Jon Lebkowsky's Guide to the Universe
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Jon Lebkowsky is an author, blogger, and consultant living in Austin, Texas.
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May 14, 2008
Cognitive recycling
From Clay Shirky: As we move online, we're recycling cognitive energy formerly invested in passive consumption of television, and applying it to active effort online. This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share. Update and oops: this was originally published before I completed the thought. From my comment below: "Clay's made a good point about repurposing cognitive cycles, but I wanted to acknowledge a challenge here for us to optimize the effectiveness of our recycled energies. How do we evolve distributed projects that, while in effect leaderless, are focused and effective? (I'm also going to add this question to the post.)" Category: May 5, 2008
Austin350
I've been blogging at the new Austin350 web site. We're looking for more bloggers for that site - if you're interested, contact me. Category: Blogging May 4, 2008
Air Jelly
Saw this video of jellyfish art at Beyond the Beyond: Category: Art May 3, 2008
Maker Faire on Twitter
If you couldn't make it to the Bay Area Maker Faire, you can track the event on Twitter. [Link] Category: Art, Community, Digital Lifestyle April 30, 2008
Call for creativity: communication systems and urban architecture
Adam Green field posted this at Speedbird:
Category: Design “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most”
Thanks to Bill Anderson for sending me a link to this rightfully angry piece by Thomas Friedman, who says that "we have no energy strategy." If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage — gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars — and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage — new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite. Category: Sustainability April 29, 2008
Dad's groceries and the inevitability of death
My friend Bruce and I made a run to the local H.E.B. supermarket this evening, chatting all the way about the economy and families and, of course, groceries, and as we were checking out, I made a fond recollection of my Dad, who absolutely loved the grocery store. He would wander slowly through, pondering various items, buying too much of this or that. Never hurrying to finish and leave... he really loved shopping for groceries. Bruce got this immediately: our parents were raised during the depression, and wandering through a well-stocked supermarket with enough money to buy whatever you might need made them feel just incredibly secure. We take it for granted today, but it really meant something to them. And we probably shouldn't take it too much for granted. Grocery prices are accelerating, and food items you took for granted before now may be out of reach in a couple of years. What would my Dad think if he was here today? (Coincidentally I met earlier today with Mary Matthiesen of Conversations for Life! about dying... thinking how profoundly your life changes after your parents have died. We take our supermarkets for granted, and we're in denial about death... we don't talk about it. Mary's thinking (and I heartily agree) that we need more conversations about the reality and implications of death. Because we avoid the subject and hide the fact, it's a huge mystery for so many of us, often experienced as something more traumatic than it needs to be - we've all got stories, she says, of the death of a parent or someone we know, and often the experience is pretty terrible. We don't have a framework for it, or a tradition (they're fading). We fear rather than accept the inevitability. Pondering this as my eyes get fuzzy. Visits to the grocery store don't leave me feeling terribly secure. Category: Culture April 27, 2008
FringeWare history
Scott Casey has published a history of FringeWare, Inc. from his perspective (he joined the company after I left). It's 'way incomplete, but what's there is generally accurate, and it's cool to see a remembrance. Update: Johannes at Monochrom saw this post on Twitter and posted a followup about his first U.S. appearance at the FringeWare store. He posts the announcement of that event from back in '98: FringeWare is pleased to announce our in-store presentation of Austria's culture-jamming heroes from "monochrom" magazine, currently travelling throughout North America on their 1998 "monochrom bringt amerika den sozialismus tour". The illusive and infamous "der jg" and company of media subversives will appear for a special signing of their publication, and also spin as DJs for a show featuring "a really strange mixture of austrian and german music scores..." FringeWare will provide the beer. Category: April 26, 2008
Twitter is useful
For some, Twitter just seems weird at first glance. Why would anybody sign up for a microblogging system with a 140 character per post limit? I personally had no hesitation, because I could see it as a variation on the always-open chat room, the kind of virtual coworking space that so many Open Source projects have used, often hosted by Freenode's IRC servers, at least until Campfire came along. Twitter is kind of like chat, only instead of a chat room you have a chat network - you don't see everybody in a particular virtual space, but all the people whose posts you choose to follow, often people in your own social network, some of whom will follow you back. You're in a conversation that can vary depending you who follow... and it can be even more complicated, with a public comment feed and people who opt out of it, and protected private feeds that you can only follow with permission, and direct messaging that's one to one. If many people you know and work with are on Twitter, that can be useful. If you have problems that collective intelligence can solve, Twitter's useful there, too. Marshall Kirkpatrick posts about Twitter for journalism, where it's useful for picking up on stories as they occur, for performing ad hoc interviews, and to get feedback on pieces you've written. I've been using Twitter as a matter of course when I write articles, asking questions of the people who follow me and working pretty effectively with the responses I get. Kirkpatrick quotes Suw Charman-Anderson: "No, it's not a random sample. But since when are 'man on the street' interviews?" If I could just get all my clients and colleagues to use Twitter, it could be one stop shopping for ideas and productivity. Category: April 21, 2008
Social enterprises
Some organizations that are structured as nonprofits with social missions, or social enterprises, are run like businesses and generate sustainable revenue sources, though earnings are retained, not distributed. “There is a lot of discussion taking place right now about a whole new organization form around social enterprise,” said James Fruchterman, president of Benetech, a social enterprise incubator based in Palo Alto. “Many of these efforts can make money; they will just never make enough to provide venture capital rates of return.” These organizations tend to be tech-oriented, "driven in part by a set of microelectronics technology trends that have sent shock waves through many industries, from publishing to music and movies." [Link] |
worldchanging column links to jon's weekly columns at Worldchanging. polycot posts --> older entries
Serious worldsaving play
Doing the math for NASA Screw sustainability? Honoria's through with nice! Why are food prices rising? Being human The meaning of "the great unbundling" Fair use "whispering campaign" Live Art Blogging from SXSW Interactive 2008 What should we be thinking about?
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