You’re In Good Hands, With Geek Insurance
Had the honor last week of speaking on a panel at the VRooM “Getting Personal With Data” panel, hosted by the typically brilliant and insightful Keith Hopper and Doc Searls. My fellow panelist was local entrepreneur Ben Rubin. His company, Zeo, is in the business of personal informatics — sleep, in particular. They produce slick alarm clock units that sync with a headset that the user wears at night. The machine tracks a variety of really neat stuff for the obsessive lifehacker in all of us: when you sleep, how much REM you’re getting, whether or not your sleep is being disturbed, and so on.
One point of discussion emerged from Ben, a position that you’ve heard a great deal if you’re anywhere near conference-inclined for the tech-open data-free/open source software world. This was the looming threat of the Data Dilemma, a common paranoia of businesses involved in handling large quantities of information. The general idea is this:
Businesses are majorly screwed with regards to choosing to make their data about users widely available or strictly controlled. Whatever they do, they will lose.
The Story of Atari Missile Command
Sometimes, you find the best stuff in the weirdest places. Absentmindedly picked up this novelization of Atari Missle Command for chuckles in a roadside antique shop right outside Mount Rushmore for $1. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a vinyl audiobook tucked into the back. The cover promises, “SEE the pictures. HEAR the story. READ the book.”
And the audio is, well, incredible. Complete with the ridiculous bleeps-and-bloops background music loop and William-Shatner-knockoff narrator. Been talking about it for a long while, but thanks to the help of Fred Owsley, it’s finally now available online in its pure .wav glory:
* Atari Missile Command Read-Along (Side 1)
* Atari Missle Command Read-Along (Side 2)
If you’d like to read along, I’ve also captured the book and all the illustrations here (which are kind of great in their own right). The best part is that the inner flap of the cover suggests that there’s similar vinyl-novelizations of Pac-Man and Marmaduke. Marmaduke?
Update (11/15/09): Thanks to the ineffable Mac Cowell, we now have a compiled and cleaned up version! He rocks.
Uncertain Futures: An Analysis of the FCC’s Newest Commissioners
I’m glad to announce today the release of “Uncertain Futures,” our political analysis of the FCC and its future. While public attention has largely missed the activity surrounding the nominations (particularly in the face of the Sotomayor hearings), the recent FCC commissioner confirmations have huge implications for the communications infrastructure in the US. Plus, no well-researched overview seems available online for researchers in the space.
To that end, we’ve gone through and done our homework. We prepared a basic briefing which reviews the background of the five newly minted commissioners of the FCC. Then, using what we know of the breakdown of their positions across various issues, we’ve made some educated guesses about the direction of the Commission in the coming years, and which policies will dominate going forwards.
The big news: while there is accordance on a great deal of issues, the controversial, divisive (and most important) points of policy will be determined by the critical vote cast by Mignon Clyburn, whose positions on issues are still largely unknown.
You can read the full report here (pdf).
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Other Key Findings and Predictions:
* Drawing from what we know of Mignon Clyburn and her father’s political connections, it appears that the principle of net neutrality may be at risk in the coming years.
* The most contentious issues among the commissioners will be net neutrality and media consolidation, issues that have created intense debate and were the focus of the Senate Committee hearings.
* The FCC will put an end to any further discussion of the Fairness Doctrine, which is opposed by all five of the commissioners and President Obama.
Comprehensive List of the Most Boring Questions About Memes
So lately, I’ve had the pleasure of going back and forth with some folks on the nearly instant community that has popped up around the Internet Dynamics list, the open-invitation general discuss e-mail list that the Web Ecology Project set up to collect all the people interested in talking more substantively about web culture, and how it could be more scientifically measured, studied, analyzed, etc.
One particular thread, which I’m excited to preserve for posterity, is an ongoing discussion to compile the Most Boring Questions Having To Do With Memes. These mostly emerge from the observation that there exist some key set of impulsively asked, knee-jerk questions that repeatedly come up during any discussion about web culture, memes, and the like. It’s a social phenomenon worth documenting in its own right, and the compiled list from contributions on Internet Dynamics, eliminating repeats, is below.
Are we missing any? Feel free to comment — thinking it’ll end up being a useful resource at some point to write some basic answers to all these, so there’s a perma-link to point to anytime people get inevitably hit with these questions during presentations, etc.
* Can you create a meme?
* What is a meme?
* What is an ”internet meme”?
* How can my business uses memes?
* How do I say meme?
* Who starts memes?
* Where do memes come from?
* Should my company try to start a meme?
* Who coined the term meme?
* Where can I find memes?
* What’s the difference between a meme and something that’s viral?
* Why are you interested in silly Memes? What is the big deal about kids’ bad jokes?
* How can I make money using memes?
* What are some examples of classic memes through out the ages?
[Update: "Are memes always supposed to be funny?" and "Where do I find these 'memes'?" -- via Meredith]
The Awesome Foundation Seeks Awesome Grantees
Now that we’ve assembled all our micro-trustees, The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences is now seeking awesome micro-geniuses to fund.
That is to say, grant applications are open! We’ve designed the grant process to be incredibly, mind-blowingly simple to do. So if you’ve had an Awesome Idea that needs doing, apply now. The form for July/August grants will be open for (approximately) two weeks.
The Quiet, Private Research Center Makes A Debut
A little while back, I was talking about the concept of a quiet private research center model to take a look at doing some rigoriously researched work on the flows of culture and the formation of communities online. This group, which has been meeting weekly since then, has emerged as The Web Ecology Project, a casual interdisciplinary group of folks from around the Boston and Cambridge area that are looking to produce analysis in the space.
As of last Friday, I’m happy to announce that WEP has also officially published its first report on the Iran election and Twitter! We’ve trawled over 2,000,000 tweets of related terms about the election over the past eighteen days and, to our knowledge, it’s the most comprehensive data set released yet. It’s been getting some neat traction, and excited to see where the private research center goes next…
The Awesome Foundation Micro-Trustees
Following the call for the creation of the Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences and an ensuing wave of retweets, the staff over here at Broseph Stalin have been busy trawling through the micro-trustee applications that floated through the ether to us. We’re still waiting on two more to get back to us (will be posted here as soon as we hear back from them), but I’m happy to announce today that the bulk of the micro-trustees have accepted their offers and we’re happy to go public with the inaugural board of the Foundation. They are:
- David Nunez (Dorkbot Boston)
- Reed Sturtevant (Director, Microsoft Startup Labs)
- Emily Daniels (Dorkbot Boston)
- Keith Hopper (Public Interactive Group, NPR)
- David Fisher (Web Ecology Project, Development Ninja)
- Erhardt Graeff (The Berkman Center for Internet and Society)
- Evan Burchard (Developer, Rocker)
- Tim Hwang (ROFLCon)
Kickass. We’re pumped here at Broseph by the collection of organizations represented, and the e-mails we’ve already gotten to apply for micro-genius grants. We’ll be meeting up this week to get everything in place for the summer, and they’ll be information on how to apply for Awesome Fellowships shortly. Stay tuned…
[Update: as of this morning, we're happy to announce that Jon Pierce -- of the badass co-working group over at Betahouse -- is officially our ninth micro-trustee!]
[Update: as of THIS morning, we're happy to announce that Matt Blake -- one of the coding masterminds behind ROFLCon and Yawnlog -- is officially our tenth and last micro-trustee!]
The Awesome Foundation Seeks Awesome Trustees
I’ve been babbling directionlessly about crowdsourcing Awesome for a little while now, but I’m glad to report that after some encouragement from the awesome folks at Dorkbot Boston and Betahouse — we’re finally getting off our behinds here at BrosephStalin headquarters in Boston.
We’ve teamed up with the good people at Information Superhighway and are officially announcing today the creation of first (and only) chapter of The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences. And we’re seeking trustees to be a part of it.
And, you might ask: what is the Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences?
I’m glad you asked.
The idea is simple: create a monthly $1,000 grant awarded to a person doing things to forward the interest of Awesome. The money will be spent on a project, activity, or research, and it will be (intentionally) broadly defined. We don’t even really care if it’s for fun or for profit. We will never claim your intellectual property or anything like that, and anyone in the world is eligible. So long as you need the money and the idea is awesome, you will receive it with no strings attached. Period. End of story.
Think of us like a fast-paced micro-MacArthur Foundation for your flashes of fast-paced micro-genius.
Oh sure, there’s lots of bigger grants that you could apply for out there. But they’re expecting you to fill out large onerous forms, fulfill all sorts of legal and organizational requirements, and probably require you to laboriously report about how you’re doing. It also might take months (or years) for the checks to clear. Worst of all, the granting organizations will probably require you to hide your motivations for promoting Awesome in a boring, stuffy cloak of academic, scientific, or artistic significance.
Screw that. We say this today: Awesomeness demands doing immediately, and we aim to help people do it.
To facilitate that, we’re making the grant competition process as lightweight and fast as possible — once a month, there will be a short publicly available application to fill out. If accepted, we give you personal checks (or even cash in a brown paper bag if it comes to something like that) and then you tell us what you did for five minutes at the monthly Information Superhighway party. That’s it.
And, you might ask: that sounds great, but Tim, where are you going to get $1,000 a month?
I’m glad you asked.
Eds. Note: so here at Broseph Stalin HQ, I’ve resolved that we’ll be doing long-form, edited (wow!) pieces once a week on Mondays (with a few other things sporadically sprinked in). However, every Friday — we’ll be doing a smaller feature from here on in entitled “Meat and Brotatoes” — briefly talking about some projects/research updates/follow-ups events going on. It will also feature crudely ‘shopped images, because they make me giggle like a little boy.
So I’ve been finding myself meeting a bunch of people over the past few months who have all been complaining about the same thing — that our understanding of web culture, communities online, “social media,” or whatever you want to call it — pretty much sucks.
It’s a shame. Our common working knowledge about the space is thin and mostly subjective/qualitative (do-it-yourself-experiment: try to name 25 interesting microblogging sites and their unique features. if you can’t: I can’t either, if you can: I owe you a beer. Works for other social web tech developments over the past few years).
Plus, our tools for analyzing the space are pretty weak scientifically speaking (though undoubtedly sometimes very pretty). And worst of all, what good tools we do have are pretty esoteric to the nontechnical — which raises the barriers for people to research this sort of stuff on their own.
What we need is a quantitative, rigorous, experimental study of not only memes, but the structure of community and culture online. So, with some people in the Boston area, we’ve started the process of pulling ourselves from a world of superstition and alchemy (thanks for the metaphor, Mike K) to an organized scientific study of something like a chemistry.
This has taken the form of a quiet, private group of people meeting weekly in the Cambridge MA area — drinking a few beers, throwing around ideas, watching out for opportunities, doing research, and building applications from that knowledge. We’ll be releasing the products of this work publicly as they are finished and working with various institutions, companies, and etc to put this together. We’ve also got an e-mail list for people from Boston and afar. If you’re interested in being part of this and collaborating, drop me a line at tim AT timhwang DOT org with the kinds of projects and cool skillz that you’d want to bring to bear and we’ll get you all set up.
Disclosure: this concept is something I’ve been blahblahing about at events for awhile (and the commentary of David and Ethan from the Berkman Center lunch are definitely worth reading). But, in any case, the idea’s developed a bit since so I’m taking to converting it to an extended text form and hoping that getting harangued by randos on the internet will be good for it.
Ok, so, here’s the idea:
The crashing global economy is hella great for internet culture.
This should strike you as weird, if not absolutely wrong as an intuition. What does a crumbling banking structure, mass unemployment, and world financial jitters have to do with the production of lipdubs on Youtube or the repetitive watching of the Susan Boyle video (there’s a psychological explanation that’s been kicked around — but really it seems pretty hand-wavy to me). If anything, you might think that money troubles should take attention away from funny cats and countless hours of reading FML and towards other things, like, you know, finding a new job or making sure your kids have something to eat.
What’s interesting though, is that as we meet people through ROFLCon and related events, this isn’t the case at all. There hasn’t been any noticeable dip among people participating or contributions to the messy ridiculous universe of internet culture. And better yet, people creating content and hanging out online are thriving.
Why?
