Archives for May 2010

получился человечек

27 May 2010 | Facebook, Internet, Lifeform | No Comments

в одном былом фильме мелькала очевидная мысль:

When deep space exploration ramps up, it’ll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.

на самом деле все иначе — мы будем так называть не звезды или галактики, но самих себя:

So read recent updates on Blippy, a sort of Twitter for shopping that allows users to automatically broadcast what they bought using credit and debit cards to the rest of the world.

The founders of the network and rival site Swipely say the purpose is to reveal the stories behind America’s stuff and explore how much our purchases reflect our personalities. Are we Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts, Target or Wal-Mart, Payless or Prada?

“Part of it, for a lot of people, is simply: ‘I shop; therefore I am,’ ” said Paco Underhill, a consumer researcher and author of the books “What Women Want” and “Why We Buy.” “The ability to consume is part of what their identities are based on.”

определенно, еще одна часть личности, как ее видит Марк Зукерберг:

Five months after Blippy was publicly launched, its users share $1.5 million in transactions every week, and the company says that amount is growing rapidly. Members can give Blippy access to their credit and debit card accounts as well as 15 other online accounts, such as iTunes, Netflix or Amazon. The site compiles a history of purchases, some dating back several years, and automatically records new ones. Members can choose which purchases to make public on their profiles, but the site’s default setting is to share them all with the world.

Blippy co-founder Philip Kaplan calls this “passive sharing” because members don’t have to sign in to use the site; Blippy already knows what you’re doing with every swipe. And friends, or strangers, can join your network and watch your money leave your wallet.

тем более неудивительно, что именно Facebook когда-то нечто подобное уже пробовал:

Three years ago, Facebook experimented with a similar concept called Beacon. When members visited Web sites such as Blockbuster, Zappos and Overstock.com, it published alerts that sometimes ran alongside ads or a person’s photo. The move sparked outrage among users, prompting a petition drive by MoveOn.org and a class-action lawsuit. Facebook eventually axed the program and settled the suit for $9.5 million, which it promised to use to create a foundation to study privacy issues.

  

погружение

24 May 2010 | Literature | No Comments

сегодня исполнилось бы 70 лет Иосифу Бродскому. впрочем, меня никогда не тяготило это преждевременно случившееся отсутствие — настолько многомерны его произведения, настолько многослойны, что жизни не хватит их объять — моей, обычной человеческой жизни.

тем приятнее новости:

К 70-летию со дня рождения Иосифа Бродского издательство «Азбука» выпускает несколько книг поэта, среди которых два редких сборника эссе, составленных самим поэтом. <...>

В сборник «О скорби и разуме» вошли нобелевская лекция, а также эссе «Похвала скуке», «Нескромное предложение», «О скорби и разуме», «Кошачье “Мяу”».

В сборник «Меньше единицы», помимо одноименного эссе, вошли «Власть стихий», «Катастрофы в воздухе», «Поклониться тени», «Полторы комнаты» и другие.

чуть раньше “Азбука” так же переиздала несколько его поэтических сборников (1 + 2).

а я перечитал ночью “Мрамор”. и буду ждать фильм.

  

greatest hits

23 May 2010 | Music | No Comments

а это наши старые дискотеки. смотрю и слушаю в экстазе.

  

самиздат

23 May 2010 | Technology | No Comments

плюс, еще немного из той же статьи — о собственно издании:

Amazon seems to believe that in the digital world it might not need publishers at all. In December, the Simon & Schuster author Stephen Covey sold Amazon the exclusive digital rights to two of his best-sellers, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and “Principle-Centered Leadership.” The books were sold on Amazon by RosettaBooks, and Covey got more than half the net proceeds. One publisher said, “What it did for us was confirm that Amazon sees itself as much as a competitor as a retailer. They have aspirations to be a publisher.”

и ниже:

Asked to describe her foremost concern, Carolyn Reidy, of Simon & Schuster, said, “In the digital world, it is possible for authors to publish without publishers. It is therefore incumbent on us to prove our worth to authors every day.” But publishers have been slow to take up new technologies that might help authors.

ага, имейте ввиду.

  

будущие Гутенберги

23 May 2010 | Apple, Technology | 2 Comments

замечательная статья Кена Аулетта в “Нью-Йоркере” о реалиях и перспективах книгоиздания. первые, кстати, для печатников выглядят устрашающе:

E-books are booming. Although they account for only an estimated three to five per cent of the market, their sales increased a hundred and seventy-seven per cent in 2009, and it was projected that they would eventually account for between twenty-five and fifty per cent of all books sold. But publishers were concerned that lower prices would decimate their profits.

там же много интересного про Амазон, его соперничество с Эппл, ценообразование, связи издателей со своими читателями (и магазинами) и книжные рынки вообще.

но вот немного о другом:

According to Grandinetti, publishers are asking the wrong questions. “The real competition here is not, in our view, between the hardcover book and the e-book,” he says. “TV, movies, Web browsing, video games are all competing for people’s valuable time. And if the book doesn’t compete we think that over time the industry will suffer.

и дальше:

In Grandinetti’s view, book publishers—like executives in other media—are making the same mistake the railroad companies made more than a century ago: thinking they were in the train business rather than the transportation business. To thrive, he believes, publishers have to reimagine the book as multimedia entertainment. David Rosenthal, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, says that his company is racing “to embed audio and video and other value-added features in e-books. It could be an author discussing his book, or a clip from a movie that touches on the book’s topic.” The other major publishers are working on similar projects, experimenting with music, video from news clips, and animation. Publishers hope that consumers will be willing to pay more for the added features. The iPad, Rosenthal says, “has opened up the possibility that we are no longer dealing with a static book. You have tremendous possibilities.”

именно.

  

многообразие

23 May 2010 | Facebook, Internet, Lifeform | 2 Comments

еще одна пресыщенная цитатами запись об информации, что создает нас — недавно Марк Зукерберг сказал буквально следующее:

You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.

он целеустремленно смотрит вперед:

To get people to this point where there’s more openness — that’s a big challenge. But I think we’ll do it. I just think it will take time. The concept that the world will be better if you share more is something that’s pretty foreign to a lot of people and it runs into all these privacy concerns.

и вот почему:

Let me paint the two scenarios for you. They correspond to two companies in the Valley. It’s not completely this extreme, but they are on different sides of the spectrum. On the one hand you have Google, which primarily gets information by tracking stuff that’s going on. They call it crawling. They crawl the web and get information and bring it into their systems. They want to build maps, so they send around vans which literally go and take pictures of your home for their Street View system. And the way they collect and build profiles on people to do advertising is by tracking where you go on the Web, through cookies with DoubleClick and AdSense. That’s how they build a profile about what you’re interested in. Google is a great company, but you can see that taken to a logical extreme that’s a little scary.

On the other hand, we started the company saying there should be another way. If you allow people to share what they want and give them good tools to control what they’re sharing, you can get even more information shared. But think of all the things you share on Facebook that you wouldn’t want to share with everyone, right? You wouldn’t want these things to be crawled or indexed–like pictures from family vacations, your phone number, anything that happens on an intranet inside a company, or any kind of private message or e-mail. So a lot of stuff is getting more and more open, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s not open to everyone.

This is one of the most important problems for the next ten to twenty years. Given that the world is moving toward more sharing of information, making sure that it happens in a bottom-up way, with people inputting the information themselves and having control over how their information interacts with the system, as opposed to a centralized way, through it being tracked in some surveillance system. I think that’s critical for the world. That’s just a really important part of my personality, and what I care about.

однако, разве не меняем мы постоянно отображаение своей личности в той или иной ситуации? как и ситуации, в свою очередь, меняются непрерывно вокруг нас, подчеркивая или создавая те или иные (как открытые, так и закрытые) аспекты наших личностей:

Zuckerberg must have skipped that class where Jung and Goffman were discussed. Individuals are constantly managing and restricting flows of information based on the context they are in, switching between identities and persona. I present myself differently when I’m lecturing in the classroom compared to when I’m have a beer with friends. I might present a slightly different identity when I’m at a church meeting compared to when I’m at a football game. This is how we navigate the multiple and increasingly complex spheres of our lives. It is not that you pretend to be someone that you are not; rather, you turn the volume up on some aspects of your identity, and tone down others, all based on the particular context you find yourself.

  

да здравствует король

22 May 2010 | Religion | 1 Comment

Миша tipharethtiphareth Вербицкий совершено точно о религии:

Возвращаются все идиотства совка, одно за другим, как будто и не было никакой perestroyka. Единственная разница – где раньше был “коммунизм”, сейчас православие.

вот и ссылка по теме: Иран до революции и после. именно, так и будет.

  

новые возможности

22 May 2010 | Technology | No Comments

а вот немного мыслей о ремесле от Марка Пилгрима:

I’m a three-time (soon to be four-time) published author. When aspiring authors learn this, they invariably ask what word processor I use. It doesn’t fucking matter! I happen to write in Emacs. I also code in Emacs, which is a nice bonus. Other people write and code in vi. Other people write in Microsoft Word and code in TextMate+ or TextEdit or some fancy web-based collaborative editor like EtherPad or Google Wave. Whatever. Picking the right text editor will not make you a better writer. Writing will make you a better writer. Writing, and editing, and publishing, and listening — really listening — to what people say about your writing. This is the golden age for aspiring writers. We have a worldwide communications and distribution network where you can publish anything you want and — if you can manage to get anybody’s attention — get near-instant feedback. Writers just 20 years ago would have killed for that kind of feedback loop. Killed! And you’re asking me what word processor I use? Just fucking write, then publish, then write some more. One day your writing will get featured on a site like Reddit and you’ll go from 5 readers to 5000 in a matter of hours, and they’ll all tell you how much your writing sucks. And most of them will be right! Learn how to respond to constructive criticism and filter out the trolls, and you can write the next great American novel in edlin.

  

придумаем вместе

22 May 2010 | Facebook, Lifeform, Literature | No Comments

а Нил Стивенсон, тем временем, снова играет в коллективные игры (но другими инструментами[1]):

The Mongoliad is a rip-roaring adventure tale set 1241, a pivotal year in history, when Europe thought that the Mongol Horde was about to completely destroy their world. The Mongoliad is also the beginning of an experiment in storytelling, technology, and community-driven creativity.

Our story begins with a serial novel of sorts, which we will release over the course of about a year. Neal Stephenson created the world in which The Mongoliad is set, and presides benevolently over it. Our first set of stories is being written by Neal, Greg Bear, Nicole Galland, Mark Teppo, and a number of other authors; we’re also working closely with artists, fight choreographers & other martial artists, programmers, film-makers, game designers, and a bunch of other folks to produce an ongoing stream of nontextual, para-narrative, and extra-narrative stuff which we think brings the story to life in ways that are pleasingly unique, and which can’t be done in any single medium.

Very shortly, once The Mongoliad has developed some mass and momentum, we will be asking fans to join us in creating the rest of the world and telling new stories in it. That’s where the real experiment part comes in. We are building some pretty cool tech to make that easy and fun, and we hope lots of you will use it.

People will be able to get The Mongoliad over the web and via custom clients for mobile devices – we’re going to start out with iPad, iPhone, Android, and Kindle apps, and will probably do more in the not too distant future.

Stay tuned. Fun stuff coming!

via.


[1] — как и в какой-то мере раньше, когда на месте metaweb.com была посвященная “Криптономикону” и “Барочному циклу” wiki.

  

выдали с головой

21 May 2010 | Facebook, Privacy, Security | No Comments

еще раз о том же:

All the items you list as things you like must become public and linked to public profile pages. If you don’t want them linked and made public, then you don’t get them — though Facebook nicely hangs onto them in its database in order to let advertisers target you.

так и оказалось на самом деле:

Facebook, MySpace and several other social-networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers’ names and other personal details, despite promises they don’t share such information without consent.