30 May 2010, Posted by Matthew Reinbold in Wunderkammer (the links), 0 Comments

Wunderkammer; Memorial Day Edition

The browser tabs are once again reduced to nothing but a favicon! It’s time to write ‘em up, save ‘em, and close ‘em out in a regular feature Vox Pop reverentially refers to as THE WUNDERKAMMER.

19 Mar 2010, Posted by Matthew Reinbold in Events, 2 Comments

Ignite ‘Tribes Talk’ Recap

The videos to the fourth Ignite, Salt Lake event have been posted. Here, yours truly, wades into the minutia and comes back with super-tribal-something-err-rather. So what is all the fumbling bluster about?

25 Feb 2010, Posted by Matthew Reinbold in Events, Thought & Theory, 5 Comments

An End is a Beginning – Ignite Slides

Five minutes is not a lot of time, even if is an Ignite talk. My challenge is to explain a diverse business ecosystem made up of parallel economic tribes with semi-permeable membranes based on shared belief. Crazy? Maybe. At least I’ll get in my quota of syllables said. Interested? Read on.

23 Dec 2009, Posted by Matthew Reinbold in Wunderkammer (the links), 0 Comments

Wunderkammer: Dec 20th, 2009

I go through the browser history and find the curiosities for the past several weeks. What have you stumbled across online that has become a “must-read”?

02 Aug 2009, Posted by Matthew Reinbold in Week in Pop, 0 Comments

Week in Pop – 2009-07-27

The ‘Week in Pop’ is that post where I gather up the various minutia from around the web generated in the course of Vox Pop operations and put it into one place.

Rushkoff’s Get Back in the Box

First up, I recently finished Douglas Rushkoff’s Get Back In the Box. I wanted to make sure I was full up on my Rushkoff-isms before tackling his latest/greatest, Life, Inc.. The 3-star review I left on Amazon.com went something like:

After reading ‘Get Back in the Box’ and watching the press run up to Rushkoff’s latest, Life Inc., I’m puzzled. Many of the stories that Rushkoff cites as impetus for creating Life Inc are thoroughly covered in ‘Get Back in the Box’.

And stories they are. While much of the anecdotal evidence is entertaining it remains personal opinion and observation. Rushkoff’s message is one, ultimately, of wanting companies to *DO* something. The clarion call is to those companies that have so fragmented and outsourced what they do that there is no real expertise or ‘craft’ to be had. This is a much needed message in an age of ‘Four Hour Work Weeks’. It makes for a compelling read. I just wish his foils weren’t such cardboard; something that makes the dispatching easy when presented in such a one-dimensional manner.

One of the afore-mentioned cardboard evils are “traditional” software companies, or companies that get paid directly for the software that they produce. The opposite business model is open source, a practice that Rushkoff spends some time on. Rushkoff dresses the movement as an ideological truth, a product of pure passion whose ubiquitousness is just a matter of time. Its as if he sees every company that charges as having an office full of mustache twirling evil-doers; those for whom plotting how to wring more profit has become paramount over creating anything resembling new software. As easy as it may be to paint faceless, large corporations as being wholly malevolent, in reality the true is much less scintillating.

And so it is for many of the other companies profiled throughout the book. In truth, none are as one dimensional as Rushkoff portrays them – and thus the optimal solution not as obvious as he would make it seem. For some, lost in a sea of change, simply regurgitating the same insights based on past experience (getting “back in the box”) will have the same sorry results. It would be like telling newspapers the way forward is to double down on their production and distribution expertise (not a good idea in the face of systemic disruption).

Delicious Links

Speaking of newspapers, lots of opining this week ended up matriculating to the delicious bookmarks:

• Trust me on the future of journalism
  Piece from Paul Carr on how the future of journalism may be in the future. Model outlines how general interest news will be commodified. Niche sites, the leaders in their topic areas, will continue breaking stories and doing the in-depth follow through. Meanwhile, larger names (like NYT) will use their trusted brands as aggregators, lead by crack teams of editors.
• Media as a hobby is not sustainable as a business – broadstuff
  “We tend to forget that the reason for profits is unique access to bottleneck resources. In the case of the media it has been production and distribution. The ‘Net changed all that of course – production and distribution is now in the hands of anyone with a PC and a ‘Net connection.” – commentary on Umair Haque’s recent piece on niche papers, as well as analyzing the shifting costs of production.
• EXPONENTIAL IMPROVEMENT – Global Guerrillas
  “A technological imperative [for resilient communities]: In short, a suite of technologies that can increasingly replicate the functions of the global economy at the hyper-local level (the equivalent of the very small or nano level of the global economy) — with headroom for advancement/improvement as far as the eye can see. There are signs that this is potentially true: think 3D printing (‘fab labs), computing, bio, communications, etc. ” – John Robb on how his concepts of super-empowerment brought about by technology improvements (Moore’s law) may aid in the building of resilient communities.
• Yahoo committed seppuku today – The Jason Calacanis Weblog
  “The lesson for all startups–and BDC’s (big dumb companies)–is that innovation is all you have. Once you stop innovating you lose your talent and you lose the race. Never. Stop. Innovating. Never. Never. Never.”
• Misunderstanding Markup: XHTML 2/HTML 5 Comic Strip – Smashing Magazine
  Wonderful comic that clearly illustrates the difference between XHTML 2/HTML 5 standards and what is currently happening in the planning committees.
• Developer Evangelism – home of the Developer Evangelist Handbook
  “Every day millions of dollars are wasted in companies because non-tech people and tech people either don’t communicate at all or completely miss each other’s points.

  “Even more money is then spent on internal promotion of your products or external communication and advertising to get people excited about your new product.

  “What you really need is enthusiasm about your product – honest interest in using it and the right message to the right group.

  “If your product targets developers this can not be achieved with marketing or PR. We’ve managed to remove the developer world from the commercial part of IT companies so far over the last few years that developers are very cynical about anything that does not relate to technology first and brand second – and neither marketing nor PR can deliver that.

  “Developers however are very happy to listen to what other developers say – if these developers are very good, have their respect and deliver the message in the right way.”

• CUSTOM LETTERS at COMIC CON — LetterCult
  Massive collection of custom and/or hand illustrated typefaces found at Comic Con.
• Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule
  “There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.

  “When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.”

  Very true and I wholeheartedly agree. Uninterrupted time is essential for focus, clarity, and being productive in a creative task.

• Transcript API : Tech Center : NPR
  Resources for getting and using transcripts of NPR shows through their official API.
• Rob Hopkins at TEDGlobal 2009 on Transistion Towns
  “Hopkins outlines the qualities of the transition response: viral, open-source, self-organizing, solutions-focused, sensitive to place and scale, learns from its mistakes and is a joyful process. It’s not about winning the argument, he says, it’s about changing the climate. Transition depends on the idea of resilience, which he thinks is a more useful concept than sustainability. Sustainability wants the supermarket to be more energy efficient, while resilience questions the vulnerability of depending on the supermarket.” – description by John Robb
• The Value Every Business Needs to Create Now
  “Profit through economic harm to others results in what I’ve termed ‘thin value.’ Thin value is an economic illusion: profit that is economically meaningless, because it leaves others worse off, or, at best, no one better off. When you have to spend an extra 30 seconds for no reason, mobile operators win — but you lose time, money, and productivity. Mobile networks’ marginal profits are simply counterbalanced by your marginal losses. That marginal profit doesn’t reflect, often, the creation of authentic, meaningful value.”

  Umair Haque defining ‘thin value’ and how it is not what is needed right now. Businesses should seek ‘thick value’, or products and services which empower even greater economic benefit.

• Do not f* with graphic designers on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
  Dear Rep. Boehner,

  Recently, you released a chart purportedly describing the organization of the House Democrats’ health plan. I think Democrats, Republicans, and independents agree that the problem is very complicated, no matter how you visualize it.

  By releasing your chart, instead of meaningfully educating the public, you willfully obfuscated an already complicated proposal. There is no simple proposal to solve this problem. You instead chose to shout “12! 16! 37! 9! 24!” while we were trying to count something.

  So, to try and do my duty both to the country and to information design (a profession and skill you have loudly shat upon), I have taken it upon myself to untangle your delightful chart.

Week in Graphs
This week I thought I’d take some of the nice graphical abilities possible with a blank wall and way too many empties to illustrate my own ugly truth. I’m previously talked about how I need to ween myself off the carbonated stuff. As you can see from the single plotted week below, I’m well on my way to a case of type-II adult onset diabetes. I knew things were bad but seeing it in stark bar chart form with subsequent totals sound me alarmed.

New Work

This week the vacations continued for a number associates. However, beginning in August we’ll be starting a number of projects and I expect the numbers to go up. The spread between billable and unbillable time necessary to keep things running still chaffs a bit. However, I probably just need to accept that the time lost in ‘administrative’ tasks is probably just the cost of doing business.

Played in the Popperplex
White Rose Movement’s 2006 Album, Kick still remains my preferred way of getting the brain peculating in the morning. However, once I get a certain level of focus I’ve found the Ennio Morricone remix album a great way of keeping it there (Ennio Morricone is most famously known for doing the scores to scads of spaghetti westerns).