Jason Kottke on the Nature of Blogs and Writing Your Own World Book Encyclopedia 
By: Jason Kottke
Wired, April 16, 2013
It all started with the World Book Encyclopedia. The complete set we had on the bottom shelf of the family bookcase was my first Internet. I still remember sitting on the sofa with my dad reading about the theory of relativity when I was 8.
Fast-forward to my early twenties. I dropped out of grad school after a semester because I’d fallen in love. My dad was a little alarmed when I moved back home to spend all day tying up the phone line with my new intimate friend, the World Wide Web, but I knew what I wanted to do with myself for the first time in my life: I wanted to be a web person! Whatever that was.
One of the first pages I ever visited in the fall of 1994 was the National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ “What’s New” page. Every time someone added a new homepage to the web, the NCSA would publish it on this page. In hindsight, that was the first blog—published reverse-chronologically, colloquial, and full of links. It was the family encyclopedia with velocity.
Within a few years, a self-identifying group of people called webloggers realized the power of that “What’s New” page, especially through the lens of a personal POV. I modeled kottke.org, the blog I’ve been publishing for 15 years, after sites like Michael Sippey’s Stating the Obvious, Jesse James Garrett’s infosift, and Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom. Those weblogs were idiosyncratic, about a little bit of everything, and sent people away to keep them coming back — a stark contrast to the late-’90s portal strategy of “stickiness.”
Kottke.org still does all of those things, which makes it a bit of a throwback. Funny to say that about new media, but if you look at other blogs, they are part of large networks (The Huffington Post), they cover narrow beats like startups or food that are amenable to advertising (TechCrunch), and they have a rotating cast of contributors (Gawker Media). By contrast, kottke.org is still written mostly in first person by me and ranges from essays on human extinction to videos of competitive wood planing in Japan.
A friend of mine says, “Nostalgia is death,” but I hope my approach is more than pining for the olden days of weblogs. Kottke.org is a way for me to relate to the world as a whole person, communicate with like minds, celebrate knowledge, and, yes, to write my own personal World Book.
Kickstarter: Beautiful Craigslist Ads
As some of you know, I recently moved into a new house and have been really happy with the move but prior to that, there were a few months of searching that made me want to tear my hair out.
I decided to do something about it so I’ve been working on a project with some friends to make Craigslist ads better and better-looking. This will be a free and easy form that anyone can use to create beautiful craigslist ads that have all the necessary information included and laid out so you know exactly what you’re getting.
What I thought would be a quick and simple exercise in design has grown to be much more and we’ve gotten obsessive with the details, paring everything down to just what you need. I’m hoping that once we solve real estate rentals, this will translate to other parts of Craigslist. I’m happy to announce that we’re close to launching it now.
If you choose to back this Kickstarter for Beautiful Craigslist Ads, know that it will be going towards server costs (EC2 baby!) and anything left over will go to Helen’s snack fund. It’d mean a lot to me if you reblogged and help spread the word!
Oh yeah, we made some cool stickers as part of the rewards:
Offline: hard to binge
By: Paul Miller
The Verge, July 12, 2012
The hyperlink architecture of the internet allows for an only-in-the-21st-century kind of binge. It always starts innocuously enough. Like, one time I saw a video of someone explaining their Yu-Gi-Oh deck, and I didn’t understand 90 percent of the words they were using. So I read the Wikipedia entry on Yu-Gi-Oh. And then I watched some more YouTube videos. And then I read a Yu-Gi-Oh card game-specific wiki. And — OMG — I watched so many more YouTube videos.
Seven hours later, at midnight, I was pretty sure Yu-Gi-Oh wasn’t for me. What about Magic the Gathering? Three hours later, I fell asleep at my computer — dreaming about the Lord of The Rings collectible card game.
Without the internet, a binge is more difficult. The other day I read a dozen thousand words about Assyrian archeology in my DVD copy of Encyclopedia Britannica, but when I wanted to read about the Xbox 360, there wasn’t even a single entry, so I gave up. Yu-Gi-Oh also isn’t known to Britannica, thankfully.
A friend of mine recently told me, triumphantly, that he hadn’t curtailed his internet use at all since I left the internet. I congratulated him, because he was the first person to brag about it. Most people I’ve spoken to in the past couple months have offered, unprompted, at least one aspect of their internet use they’d like to cut down on.
On the train ride out to Citi Field for the ultra-Orthodox Jew internet rally, I explained to a fellow non-Jewish passenger where we were headed. She said she didn’t have a problem with the internet, but then, a beat later, confessed to being “addicted to Facebook and Twitter.”
Even my zero-curtail friend did go on to admit that he’s been more cognizant lately of where his web browsing time goes. He feels no guilt over watching endless hours of StarCraft video on YouTube, but wasn’t sure he liked how much time he spent poring over sports statistics.
Sports were always a bit of a trap for me as well. Since I don’t follow any of them regularly, every time some character would stick out to me — Tim Tebow, Jeremy Lin, Roger Federer — I would have to spend hours catching up on their sport of choice for context, and then more hours reading every essay I could find explaining that athlete’s exceptionalism, or lack of.
Other top topics for recurring bingeing included Bob Dylan and World War II, specifically: why-the-hell-was-Hitler.
Reddit and SenórGIF were a different type of binge. If an endless trip through Bob Dylan’s worst-received albums is “exploring,” Reddit is getting lost in the woods — you don’t know where you’re going, and the more you walk the more lost you are. You don’t know why you just read that page, you don’t think it was a good use of your time, but maybe if you read just one more page you’ll find fulfillment. It’s like you’re eating pistachios, and those pistachios are salty animated GIFs of corgi pratfalls, and you can’t stop.
While I’m less of a binge risk these days, due to lack of opportunity, that doesn’t mean I’m safe — in fact, I might’ve lowered my tolerance. When I was a kid, I had a friend whose family didn’t watch TV. I’d go over to his house and we’d play LEGOs (his collection had all the weapons excised, but we improvised), Civil War (sticks make for great guns, two sticks taped together and you have a bayonet), or just pretend to shoot each other under no pretense. Then, one time, his parents rented a TV to watch some nature documentary, and I couldn’t peel him away from it. I was disgusted with him. I’d seen everything TV had to offer: Inspector Gadget, Garfield and Friends, part of Star Wars, and all of PBS. I guess you could’ve called me a connoisseur, and here this naive chump was being taken in by a cheesy made-for-TV doc on the migratory patterns of butterflies.
A couple weeks ago I was looking for some stuff to delete off my MacBook’s 128GB SSD, which is always full, and I happened upon a folder called “4chan dump,” which had been so kindly provided to me by a reader before I left the internet. It was terrible. The GIFs were okay — I mean, I’ve seen better — but the memes were either lame or offensive. I really don’t get that Spider-Man animated series meme where Spider-Man is a terrible person and has his hand down his pants. But I looked at every single image in that stupid directory. If it was too small to discern in the Quick Look view, I’d zoom in and read every imbecilic word. I absorbed that folder. It took me more than an hour, and I ended up being late for an evening appointment.
My fear is that I’ll return to the internet ten months from now and then just disappear for another year while I read everything, watch everything, and LOL at everything I’ve missed. What I need is an anti-binge strategy, a way to recognize when my curiosity on Bob Dylan and Yu-Gi-Oh has turned into a pistachio-type fever, and then how to put on the brakes.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see what information turns out useless, and what’s worth my time. In Amusing Ourselves To Death, which I quote too often, Neil Postman differentiates between the medium of books, which are a sin to burn, and newspapers, which require violent disposal — otherwise we’d be buried under them. It’s disposable information vs. evergreen information. Another metric he offers is “actionable” information: is reading about a hurricane thousands of miles away going to influence my actions, say, in terms of donating to the Red Cross, or is it mere spectacle? Postman’s problem isn’t with dumb entertainment, it’s with dumb entertainment that masquerades as knowledge. Still, it can be hard to know which is which up front.
The goal for me, in this year and beyond, is to do things consciously and purposefully — submitting my time to my personal goals and values, instead of the next clickiest link. Someone on Reddit warned me that I’d be bored if I left the internet, and they were right. I get bored all the time. In my internet days, I’d rarely be aware of boredom — I might chalk it up to my favorite websites being “boring,” or just satiate it with the endless spectacle of Tumblr or YouTube, and either way I’d keep clicking. But now I sit on my couch, and the boredom weighs heavy, and then I decide what to do. In the meatspace, my next activity doesn’t come to me in the form of a push notification. I have to reach for a book, or my bike, or a guitar. I might sound like a college student from 1992, but I don’t mind.
Paul Miller will regularly be posting dispatches from the disconnected world on The Verge during his year away from the internet. He won’t be reading your comments, but he’ll be here in spirit.
Seth Godin on When You Should Start Marketing Your Product, Service, or Idea
(Editor’s note: This is a really insightful talk by Seth Godin. He does a good job of shining a spotlight on how marketing and selling things/ideas have shifted in today’s age. The days are gone when you could just show up unannounced with a bag of money and people would have to tolerate your marketing because there were only a handful of channels and attention was abundant. We have choices now (too many now, in fact) and the only ones that will be left standing are the ones that earn your trust and attention. That only comes after delivering consistently time after time.)
Stop Calling it Curation
langer: Imagine, if you will, a world in which Richard Seaver or Robert Gottlieb had stomped their feet and huffed and puffed every time John Leonard forgot to give them their proper “↬”. Or rather, as I joked on Twitter over the weekend about the new “Curator’s Code,” if Goethe had lived long enough to chide Mann for writing about Faust and giving a “ᔥ” to Marlowe but forgetting to give a “↬” to Goethe.
It’s funny to think about! But only for a minute, since after that it all just becomes too depressing for words, because what we talk about when we talk about curation first of all sure ain’t curation and secondly isn’t even all that special. But mostly it’s depressing because it’s a conversation that happens at the expense of original content itself.
First, let’s just get clear on the terminology here: “Curation” is an act performed by people with PhDs in art history; the business in which we’re all engaged when we’re tossing links around on the internet is simple “sharing.” And some of us are very good at that! (At least if we accept “very good” to mean “has a large audience.”)
But we should not delude ourselves for a moment into bestowing any special significance on this, because when we do this thing that so many of us like to call “curation” we’re not providing any sort of ontology or semantic continuity beyond that of our own whimsy or taste or desire. “Interesting things” or “smart things” are not rubrics that make the collection and dissemination of data that happens on the internet anything closer to a curatorial act; these categories are ultimately still reducible to “things I find appealing,” and regardless of how special one might feel about the highly cultivated state of his or her tastes there is no threshold of how many other people are eager to be on the receiving end of whatever it is we’re sharing that somehow magically transforms this act into curation—that is, at least, unless we’re also comfortable with arguing that “curation” is the act in which Buzzfeed is engaged. Or The Huffington Post. Or the top contributor on those weightlifting comment boards.
Remember what it was like way back in the dark ages before the internet? When all sorts of IRL conversations like this would occur?
“Hey I saw the coolest thing in a magazine today.”
“Yeah? What?”
“A bunch of pictures of cats—that all looked like Hitler!”
“OMG I HAVE TO SEE THAT!”
“LOL RIGHT?! I’ll xerox it for you!”
What we do online every day is no different, and neither the introduction of an audience nor the torrent of information we wade through on a daily basis does anything at all to alter or enhance this fundamental behavior. Call it sifting, call it filtering, call it editing even, but it sure as hell isn’t curating.
Which makes it all very curious to me that those most eager to self-desribe as “curators” are often the most vocal in their concerns with “proper” attribution. And attribution I can get behind! Footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies—I’m a big fan! I’m also a big fan of the internet’s native form of attribution, the hyperlink. Yet the Curator’s Code seeks to bolt an additional piece of ultimately vestigial metadata onto this native form—the “ᔥ”—an addition only made necessary so as to distinguish this one particular form of attribution from that other one which Popova and others are so eager to see elevated: the “via.”
Now the “hat-tip” has long been a simple courtesy, not some kind of moral commandment; its omission from any citation is in no way the sort of punishable offense that failing to attribute any borrowed content would be. That’s because usually the greatest sin of omitting a “via” is denying someone else the moment of flattery that comes with the recognition that some other person follows whatever it is they have to share, whereas omitting a link to original content is, you know, stealing.
But as far as value-adds go the “via” generally offers little more than a cookie crumb trail of others who have also read the material in question—the digital equivalent of finding the previous borrower’s name scribbled on the card in the back of a library book. Which is neat, I guess? But come on now, none of us here is Averroes rediscovering Aristotle or Poggio Bracciolini serendipitously plucking Lucretius off a dusty shelf—this is people posting pictures of yawning kittens on Tumblr blogs we’re talking about here.
And yet we see this sort of thing happen all the time on the internet, all these great hand-wringing debates over “proper” attribution (“proper” usually meaning “sending traffic my way as a reward for finding something first”).
And it all stinks to high heaven of self-importance.
Think of how often the words “broke the reblog chain” get bandied about in breathy Tumblr scolds, as if the put-off bloggers behind these scolds are all willfully ignorant of the possibility—hard to believe! I know!—that someone could have run across the same piece of original content elsewhere on the internet. Or think of how often one link aggregator complains that another link aggregator has “stolen” his material without giving proper credit. Aggregators! Arguing about who aggregated what first!!
So much ink has been spilled over something so ridiculously petty. People seem downright incapable of the innocent excitement that comes from seeing other people enjoy a piece of solid writing—and this sadly seems unlikely to change, at least until we change the very language we use to describe it, since by calling the activity of people who traffic in links “curation” instead of “sharing” we imbue it with all sorts of hollow importance and circumscribe it as something wholly apart from the selfless and benevolent sharing of knowledge.
The self-described “curator” of the modern day web seeks special recognition for what is nothing more than a pattern of behavior that distinguishes an individual from those with uncurious, idle minds. Rather than issuing demerits on the latter we’re instead being invited—no! implored, rather, via an “actionable code of ethics”—to heap praise upon the former. And I’m sorry, but I refuse to be bullied into giving people credit for shit they’re supposed to be doing, especially not when that comes at the price of devaluing the most important object of attribution—original content—by setting it up as just one among a multitude of things deserving of attribution. I don’t know what sort of addled reading of Barthes it must’ve taken to get here—to employ phrases like the “creative and intellectual labor of information discovery” and “a form of authorship”—but the often tortuous act of writing compared with the reading of someone else’s writing are two vastly different things, not just simple variations of unicode runes.
Furthermore, Maria Popova was quoted by David Carr today saying that “When we don’t honor discovery, we are robbing somebody’s time and labor.”
Which: Bull.Shit.
People who consider the act of intellectual enrichment to be some sort of currency or property that can be “robbed” have absolutely no business whatsoever telling the rest of us what it means to “honor discovery.” And while I hate to be the guy who’s like “let’s have a look at the etymology!”, well, let’s do that actually! Because it will at least afford us all the opportunity to be outraged together by this sort of talk.
What Popova calls “discovery”—which in simpler times could’ve just been called “reading” or “learning”—can be traced back to the Greek root of the word “scholarship,” which is derived from “rest,” a linguistic heritage which first established knowledge in its time-honored tradition of being something wholly antithetical to commerce, something invaluable in the truest sense of the term.
And one does great injury to knowledge by assuming it to be merely some exchange value in a zero-sum game.
If people want to be celebrated for being smart or for having exceptional taste that’s all fine and good, everyone can go right on congratulating one another in their little mutual admiration societies. But please spare the rest of us all this moralizing on why we should be giving people who share links anywhere near the same amount of credit we afford that singularly special act of original content creation.
My friends over at 1000Memories just released ShoeBox, an app that makes it easy to scan old paper photos and share them to family and friends. This is the family scrapbook for the 21st century. I’m headed back to the motherland next month and I’m hoping to dig up old family mementos to preserve that weren’t lost in the flood two years ago.
Birth of the global mind
By Tim O’Reilly
FT Magazine, Sept 23, 2011
The best symbiosis of man and computer is where a program learns from humans but notices things they would not
Global consciousness. We’ve heard that before. In the 1960s we were all going to be mystically connected; or it would come as a super-intelligent machine – Terminator’s Skynet – that is inimical to humanity. And yet, what if the reality is more mundane?
Computer scientist Danny Hillis once remarked, “Global consciousness is that thing responsible for deciding that pots containing decaffeinated coffee should be orange.” And of course, the mechanism by which the Sanka brand colour became a near-universal symbol for decaffeinated coffee in the US is exactly the same one by which hundreds of millions of people have a shared knowledge of Lady Gaga, Newton, Einstein and Darwin, and, for that matter, of many things both true and untrue.
What is different today, though, is the speed with which knowledge propagates. News, entertainment and opinions spread through social networks, websites and search engines in a process increasingly close to real-time. Those things that rise to the top are decided not by media executives but by their viral momentum.
One might say that this is the same underlying mechanism of human knowledge capture and retransmission that has always driven the advance of civilisation. But just as the spread of literacy and the printed book led us into the modern era, the even greater capability for knowledge transmission and recall using electronic networks is propelling us towards a very different future.
The web is a perfect example of what engineer and early computer scientist Vannevar Bush called “intelligence augmentation” by computers, in his 1945 article “As We May Think” in The Atlantic. He described a future in which human ability to follow an associative knowledge trail would be enabled by a device he called “the memex”. This would improve on human memory in the precision of its recall. Google is today’s ultimate memex.
The web also demonstrates what JCR Licklider, another early computer visionary, called “man-machine symbiosis”. Humans create the documents that make up the web and provide the associative links between them. Search engines follow our breadcrumb trail, evaluate the strongest paths, and lead others to what has been found. When the algorithms for finding the “right” documents improve, we all get smarter; when spammers or other malware lead the algorithms astray, we all get dumber.
Man-machine symbiosis isn’t just about knowledge retrieval, it’s also about knowledge creation. Our computers have no intelligence without us, but they accelerate our collective intelligence at a speed that has never been seen before.
When the web goes mobile, even more interesting things start to happen. A human with a smartphone can literally see around corners and through time. What’s more, our phones are eyes and ears for what is starting to look increasingly like a global brain. Photos are automatically uploaded to vast cloud databases, each one tagged with its location and the time it was taken. Applications like Shazam can listen to a song and tell you who is singing it. The ambient sound of a room can be used to pinpoint your location.
To understand where the combination of mobile sensors, cloud databases and computer algorithms augmented by human action is leading us, consider the self-driving car. Stanley, a driverless vehicle, won the US Darpa (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) grand challenge in 2005 by navigating a course of slightly over seven miles in a little under seven hours. Last year, Google demonstrated an autonomous vehicle that has driven over 100,000 miles in ordinary traffic. The difference: Stanley used traditional artificial intelligence algorithms and techniques; the Google autonomous vehicle is augmented with the memory of millions of road miles put in by human drivers building the Google Street View database. Those cars recorded countless details – the location of stop signs, obstacles, even the road surface.
This is man-computer symbiosis at its best, where the computer program learns from the activity of human teachers, and its sensors notice and remember things the humans themselves would not. This is the future: massive amounts of data created by people, stored in cloud applications that use smart algorithms to extract meaning from it, feeding back results to those people on mobile devices, gradually giving way to applications that emulate what they have learned from the feedback loops between those people and their devices.
In the best case, we see a creative symbiosis of man and machine. However, it’s easy to get the balance wrong: we have only to look at the financial market excesses of the past decade to see the danger of algorithms gone wild in the hands of rogue companies and individuals seeking only their own advantage.
The global brain is still in its infancy. We can raise it to help us make a better world, or we can raise it to be selfish, unjust and short-term in its outlook.
Author and designer Edwin Schlossberg once said, “The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” This is a good time to think hard about the future. It’s increasingly in the hands of computers that magnify the effectiveness – and the choices – of those who use them; the great challenge of the 21st century will be to teach them the difference between right and wrong.
Bubble Boys
Everyone here has a project. Two students are working on Habut, a web service that helps you create good habits by sending you periodic reminders (e.g., “Go outside”). Another student is starting a Q&A site for medical topics. A pair of undergrads, Dan Thompson and Grant Mathews, are working on StanfordHub, a discussion forum pegged to the student-government elections. “This guy is a total frickin’ genius,” says Thompson, nodding at Mathews. Mathews doesn’t react.
Thompson, a chatty, Bieber-haired then-sophomore, came to Stanford from the aggressively traditional St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, planning to study psychology. “I got into CS because here it’s cool,” he says. When you understand the pleasure of hacking—the application of creativity and problem-solving—spending a Saturday night writing code doesn’t seem that crazy. Pleasure comes with pain. You code for hours, you run the program, it fails, you debug it, run it again, pass out on your keyboard, wake up, code some more. But when it finally works, it’s a rush. Thompson, who has dabbled with cocaine in the past, compares it to the drug. “Writing code to me is the same experience,” he says. “It’s misery, misery, misery, misery, euphoria.” Hackers don’t always sit down at their computers with a goal, says Feross: “They just want to see what they can make a computer do, even if no one uses what you build.” For him, tinkering started at an early age. Whenever his dad brought home anything requiring assembly, Feross would put it together. Reading the manuals gave him power over his parents. When his mother grounded him, he’d get revenge by setting the child lock on the microwave. When he got his first computer, driven by an old Intel 386, he installed a bunch of viruses and then fixed it himself. He started programming in middle school and created an AP-study-notes website that still gets 10,000 hits a day. “My dad called me Computer Guy, and he called my brother Sports Guy,” says Feross. “I hated that. I wanted to be Sports Guy too.” Feross plays club basketball now—at six-foot-five, how can he not?—but he’s come to terms with his skill set. “Now I’m proud to say I’m a computer nerd.” When I met Feross at his Stanford dorm, his lanky frame was draped in a Facebook T-shirt. It was almost like the company had called dibs on him. Last summer, Feross interned at Facebook, where he worked on a small team that was rebuilding the Facebook Groups application. As the launch date approached, Mark Zuckerberg started working out of the team’s office. Zuckerberg doesn’t code much for Facebook anymore, the same way that Steve Jobs never hand-coded software for the iPhone. But, as the Groups team was adding the finishing touches to its product, Zuckerberg said he wanted to write a few lines. “Everybody was like, Ohhhh, Zuck’s gonna write code,” says Feross. Someone set up an easy bug for him to fix—adding a link to a picture, or something—and he went to work. Five minutes passed. Twenty minutes. An hour. “It took him like two hours to do something that would take one of us who’s an engineer like five minutes,” says Feross. It was like a retired slugger coming back for one last at-bat, for old time’s sake, and finding he’d lost more of his game than he’d reckoned. Still, he got props from Feross & Co. for getting his hands dirty. It’s moments like these that growing tech companies struggle to hang on to. When Zuckerberg gets in the trenches with the grunts, it sends a message: Programming is the core of their world. Coding isn’t about making money or scratching some OCD itch. It’s about doing what you love and, yes, changing the world. Engineers shopping their talents talk about impact; they say they want to work wherever their contribution will make the most people happiest. You can have the best day of your life working at a big firm like Yahoo, and you still won’t affect the company’s value. At a small company, you can triple it. The result is that in order to recruit young talent, companies try to seem smaller while getting bigger. In January, when Google announced that Larry Page would step in as CEO of Google in April, the move was sold as a return to the company’s start-up roots. Since then, everything has been squeezed into this narrative, from prioritizing mobile to tying the size of bonuses to success in social-media efforts to the campus workshop where Googlers can build stuff out of wood or metal or Legos. Google also seduces free spirits by famously letting employees spend 20 percent of their time on projects they are passionate about—some of which turn into major Google products, such as Google News and Gmail. Facebook, while considerably smaller than Google, with over 2,000 employees, is growing fast. But it cultivates an image of start-uppiness and agility. Zuckerberg has an ethos: “Move fast and break things.” Several times a year, the company holds 24-hour hackathons. Facebook also brags to prospective hires about its enviable engineer-to-user ratio, which as of two years ago was about one to 1.26 million—the kind of leverage most successful start-ups can’t match. Anti-bureaucracy also means giving people at the bottom access to people at the top. Every week, Google hosts “TGIFs,” giant companywide meetings where employees can ask execs questions about what’s going on in the company. “That’s very much part of the Google culture, not to take everything for granted, to question authority,” says Michael Brandt, a recent Stanford graduate who has a job lined up at the company. Facebook prides itself on its flatness and Zuckerberg on his accessibility. “I’d be there at 8 or 9 p.m., and we’d talk for a half-hour about whatever was on his mind,” says Feross. “It was really personal.” Then there were the perks. It’s a cliché by now that every big tech company’s campus is a mini-resort. Apple’s proposed new site looks like the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Facebook boasts Ping-Pong tables and Xbox 360s. Employees at the “Googleplex” in Mountain View can take after-work dance classes and then get massages before hopping a free shuttle home. Zynga, the gaming company in San Francisco, lets employees bring their pets to work. And, of course, free food everywhere—food for your dog can’t be far off. Even AOL, that nineties relic, has a fancy new Palo Alto building, complete with a pinball machine, a Razor-scooter dock, and a room with a drum set. “The shoe thing is overrated,” says Joseph Huang, bouncing on a roller chair. Huang has been homeless the last few days, crashing on couches while he figures out his living situation. Skinny and barefoot, with spiky hair and an oversize T-shirt from the Montreal Jazzfest, he comes across as a tall Asian rabbit. Huang is sitting amid a cluster of tables in AOL’s Palo Alto offices, a space dedicated to StartX, an accelerator for start-ups involving Stanford students. Huang’s start-up is one of ten fledgling companies selected in the spring session by the accelerator, which helps them with everything from legal issues to accounting to office space to connecting with financiers. His company, WiFiSlam, analyzes local wireless signals to create a kind of indoor GPS. Fire up their Android app, and a little dot on a map tells you where you are. Commercial uses could include museum walking tours, private-security coordination, or navigations systems for malls. “I worked at Google, but it’s not hungry enough,” he says. The advantage of working at an accelerator is you’re surrounded by entrepreneurs with similar brains (large, hyperactive, mildly Asperger-y). After an internship at Microsoft, then-Stanford undergrad Ivan Lee decided to try something different. He and a few friends created Geomon, a sort of augmented-reality Pokémon game for your iPhone that integrates elements from the world around you. If you’re at the beach on a sunny day, for example, you’ll fight different creatures than if you’re in a rainy city. Even if Geomon doesn’t work out, he won’t go back to Microsoft. “I think I’d rather stay and do more start-ups,” he says. “Taking a job is in some ways like a second option,” says Akshay Kothari, who with his friend Ankit Gupta converted a Palo Alto garage into office space for their iPad-news-app company, Pulse. “If you say you’ve taken a job, it’s like, ‘Oh, you haven’t figured it out?’” Last year, the two Stanford classmates started building the news app as part of a class at the Institute of Design. Five weeks later, it launched on the iTunes App Store, where it sold for $4. It now has 5.5 million users. Feross buys into the Silicon Valley meme of entrepreneurs as pirates: They know the risks, but they do it out of love. “If you’re an entrepreneur, you have a kind of delusion,” he says. “You’re willing to do something that’s kind of ridiculous, which is probably gonna fail 99 percent of the time, because the adventure of doing the thing itself—the journey—is so enjoyable that you don’t give a crap about the end.”
Welcome to your curated Web, courtesy of corporate America
By: Dominic Basulto
The amount of content and information on the Web expands daily at a staggering rate. This explosion of information has created the need for talented digital curators who are able to filter the very best of the Web and help us find what’s worth reading each day. In fact, digital “curation” may be one of the hottest-growing areas of the Web right now. For example, in early August, Google News began offering “Editors’ Picks” alongside results from the Google search algorithm.
Now, corporate America is catching on.
On an individual level, you can think of digital curators the same way you think of museum curators: People who not only provide constant updates regarding what’s cool, new and interesting within their fields — but also individuals who can, with a unique aesthetic or voice, provide an overall cultural context for each piece of content they come across and promote.
For now, two of the more popular Web curators, Brain Pickings and Boing Boing, are edited by individuals who have a unique viewpoint on a particular subject area without any commercial interest in what they’re writing about. Within any 24-hour period, for example, Brain Pickings’sMaria Popova might point readers to a video about an icon of typography, a new book about narrative and storytelling in the digital era, and insights into musical notation and tennis. These digital curators — similar to their art-world counterparts — are engaged in a labor of love to find and curate the very best of the Web.
What happens, though, when the type of content curated on the Web begins to be influenced by corporations’ financial interest?
Companies, eager to find the most effective way to broadcast their message across the Web, have started to embrace digital curation as a means of staying relevant to consumers. In the process of creating this content, however, they are starting to blur the line between editorial and advertising — what folks in the marketing business call “advertorial” and “branded content.” A majority of the more popular branded, digital curation sites are in fashion and luxury goods, where it is possible — even desirable — to curate an aspirational lifestyle around specific products.
Last year, Nowness, curated by French luxury firm LVMH, raised eyebrows in Web circles when it began to curate “the latest in fashion, art, cinema, entertainment, culture, music, gastronomy, design, travel and the world of luxury.” The content is compelling, but at what point do art and commerce merge? This summer, Harley Davidson launched a new online initiative to feature content from some of the Web’s best curators. The new Harley Davidson Ridebook Web site will feature curated content in six different areas, including culture, style, music and travel. For now, the site only features a section on Tomcats Barbershopand “the art of the classic American haircut.”
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with corporations putting their content on the Web, but it does begin to raise questions about how these companies are starting to influence what we see, hear and read online. It’s getting harder and harder to tell “sponsored stories” from real stories and “promoted tweets” from real tweets. Sometimes browsing the Web is like watching a really clever infomercial or reading a magazine insert and not even realizing that you’re consuming little more than clever advertising.
The mention of Harley-Davidson is not an accident. Think back to 1998, when the Guggenheim Museum stirred up controversy with its Art of the Motorcycle exhibition. Was this art the kind of “high” art that patrons of the Guggenheim should be seeing, or was it something fundamentally different — a sort of consumerist pop art for the masses, supported by sponsors such as BMW?
Will the Web follow a similar path, where the financial interests of corporate sponsors begin to shape — or even replace — the quirky, aesthetic tastes of the savvy individual curator?
