Me and Apple TV, we’ve been through some times.

There was a time when it seemed to refuse to play purchased content except when it was pushed from my desktop. You could navigate to it, and you could select it, but it would fail to start playback: instead, it advised that the content wasn’t authorized for playing on this device, whatever that means. So you couldn’t navigate from the couch, and couldn’t play music through airtunes while video (ie. Sesame Street) played on the TV.

But since I got an awesome new receiver things have improved. Here’s why.

• My old receiver had a power outlet for low-consumption components. Like Apple TV, for example. Every time you turned off the receiver, it turned off the outlet. My new receiver doesn’t have this. Apple TV stays plugged into the wall, where power is continuously available. Since changing to this new configuration we haven’t had authorization problems. Apple TV works like it should.
  • To offset power vampirism (minimal in a device with no moving parts) we’ve retired both the CD player and the VCR.
• You can’t get multi-channel Dolby Digital sound out of Apple TV through the optical outlet. There was a time it used to work, but the last firmware update killed that. You want DD, you need HDMI. And if you’ve got Netflix, you want DD.

I hope I never give that little black box any more thought than I’ve given it in the last couple of weeks.

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This week Apple announced a feature available in iOS 5 that you won’t find on their iPhone site:Find My Friends. 

It’s Google’s Latitude designed for normal people.

It’s pretty clear Apple’s making a play for platform lock-in with built-in apps such as FMF and iMessage. It’s all functionality you can get elsewhere, but nothing will be as elegant as Apple’s integrated versions. 

What’s Google to do?

Well, they haven’t lost yet, but they sure are trying. People love Gmail. And they love Google Calendar. But they don’t love Latitude. But they could. And they could love them all together.

Here, for your benefit, are some ideas I wish I’d committed to writing months ago.

• Tie Calendar to Latitude by allowing meeting organizers to request Latitude access for 1 hour prior to the appointment and throughout it.
  • Positioning Latitude as a vague expansion of the social web hasn’t worked. Position it instead as a tool that bridges maps and scheduling — the 2 key features that distinguish a smartphone from what we had before we had smartphones. Latitude should be about sharing location when it matters with who it matters to.
  • Request Latitude access by default from meeting invitees. Apple’s going to make location sharing mainstream anyway: now is not the time to be shy. Get Latitude installed on every smartphone in every pocket as fast as possible.
    • I trained my mom to book family get-togethers in Google Calendar years ago: I just gave her access to my Latitude location and she loves it. No more calling to ask where we are or if we got home safe. If she could install it on her work-issued nannified BB, she would so she could share her location with my stepdad.
  • Create a dashboard for the meeting organizer to see everybody’s ETA. 
    • Green: accepted the meeting and ETA has them on-time.
    • Yellow: accepted the meeting and ETA has them arriving late.
    • Red: ETA has them missing the event entirely, or they’ve declined.
    • And every invitee’s name has a clock next to it: this is when they turn invisible again.
• Kill Google Talk (yes, it’s still hanging on, and you never visit anymore) and replace it with the Messenger component of Google+. Better yet, with GTalk dead, merge Messenger and Hangouts to create a Skype-killing masterpiece of group communication.
  • Enable chatting parties to view one another’s locations. 
  • Make it so that I can enable location-sharing-while-chatting with only the Circles I choose. This way I can freely enter a hangout without risk of unintended location exposure.
  • Oddly enough, on Android phones it seems that engaging someone on Google Talk tends to refresh their position on Latitude. So it would seem that someone in Google is already thinking about this. Please push on and be bold.

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Electronic reading does a better job of engaging the reader’s imagination than print books do.

It’s also, of course, a more physically pleasurable experience:

• Lighter
• Easier to operate (I’m talking about turning pages, and believe me no one is a better one-handed print page-turner than I am)
• Less likely to wake you up when you drop it on your face when falling asleep reading
• Not going to bedazzle you with glare when reading in bright sunlight (seriously, reading a good e-ink display beside a pool is a world-class experience)

But all of those are ultimately secondary. What eReading is really, really good at is letting you be a creative reader. Reading is the act of imaginatively interpreting — reconstructing — the work of an another person’s imagination. That’s subject to two sets of constraints: the range and ability of the author to express their imagination; and the range and ability of the reader to interpret it, which is to say, to creatively reimagine it on their own terms. Technology is not a neutral factor in that relationship. And electronic readers do a better job of relaxing the second set of those constraints.

Here’s what I’ve noticed about my reading experience over the last couple dozen months.

1. I’m reading more.

Having a vast array of content to choose from means less reading time lost because I’m not quite in the mood for the book that I happened to bring with me. And that’s exactly the point: I can read according to my mood — not have to remember to bring a book strong enough to change my mood. Every time.

So, I’m better read — but also have the ability to start reading something on a spur-of-the-moment suggestion. If I’m at a party and someone says, look, you have to read The Poisonwood Bible, I can start reading it on the bus on the way home instead of the Pretty Little Liars #9 that I was reading on the way there. This possibility, alone, makes me feel better read, because it’s always within reach. The horizons of my imagination feel broader. (It doesn’t hurt that the prices are usually lower.)

2. I’m far less tolerant of poorly written non-fiction.

Perhaps that’s not quite fair: I’m far less tolerant of non-fiction that is written without a distinctive voice, or at the very least some concession to narrative structure. For all the improvements of scrolling and progress indicators, it remains much easier to skim a print book than an eBook. Which means I have to page through the eBook… and if it’s boring I’d just as soon move onto something else. But on an eReader, the abandoned books aren’t staring me in the face in some strange transfiguration of guilt and anxiety. In short: I’m in control of the reading experience — unless the author is really, really good; unless they are actively contributing towards the mutual creative act.

Hannah from Pretty Little Liars

Theodore Dreiser

Perhaps we do lose something in that. “Great books don’t promise to hold your attention,” I remember an English professor once telling a class utterly bored by one of the masters of American literature (probably Dreiser), “but they do promise to reward it.” I suspect that, in a future when electronic reading is the dominant manner of reading, authors who can’t write well will not be able to release ideas slowly. (And if we don’t read Dreiser, we’ll all miss out on some of the more amusing fender-benders of American prose.)

On the other hand:

3. I can concentrate better

Somehow the flexibility of the form — yes, the font size, the typeface selection — means that I can get better terms in the reading relationship. I can take my glasses off but still read without having to hold the device a couple of inches from my face. It’s less about the conditions that I must arrange in order to read, and more about how I can manipulate the content to suit me.

4. I don’t feel like I’m carrying a book around

Because I’m not. I’m not carrying hundreds of books either. At a certain point, having more books than I could list made my device something less like a book, or a compendium, than a portal: a door. That was one of the thrilling discoveries of the first Kobo reader: it came pre-loaded with a hundred free books, which made it clear that this technology was not simply a more efficient distribution mechanism, but a gateway to limitless content. Wi-fi devices have absolutely helped with that too — but they have kept the connection to the wider Internet obscure enough that I’m not prone to jump on Twitter or the web. Reading remains immersive, yet feels connected.

5. The books I have read feel closer to one another

And that sense of connection, crucially, extends to the books I have already read. Somehow the ability to have the complete works (well, not quite yet) of Faulkner, Didion, Murakami, and John McPhee in my bag, at all times, gives me a more holistic sense of my reading life than having them marooned, out of reach, on a bookshelf, where their valences are confined to the sequence in which I happen to have them shelved. The connections between these books are multiple and they continually expand as I — by the sheer act of reading — add to their company. Virtual shelves aren’t the same as real shelves, and the books I have on my Kobo live in the same kind of unregulated relationships to one another than they do in my imagination.

John McPhee: The Non-Portable Version

By amalgamating possibility, your aggregate reading experience, the range of your reading and your interests, electronic readers offer a sort of physical external representation of your imagination. They are a sort of auxiliary imagination. My Kobo Touch, after only a few weeks, houses hundreds of books and hundreds of annotations and highlights; it has measured and marked my progress through novels and essays (and, yes, I earned the insomniac badges along the way). It hasn’t just been a device: it’s been a companion.

Reading merges the content of the page with everything else you have ever read, through the filter of your imagination. It is a cumulative, messy process: it disintegrates the boundaries between ideas, times, places, people, events. It is a process of unseaming the constraints of reality; of unspooling it into the collective and personal reaches of the imagination. And the eReading device is by definition a much better metaphor for that process than physical books. Ideas collide, aggregate, pile into one another. They are sunk within you. They do not remain distinct.

Perhaps this is how the listeners to epic poetry once felt, as the stories that are now The Iliad and The Odyssey were released into the collective ether. Perhaps physical books were a transitional media.

So that’s where I’m at. Admittedly other things have conspired to bring me there. I’m not at a point in my life where I still strongly feel the need to display my books around me as an expression of my refinement and taste, and in any event it’s rare that a book changes me in the way of a Slouching Towards Bethlehem or Light in August: my imagination is more robust than it was when I was 21, and I’ve already discovered many of the books most likely to change me. What’s more, the limitations of urban living have somewhat necessarily curtailed my ability to endlessly collect books.

But still: I’ve fallen out of love with shelves of trade paperbacks, and back in love with something that feels closer to the experience of reading itself.

Reading a physical book still retains its pleasures: there is absolutely something thrilling about a gorgeous hardcover, something that feels like a communion close to the author’s intent. But that’s exactly the point: physical books make you read on the author’s terms; reading electronically takes place more on the reader’s terms. I think that’s a good thing. It makes reading more personal, more democratic, more controversial.

But it’s a huge change — and it could be a generation before authors catch up to it.

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In @AshleighGardner’s session about reading/social media/location I proposed that Foursquare comes up just short of perfect by not letting me check into content in a meaningful way. I can say I’m at Jimmie Simpson Park but how do I tell you I’m there on a bench reading the latest issue of The Believer? And how do I find where other readers of the same magazine, or even the same issue, settled down to read? Conversely, how do I know what’s being read in my vicinity? In the age of the ebook, how will anyone know that I’m reading frickin’ Pynchon? 

When will the crowdsourced catalogue of LibraryThing be overlaid on the crowdsourced map of Foursquare?

@NicholeMcgill asked why anyone would do this. Took me a couple days to formulate an answer. It’s the same one I give to doubters of Foursquare and Twitter: wait until 3 of your friends are doing it then see how you feel.

Further thoughts from @RJWheaton in an old (*sigh*: they’re all old, these days) post from Datachondria.

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Watching Olympics coverage at my in-laws’ while muddling through a cold. Observed through a mucusy haze a few things:

• The provincialism of CTV is astonishing.
• Vancouver’s weather is governed by capricious spirits.
• I have no idea what I’m watching.

I’ve been obsessing lately about one of the principles espoused in The Brothers Heath’s excellent book Made To Stick: approximately, it’s that you’ll be heard best if you listen to yourself with the ears of your audience.

With extremely rare exception there are no sports announcers covering the 2010 games who are bearing this principle in mind.

Just now an announcer said, by way of “offering some perspective,” that mogul skiers move at up to “10 meters per second”. I have no idea what that speed means without picking up a calculator. So much for perspective.

What the announcers do talk about is whether so-and-so’s “program” was “technically challenging” and how “solid” their landing was while at no time speaking to the audience as if it’s the first time they’re seeing human beings do some of these things, which for many of us it undoubtedly is.

(Nature documentaries seem to understand this far better than presenters of sports. I guess because the participants are non-human it’s assumed that the audience needs some help making sense of what they’re seeing.)

Take the luge. For macabre reasons it’s in the spotlight these days. But does anyone understand how this sport works? Don’t most of us suspect it’s not really a sport at all, but a horizontal rebuttal to bungee jumping?

But we also know that we’re probably missing something. We know it’s bad to slow down. We know it’s hard to see what your heels are pointed at when you’re lying on your back. We’ve all tobogganned.

Among the things we don’t know is whether you can steer one of those little sleds. And it’s not clear how weight and height aid or hinder a competitor. We don’t know why some lugers come out of turns cleanly while others rattle against the sides of the track. How to tell when one is luging well or poorly is so elementary a thing that we almost fail to notice that it’s entirely obscure.

But wouldn’t it be cool if there were a channel (even if it’s just an alternative audio track on existing channels) that covered sports with commentary that informed the viewer of the principles at play? I’d seek out coverage of unfamiliar sports (cricket, anyone?) if the announcers told me how to watch what I’m watching.

• How do the rifles in biathlon work differently from a conventional hunting rifle?
• Why do mogul skiers all have those bands on their knees?
• What the hell is going on in figure skating?

Why not let informed audience members contribute the audio track as a sort of real-time audio blog? Let fans recruit and train new fans. Feed curiosity and grow the sport. You can’t make an aficionado in an hour but you can convey an illusion of understanding, and that’s enough for us dilettantes.

Am I the only one?

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Just a little off (to) the side (of gmail)

Got it? Alright.

I love that my non-twittering friends are now not only privy to my tweets (a dubious privilege, indeed) but able to respond at length without having to join Twitter themselves.

Not only this: they’re now able to converse with one another in the course of commenting. This is gold. When they said Buzz was like writing a message without a “To:” I wondered initially how that was different from Twitter or a Facebook update. I get it now.

With Buzz I can do what I thought I’d be able to do with Wave before I used it and got confused, frustrated, and finally bored.

I haven’t checked on my Wave account in months (has it been months?) but I’ve checked in on Buzz a dozen times already, not counting the emails (are they emails?) that alerted me via my Android phone that someone had commented on something in Buzz.

Of course I’ve checked in a bunch of times: it’s email. We all have email. Specifically, we all have Gmail.

If Wave has failed to take off it’s because it’s

• in need of some enterprising gang (Basecamp, can you hear me?) to build a killer app on top of it so we don’t have to Wave in the raw and
• requires another signup and the inconvenience that comes with migration.

By anchoring in Gmail, Buzz removes signup and migration pain in one step. And it’s got just enough functionality to make it interestingly messy, but not enough to overwhelm.

Buzz isn’t perfect right now but I won’t get into my quibbles with it because they’re boring, obvious, and probably already fixed and being tested as I write this. And I won’t say “this will fundamentally change email” because prognostications are just as boring as complaints.

But I will say that I think sharing stuff on the internet with my friends just became a little bit easier and therefore made the internet a little bit more fun.

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Last week Joe Wilcox wrote an excellent piece on the decade that wasn’t at Microsoft. He included this point…

That’s another problem — and I’ve heard about it so many, many times from Microsoft employees: Most every technology decision must be justified by some data point.

Google. Microsoft. Both have a data-driven cultures but one is functioning and one isn’t.

You could conclude from this that Google is  destined for the same-fate as Microsoft — analysis paralysis. It is only a matter of time. But I am keen to see if Google can overcome this problem. Instead of having a bun fight with metrics, I wonder if improved data-flow within teams — that ambient awareness you get from twitter — can mitigate this outcome.

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A year after starting this blog (and a month into my new job) I’ve resolved to roll up my sleeves and learn how to deal with data.

Also, when my boss asked me for figures including median and standard deviation I got sweaty palms and goobered up my company iPhone.

So I bought a book; my usual stress response when confronted with my own ignorance. It’s an O’Reilly (my first, I think) from their “Head First” series, which seems to be geared towards impractically-educated people such as myself who are thumbing through night school course catalogues but not quite convinced that this subject is worth the scheduling commitment or risking entanglement in group assignments.

I worked through the first chapter last night (it was good, but you really do need a pencil handy). If I knock off 2 chapters every week I’ll be done before March.

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Flickr: Ross2085

The New York Times is featuring a rather empty article about data in retail whose thrust is basically more data = more opportunity. Uh yeah. The trend I am seeing with retailers — and my visibility here is more limited than it used to be — is an analytics or CRM vendor sells a retailer a data package that is tailored just enough for the purchase to make sense to the company’s executive but the package isn’t tailored enough to yield any intelligence to make better decisions. The mid-level users that need the intel are left saying WTF? That is an old management pattern but seeing it happen hurts my insides because the opportunity is really amazing but is being fumbled so badly. Creating a data-driven culture has to start with the analysts. Hopefully they know what to ask for.

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Your browsing history can be used to tell a lot of things about you. We are just beginning to see a raft of applications that leverage your history to provide a better web experience. One firefox add-on that I have just stumbled across is Wikipedia Diver 4.o. It tracks the research you have been doing on Wikipedia and gives you a granular info viz of your history. (http://thejit.org/)

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Brody observes that “portable” recording devices (which weighed about nine pounds then) made these conversations possible, and wonders about the effect of technology on our “expectations for information and aesthetics” generally.

The expectations-for-information-and-aesthetics bit caught my attention. As we have said here before on Datachondria new forms of technology are linked to new forms of criticism. The supercut is only one such example. Now if only we could learn how to use these tools we would be laughing.

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In this blog, I write about the world of online music discovery and recommendation.  I look at the tools available to help people find music.  I examine some of the issues that can make music recommendations go bad.   I also write about things that I find generally interesting including programming, data visualization, playing games,  and (of course) music.

Awesome. RSS reader => ADD.

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Every since hearing Chris, I have been keen on seeing the browser evolve. In the embedded video, the folks at Adaptive Path put forward one possible iteration — the browser as data manipulator.

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

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I love ol’ hotdogsladies, but I think we do owe a bit of an explanation.

If you’re not already following Datachondria on Twitter, you can do so here. And if you want to get really personal with us datachondrians, you can do that too.

Now, the excuses:

• I am a happy new daddy who just started a new job.
• Ryan, daddy of a toddler, has more going on at work than I care to consider without a drink in me
• Rob’s writing a book and was recently promoted
• Mark’s the last to have posted here so he doesn’t need any excusing, though you really should check out the fine work he does on his main blog

Now, the promises for posts we’ll be serving up soon (though perhaps later):

• We’re divided on Twitter’s new native retweet functionality — yes, at least one of us actually likes it
• We’re not sure about Foursquare; who’s it for and why would they use it?
• We’ve tried (and failed at) conducting our weekly meeting on Google Wave
• I suspect my family still resents me pushing them to Twitter for updates on the birth of The Boy
• We’re just about ready to post our first podcast.

That’s to say nothing at all of electronic reading, parenting and mobile apps, job transitioning with social media, digital guidance to analog pleasures, and however serendipity leads us to those moments of palpable transition that we’ll forever try to capture and share with you.

Thanks for sticking with us.

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Twitter allows two things to happen very well: mobs feed on themselves, and the slippery slope gets very steep and extremely slick. There’s also the snowballing analogy… Bottom line, there was a lack of respect for the topic, a clear void in researching the audience, and just bad presentational ability. A perfect storm, if you will. And once the tweeting started, it simply became more fun to be in the stream than put up with the presentation. In a way, it was less about being snarky towards the speaker, and more about amusing each other by sharing and exaggerating the pain.

We touched on this a few months ago: the idea that Twitter is, as yet, a social space largely unregulated by norms of behaviour. There are further thoughts elsewhere about this particular example and some possible lessons: are we moving from a model of passive consumption in conferences to one of active participation? Does the ‘unconference’ model so successfully employed by, for example, BookCamp Vancouver last week, provide more value to attendees? Has the burden changed from audiences (to pay attention to the presenters) to presenters (to better know their audiences)?

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ThisIsIndexed.com

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Itzbeen 10 days since I last slept 3 consecutive hours

Apologies to readers and fellow Datachondrians for my lack of posts last month. I have a great excuse.

Over on my wife’s blog you’ll find a review of Itzbeen, a gadget that over the last 10 days has become vital to our sanity.

It’s basically four non-lapping mm:hh stopwatches kluged together with a backlight & nightlight. There’s a L/R breastfeeding switch at the bottom that’s not connected to anything electronic, basically a binary abacus. That feature doesn’t get used because wifey’s got a solution she likes better. The display is as it appears. There’s no counter. You’re not accumulating hours slept or counting poops: you’re just gauging the chronological distance from now back to the last occurrence of event X.

Change a diaper: punch the diaper button to reset that clock. Feeding: punch the bottle. Etc. The wildcard “*” button worked well for timing doses of post c-section pain meds.

Couldn’t be simpler. Lost the manual minutes after unboxing.

When you’re sleep-deprived and not yet attuned to the signs your baby’s giving you for his various needs (there aren’t many, but what baby wants he wants very much and very soon) you have a hard time remembering much of anything, let alone when the last time was that you successfully satisfied any of your offspring’s needs. These needs are steadily recurrent, which is nice, but then not remembering the most recent time you guessed right means you also don’t know which need is likely the next one due for serving.

On top of that, if you’re stuck in a hospital you’re going to be talking to a lot of nurses just after your baby’s born and they’re going to want to know things like the last time he ate and how long he’s been wearing that diaper and even though that’s an unreasonable type of question to ask someone in your state you’re going to feel terrible if you don’t know.

Before I had a kid I could estimate the last time something happened reasonably well. If there was a technique to it, it went something like this: first I’d eliminate a third of the day because nothing could have happened while I was sleeping, then depending on what kind of thing you’re asking about I could narrow it down to a likely span of only a few hours.

When did you check the mail?

About 10. (It was before lunch but late enough that there would have been mail to take in.)

Brilliant. Chronological estimation by triangulation. That I ever had this skill now amazes me. And I’m in awe of you who now possess it.

This little device’s greatest value is the confidence it gives a new parent. When you’re sleeping 2 hours at a time all over the clock and eating whenever you’re hungry and able you literally lose your gut feel for time. And you can’t rely on higher faculties while you’re not getting enough sleep. But even a lab rat can punch a button to mark an event. With this thing you’re suddenly the sleep-deprived halfwit who knows to a minute’s precision how long baby’s been sleeping.

Yes, there’s an app for that. But the thing with babies is, usually there are at least 2 people who have to look after them. So one person gives up their main communications device so that diaper changes and feedings can be tracked? Does it sync with both of your phones, regardless of make? What if it’s docked for charging? What if you need to use the phone? What if it gets peed on?

Sometimes you really do want a device to do just one thing very simply and very well so you can free your mind to do other things. I’ll have a more properly Datachondrian post later on how we used Twitter to keep all interested parties up to date from the first labour pains. For now I wanted to give praise to this single-purpose device and single-purpose devices in general — scales, measuring cups, watches — that yield only the data you want exactly how you want it and in a way you can understand even when your capacity for understanding is stretched to its limit.

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In unconnected, but related news I discovered the recently acquired Mint.com has been creating data visualizations as well. Surprisingly some topics are kind of fun.

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