Archive for the 'Computing' Category

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Who Are The Digital Natives?

Published by Jarred on September 12, 2008 in Book Reviews, Computing, Culture and Sociology. View Comments

There’s a new book out that Taylor pointed me to a few weeks ago called Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. The book’s website describes the phenomenon in question and the purpose of the book:

The first generation of “Digital Natives” – children who were born into and raised in the digital world – are coming of age, and soon our world will be reshaped in their image. Our economy, our politics, our culture and even the shape of our family life will be forever transformed.

But who are these Digital Natives? How are they different from older generations – or “Digital Immigrants” – and what is the world they’re creating going to look like? In Born Digital, leading Internet and technology experts John Palfrey and Urs Gasser offer a sociological portrait of these young people who can seem, even to those merely a generation older, both extraordinarily sophisticated and strangely narrow.

A book about the impact of technology on an entire generation, written by two law professors?  Consider it Kindled, my friends.  But wait, there’s more!  Make the jump!

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“The Death of Mystery” in the Age of the Blackberry

Published by Taylor on August 5, 2008 in Computing, Culture and Lifestyle. View Comments

I recently joined the mobile web wielding hordes: I received a Blackberry.  My employer decided to upgrade and…well…I’m now one of “those people.”

I received the device about a month ago, and days later I was with my family for the Fourth of July.  One night after dinner, sitting around the large and ancient oak table, my 92-year-old grandfather asked if I had heard about an ambidextrous pitcher on the Yankees.  I hadn’t heard a thing about it*, and Grandpa couldn’t remember where he’d read about the athlete.  Imagine his shock when, across the dinner table, I reported the details of Pat Venditte: a truly ambidextrous pitcher, currently in the Yankees’ minor league system, who wears a special 6-finger glove so that he can slip it on either hand.  I even related a story from an article I found Googling “ambidextrous yankees pitcher” (it’s a fascinating story, and worth reading).

I read this story aloud from my little black box and a conversation that might have ended with “That’s interesting–I’ll have to look that up when I get home!” instead concluded with six people walking away from the table with the full story.

My grandfather, for his part, was impressed and glad that I’d uncovered the information he remembered vaguely.  My grandmother (God bless her, the most stubborn person I know, but also the most interesting) reacted differently: she lamented, more than a little seriously, the “death of mystery” inherent in on-demand web access from the beach, the bar, and even–when appropriate–the dinner table.

I think this is actually a manifestation of a pretty common generational difference: some people, principally older folks, relish the quest for information.  They take pride in working for their knowledge: digging through a dusty bookshelf to find a specific book with a description of the bird they see in the back yard, or looking through the recycling to find a newspaper article they read days before.  This quest for information makes uncovering even trivial information–like the difference between sherry and port wine…true story–a triumph.  The “mystery” my grandmother refers to is, I think, actually the satisfaction that comes from resolving a perplexing question or investing time in finding an answer.

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Web Frustration: Partial RSS Feeds

Published by Taylor on July 23, 2008 in Advertising, Blogging, Computing, Consumer Behavior and Web 2.0. View Comments

I’m sure if I thought about it for a moment, I could come up with other blog and web quirks that drive me bonkers (please share your own web-peeves in the comments).  But there’s one in particular that has me rankled this morning: RSS feeds that provide only partial content.

Those of us who use feed readers are well accustomed to major newspapers limiting their feeds to article titles and a sentence or two of summary.  A typical NY Times feed item, instead of a full article, looks like this:

Sticking Together, Up to a Point

from NYT > NYTimes.com Home

The Americans preparing for the Olympic sabre team have come to New York City, always a hotbed of fencing, to train for Beijing with Yury Gelman at the Manhattan Fencing Club.

It drives me nuts that I have to click through to read an article instead of reading without breaking stride on the Google Reader page.  But I accept that advertising pressures–despite the fact that some feeds, even partial ones (*cough*washington post*cough*), have ads embedded in them–will prevent the major news institutions from sharing their content in a more open way.

When the Freakonomics blog moved from an independent site to the NY Times, they experienced a huge amount of legitimate outrage from readers for switching from a full to a partial feed.  In a post to readers, co-author/blogger Stephen Dubner wrote (emphasis mine):

Way back when we first started talking to the Times, they said that they, like most content providers of their sort, favor partial feeds. Why? As much as people like to say that “information wants to be free,” content does not like to be created for free. In order to pay all the writers, editors, photographers, graphic artists, technologists, and the few dozen other kinds of folks who create and curate the Times’s content, most of which is free on the web [...] the Times sells ads on its site. But can’t they sell ads on a full feed, so that feed readers can still get all the content they want delivered to their computers for free without having to visit a single web site? The short answer is yes, they can, and our friends at FeedBurner, who have been distributing our feed, created a great business by doing so. But the Times and its advertisers aren’t crazy about this option. (Nor are they alone, apparently.) Why? This is the fundamental point: many advertisers do not value feed readers as much as they value site readers, since they believe that feed readers are far harder to measure and track.

Enter the most recent source of my web-frustration: Mental Floss.  I’ve read the Mental Floss blog (which is absolutely terrific) for about a year and a half.  While catching up on their prolific feed after a week of travel, I discovered that in early July they switched from a glorious and full feed to a sloppy partial feed.  I’m pissed.

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Old Media Attempts New Media: NY Times Reader and MSNBC Spectra

Published by Taylor on June 24, 2008 in Business, Computing, News and Reading. View Comments

Do two of something constitute a trend? Assuming that the two examples I’ve encountered are not the only instances of the “trend” that I’ll describe, let’s say that the answer is yes. Folks, we’re seeing a trend (that’s right, I said it) of old media giants (the NY Times and NBC News/MSNBC) attempting to capture some slice of the new media market by introducing what I’ll call “selective aggregator” software programs.

The examples I’ll write about in a moment are “selective” insofar as they focus a user’s attention EXCLUSIVELY on content produced by the respective news company. The programs are aggregators in that they function (theoretically) by responding to the information preferences and desires of users, aggregating information into a single interface. The two examples I’ve seen are NY Times Reader for Mac and MSNBC Spectra.

I read a number of blog posts a few weeks ago about the beta release of NY Times Reader for Mac (screenshot at right). It’s essentially an on- and off-line freestanding application that is intended to mimic the experience of reading an actual NY Times paper in a way that the NY Times website and RSS feeds do not. The program is a free download in beta phase, but will likely be a $14.95/month investment when it is released in full. From the Times site:

In building Times Reader for the Mac we’ve focused on providing the core set of features that have made the PC version popular. These include the easy-to-read paginated format, the ability to view the paper offline, a seven-day archive, text search, the ability to adjust the font size and access to Premium Crosswords.

Particularly in the near-term, a product like the reader application could* provide a nice entry point for more traditionally-minded readers who want their daily NY Times fix but are turned off by the (oftentimes overwhelming) NY Times homepage.  These same readers are unlikely to subscribe to feeds, so a freestanding application could hold a great deal of appeal.

As for geeks like me, it’s not a tool I would use–particularly not if I had to pay for it.  The same desire for one-stop reading that makes me VERY selective of which articles I’ll click through from the NY Times feed on Google Reader makes me loathe to open a separate application in order to access limited content.  This is in many ways a band-aid instead of a novel solution to lagging readership: the features are focused on the past, not the future.  Offline readibility is great, but if the Times offered full articles through their feed, we could view it offline in Google Reader just like most blogs.  Likewise, an advertisement-free interface is nice but (I would contend) less important to younger users who are accustomed to ignoring banner ads.

I found MSNBC Spectra through a simple one-line recommendation on DailyKos: “Woah, this is cool.” I felt the same way…for the first 20 seconds I used the application. Then I became nauseous and convinced that this is, in fact, the dumbest idea I’ve ever seen. Let me explain.

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The Pace of Human Progress

Published by Jarred on June 4, 2008 in Computing, Health, Humanism and Science. View Comments

Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity

Man… that would be a great name for a band, wouldn’t it? Alas, Mr. Kurzweil – to my knowledge – is not sick nasty at the guitar. He did, however, invent “the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments.”

According to his biography, Ray Kurzweil “has been described as ‘the restless genius’ by the Wall Street Journal, and ‘the ultimate thinking machine’ by Forbes.” He’s part entrepreneur, part inventor, part futurist. He’s been receiving lots of press recently. Why? Because Mr. Kurzweil believes in the coming of the Singularity.

What is the Singularity? According to Kurzweil’s website, it’s:

an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity. In this new world, there will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality. We will be able to assume different bodies and take on a range of personae at will. In practical terms, human aging and illness will be reversed; pollution will be stopped; world hunger and poverty will be solved. Nanotechnology will make it possible to create virtually any physical product using inexpensive information processes and will ultimately turn even death into a soluble problem.

Before you dismiss Kurzweil as having watched The Matrix a few too many times, you should understand the logic behind his seemingly preposterous claims.

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