June 2012
20 posts
Microsoft’s Tablet Revolution: Surface Marks End of the PC Era - The Daily Beast →
thedailybeast.com
There’s a lot of right in this piece about the implications of the nifty Surface tablet that Microsoft debuted a couple of days ago.
It’s going to be difficult for hardware makers to find room to profit in the future, and the moves of some of them (as he mentions, HP and Samsung) suggest they get it too. That’s because they’re going to be left fighting for margin in devices that are commoditized.
Think not? Look at what’s happening to HTC, Nokia and other hardware makers in the mobile space.
If you’re making devices based on someone else’s operating system (and someone else’s carrier network) you’re left with making cheap phones that are designed to obsolesce hours after their two-year contract expires. That’s not a recipe for standing out in the marketplace.
I think he overlooks one very big player, though, in ignoring Amazon, which has the cloud play, a reader device, huge other sources of revenue, and even an operating system (a heavily modified version of Android that is effectively it’s own.
Finding Your People: Why Filmmakers Should be on Tumblr... Now →
tribecafilm.com
Nice Tribeca.com piece that outlines both the stats behind Tumblr’s great growth and the successful tactics needed to take advantage of opportunities it presents especially for filmmakers.
NYT tech columnist David Pogue on the stuff he buys for himself →
pogue.blogs.nytimes.com
I love that NY Times tech columnist David Pogue does annual column calling out the tech products he actually buys for himself from all the zillions of goodies that he gets to try out for his many writing projects.
The list here is a good one, if Mac-centric (well, so am I, but that’ll bait some Windows bears out there). I was more interested in the camera, earphone and bag choices than anything else, and he delivers here too.
My bag (itself a quite durable but now six-year-old High Sierra over-the-shoulder) has a MacBook Pro 15”, an aging iPad, an iPhone 4S, a 500Gb Western Digital portable hard drive, a checkbook, pens, backup cables, and a few other ends.
So, what’s in YOUR bag?
Some useful social-media usage stats, among the self-promotion →
convinceandconvert.com
This (annoyingly self-promoting) article has some useful stats about the increasing engagement a significant portion of us have with social media. Key stats include:
- More than one in five people checks Facebook at least five times a day;
- 56% of Americans have a profile on a social media site, including nearly as many 45- to 54-year-olds;
- more than 1 in 5 Americans uses several social-media sites DAILY;
- three-fourths of Twitter users post regularly.
- Facebook continues to be the only meaningful site for affecting purchase behaviors (might be time to reconsider that put on their stock).
So, a significant subset of users are wired into social media on a highly frequent basis, and numbers continue to creep up. Does anyone see these numbers dropping anytime soon, for all the talk among some about social-media fatigue?
“Anytime you’re at the movies, and you see the words ‘The following is based on a true story,’ you should think about it as a painting, not a photograph.”
—
From the live blog of Aaron Sorkin’s Interview at D10 with Walt Mossberg.
Another great line:
“The stuff that I write doesn’t work very well as background music.”
And another:
“I’m all but computer illiterate, which I’m not proud of.” Mostly I just use my computer to write scripts. But I’m amazed that 3-and-a-half-year-olds can resonate with computers right away. “If I could ask Steve Jobs anything, it would be ‘What’s that magic trick?’”
Also, Sorkin’s dad was an intellectual property lawyer!
And another great line:
“Storytelling is a very old art form, and the important parts of it don’t change at all.” Read your Aristotle.
On writing about Steve Jobs and the hero/antihero spectrum:
He’s a complicated guy. Zuckerberg was, as well. But when I’m writing this movie, “I cant judge this character. He has to be, for me, a hero. … To put is as simply as possible, you want to write the character like they are making their case to God, why they should be let into heaven.”
And finally, speaking of Aristotelian dialectics:
“I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle.” That conflict is the whole point of drama.
“Journalists should no longer think of themselves as “newspaper reporters” or a journalist of any specific medium. Instead they should consider themselves multimedia producers equipped to tell a story on multiple platforms. They should also have knowledge of how stories are being consumed. More than anything, a truly “integrated newsroom” will have journalists who build tools that enable them to do reporting at scale and innovate the storytelling process.”
—
*Why Reporting Is Ripe For Innovation*
Some of this is coming to be accepted knowledge, at least in the forward-looking corners of journalism, but this story does point in the directions journalism should be going.
I love the idea of creating “listening dashboards” designed to surface in real time the trends in news, so reporters can be more nimble and responsive to what’s happening in the zeitgeist.
You can somewhat get there with current tools, monitoring for keywords and trending topics, and using sentiment tools to measure where people are coming down on a given issue or topic.
But in fact, those tools now are mostly constructed around seeing brands monitoring what people are saying about them. There’s lots of money there for developers (and that’s why we have those tools), but there should be an opportunity to develop these other tools as well, for whatever counts as a journalistic enterprise in this fluid time.
Obama Ordered Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran - NYTimes.com →
nytimes.com
A deeply and brilliantly reported look at efforts to use IT tools to undermine the Iranian effort to build nuclear capabilities.
Great job by the NY Times, even as I feel more than a bit uneasy about disclosing as much as they have been able to discover.
Flavorwire » 10 MP3s You Need to Download for Free This Week: Iggy Pop, Dan Deacon →
flavorwire.com
Another interesting set of legal free downloads, courtesy of Flavorpill’s combing the net. Check ‘em out.
