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I liked this podcast so much, I listened to it twice. And I may listen to it again. It’s a beautiful discussion about the philosophy and impact of Ludwig Wittgenstein. You can find this gem on the Philosophy Bites site. Regular hosts Dave Edmonds and Nigel Warburton discuss Wittgenstein with Barry Smith of Birkbeck College London.

I particularly like the discussion of Wittgenstein’s later work and the Philosophical Investigations. Although they even made the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus sound interesting. There’s a great story recounted about Elizabeth Anscombe saying to Wittgenstein, that she can “understand why people thought that the sun revolves around the earth.” Ludwig asks, “why?” Anscombe says, “Well, it looks that way.” Wittgenstein responds, “and how would it look if the earth revolved around the sun?”

If there is such a thing as “memes,” did they drive humans toward the digital? A meme has been defined as a theoretical unit of cultural information. Digital replication is exact, whereas human memory is fallible. Some say human memory doesn’t even remember things, but rather the relationship between things. If a meme wanted to persist in an exactly identical form as it passed from human to human, it could only do so through the digital. In some ways this is counter to the idea of evolution, it’s not an adaptive system. The digital meme can’t adapt because it would become unreadable. This meme, and no other, shall survive.

Is The Funded going to create transparency and symmetric access to information for both buyers and sellers in the private investing market? TechCrunch says that they’re going to create a database of term sheets. If this works, it’ll change the landscape of private investing.Today venture capital firms have vision into the pricing market, in fact they largely create it. New companies are completely in the dark. How do you decide the right price for equity units in a private company? How does a new company know if they’re getting a good deal, or getting taken? Openness and transparency will change the market and just like with IPO pricing, the status quo will resist the change.

Duncan Watts is stirring it up. Fast Company asks “Is The Tipping Point Toast?” Just when everyone had internalized the Tipping Point and the meme of Influentials playing a key role in the distribution of ideas/trends through the network by virtue of their extra large social graphs and reputations. We like the idea of being able to influence the influencers through public relations or marketing projects. We design communications plans to advertise to the special few who are connected to and influence large numbers of people. In a conference room somewhere, someone is designing an ad campaign to appeal specifically to Robert Scoble.

Watts has created computer models that show that Influentials aren’t key to a trend’s tipping point. Although he does show that they have the effect of magnifying the reach of a trend through the network. Mass marketing that automates sharing will permeate a network through ordinary nodes more often than through influential nodes. The tipping point is the readiness of the network to accept a new trend. Apple’s new MacBook Air is a good example. Influentials like Jason Calacanis and Mike Arrington have stated that they will buy and use the Air. If the MB Air is ahead of the market’s readiness for it, will it make a difference who endorses it? A viral trend contained to early adopters is not a trend.

Is the network ready for the idea that Influentials aren’t as influential as we think? I’m putting that meme out on another node, but how did it get to me? I found it via Del.icio.us, I subscribe to Jeremy Keith‘s bookmark flow. I look at what other people bookmark. I added the link to my bookmark flow and clicked over to the article and read about half of it. I forwarded the link to a few people that I thought might find it interesting. This morning during my regular Sunday visit to the news stand I saw a copy of Fast Company magazine with the same article. I bought a copy, and read it all the way through before composing this post. But this idea/meme isn’t a good candidate for trend status. It’s only interesting to a small subset.

Kills me to miss even one of Richard Foreman’s productions. The digerati think they understand multimedia, but until you’ve experienced one of Foreman’s Theater Machines you don’t understand the potential of multiple media. If you live in the New York City area, secure tickets immediately to see Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland. The New York Times provides a nice photo gallery of the production and Ben Brantley provides a review of the performance. Foreman integrates digital film, live performance, non-linear text, funhouse sets and explosive thought into an evening of the highest form of entertainment.

At the other end of the spectrum is The Flea Theater’s production of Peter Handke’s “Offending The Audience.”  A group of actors take the stage and announce that there will be no play. They are not characters. The stage does not represent another place. Time passes as it does in real life. There is no illusion.

Foreman goes to the maximum, stuffing the stage with imagery, words, visions, poetry; Handke strips it all away, exposes the real moment of time existing between performers and audience, and then he takes that opportunity to tell us what he thinks of us. Boundaries bleed, frames are erased, we experience a shock to the deep trance of our lives.

Ever since I studied theater direction in college, I’ve been fascinated by Polish theater, and the posters created for the performances. Many years ago I saw a production of Rozewicz’s White Marriage at the Odyssey Theater in Los Angeles. The images and poetry of the performance remain with me to this day. To find and purchase a Polish theater poster once required a quest. Today, you can buy them online. 

The complete version of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander is stunning from the opening frame. Alexander peering through his toy theater sets the stage for the drama that unfolds. The theme of the “little world” and the “big world” that surrounds it continues to recur throughout the story. The little world is the extended family of the theater; the big world is larger world beyond their control. The story takes place in the years before World War I. 

This thread of thought bounced from Zeldman to Buxton to Gillmor.

Jeffrey Zeldman wrote a post about how Apple should hire itself out to fix the awful state of user interface in a number of devices. My immediate reaction was that there’s no reason that good UI should be unique to Apple. Jobs and Ive just start at a different point than most manufacturers. The question really comes down to where the power lies with regard to design thinking in an organization, and at what level design decisions are made (or not made). At Apple the answer is very clear.

This lead me to a lecture by Bill Buxton at Stanford’s HCI program. I wasn’t able to attend in person, but a video of Buxton’s lecture is available through iTunes University. Buxton’s lecture provides the link between industrial design and software interface design– the interface is now part of the form factor. Buxton has been hired to change the design culture of Microsoft. That’s a tall order, but I give them credit for bringing Buxton on board. His ideas about understanding the transitions between states, and the journey from sketching to prototype are very important.

Steve Gillmor chronicles the transition of software applications from the hard drive to the cache / cloud. His latest prediction is that Silverlight will become the rich internet application runtime of choice for the new MacBook Air and the iPhone. Clearly it won’t be Flash or Java. The Ajax apps are already there, but more richness is always better. If Microsoft plays it right, they could find a path into their next incarnation. MS Office may be dead, but Ray Ozzie’s Live Office is yet to be born.

The reason that no phone or computer manufacturer can compete with Apple is they don’t understand what design thinking is or why it’s important to their organization. Phones are designed by a set of pipes, the telecommunications network makes the design decisions. Computer and software interface design is still dominated by the hardware, it’s designed back to front. Until the value of design is understood, and the hardware stops designing the software, Apple will have no competition. It’s all about the ratio of features to features used. Apple leads the field by a mile.

We can connect to servers wirelessly, and that’s a kind of air. But when we broadcast over the air, it’s entirely different. When broadcasting content over the air, you don’t care how many receivers are taking in the signal. When listening with a web server, the number of requests for content matter a lot.  A good example is what happened to Twitter or many of the blogs during Steve Jobs’s MacWorld keynote. Twitter went down, and many of the blogs covering the event were slow or unreachable. It’s the finite and the infinite, a fundamental difference in the way communications channels scale.

Trent Reznor tried something similar to RadioHead, and didn’t like the results. In an interview with CNET he suggested an ISP tax that would allow all music to be downloaded for free. I suppose this would be like the tax that citizens of the UK pay to support the BBC. The tricky part about the kind of tax that Reznor suggests is distributing the monies collected. Who gets paid and how much? Distributed based on number of downloads? By what measure?

The music industry has done something like this before with CD-R discs. If you want to, you can buy CD-R Music discs on which to burn your music. They cost a little more, and the extra bit goes to the music industry to make up for lost revenue. But the fact is, a business needs to succeed in the marketplace. The music business needs to find a model that works with the new set of music containers and accompanying artifacts. Seth Godin points the way in his post entitled: Music Lessons.

They’re stuck on the idea of selling particular kinds physical of containers for music. It’s not just the music that people like to buy, it’s the stories and ephemera around the music. The one thing I miss about vinyl is the beautifully designed large record covers and the album notes. The digital container loses all meaningful context, there’s an opportunity there.