Readings…

Blah blah blah. This is for most of September. Readings from the last week will be up in the next day or two. Enjoy!

The Peanut Solution was one of my favorite articles I read in the past few weeks. A few things I was struck by: how simple solutions can be with just a little thought and experimentation. Just being willing to get dirty and think about a problem in a unique way can lead to a solution. What’s also striking is the way this solution is barred in by regulatory structures leaves you wondering how to align incentives and opportunities for inventors and growers.
I posted this quote from “Why the conversation isn’t necessarily a conversation,” and I like it:
“What do people do in a public environment where they are evaluated based on the number of fans they have? They don’t talk about what they had for breakfast (unless they’re a celebrity). Rather, they try to be fascinating. This tendency has made Twitter a great venue for content sharing, and often a great filter for the news. But again, it doesn’t mean that people are having conversations. Even if there are occasional two-way exchanges, they are quite limited.”
Also from Interactions magazine is a piece on Affinities, or how to design for people to fall in love with your product - from an emotional, not utility, perspective.
Defriended, Not Demoted shows how our design decisions about a service effect the social consequences and feelings tied to that service.
An article on Techcrunch appeared that argued that “Social Gaming Market Reaches Its Final Stage…and It’s Not Looking Pretty.” It’s not that surprising: social games are optimized to make the best use of “viral channels.” As those “viral channels” start to close or become less effective, of course you’re going to see a shift back to what really makes sense in game product development: creating fun, worthwhile games to play.
The Depression Map is totally fascinating. David Dobbs also wrote about the Science of Success in the Atlantic, which I linked to previously, and is also extremely fascinating. What’s most interesting to me is the way in which social supports and emphasis help to stave off depression in these gifted people. I wonder how we can recreate social customs to help support these people.
The Pen That Never Forgets is either an especially exuberant product review or a discussion of how technology products can help learn and preform better. I haven’t decided yet, but even still, wow, cool.
The costs of ‘the chaos of constant connection’ probably sounds a bit draconian, but my bet is we’re going to see more and more of stuff like this, and some of it even based in science. In fact, there was another article this month talking about this: Your Brain on Computers. We know how important down time, reflection and rest are to our brain’s integration and processing of information - not having that time anymore is bound to sting.
Untangling the Social Web covers how monitoring and analyzing social data can help us make better, more effective decisions and allocation of resources. Two things: thanks to Facebook and other social media tools, this is the first time this data has really been available in a way we can analyze it, and, two, we’re developing an understanding of the theory of networks that means we know how to analyze it. Jonah Lehrer wrote about how we could use our understanding of social networks to prevent and predict epidemics. Similarly, apparently Clustered Networks Spread Behavior Change Faster. What’s most interesting about this to me is the idea that different networks are effective for different purposes. We haven’t studied much about this, but it would be good to be able to start different qualities with different network structures.
A few profiles and interviews: There was a good interview with my dad. Sean Parker. Mark Zuckerberg. I like personalities, I like the stories told and how it effects a persons view of the world and thoughts. I’m especially bemused by the fact that Sean Parker and Mark Zuckerberg originally met through the internet - nope, no real personalities and realities there.
The future of the internet: A virtual counter-revolution is an interesting look at the forces that might splinter the internet. This is bigger and potentially even more interesting than net-neutrality issues.
Urban Legends: Why suburbs, not cities, are the answer is a look at the reality of the economics of cities. I don’t have much to say about this, it really doesn’t surprise me, but I guess it’s not a vogue thing to say.
Our Digital Crisis by Jonathan Harris. I love Jonathan Harris. I find this essay particularly inspiring to me as I start to think about communities and how we can build appropriate tools and services for these communities. Not every community can exist using the same tools, and our tools of today teach us to broadcast, but not yet have deep and meaningful conversations. “Our online tools do a great job at breadth (hundreds of friends, thousands of tweets), but a bad job at depth. We live increasingly superficial lives, reducing our relationships to caricatures and our personalities to billboards, as we speed along at 1,000 miles an hour.”