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Everybody take a seat in the auditorium. Turn off all phones, smart phones and any other distractions. No drinking or eating, with the possible exception of water and glucose tablets for diabetics in the audience. No talking. No texting – well you already turned of your devices, right? In any case, focus, focus, focus. Focus on the speaker, the slides, the message, and take good notes. Well, that’s the old way. The traditional way. Not the way to start a new media conversation, because you can’t have a conversation while sequestered in a dimly lit room. New media is about disruption, except that you can’t be disruptive while focusing on one thing.
This may or may not be the message from a presentation at Minnesota Public Radio’s “Wits” series. The featured guest was John Hodgman, an author, editor, actor (as a PC in Apple commercials) and self-described cheesemonger – he dreams about cheese. Hodgman touted the value of distraction and digression – the brain chemistry during social media distraction is the same as the brain chemistry during combat. Instead of a straightforward storytelling style, he embraced his inner absent-minded professor, wandering from topic to topic – don’t give a man a free computer, he’ll only use it for a day; attack ads could be good for winning a fight but henchmen, widely available in a bad economy, shouldn’t be ruled out.
Meanwhile MPR allowed audience members to use various devices to Tweet and Text about the conversation in the auditorium. While some complain about today’s excessive distractions, Hodgman and others at the presentation claim that there have always been distractions, and that said distraction is the food of creativity. Of course, John Hodgman is a humorist and has a way with presenting material. But ultimately, the audience at the event was quite engaged and entertained, and they were able to use social media to spread the word across a much wider audience in the Twittersphere. If only distraction didn’t require so much time.
Life in a day is a historic global experiment to create a user generated feature film documenting a single day on earth. On July 24, 2010, people around the world captured a glimpse of their lives on camera and uploaded the footage to YouTube and others submitted it via SD cards.
Here are the results >>>
Old computers never die, they just lose their chips, or relevance as the case may be. It was 1988 when computer scientist Mark Weiser realized that the personal computer, which was at that time still in its youthful years, was headed for obsolescence. His crystal ball revealed a digital future where the new world order would include, “Ubiquitous Computing.” Instead of sitting in front of a computer that’s sitting on top of a desk, the average human would interact with numerous, small, connected, electronic devices, and some large devices too, that perform a variety of computerized functions. Now with better computer chips possessing larger storage capacity, the personal computer, or the shape and form of it, may just disappear.
Weiser once outlined that the purpose of a computer is to help humans do something other than compute, be an obedient yet unobtrusive servant and be calm. And what exactly is this calm technology of which he spoke? This is technology that fades away into the background, not demanding of our immediate attention. And back in 1995 when Weiser described calm technology much of it wasn’t really around. But now in the age of iPods, Smart Phones and most recently with Google TV and a smaller version of Apple TV, we have seen Weiser’s ideas in motion, though he didn’t live to see the day. Beyond that, there are among others, smart refrigerators, smart clothes, smart houses and smart cars – not those smart cars. All of these combined with cloud computing allow us to unhitch and let our computers fade into the background.
In yet another strange development in the world of gaming, none other than Nintendo has devised a game where real men date fake women but pay real money for the privilege. Okay so lots of men are thinking – so what. They have experienced all kinds of fake women on expensive dates. Except that these women are real fakes. Well, they are virtual, existing only inside the Nintendo game. But the men are real, unless they are fake men – and this could go on and on. In any case, the Nintendo game, Love+ is quite popular in Japan where men who play it are required to seduce a virtual girlfriend and maintain a relationship with her. And if they are less than arduous, the girls reportedly let them know by being cold and distant – and possibly quarrelsome.
One version of the game features Atami, a city in Japan where the men can take romantic trips with their virtual girlfriends. They check in to a hotel and can pay the extra person fee even though the only extra “person,” is their Nintendo DS. This helps keep the fantasy more real – go figure. They can go to restaurants alone while pretending to be there with the virtual girlfriends – who are accessible via the game. Men can speak to their “girlfriends” via the device’s microphone. In the town of Atami restaurants and tourist attractions are up with the digital times. They all play along with the fantasy, indulging the men who pay for “vacation” dining and outings with their virtual girlfriends. Who would have guessed? No word on plans for a female version of this game but some gentlewomen may actually prefer virtual dates.
While businesses spend time and money on Search Engine Optimization, Google is behind the scenes optimizing its search engine. For Google, it’s not so much about the results any given search yields but more about whether Googlers get the results they were searching for, and the ease of use of those results. Anyone who has spent time “Googling” over the past decade can see that search results have evolved. Along the way, they innovated the PageRank, where a search delivers the resulting pages, ranked according to those with the largest number of web pages linked to them. Google also created the “snippet.”
While a snippet may seem like a cute and fun thing, from Google’s viewpoint it is actually quite complicated. Whenever someone searches on a given topic, the “engine” searches through the pages in a web site to assemble a relevant snippet of how the search term appeared – in milliseconds. And it handles hundreds of millions of searches daily. If you’re in Minnesota and you Google “State Fair,” the top ranking result will your state’s fair site, plus a Google map showing the location. Other near top ranking results will be for other states fairs plus newsmaking events at your state fair. At the bottom of the page you’ll have the opportunity to refine your search in case you were looking for “State Fair,” the musical.
All of this in the interest of providing the best customer experience because the search feature brings in more than 90 percent of Google’s revenue. Consequently, engineers at Google may be working on their Android phones or Google News or improving Gmail, but they also track everything from the sorts of search terms users enter to the way the human eyes move across a web page. They’re also constantly tweaking, adding such options as clickable links for broad topics. Google a news media site, any news site, and you’ll instantly have the opportunity to click to Sports, Weather, Opinions and the like. It’s easy to take all those things for granted because the Google people make it seem so effortless.
However much we may claim to be self-deprecating, it seems that we humans don’t want to be portrayed in anything other than our best form. But somewhere in California, a group of officials neglected to attend to this basic fact of the human personality when they allocated money for a sculpture. The group in a town called, Cardiff by the Sea, aimed to honor the surfing passions of its locals by erecting an interpretive sculpture of a surfer. They commissioned an artist and possibly behind closed doors, approved the piece. But soon after the sculpture materialized, there arose a massive hue and cry from the townsfolk who felt they should have been consulted.
The artistic license resulted in a piece depicting a child learning to surf. But such limpness of wrists, such awfulness of form, such lack of a powerful wave being ridden, was soundly ridiculed. While many among the surfers may actually perform in this very inexpert pose, they did not wish to be publicized as such. They would have preferred a sculpted figure showing off top form, next to a powerful wave that was more in line with the stuff of their dreams rather than their reality.
And complaining was not enough. To date the innocent, inanimate sculpture continues to suffer much abuse at the hands of the town’s “artists.” They named it “The Kook,” much to the dismay of the artist who had named it, “Magic Carpet Ride.” They dressed it in clown’s clothing. Someone stuck a pumpkin atop its head. And possibly most insulting, someone created a paper mache whale that appears to be swallowing the sculpture. There are bumper sticker and e-mail campaigns to get rid of “The Kook.” No one knows where this will end but chances are the next sculptor, if there is one, won’t take quite so much artistic license.
It was discontinued in 1998 but by then it had been around for more than 14 years. And now those who are fans of source code can visit the original MacPaint program because Apple donated it to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Nowadays there are numerous digital drawing tools but for many years MacPaint was the drawing program on Apple’s computers, allowing anyone to use the lasso or paintbrush or other tools to draw on a computer screen. For those interested in the actual code that made this possible, the MacPaint source code had 5,822 lines of code written in the Pascal programming language with another 3,583 lines of code in the Assembler language. That’s what was donated to the Computer History Museum. And rumors are that it’s easy to read.
But not everyone is into the programming details, which is why MacPaint and its relatives, MacSketch, Quickdraw and the like became so popular. The tools provided an easy way for non-programmers to pursue art on their computers. It also set the stage for Apple’s popularity with artists. And what of the guy who wrote the program? Bill Atkinson, one of the major figures in MacPaint programming, moved on to other things but most recently is pursuing nature photography in a big way – photographing the tiny details contained in polished stone. As a child he became fascinated with photographs in the Arizona Highways magazine. It isn’t yet clear whether he is a geek turned artist or the other way around. In any case, MacPaint once rocked, and paved the way for all the stuff we have today.
Jerry Seinfeld jokes that most people at a funeral, faced with the choice of either being the body in the coffin or the live person giving the eulogy, would choose – the coffin? This sad state of affairs is due to the fact that most people are deathly afraid of public speaking. It’s the embodiment of performance anxiety. And over the ages there have been all sorts of strange strategies including the rather curious tip – try to imagine members of the audience in their underwear, or worse. But Kate Hayes, who is somewhat of an expert on the topic believes that with a few strategies, anyone can overcome fear and give that all important presentation the treatment it deserves.
Keep in mind, the primacy and recency effect with a strong beginning and a strong ending because people recall the first and last things they heard. Begin with your name and affiliation and a word or two about your topic – you want them to remember your name. After that, an anecdote, quote or unexpected fact, and if you can make them laugh, even better. But forget that if your joke is lame. In the middle of your presentation, remember that audiences “hear” with their eyes so the more that you can step away from the podium, gesticulate, maybe dance – unless that doesn’t come naturally to you, in which case they’ll remember your awkwardness. Use props if you can. End your presentation with a recap of your main points. And because presentations are a critical part of business strategy, it’s a good idea to get books or coaching for those who are truly nervous but need to give presentations.