we like our words are constructed and combined. Spell-checking and grammar checking have been around for decades. For as long as I can remember Microsoft Word could tell you at what Grade Level you were writing.

Yet – we’re still struggling with the 1-gesture-for-1-character writing model.

Makes me think we should drop all text input from these devices, limiting inputs to video and audio.

My Ubuntu machine and my Nokia N900 both have something of an ‘app store’ in them.

If we call an app store – an application that connects to platform-specific software repositories to easily install software, notify me of updates, etc. Though, in the Un*x world, these things are called package managers or application managers.

The Mac has never had one of these. Most updates are handled by the software vendor – Adobe has their updater, Apple theirs, Firefox and other applications handle updating from within the application. Since OS X is BSD-based, there have been attempts to create Un*x-esque package managers for OS X – Fink & MacPorts come to mind. I’ve tried them, and found the unsatisfying.

If we say, the majority of the software will be $0 (and other definitions of free) – then the difference between a Mac App Store and a Unix Package Manager becomes a question of whether or not it’s running within iTunes.

“We are deeply in a situation in which the few are supporting the many: the bottom 50% of income earners paid only 2.7% of total income taxes in 2008, and 52 million taxpayers paid no income taxes at all” – Scott Grannis