Category: Friday Reading

Don’t watch the news read some things that will make you smarter and less despondant. Lots of things caught my eye this week and here I share them with you to see if you enjoy them as much as I did.

Inside Google’s Secret Lab

Thrun always thought of corporate labs as playgrounds for lifetime employees who were overly absorbed by the abstractions of pure research. He wanted to focus on research that was at least commercially plausible and let talent come and go as projects evolved. Thrun says he seriously considered calling the new group the Google Research Institute, but that carried exactly the kind of sleepy connotations he was trying to avoid. Google X, he says, was a placeholder, a variable to be filled in later.

‘Trading can take over your life – but only if you let it’

“When I was working as a derivatives trader in a small European country my routine went like this: I’d come into the office just before 8am and switch on my seven screens. There are many programs to log into. I sort each data feed to update me preferentially on news in the underlying names I trade and on macro developments. I ensure my connections to all relevant exchanges are functioning. I calculate hedge limits and input them into the order book. I make sure all this is done before 8.45am, as the market opens at 9am.”

Look on the dark side

Darkness is powerful. It is powerful in destruction. It has the ability to make us feel wretched and alone, tear down our confidence, sabotage our progress through life. But darkness is also powerful in creation. It has the ability to transform itself from a destructive force into something that can unleash the most essential, most indispensable element of your person.

 The truth about being ‘done versus being ‘perfect’

Whenever I spend time in boardrooms across the world, I can’t help but notice that courage seems to be a limited currency. No matter how the company presents itself, it seems CEOs rarely have the power one would imagine. The fact of the matter is that companies of this magnitude tend to be run by committees that make the tough decisions and take the risks. The problem is that committees rarely have courage–only people do.

The Perceptive Radio: a project for BBC R&D

The design challenge was to demonstrate how a networked object could deliver tailored media experiences that are sympathetic to domestic environments, without being disruptive or jarring.

Roof Bug-fixing

You see, when we find a bug in our software, we try and recreate it. Then we know when we’ve fixed it. And something I was starting to notice here was that this wasn’t happening. It was as if I had noticed the timeout, and made a configuration change in the general area, then marked the story as done and walked away. We don’t do that, with software. And yet this situation that was making my life pretty inconvenient – three months in, my flat was covered in mould, smelt of damp and all my furniture was in one room while I waited for the leak to be be fixed – was being dealt with by people who seemed to be making general stabs in the direction of the problem, without any kind of theory or analysis.

Why getting new things makes us feel so good: Novelty and the brain

Having just moved to a new country, I’m currently surrounded by novel sights, sounds and experiences. It’s an overload of new for my brain. However, after only being here a week, I’m surprised how ordinary my house and my street seem. After walking the same route to the train station three or four times, it quickly became boring.

You are your data: The scary future of the quantified self movement

As we document and share more of where we go, what we do, who we spend time with, what we eat, what we buy, how hard we exert ourselves, and so on, we create more data that companies can and will use to evaluate our worthiness – or lack thereof – for their products, services, and opportunities. For those of us who don’t measure up compared to the rest of the population, the outcome won’t be pretty.

Microinteractions (Sample chapter from the upcoming book by Dan Saffer)

A 56-year-old man punched his fist through the glass and into the electronics of the machine. “Yes, I broke the machine and I’d do it again,” he told the security guards. (He was sentenced to 90 days in jail.) Another man, 59-year-old Douglas Batiste, was also arrested for assaulting a machine—by urinating on it. A woman caused $1,800 in damages to another machine by slapping it three times. And 67-year-old Albert Lee Clark, after complaining to an employee and getting no satisfaction, went to his car and got his gun. He came back inside and shot the machine several times. What device is causing so much rage? Slot machines.

The humble hero

Containerisation is a testament to the power of process innovation. In the 1950s the world’s ports still did business much as they had for centuries. When ships moored, hordes of longshoremen unloaded “break bulk” cargo crammed into the hold. They then squeezed outbound cargo in as efficiently as possible in a game of maritime Tetris. The process was expensive and slow; most ships spent much more time tied up than plying the seas. And theft was rampant: a dock worker was said to earn “$20 a day and all the Scotch you could carry home.”

How social media improved writing

A woman I know says only after the internet arrived did she realise her mother was semi-literate. Previously they’d always communicated by phone, but now Mom was suddenly sending her emails full of “!!!!”s and “……”s. Email kicked off an unprecedented expansion in writing. We’re now in the most literate age in history.

 Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing by Melissa Mohr – review

(unsurpisingly this features lots of swear words)

Swearing doesn’t just mean what we now understand by “dirty words”. It is entwined, in social and linguistic history, with the other sort of swearing: vows and oaths. Consider for a moment the origins of almost any word we have for bad language – “profanity”, “curses”, “oaths” and “swearing” itself.

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I am fascinated by the ‘acquihire’, the act of a large company buying a smaller company to either take on its excellent staff members or to take its competitive prodcut out of the market or for numerous other reasons. Ever since Facebook acquihired my once beloved FriendFeed, a four man startup, in 2009 for around 50 million dollars I was fascinated by the trend. The main acquihire was the CTO of FriendFeed Bret Taylor who became CTO of Facebook, until he left last year to start up again. He had previous with Google on their Maps product and is clearly a clever chap (lots of features that FriendFeed had years are ago are still drip feeding into Facebook). The interesting thing though is the attempts to shoe horn in these founders to a larger corporation, many don’t last, Bret included as they year for the freedom and challenge of their own company but what about the others staff members? How do they fare? What about the users who helped build these companies with their usage only to see them left to rot, ala FriendFeed or closed down with a cheery ‘our incredible journey‘ type message.  I wanted to write something about this but time, ability and focus means I haven’t but thankfully someone else has that is better than anything i could have dribbled out (see first link of the week). Other topics for reads of the week include the failure of hackathons, the destruction of the middle class, advertising tyranny, Ikea love, AI love, Apple photo hate and an interview with Jason Fried. Enjoy.

The Corrosive Downside of Acquihires

I know the buyers try the best to believe that [insert well known founder name here … David Sacks, Max Levchin, Dennis Crowley, Keith Rabois] will stay and help lead their company in a totally new direction. But evidence suggests otherwise.

Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class

You argue that the middle class, unlike the rich and the poor, is not a natural class but was built and sustained through some kind of intervention. Has that changed in the last decade or two as the digital world has grown? Well, there’s a lot of ways. I mean, one of the issues is that in a market society, a middle class has always required some little artificial help to keep going. There’s always academic tenure, or a taxi medallion, or a cosmetology license, or a pension. There’s often some kind of license or some kind of ratcheting scheme that allows people to keep their middle-class status.

The tyranny of digital advertising

Let’s be clear: big businesses have grown up around the availability and theory of mass media and buying attention. Any big client older than15 years old will have grown up with the reassuring ability of tv and print advertising to reach mass audiences. Those were methods of advertising predicated on guaranteed access to peoples’ attention through interruptions in mass media.

Jason Fried: Interview

Are you satisfied creatively? Yes, but I’m also impatient. I’m satisfied in that I get to build what I think is right. I don’t feel repressed in that way. I have a lot of friends in this business who feel repressed because they have an idea, but can’t act on it for whatever reason. I feel very free, but I’m also always slightly frustrated with the fact that there are more ideas and more things I want to do, but can’t because I don’t have time or knowledge to do them yet.

The ‘IKEA Effect’: When Labor Leads to Love (PDF & free subscription required)

Labor leading to value thus appears to be a very basic process, and an effort justification account predicts that effort and valuation increase in lockstep. We suggest, however, that the psychological process by which labor leads to love requires consideration of an additional crucial factor: The extent to which one’s labor is successful.

Dear Apple, let’s talk about photos

So Apple, I think you’ve got a bit confused. Don’t worry about sharing, we don’t need you for that. Your job is to take photos, organise them and make sure they don’t get lost. So let’s talk about how you can do that.

Hackathons Don’t Solve Problems

– and certainly not big problems. The big problems are big for a reason. They’re hard, bordering on intractable, and people are working to solve these problems constantly, spending much more energy and resources than a single hackathon could ever do. There is nothing magical about putting a bunch of technologists and creatives in a room which will suddenly solve disasters, world crises, the economy, or anything else.

Love machines

Then again, isn’t love always uncertain? And isn’t the fear that our children will turn against us also an aspect of love? Partners and children might indeed abandon us, regardless of what good we did for them. But perhaps it doesn’t have to be this way. MIRI suggests that we should embed a fail-safe program in all future AI to prevent them from ever hating us.

Bonus self promotion link – Web Curios the spreadsheet edition

This week I made a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet version of the wonderful Web Curios. You can read about it here and see it mentioned in this weeks Web Curios here. While you are there read the rest of it, every single bit of it.

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Friday you are a welcome sight after a tiring busy week. Not had much chance to read this week but here are a few things that caught my eye/brain. As I get back into work it seems I have an interest in posts about making things and I like people that share their working out so that is a bit of a theme. I am rubbish at making things. I have been wanting to write about that but well…like I said I am rubbish.

Restructing Britain

The problems we face today are those same problems that brought down modernism. We can’t control them with one solution, strategy or ‘five circled grid’. But just because you can’t control something, doesn’t mean it can’t be changed.

Citibank: a flawed innovation process? No, but a ruthless one

I could tell you a lot more about the process and project, but I will not as I was sent a bunch of internal confidential documents by someone disillusioned with the process.

The New Kind of Worker Every Business Needs

To use a term I introduced in an earlier piece, people like these are engaged in “socialstructing” — that is, bypassing established institutions and processes for building new things, and instead working to create what they find missing in the world by communicating the need to their social networks, mobilizing whatever resources they have at their disposal, and pursuing solutions collaboratively.

 

How Do You Create A Data Driven Organisation?

A lot of companies play lip service to the idea but when it comes down to making decisions they end up being made by those that are more senior (by HiPPO: highest paid person’s opinion) or, worse, loudest, based on gut instinct, experience or opinion.

Fifteen modifications later, he threw it into her fantasies – The Warren Ellis Gun Machine remix

I like the idea of “Making Things Fast“, however I seem to end up making things slowly – which is why I’ve decided just to say “to hell with it” and write up projects as I go along.

Interview: John McAfee Answers Your Questions

Did you really evade the police by dressing up in a speedo and screaming at people in German, as you describe here?

McAfee: I favor disguises that change character rather than looks when running from the police. The German Tourist disguise was terrific. I looked exactly like me but no-one searching for me paid me any mind.

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Hello there, yes it has been a while. I have been a bit busy in April with the arrival of my second child so things like blogging took a back seat to changing picalli filled nappies, wiping up milky mouth discharges and forgoing any sort of decent sleep. It has been a joy, honestly it has. The reality of work has kicked back in and I have been reading something other than Gina Ford so I thought I would share them with you to keep you entertained on a Friday afternoon before a three day weekend, in the UK that is.

Experimentation beats expertise

Stop having meetings to argue about which design approach is better  – endless meetings with stakeholders full of defensiveness and crazy arguments where the people who tend to win are those who are loudest, most persistent or highest paid. Start making decisions based on lightweight research that provides evidence (sometimes stories, sometimes numbers) to support the design that most strongly supports the agreed goals.

An innovative approach

We need more grown-up talk about business and growth strategies. This has to be the year when adland’s innovation practitioners need to grow up or, put brutally, shut up. It’s time to make ourselves invaluable. If we can’t do that, then I think we should conclude that our industry innovation era has failed.

Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface

The first real-world demo of Google Glass’s user interface made me laugh out loud. Forget the tiny touchpad on your temples you’ll be fussing with, or the constant “OK Glass” utterances-to-nobody: the supposedly subtle “gestural” interaction they came up with–snapping your chin upwards to activate the glasses, in a kind of twitchy, tech-augmented version of the “bro nod”–made the guy look like he was operating his own body like a crude marionette.

Meet the man who turned David Cameron onto open data

Senior civil servants wanted to include this text in all government pronouncements on open data:

“No government data shall be released unless its quality can be assured”

Silva refused. His argument was that sunlight would drive improvements in the data itself. “They kept writing that in – I kept taking it out. I got into an argument with the civil servants about it. That would mean essentially no data ever released. That would have choked off the open data agenda from day one. They said if we release poor quality data it will embarass the civil service – but I believed the only way to improve that data would be to release it.”

I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet

A couple weeks later, I found myself among 60,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews, pouring into New York’s Citi Field to learn from the world’s most respected rabbis about the dangers of the internet. Naturally. Outside the stadium, I was spotted by a man brandishing one of my own articles about leaving the internet. He was ecstatic to meet me. I had chosen to avoid the internet for many of the same reasons his religion expressed caution about the modern world.

“About the Word Design” by Vilém Flusser

The new form of culture which Design was to make possible would be [i.e.,] a culture that was aware of the fact that it was deceptive [i.e., designed]. So the question is: Who and what are we deceiving when we become involved with culture (with art, with technology—in short, with Design)?

Does alcohol improve ideas?

The experiment, in a nutshell, involved 18 advertising creatives, split into two equal teams according to their length of service in the industry. One team was plied with as much alcohol as they wanted, while the other team was assigned a liquid diet that the temperance movement would have approved of. They were each given three hours to work on a brief. And once it was all over, their work was judged by a team of big-shot creative directors.

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Obviously all my Friday Reading posts are good but this one is extra good for religious reasons i.e. a day off work. As well as the fact this Friday is a bank holiday it is also two weeks since I did a Friday Reading post due to a pesky bout of illness so it really will be extra good. This weeks roundup features Bruce Sterling, government innovation, Edward Tufte, data darwinism, spying on employees, decision making psychology, Douglas Rushkoff and the crushing reality of following your dreams. Enjoy.

“Disrupters don’t just play and experiment. They kill”

And then there’s this empty pretense that these innovations make the world better. This is a dangerous word, like, ‘If we’re not making the world better, then why are we doing this at all?’. Now, I don’t want to claim that this attitude is hypocritical, because when you say a thing like that at South By – ‘Oh, we’re here to make the world better’ – you haven’t even reached the level of hypocrisy. You’re stuck at the level of childish naivety.

In depth: government support for innovation must be less timid

When Jaggeree’s Christopher Thorpe applied for funding through an additive manufacturing programme, he found that filling out the forms was more hassle than just working on a prototype and releasing it on Kickstarter. He said: “R&D is about finding out what you don’t know, testing hypotheses. The grant forms suggested you had to know all the answers up front and be able to cost the work. I’ve written successful scientific research grants before and I’ve never seen anything like it. We just gave up on them.”

Edward Tufte: The AdAgeStat Q&A

AdAgeStat: Can visualizations make it easier for journalists/pundits/advertisers, etc. to “lie with numbers?”

Mr. Tufte: No, lying comes from the producer of the content, not the mode of production. Also highly produced visualizations look like marketing, movie trailers, and video games and so have little inherent credibility for already skeptical viewers, who have learned by their bruising experiences in the marketplace about the discrepancy between ads and reality

Uber, Data Darwinism and the future of work

At present we rank photos, rate restaurants, like or dislike brands, retweet things we love. But if this idea of collaborative consumption takes hold — and I have no reason to think it won’t — we will be building a quantified society. We will be ranking real humans. The freelance workers — like the Uber drivers and Postmates couriers — are getting quantified. The best ones will continue to do well, but what about the others, the victims of this data darwinism? Do they have any protection or any rights?

You Won’t Believe How Adorable This Kitty Is! Click for More!

“Check out these kitties! :-)” read emails featuring the photo of a Turkish Angora cat with a purple mohawk, sent to nearly two million cubicle dwellers so far. It includes an attachment or link promising more feline photos. Those who click get a surprise: stern warnings from their tech departments.

In the wild: Rory Sutherland

The problem we all face is “The physical fallacy”. All of us, even those the social sciences, have an innate bias where we are happier fixing problems with stuff, rather than with psychological solutions – building faster trains rather than putting wifi on existing trains, to use my oft cited example. But as Benjamin Franklin (no mean decision scientist himself) remarked “There are two ways of being happy: We must either diminish our wants or augment our means – either may do. The result is the same and it is for each man to decide for himself and to do that which happens to be easier.”

For Douglas Rushkoff the future is now — and that’s the problem

I have been doing talks at high schools and colleges about Facebook, and over the past few months when I talk to them about Facebook, the vast majority says it’s not where they put their attention now. I’ve asked for a show of hands three or four times now, and the majority say that Facebook is for older people – that it’s “too slow” and too “permanent.”

Find The Thing You’re Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life

Before you get started, though, you need to find the one interest or activity that truly fulfills you in ways nothing else can. Then, really immerse yourself in it for a few fleeting moments after an exhausting 10-hour day at a desk job and an excruciating 65-minute commute home. During nights when all you really want to do is lie down and shut your eyes for a few precious hours before you have to drag yourself out of bed for work the next morning, or on weekends when your friends want to hang out and you’re dying to just lie on your couch and watch TV because you’re too fatigued to even think straight—these are the times when you need to do what you enjoy most in life.

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Hello Friday you weekend cuddling, third best day of the week. Another week draws to a close so let’s have a look back at some things I read on the Internet this week. Last week I mentioned how my Twitter favourites i.e. how I capture the vast majority of the things I read, show an interesting pattern around my main interests at the time. There is still a clear skew recently to all things ‘design’. I am in no way a designer but I am fascinated by the science and craft of it. There were some cracking articles on the subject this week that made my brain hurt. An interesting debate around No UI, UX behind the firewall (a subject close to my heart, as in it clogs my arteries) and a look at the importance of design on the impact of the stock price. The other things that caught my eye were APIs being dead, the constant pursuit of authenticity, innovation hypocrisy, views my own, Pixar storytelling and shrinking otter appendages.

No to No UI

We already have plenty of thinking that celebrates the invisibility and seamlessness of technology. We are overloaded with childish mythologies like ‘the cloud’; a soft, fuzzy metaphor for enormous infrastructural projects of undersea cables and power-hungry data farms. This mythology can be harmful and is often just plain wrong. Networks go down, hard disks fail, sensors fail to sense, processors overheat and batteries die.

UX Behind the Firewall

IT departments are not like sales and marketing teams in that they have not purchased services that would fall into the “creative” category. Therefore they are often wary of UX providers, creating a cultural clash between IT and “design.” Some from the UX world may think that this is similar to any project where developers are involved. However, in this case, the developer is firmly in charge. There will be resistance to UX providers, and more than ever the concept of UX will need to be evangelized at all levels from the board director down.

Don’t be Ugly

What makes Google’s efforts so striking is that the firm has long had a reputation for caring far more about algorithms than aesthetics. In 2009 Douglas Bowman, its top designer, quit and complained that Google’s obsession with data was preventing it from listening to its designers. In a farewell missive, he wrote that it was hard to work in a culture that insisted on testing 41 different shades of blue to determine the right colour for web links displayed in search results.

APIs are Dead, Long Live APIs

Is an app that helps you manage your Netflix queue driving meaningful new subscriptions for Netflix? Probably not. Is another Twitter client helping Twitter sell and show you ads? Definitely not. When the most important transaction for Twitter was someone putting content into the network, it made sense to allow that content from anywhere. That’s no longer important to them. This is the future of Twitter APIs.

Why are we so obsessed with the pursuit of authenticity?

Innumerable industrial products now advertise themselves as “real”, following the lead of Coke’s slogan “the Real Thing”. In 2011, even Starbucks began selling salad-based lunchboxes labelled “Real Food”. A box of Rombouts’s disposable one-cup coffee filters describes its flavour as “Original Blend . . . Medium 3 AUTHENTIC”. Even Marks & Spencer’s men’s underwear is branded “authentic”, posing the nice question of what an inauthentic pair of boxer shorts or trunks would look like.

The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley’s big talk on innovation

In fact, “innovation” is something of a magic word around here, shape-shifting to fit the speaker’s immediate needs. So long as semiconductors and coding are involved, people will staple it to anything from flying cars to the iFart app.

Views my own. Obviously.

Cultures in which diverse opinions are encouraged are more open, innovative and honest than those in which they’re censored or distanced from official policy. This is true on both a national and a corporate level: censorship in North Korea hinders political change, while free speech in the Western world empowers people to oust governments; Google’s 20% time encourages employees to pursue visions not on the company’s main agenda, while a culture of subservience in the financial sector inhibits creativity. Encouraging opinions fosters innovation, while discouraging them is at best stifling and at worst dangerous.

Never mind endangered animals – it’s the thinkers that we need to save

In those halcyon days, the entire nation would sit down with bottles of stout and plates of dripping to watch a programme in which an enthusiastically cigarette-smoking Bertrand Russell, or someone of similar super-intelligence, sat motionless in a chair and discussed for hours the finer points of philosophy in incredible detail with an equally un-televisual man. Their noses and ears full of tufts of hair, their brains crackling with mental electricity, their flappy trousers hoiked biffin-tight, and their little odd socks showing, they reassured the hoi polloi that, although they were very clever, and we needed and valued them as a society, these people were loonies.

22 Rules of Storytelling by a Pixar Storyboard Artist

9. When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.

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Hello. It’s Friday time for me to look back though my Twitter favourites and pull out my favourites from my favourites. No real theme this week although I think my favourites on Twitter do offer a peek into my current interests and there seem to be a lot about design/ux/people sharing their working out which I find fascinating to read but not really Friday Reading type material. That being said two of the links this week are very much design related, one about how big organisations aren’t very good at it and another that looks at a horrific experience that effectively forces customers to steal your content (even though they have already bought it). The other articles can be summed up with these words TED, Track, Workplace, Secret, Innovation, Stock, Flow, Disney, Sucking. Enjoy.

Design is the easy part…

“At first glance, the solution is strategy. Get more designers higher up the food chain and involved in the creation of strategies that would guide an organisation to make better decisions. Sounds right, but the reality is different. Most places I encounter these problems have all kinds of strategies talking about how important design and the end user is to them. They all handwave the right way, but the execution doesn’t match the strategy.”

Getting ultraviolent about UltraViolet™

“A good UX can be hard to quantify, but you sure know when you are having a bad one. And over Christmas I stumbled over a really good example of a bad one.”

Inside TED: the smartest bubble in the world

“The crowd is diverse, but not exactly the kind of diversity you think of when you hear the word. There are celebrities, CEOs, politicians, engineers, designers, scientists, philosophers, artists, even royalty. And while there are attendees from around the world, TED feels very white, for lack of a better way to describe it. This observation is not simply my own: it was communicated to me, unsolicited, by a number of other TEDsters during the conference. White in that specific way you can feel white people striving for diversity.”

Tracking Sensors Invade the Workplace

“Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, an employee advocacy group, says current sensing technologies don’t seem to violate employment laws. “It’s not illegal to track your own employees inside your own building,” he says, adding that the data could be helpful in improving firm and worker performance.”

The Truth Behind “Secret” Innovation At Nike, Apple, Google X

“So what’s with all the hush-hush? Culture. Employees internalize their own stories–that their work is imbued with a value worthy of secrecy, vaulting Nike into the lofty heights of philosophical (and sometimes self-important) corporate cultures alongside only Apple and Disney. When I bump into Nike coach and three-time New York City Marathon winner Alberto Salazar, in between the campus’s Olympic-size swimming pools and sky-high climbing walls, even he tells me, “This place is like Disneyland.”

How Disney Bought Lucasfilm—and Its Plans for ‘Star Wars’

“His company maintained a database called the Holocron, named after a crystal cube powered by the Force. The real-world Holocron lists 17,000 characters in the Star Wars universe inhabiting several thousand planets over a span of more than 20,000 years. It was quite a bit for Disney to process. So Lucas also provided the company with a guide, Pablo Hidalgo. A founding member of the Star Wars Fan Boy Association, Hidalgo is now a “brand communication manager” at Lucasfilm. “The Holocron can be a little overwhelming,” says Hidalgo, who obsesses over canonical matters such as the correct spelling of Wookiee and the definitive list of individuals who met with Yoda while he was hiding in the swamps of Dagobah.”

and finally here is a link to a full book in ‘blog from’ by the brilliant Hugh MacLeod

My next book: “The Art Of Not Sucking”

“Gene­rally, the real world doesn’t go out of its way to tell you to go create something use­ful and/or mea­ning­ful. Usually, it just tells you to keep your nose down and don’t rock the boat. The fact that this could quickly des­troy your soul in the pro­cess is irre­le­vant to them.

So I’m afraid it’s you who must take the ini­tia­tive; I am equally afraid that it’s you who has to take the heat if things go terribly wrong.”

When I said finally above I meant ‘finallyish’ because here is a blatant inclusion of a link to one of my own posts from this week. Shameless.

Banking conferences are broken…

“‘Oh boohoo poor little mid management banker can’t afford to go to conferences, my heart bleeds’ Yes, yes I can imagine there is very little sympathy for me but all I want is an event that tries to bridge the worlds of new and old but also opens the door to others that may be interested.”

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Thirteen proved an unlucky number as I failed to do a Friday Reading post which must have been devastating for the 7 people that read it. My excuse was that I was at the bloody excellent conference The Story and then at the pub with a lot of excellent people who had been to The Story and some that had not. I will try and write some words about it (the conference not the pub visit) next week. As way of penance for forgetting last weeks I shall do a bumper edition this week for your reading pleasure. Enjoy it and your weekend you lovely people.

Connbox: prototyping a physical product for video presence with Google Creative Lab, 2011

“Although video phones have lived large in the public imagination, no company has made a hardware product stick in the way that audio devices have. There’s something weirdly broken about taking behaviours associated with a phone: synchronous talking, ringing or alerts when one person wants another’s attention, hanging up and picking up etc.”

Why A True 3D Desktop Would Be A Colossal Mistake

“Whether it be Windows 8 or something from Google, a true Minority Report future won’t be enabled until we can replace the keyboard with true speech recognition. This isn’t impossible, technically – but it may be so, culturally.”

The Overly Documented Life

“At night, I plug in my device and load the videos onto my computer. I try to watch a few snippets before bed, which can be a disconcerting experience. I’m learning things about myself I didn’t want to know. “

Seduced by ‘perfect’ pitch: how Auto-Tune conquered pop music

“People think they’ve heard the Auto-Tune, they’ve heard the dance hits, but you really have a great voice, too,” said Guthrie, helpfully.

“No, I got, like, bummed out when I heard that,” said Sebert, sadly. “Because I really can sing. It’s one of the few things I can do.”

Warrior starts with a shredding electrical static noise, then comes her voice, sounding like what the Guardian called “a robo squawk devoid of all emotion.”

Hail Corporate: The Increasingly Insufferable Fakery of Brands on Reddit

“Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. These aren’t organic accidents or real fan-to-brand interaction. It’s just fakery–there’s too much of it for that not to be the case. And what’s worse, the brands that are engaging in the stunts could easily afford to pay for the ad space on those same pages. In other words, we’re not talking about small creative marketing here–we’re talking multibillion-dollar corporations using their enormous marketing teams to overwhelm busy volunteer moderators.”

How “Golden Eagle Snatches Kid” Ruled The Internet

“A second later, the eagle’s talons have latched on and the boy’s taken up off the ground; he’s dead weight. A guy in a black-and-white striped sweater rooting around in a bag nearby runs over as the boy takes flight. He’s in mid-air, and when the talons release, he’s flying for a split second before hitting the ground.”

Play by your own rules.

“At launch, both apps had their distinct moments of strength and weakness. We thought foursquare was crap, and believed the design nerds flocking to Gowalla validated our attitude. Gowalla also worked anywhere — We were the first to crowd-source a local database from scratch. foursquare only worked in a dozen cities. In short, all else equal, we believed people would use our service because of its superior craft and availability.”

Designing with context

“Context is a slippery topic that evades attempts to define it too tightly. Some definitions cover just the immediate surroundings of an interaction. But in the interwoven space-time of the web, context is no longer just about the here and now. Instead, context refers to the physical, digital, and social structures that surround the point of use.”

The 3 Pillars Of The Innovation Economy

“Research carried out by the Carnegie Institute of Technology shows that 85 percent of your financial success is due to skills in ‘human engineering,’ your personality and ability to communicate, negotiate, and lead. Shockingly, only 15 percent is due to technical knowledge.”

Twenty years ago (where the hell did those two decades go) Pulp Fiction was released. For a certain generation it was a defining film and for an ailing film industry it completely changed their world in so many ways. This great article covers how on earth it was made.

Cinema Tarantino: The Making of Pulp Fiction

“Keitel invited Willis to a barbecue at his home, saying that Tarantino would be there. The superstar arrived, and, one insider insists, he wanted the leading role, Vincent Vega. But with Travolta already cast as Vega, there was only one possible part for Willis—Butch, the boxer—which Tarantino had promised to Matt Dillon, whom he’d had in mind originally for the role.”

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My job title is Social Technologies Specialist. I made up this job title in an attempt to show my areas of interest and focus. The problem is that the majority of social technologies i.e. the ‘media’ bit, I am getting rather bored with for a number of reasons, mainly the attempts to shoe horn exisiting ways of working into new models of interaction and particiapation. Emperor’s new clothes etc. I still believe in the value of these technologies but I am disillusioned by them at the moment and I am more interested in the linking pieces of the next generation of infrastructure APIs, Identity and Open Data. That being said I still want the company I work for to be good on Twitter. My favourite link of the week is a fictional story about social media use in large organisations. It resonated strongly with me as did @LouLouK’s post about the difficulties of being human on the web and working for Government. They point to a real challenge organisations have in presenting this glowing, shiny and perfect corporate brand vs the fact they are just made up of humans. In the seemingly endless drive for ‘greater customer engagement’ and ‘increased transparency’ allowing your human side to show is really the only way to achieve those things, without letting your people be who they are then they are just lazy business platitudes or buzzphrases du jour. Happy Friday All!

Four Million Followers

“Once or twice he replied to joking references or complaints with counter-jokes, and was surprised to discover that these replies usually ended up featured on well-known blogs and humour sites. He decided that people were so starved for interaction from faceless corporations so prevalent in their lives that even a small reply was taken as a special event. An acknowledgment by an unknowable and opaque authority, of sorts.”

Forgive me, for I have sinned

“Because on the flip side of this, there is a ‘thing’ around people getting to see that Civil Servants are normal people. Just normal people. We read MIT review, Forbes, Boing Boing and El Reg. We disagree with some things that happen in the world, we find science fascinating, we watch in awe as David Attenborough shows us yet more of the wonders of the world, and we get stuck in snow related transport failures. Just like everyone else. We are not faceless, we are not boring, we don’t wear bowler hats (well, most of us) and we have opinions.”

The Computing Deployment Phase

“What industries are the best candidates for the next phase of deployment? The likely candidates are the information-intensive mega-industries that have been only superficially affected by the internet thus far: education, healthcare, and finance. Note that deployment doesn’t just mean creating, say, a healthcare or education app. It means refactoring an industry into its “optimal structure” – what the industry would look like if rebuilt from scratch using the new technology.”

Welcome to the stack: the end of mainframe banking

“By embracing change and working within the grain of this new paradigm, incumbent banks can do much to ensure their future success and survival and will find it much easier to rebuild trust – with customers, regulators and their communities – mitigating the short term pain and setting themselves on a path to sustainable profitability. The alternative is to keep doing the same thing and slowly but surely rust away. The best banking executives of tomorrow will need to be as familiar with APIs and SDKs as they are with APRs andRAROC.”

Clayton Christensen Wants to Transform Capitalism

“You could see how, in each generation, an established company would start focusing on bigger, more powerful disks for the top end of the market and then just get wiped out when the lower end of the market found a way to make smaller, cheaper disks, even though those had lower profit margins. It made my thesis. Smart companies fail because they do everything right. They cater to high-profit-margin customers and ignore the low end of the market, where disruptive innovations emerge from.”

Tim O’Reilly’s Key to Creating the Next Big Thing

“Over time the companies that become dominant take more out of the ecosystem than they put back in. We saw this happen with Microsoft. It started out with a big vision: How do we get a PC on every desk and in every home? It was profoundly democratizing. But when Microsoft got on top, it slowly started choking off the pathways to success for everybody else. It stopped creating more value than it captured.”

How Nest’s Control Freaks Reinvented the Thermostat

“I said, ‘How do I design this home when the primary interface to my world is the thing in my pocket?’?” says Fadell. He baffled architects with demands that the home’s every feature, from the TV to the electricity supply, be ready for a world in which the Internet and mobile apps made many services more responsive.”

Nike: the no.1 most innovative company of 2013

“One of my fears is being this big, slow, constipated, bureaucratic company that’s happy with its success,” he says. “Companies fall apart when their model is so successful that it stifles thinking that challenges it. It’s like what the Joker said–‘This town needs an enema.’ When needed, you’ve got to apply that enema, so to speak.”

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Another week and another very unpleasant incident of misogyny in the tech world. Sarah Parmenter has spoken out about something she went through last year that I am unable to fully comprehend. You can read about it in her words in the article below. The bottom line is that the tech conference world (this includes banking conferences as well) is over run by white males of a certain age range. If female speakers are not invited, encouraged, celebrated etc. then all we will end up with is rooms full of Beavis & Butthead alikes and technical evolution that might follow suit and nobody wants that. So if you are an event organiser I highly recommend you check out the Articulate Network created by good people at Mudlark and Caper. Articulate aims to ‘raise the profile of women speakers in the technology and the creative industries by offering public speaking training, developing partnerships with event programmers, and giving better access to talented female speakers’. It is also worth reading this guide to making all speakers feel welcome and comfortable at your events. The fact that one of my other links of the week is one of the smartest thinkers on the web, Kathy Sierra,  is a woman that was effectively hounded off the web is a coincidence that I am not surehow I feel about. These weekly posts are available in multiple eBook formats for your favourite digital reading device. You can also subscribe by email to receive them in your inbox as soon as they are published.

Speaking Up

“It’s with great sadness I have to speak up about something. I’m not sad myself, nor am I particularly hurt – but being scared into silence is not an option. The reason I’m sad is that the person involved with what I’m about to speak up about, could be a member of our community. Infact at the moment,everything is pointing to the fact they are. They are currently feeding off the suppression of this topic, so I’m writing publicly about it.”

The problem with if you’re not paying you’re the product

“We understand that we’re the product, just not exactly sure that the way we were becoming the product was one we felt happy with. Instagram said themselves that they were planning on“experimenting with new advertising models”. Now I think that’s good, I like free stuff and I like businesses to be able to support their developers but personally I think I’ll wait until they’ve finished experimenting so that I can then decide once again if it’s a deal I want to make with them.”

Building The Minimum Badass User

“Now some of you may know I used to say words like “user awesome” or “user kicking ass” or “user passionate” I don’t really tend to use those words anymore because it’s really easy to misinterpret that as yet another “we made the customer feel good” or ‘he likes us.” It’s too easy to focus back on the company again. This isn’t about focusing on what the user thinks of you. It’s about what the user is able to do, and to be able to become badass.”

Too much testosterone, too much confidence: the psychology of banking

“The same trader explains modestly that the cappuccinos are “just to say thank you for your help in the past few weeks”. The corresponding submitter, having submitted, replies: “Done, for you big boy.” It brings a tear to the eye.”

Little Printer: A portrait in the nude

“Mary Poppins has an incredibly domestic set of superpowers. Her magic is all done with gestures. There are no spaceships or robots. It’s all about austerity, family. And although it’s an American movie, it’s set in a very British context. She works within the British class system and subverts it from within. She destroys the banking sector, reunites the family, but not in an anarchic way.”

Essay: On the smart city; Or, a ‘manifesto’ for smart citizens instead

“Of course, the basic model of crowd-funding currently limits the capital it might produce, even for dense neighbourhoods. Kickstarter can generate tens of millions of dollars at best, which is a lot for a watch but doesn’t get near the investment required for a light-rail system, say. And the average Kickstarter project raises under USD10k, on a global platform, often promoting global projects. Most urban projects are intrinsically not global, but highly local, limiting the size of the crowd that might fund, whilst asking the basic question of who decides what is best locally, when using a global platform.”