the love of change
Common Craft has done it again, this time with an excellent video explaining social media. Watch this video if you don’t understand social media, or if you like ice cream:
No relation between me and “Jarret.”
Since we’ve been lame again this week, I thought I’d share it here instead of in the sidebar. We’re running out of excuses, I know. GRE, LSAT, work, travel. Such is life. Bear with us!
I’ve just added a new widget to our sidebar: the 350 Challenge Badge. The premise is simple: Brighter Planet is offsetting 350 pounds of CO2 emissions in Tropophilia’s honor. That’s the equivalent of 100 lightbulbs burning for one day, or two weeks’ worth of car emissions. Small, but it’s something, and we’re happy to participate. -T
[Warning: Here be spoilers, mateys.]
The moment I heard that TechCrunch was sponsoring a pre-screening of Iron Man, I knew it was a must-see. Tropophilia-favorite blog Gizmodo lovingly titled its review of the film “126 Minutes of Gadget Porn“. I saw it on Saturday night, and I’m afraid that I too was filled with a deep technolust. What self-respecting geek wouldn’t want a suit of armor that enabled him to fly and kill bad guys? I mean, come on.
If you had trouble following some of the concepts I was talking about when I wrote about augmented reality a few months ago, you need look no further than the “heads-up display” inside Iron Man’s helmet. Check out this short clip from the movie. Imagine looking at anything, anywhere, and seeing computer-fed, real-time information layered on top of and around it. It’s coming - first to our vehicles, and later to our glasses. There’s too much other gadgety goodness to mention, but pay special attention to the technology around Stark’s home. All of it is believable to this geek’s eye. Well done, Industrial Light & Magic. Well done.
For the most part, Iron Man was able to avoid following a too-familiar formula in recreating the Marvel comic on the big screen. Robert Downey, Jr. was a brilliant choice for Tony Stark, both of them being somewhat cocky rich dudes who head down the road of reform after nearly getting themselves killed. I liked that even though he decides to consult his moral compass and do battle on the side of good, Stark loses neither his snarky sense of humor nor his arrogance. Sometimes his disregard for the opinions of everyone else becomes annoying, but mostly it helps to keep him from becoming the overly-dramatic “with great power comes great responsibility” stereotype that he could easily have become.
I have another guest post up on Tactical Philanthropy today, this time talking about a number of different foundations that are using technology in innovative and effective ways. This post is essentially a recap of my favorite session from the conference I attended a few weeks ago. It’s been a hectic few weeks, which is why my post is so delayed.
While I recognize that few of Tropophilia’s readers are involved in formal philanthropy or the foundation world, I think many of these tools and lessons learned should be interesting to a variety of folks in many different types of organizations or fields.
Here are a few snippets of my post, you can read the rest here.
Amy Luckey from Blueprint Research and Design pointed out a number of examples of foundations using technology well, including [...]
A personal favorite, the Packard Foundation’s wiki on nitrogen pollution and agriculture strategy
[...]
Marc Osten, from Summit Collaborative, offered advice for those in the room who are facing an uphill battle bringing technology into their organizational culture OR are simply unaware of how to get started using these tools. First, he warned that getting caught up in specific tools (“We need a blog!”) without first carefully considering your organization’s goals—and what tools might help accomplish those goals—is a recipe for failure. This is a point that I think deserves highlighting, because it’s the reason (for example) that so many organizational blogs are launched with enthusiasm and then updated once a month or less. All the while, those (limited) resources could be more useful if deployed on other tools that better address the needs of the organization.
Happy Memorial Day to everyone. Monday Links are a little late today, but nobody is at work to read them anyway, so enjoy these on Tuesday Morning:
Among adults, the words “geek” and “nerd” exchanged status positions. A nerd was still socially tainted, but geekdom acquired its own cool counterculture. A geek possessed a certain passion for specialized knowledge, but also a high degree of cultural awareness and poise that a nerd lacked. [...]
So, in a relatively short period of time, the social structure has flipped. For as it is written, the last shall be first and the geek shall inherit the earth.
Yesterday I came across a slightly mysterious website — a collection of Polaroids, one per day, from March 31, 1979 through October 25, 1997. There’s no author listed, no contact info, and no other indication as to where these came from. So, naturally, I started looking through the photos. I was stunned by what I found.
Enjoy! Check back this week for more regular bloggin’ (thanks for your patience last week).
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