Seriously good talk.
Very powerful:
- The elegance of simplicity.
- The power of experience. (What’s a great experience?)
- The magic of stories. Technology + Art = Magic.
How can we get lots of disciplines work together? To solve large problems?
- At Pixar, creatives and techs get paid the same.
- It’s really hard to get the tech people to respect the creative people and vice versa.
Works for all systems, not just software.
Culture:
- Peer culture: everyone shows everyone else their work and get lot of feedback.
- Learning environment. Empowered people. Great at tech & creativity – work hand in hand together. Same team. Giving feedback.
- Product design + Engineering + Understand Consumer problem.
Design thinking:
- Team of DIFFERENT thinking people. Not just engineers. Different. Respect each other. Bounce ideas of each other.
- Examine and understand a problem.
- Iterate to a solution.
- NEED A TEAM! Not one person, one designer, one product leader.
Great photos of Medellin http://www.behance.net/gallery/Las-Golondrinas-Comuna-8-Medellin/5910203
Easy product tours with http://bootstraptour.com/
Escrow and payment provider for marketplaces – https://www.balancedpayments.com/ looks good.
Developing the ability to get stuff done is crucial. Some quick thoughts:
- Technical skills.
- Maker’s schedule. (so you get stuff done in a day)
- Process. (OKRs) (so you get stuff done in a week)
Just watch the video, yey seal (and that it sucks to be a penguin).
Or, “walk the earth”, as they say. Why we need nomads.
Thinking: is the Like for blogging related to the Linkroll (since a link is like a Like)? I should get an email or notification when someone Likes my post. That’s the feedback loop I’m talking about. And Liking should be 1-click. So is adding to the linkroll 1-click?
It is conceivable that there is simply no distributed solution that can compete in user experience with a closed solution like FB and such. But that doesn’t sound like it would be true.
I’m oldschool but I like blue and white. New look today.
Now, the new blogging. Can we reproduce the LIKE in the world of blogging? The feeling of immediate feedback? The one-click micro-payment that has no limits.
Here’s a related thought: why do people think stuff on blogs is more private than stuff on Facebook? (Technically it’s not.) Because more people see it on Facebook. And you get feedback.
Blogs need more feedback. Commenting is too much work. Where’s the LIKE button for blogging? (And I don’t mean the WordPress Like button, that just feel like micropayments to Matt.)
Mmm…
In which India declares dolphins “non-human persons”. Cool. Only one but: humans can be performers. So why not dolphins? Still pretty cool, kinda sci-fi.
Arbitrary standards are more defensible (Pantone example).
How data was misused in the Vietnam war.
In 1977, two years after the last helicopter lifted off the rooftop of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, a retired Army general, Douglas Kinnard, published a landmark survey called The War Managers that revealed the quagmire of quantification. A mere 2 percent of America’s generals considered the body count a valid way to measure progress. “A fake—totally worthless,” wrote one general in his comments. “Often blatant lies,” wrote another. “They were grossly exaggerated by many units primarily because of the incredible interest shown by people like McNamara,” said a third.
I’ve blogged about this before, the US census is an ongoing and fascinating categorization case study.
From the article: “By 1970 the government was collecting census data by mail-in survey. The shift to a survey had dramatic effects on at least one census category: race.”
- First, it resulted in a dramatic increase in the Native American population. Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. Native American population magically grew 110 percent. People who had identified as American Indian had apparently been somewhat invisible to the government.
- Second, to the chagrin of the Census Bureau, 80 percent of Puerto Ricans choose white (only 40 percent of them had been identified as white in the previous census). The government wanted to categorize Puerto Ricans as predominantly black, but the Puerto Rican population saw things differently.
New and improved categorization of abuse and dependence just joins them, with this amazing quote in the article, where two students were trying to figure out the difference between abuse and dependence.
“Isn’t ‘abuse’ like when you get a DUI?” said the medical student.
“Yeah,” said the psychiatry resident, “and ‘dependence’ is when you get withdrawal, right?”
“I think ‘abuse’ leads to ‘dependence,’” said the neurology resident.
“Or maybe ‘abuse’ is not as bad as ‘dependence’?”
“So what about our patient? He’s pretty hard-core.”
“I see him all the time in the emergency room. Totally intoxicated.”
“I’ve seen him drunk on the train.”
That sealed the deal.
“Dependence it is!” they all agreed.
Zipcar is the first site I have ever seen options for the type of English: American, British, Canadian.
Urban decay tourism :) (great pictures)
Never too old to learn.
- I believe in fundamentals.
- Adaptation, evolution. Design = solve the problem. (So changeable design > unchangeable design.)
- Community = group that works together.
- Group -> social -> trust.
- Trust each other to get things done.
- Our environment is everyone else.
- You want to be unique but also fit in. You feel lonely.
- So you form an “identity”, so you can fit in but be apart. A representation of yourself.
Identity:
- Create an outside world we can control. Collect. Music. Home. Friends we trust. World is not so scary then.
- Can also create inside world we control: yoga, music, meditation, learning, …
- EVERYONE is doing this.
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone” (Thoreau)
Social design = facilitate communication.
- People just need to talk.
- Need identity, trust.
- People need connection.
Social Graph (nodes & edges).
- If you write it out, forms a narrative. Story.
- Narrative leads to identity: this is me. This is what I did.
- The connections give things life.
- Graph is very valuable information.
Stream.
- Don’t hide info, show it all in feed.
- Keeps going, like life.
Collections.
- Pile of things that I like.
Feedback.
- When something happens, send feedback (like, pin, repin, tag, …).
“Virtuous cycle of sharing” -> enough stuff and connections so it grows.
Might as well build things that bring people together.
Saved via here (via a trippy duckduckgo search), I found this screenshot of a semantic tagging system that I built and then gave a talk about around 2005/6 or so. The idea was that tags were organized in facets, which gave them some level of meaning (ie. “sanfran” is a place), and from that meaning and from tags that were used together, you could infer more meaning (ie. “peter has been to sanfran”).
But what is not so cool is that WP doesn’t seem to let you post animated GIFs? Come on guys!
Click the image to see the animation.
Salon.io is pretty interesting. Posting this here to not loose the link (which is also interesting). What an INTERESTING post!
Let’s see:
- New blog at http://blog.petervandijck.com (and WordPress.com’s image import is just magical btw). This was the biggest deal.
- ITTT for cross-posting to Twitter from blog. This is meant to encourage me to blog as opposed to posting on Twitter.
- Turned off bunch of apps on Facebook. No more cross-posting from Twitter to Facebook. Twitter is work-world, Facebook is friends/family who don’t care about my geeky rants.
- Still using Path as my private little Facebook for a few select people.
- Next: set up phone apps for everything.
Perhaps this will inspire me to blog? The problem I’m trying to solve is that of audience.
