Guest Post on VentureBeat on the iPad

I have a guest post up on VentureBeat.com, Why Apple’s design approach may not work with the iPad. I haven’t written about innovation in a while, so for those of you who like my old posts on that subject, you’ll probably enjoy this.

In Arthur Hailey’s 1971 novel, Wheels, the hero has an epiphany while looking at the Apollo Lunar Module: “Ugly is Beautiful.” Watching the iPad launch coverage, I realized that Apple limits its innovation potential by never building anything ugly. “Ugly is beautiful” isn’t just an epigram. It has substance as an innovation design principle. There are theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that revolutionary products are, by necessity, ugly-beautiful (as an effect, not a cause: a technology is not revolutionary simply because it is ugly).

Do head on over and comment. This was written with my work hat on, as part of the general tech scene conversation-joining blogging I am doing as part of trailmeme.com promotion. Sometimes you get to mix work and play…

The Misanthrope’s Guide to the End of the World

To diagnose somebody’s worldview, the single most effective test is to ask about their end-of-the-world opinions. You find out whether they have tragic or idealistic worldviews. You learn about their morality. You find out whether they are self-centric, ethnocentric, anthropocentric, bio-centric, enviro-centric or cosmos-centric. You get at how they ride the tension between individualism and collectivism. Attitudes towards grit and survival shine through. You get a read on their views of politics, technology, globalization, religion and mysticism. You find out whether misanthropy or empathy rules their heads and hearts. Their ability to transcend the varied dichotomies involved gives you a read on their intelligence. Perhaps most important of all, you find out about their sense of humor. So here is an introduction to the End of the World. Popcorn not included.

worldWillEnd

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The Ribbonfarm Posterous

A few weeks ago, I started playing around with Posterous, the clever young easy-blogging service.

I hereby present: the Ribbonfarm Posterous.

While I am still a dedicated WordPress guy, Posterous is proof that innovating on one vector to a ridiculous extreme can get you to fertile new territory.  At first I thought Posterous occupied a “miniblogging” niche between microblogging and blogging, but I quickly realized it is primarily an “email attachment” blogging model, and not about a specific length. You can just email the service with any sort of media attachment/inline URL and it does amazingly clever things with your raw material (make slideshows automatically, embed videos, etc.). There’s also a neat bookmarklet for real easy quick-blogging.

I figured it would be the perfect way to scratch an itch I’ve had for a while: how to share stuff that interests me, where I don’t add a lot of my own commentary, but it still has more of a “publishing” feel than Twitter links, Facebook or social bookmarking (which to me seem “personal”).

Please subscribe if you are interested in one or more of the following types of content:

  1. More frequent and shorter stuff: likely derivative/reblogs, but hopefully not just “Awesome!” as the default comment
  2. Input to ribbonfarm: stuff that sparks posts here, usually months later
  3. Sorta personal stuff: mainly vacation photos, brief travel thought

I am doing this mainly to park high-frequency/low-effort/short/derivative thoughts somewhere without ‘drowning this blog, which I want to reserve for feature-length original stuff. Partly also inspired by the format of eclectic reblogs like kottke.org, which I really enjoy.

And of course, send me stuff you think I should post there.

Note to Garry Tan: I have a feature request, I’d like one-click “summary post” capability so I can post a roundup of my recent posterous posts here on ribbonfarm at a set day/time every week. Republishing everything here defeats the purpose of separation :)

Conceptual Metaphors (Mashable), Gervais Principle (Fugitive Philosophy)

Heads up on two posts that should interest ribbonfarm readers. The first is a guest post by me on Mashable, and the other is a post by Tobias C. Van Veen on the Gervais Principle. I keep meaning to do a big roundup of all the blogosphere reactions (there’s several pretty good ones) to GP, but haven’t had time. But this one was worth pointing out, since it adds some new ideas.

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Predictions 2010 (on Silicon Angle)

Silicon Angle ran a guest post by me while I was on vacation (written with my work hat on, and with input from my team). My five predictions for Web technology are:

  1. The rise of the long form
  2. The Cambrian explosion of devices
  3. The “Website” will dissolve into the real-time Web
  4. The quality/quantity chasm will deepen
  5. Social filtering will start to displace search as the primary driver of monetizable content

Click on to read the details. Shortened URL for the original post for your C&P pleasure: http://bit.ly/92RDT8

Of course, my predictions are a function of my personal and professional biases/interests/agendas, but still, I do believe them. I think there really are forces making these 5 things happen. Thoughts?

The Book as a Social Signal

Thrice in recent memory, a stranger has come up to speak to me because of the cover of a book. Within the three great introvert institutions built by the book: the cafe, the library and the bookstore, book covers serve as social signals. They are ice-breakers par excellence. Or were. I recently bought the austerely cover-free Kindle.

kindle

From Wikimedia commons, GFDL

I am among those who celebrate the possibilities of the Kindle, but I have to acknowledge the dark side. With apologies to Joni Mitchell, we’ve digitized paradise, put up a plastic box. Finishing my first full Kindle-read, I realized with a sinking sadness that I was not holding a fringe toy. For all its rough edges, the Kindle is a legitimate book-killer, and it will prevail. In time, it will catalyze the formation of its own institutions and social-psychological landscape, complete with different social signals. But it will be too late for me. I am the sum total of the books I’ve read. Paper books with covers, with associated memories of intimate bookish conversations triggered by glimpses of covers. With the paper book, a part of me will die. I can imagine having a conversation with an 18-year-old Kindleworm in 2025. He will probably view me with the same incomprehension with which I, as a calculator-trained engineer, view 50-plus slide-rule-trained engineers.

This is my first stab at finding a short-format style that works for me. 250 words. What do you think? Still ribbonfarmesque?


The Crucible Effect and the Scarcity of Collective Attention

This article is about a number I call the optimal crucible size. I’ll define this number — call it C — in a bit, but I believe its value to be around 12. This article is also about an argument that I’ve been unconsciously circling for a long time. Chris Anderson’s Free provided me with the insight that helped me put the whole package together: economics is fundamentally a process driven by abundance and creative-destruction rather than scarcity. The reason we focus on scarcity is that at any given time, the economy is constrained by a single important “bottleneck scarcity.” Land, labor, factories, information and most recently, individual attention, have all played the bottleneck role in the past. I believe we are experiencing the first major bottleneck-shift in a decade. “Attention,” as an unqualified commodity is no longer the critical scarcity. Collective attention is: the coordinated, creative attention of more than 1 person. It is scarce and it is horrendously badly allocated in the economy today. The free-agent planet under-organizes it, and the industrial economy over-organizes it.  That’s the story of C, the optimal size of a creative group. There are seven other significant numbers in this tale: 0, 1, 7, 150, 8, 1000 and 10,000. The big story is how the economy is moving closer to C-driven allocation of creative capital. But the little story starts with my table tennis clique in high school.

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The Epic Story of Container Shipping

If you read only one book about globalization, make it The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, by Marc Levinson (2006). If your expectations in this space have been set to “low” by the mostly obvious, lightweight and mildly entertaining stuff from the likes of Tom Friedman, be prepared to be blown away.  Levinson is a heavyweight (former finance and economics editor at the Economist), and the book has won a bagful of prizes. And with good reason: the story of an unsung star of globalization, the shipping container, is an extraordinarily gripping one, and it is practically a crime that it wasn’t properly told till 2006.

(From Wikimedia Commons, GFDL license)

40 foot container (from Wikimedia Commons, GFDL license)

There are no strained metaphors (like Friedman’s “Flat”) or attempts to dazzle with overworked, right-brained high concepts (Gladwell’s books come to mind). This is an  important story of the modern world, painstakingly researched, and masterfully narrated with the sort of balanced and detached passion one would expect from an Economist writer.  It isn’t a narrow tale though. Even though the Internet revolution, spaceflight, GPS and biotechnology don’t feature in this book, the story teases out the DNA of globalization in a way grand sweeping syntheses never could. Think of the container story as the radioactive tracer in the body politic of globalization.

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Zen and the Art of Google Wave Mechanics

Much of the discussion around Google Wave so far has been down-in-the-weeds prosaic and business-like. So I decided to seek out physicist turned Zen Master, Roshi Tsu Nami, and historian of technology, Prof. Sophius Trie, in order to get to some deeper insights. Here is the transcript of our conversation. Warning: all three of us are ridiculously enamored of tech-geek-mysticism references, but I hope you can follow our thinking.

Me: What is Google Wave?

Roshi Tsu Nami: 47.

Me: 47? Ha ha! Don’t you mean 42?

Roshi Tsu Nami: Yes, I was referring to the Hitchhiker’s Guide, but I do mean 47, not 42. Google Wave is the ultimate answer, to life-streaming, universal communications and everything. But it is about 10% wrong.

Me: Clever. I don’t suppose I get to look smart in this dialogue. I expect I should ask next: what is the actual question?

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Bay’s Conjecture

A few years ago, I was part of a two-day DARPA workshop on the theme of “Embedded Humans.” These things tend to be brain-numbing, so you know an idea is a good one if it manages to stick in your head. One idea really stayed with me, and we’ll call it Bay’s conjecture (John Bay, who proposed it, has held several senior military research positions, and is the author of a well-known technical textbook). It concerns the effect of intelligent automation on work. What happens when the matrix of technology around you gets smarter and smarter, and is able to make decisions on your behalf, for itself and “the overall system?” Bay’s conjecture is the antithesis of the Singularity idea (machines will get smarter and rule us, a la Skynet – I admit I am itching to see Terminator Salvation). In some ways its implications are scarier. [Read more…]