Dave Pollard says a succinct yet engaging presentation that produces Commitment to action from the listener(s). It is so called because it is time-limited to the duration of an average elevator ride... no longer than 160 words. (more)

Jesse Walker on the Culture clash between MSM and New Media. Last summer, as the explosive popularity of YouTube became obvious to the older media companies, the marketing department at the Cartoon Network decided to use the site to promote its shows... Unhappily, some of the people who noticed the videos worked for the Cartoon Network's legal department, who mistook their colleagues' new marketing tactic for an unauthorized appropriation of the firm's intellectual property. They promptly sent cease-and-desist letters demanding that the clips come down... The most telling moment came when she described a business meeting she (Betsy Morgan of CBS) and some colleagues once had with Apple Computer. The details of the deal aren't important. What's significant was that, by Morgan's own account, the TV people were caught up in pleasing all their stakeholders, while the Mac man was concerned solely with improving the consumer's experience. It's a pretty good snapshot of the difference between a company that sells eyeballs to advertisers and a company that sells tools to the audience... Caterina Fake suggested that there is a "general exhaustion with mass Consumer culture," and that less passive forms of entertainment are arguably the natural state of affairs - it wasn't long ago, historically speaking, that quilting bees and front-parlor music occupied the space now filled by movies and television... On one panel, Henry Jenkins quoted a screenwriting acquaintance: "When I started, we pitched stories, because you had to have a good story (Story Telling) to make a good film. Then I pitched characters, because a good character could sustain multiple sequels. Now I pitch worlds (World Building), because a rich world can support multiple stories about multiple characters across multiple Platform-s."

Michael Strong believes we can't have Silicon Valley-like Innovation in Schooling as long as we have an overspecific Standardized Test-driven Monoculture. Opportunities for innovation in education are constrained by the dominance of the government school educational standard. The matrix of Curriculum, Text-Book-s, standardized testing, and teacher training and certification form a standard, analogous to a computer Operating System standard, which is essentially designed to the specifications dictated by government-run schools... Educational innovation, as with technological innovation, will not produce the spectacular gains resulting from decades of freedom unless tens of thousands of educators have the freedom and potential for financial support to tinker with incremental steps, some of which may seem impractical and experimental for decades. The extraordinary benefits ultimately resulting from a free market in education have nothing to do with better test scores in the next five years. The real benefits will be realized by releasing what Hayek calls “the creative powers of a free civilization”over the course of the ensuing decades to allow radical innovation to occur in education.

aka Cool Hunt (more)

Back in 2009, perhaps before the word had lost all meaning, a small-time-invention start-up called Quirky built a Community that really acted like one... In some cases, the inventors made a lot of money. And it is for that tiny dreamer that the company’s recent death spiral feels like a true loss... In June, in a sweaty interview onstage at the Fortune Brainstorm conference, Kaufman admitted the company was all but "out of money," which had once amounted to $185 million in funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz and GE. In July came the news that nearly the entire New York City staff would be laid off. By August 1, Kaufman would officially step down from the company he started at age 22. (more)

aka A16Z

CISPA is the new SOPA. (more)

Peter Meyers book (actually just a free "Preview" - but it's from a couple years ago - never got done?) on EBook design. (more)

E Cabell Hankinson Gathman on the Computer Game as a cover for simple conversation/connection (Social Object). At any rate, many people still prefer to feel that they're "doing" something when they're talking to other people, and perhaps most importantly, a friendly game of whatever provides an automatic topic of conversation for people who may either talk so much that they don't necessarily have any news to impart at any given time, or for people who talk so little that they don't know what else to talk about. The common stereotype that video games promote antisocial behavior is belied not only by the experiences of gamers but by the interfaces of the games themselves - there is no multiplayer game that does not provide for communication amongst players, and that includes "serious" MMOGs (MMORPG) like World Of Warcraft as well as "frivolous" or Casual Game-s like the varied offerings of Yahoo!

It seems like Ad Blocking has become a bigger idea since the Instant Articles launching raised the user-cost of ads, esp on Mobile. (more)

lightweight Digital Identity? (more)

FaceBook is making a play to become the dominant player in virtual currency — the funny money you use to everything from digital magazines to Farmville turnips. It’s already a billion-dollar business in which Facebook, the world’s largest social network, will face stiff competition from other behemoths like Apple Computer, Google and PayPal. Facebook already has a big advantage over those companies: a virtual currency, FacebookCredits, that works across different apps rather than being tied to one specific app or another. (Virtual Money) (more)

Microsoft Digital Identity platform. (more)

Business Week produced an entire issue based on a 38,000 word essay by Paul Ford called "What is Code?" The online version is the "real" thing. (more)

Idea of a Mobile app providing faster content loading from partner websites. (more)

Carlota Perez disagrees with the popular Silicon Valley belief that we’re at the beginning of a new golden age of prosperity driven by technological innovation. (more)

Patrick Hogan converted his teenage-years chat logs into a Markov Chain-based ChatBot. (more)

author of Technological Revolutions And Financial Capital

Patrick McKenzie gives an annual update on his progress/earning with Bingo Card Creator, Consulting, and his new Appointment Reminder app. Things I noted: (more)

Google and Twitter are working together to help publishers show “InstantArticles” to people who use their services on mobile phones... the cached Web pages will display the original ads the publisher sold next to the story, says a person who has discussed the idea with Google. (more)