Common Craft does an excellent job of explaining stuff. Or at least I think they do. My problem is I already understand the stuff they’re explaining, so of course it makes sense to me. I like this explanation of RSS, and next time someone asks me about it, I’ll point them to this screencast.
Comments closedAuthor: cgerrish
Unemployed philosopher
I’ll be going to SF Opera’s production of Tannhauser next week. The music has been the soundtrack around the house for the last week. Just listening to the overture makes me happy. You’ve got to love a story that starts with the hero discovering “Venusberg,” the subterranean home of Venus and spending a year worshipping the goddess.
Comments closediPhone Copy and Paste from lonelysandwich on Vimeo.
The demo is fake, but the proposal for a multi-touch gesture for copy and paste is real. Will users take the time to learn these new gestures? Doug Engelbart thought so, as does Bill Buxton. A little time invested results in a life time of value. It’s the problem of single stroke short hand— or writing with a stylus on a PDA all over again. Graffiti never really caught on, although I kind of liked it. How do we get beyond the keyboard? There are some general functions like “copy and paste” that we need to bring along with us. Ray Ozzie’s Web copy and paste idea seemed very promising, and then it just disappeared. But the key here is “copy and paste” without a mouse or keyboard.
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Does Dave Winer have the power to squash a meme? The term “Social Graph” recently began an infestation of TechMeme. While tied to the interesting issue about who owns a user’s attention data in the context of social networking, the term itself obscured rather than opened the dialogue. Dave Winer objected to the use of the term, even though it was one he was familiar with given his background in mathematics. After reading Winer, Nick Carr was pleased to find that he understood what the term referred to, even if the signifier was unknown.
Can you capture the meme, remove the “Social Graph” signifier, re-attach the “Social Network” signifier and release the meme back into the wild? Can a meme survive that kind of catch and release? After all, it’s not as though “network” doesn’t have plenty of depth for those interested in going deeper. Network theory has a very interesting emerging literature, and has many ties to the mathematics implied by the use of the word “graph.”
Generally the usage of words to signify concepts is determined by common usage, the marketplace of conversation. In this case, the conversation is really a political negotiation for the right to own one’s attention and social network data. The math is the least of it.
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