Skip to content →

Category: collaboration

Kindle: The street has its own uses for things

Published November 22, 2007 by cgerrish

Kindle, Amazon’s reader

I still don’t quite understand Kindle, but I think it’s worth waiting for the street to come up with a use for it. In reading through the overwhelming stream of condemnation, I could only think that something that this many people hate must have something going for it. I’m of two minds: I posted against it, and now I will post something in its favor.

I was listening to Jason Calacanis on Leo Laporte’s This Week in Technology and William Gibson’s quote surfaced: the street has its own uses for things. That lead me to Cory Doctorow’s take on the same theme. Amazon has its intended uses for Kindle, some of them may come to pass.

I’ve previously written on what we buy when we buy creative content. We think we’re buying the writing in the book, but we’re actually buying the physical object, a book. We buy the delivery mechanism. Creative content lives in the mind’s eye as it comes in contact with the physical marks that can be purchased. We often moan about having to buy the same music over and over again in different formats. But that’s all there is, there are only formats and the players that decode them. Music and literature don’t inhabit the physical plane.

Kindle is a delivery method, it’s also a toll booth– a means of collecting fees on content that flows through it. It’s a method of publishing into a different format; this format is a machine. For the street to find uses for Kindle, it will have to win users. The offering price is too high, but perhaps it will be reduced, much like the iPhone. Will we buy the same books in yet another format? We have so far, why wouldn’t we do it again?

Comments closed

Sometimes I dream of a digital Chautauqua

Published November 18, 2007 by cgerrish

Chautauqua Tent

Sometimes I dream of a digital Chautauqua that crosses over and travels in a tent show around the land. I think about Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble, or the Willoz’s Chautauqua. I haven’t quite figured out how the Chautauqua on the network connects to the Chautauqua in the tent or the barn— but the two should be deeply intertwingled.

Enjoy Chautautqua

As I think about what the next big thing on the Web will be, I can’t help thinking about the next small thing. I imagine it will look like a digital Chautauqua, a unique performance that will exist for just a moment in time. It’s participants will be witnesses. Can I get a witness?

Comments closed

Phoning in the OpenSocial / OHA on my Teleputer

Published November 6, 2007 by cgerrish

Google seems to be in the announcement business these days. Announcements of grand alliances that make a big circle around the future of our interaction with the network. The future of social, is you can take your graph with you. (That’s friends for most people) And the future of mobile computing is that Google wants to stand as the middle man between you and anything you want on the network. (and of course, monetize that position) The phone will be opened up and will be open source.

 God knows the phone needs to be opened up in someway– it’s a very crippled interface. If you view voice as just another kind of data, it changes you idea of what a phone should do. Although I think I’ve heard all this before from George Gilder, it was called the rise of the Teleputer.

And I’m afraid I have to agree with Fake Steve Jobs, it’s not a phone, it’s an alliance. Companies join alliances for many reasons, often they do it to slow down progress, maintain the current environment, and protect their current revenue stream. I don’t see alliances creating change, they’re more effective in consolidating change that has already occured.

If you want to instigate change, you need to upset the balance of power. A new element needs to be injected into the competitive mix. Apple’s iPhone has the potential to do this because it re-invents the phone interface on a software platform. This gives it real flexibility, it can learn and adapt. Google is probably looking for the same kind of environment with their alliance. But it’s a long way from alliances to making phone calls. Remember something is only useful when it has users.  Not developers, users.

One Comment

No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail Better

Published November 4, 2007 by cgerrish

Samuel Beckett

A link tossed in to the stream by Joe Tennis on Twitter, stirred up thoughts about failure. Joe’s pointer was to a blog posting on the process of creating computer games, and the ideal of setting up an environment where failure can happen faster and isn’t punished. That’s a unique idea in this day and age.

It brought to mind a quote from a late Samuel Beckett novel called “Worstward Ho.”

Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.
Samuel Beckett

If you intend to participate in a creative profession, whether it’s writing fiction, making paintings or plays, creating companies, products or software— you’ll need to learn to live in, and with, failure. In a sense, success is the failure that we’ve made an accomodation with. We shoot for perfection, and we always fall short. Dave Winer summed it up in 1995 in his motto for Living VideoText — We make shitty software, with bugs. Software must ship prior to perfection, in that way it’s like life. We must live our lives prior to perfection. If we wait, we’ll miss everything.

Failure is tied to risk. If failure is not an option, risk is not an option. If risk isn’t an option, only a very small kind of success is possible. The principle is the same as an investment portfolio. You can banish risk, but you can’t expect a high level of return. Risk is a requirement of potential high return. The same is true in any creative pursuit, if you want a big success, you’ll need to learn to live with risk and failure.

And not just live with them, but to call them friends. Learning how to fail faster means learning how to succeed faster. Creating a safe environment for failure encourages risk taking and exploration. It gets you there faster. But just as with success, not all failure is equally successful. Failures need to be crafted just as carefully as successes. Just ask Samuel Beckett…

One Comment