- Image by Michi1308 via Flickr
This is a great little post about how Porshe made over 7 billion Euros through it’s manangement (and manipulation) of VW’s stock. It’s quite clever.
Related articles:
This is a great little post about how Porshe made over 7 billion Euros through it’s manangement (and manipulation) of VW’s stock. It’s quite clever.
I just read a great article by Clive Thompson called “Head for Detail” about Gordon Bell‘s latest experieement. Please just read the first 2 paragraphs. It’s about Gordon and how he is recording everything he’s doing (video, audio, emails, web, everything). He’s been doing it for the past 14 years and is able to bring up almost eveyrthing. Clive writes about Bell, saying:
He[Bell] had a tiny bug-eyed camera around his neck, and a small audio recorder at his elbow. As we chatted about various topics–Australian jazz musicians, his futuristic cell phone, the Seattle area’s gorgeous weather–Bell’s gear quietly logged my every gesture and all my blathering small talk, snapping a picture every 60 seconds. Back at his office, his computer had carefully archived every document related to me: all the email I’d sent him, copies of my articles he’d read, pages he’d surfed on my blog.
This really resonated with me as i am already trying to record my life. I have photos up on Flickr, i have my ideas going to my blog, i have my mundane thoughts going to Twitter, my videos going to YouTube, and my friend interactions recorded on Facebook. I’m already on the web but just in the totality that Bell is. Storage is getting cheaper and cheaper it’s gone from $233,000 for a gigabyte in 1980 to less than $1 today. Soon there will be enough storage in your cell phone for your entire life to be stored. I do this because i want to remember. I want my memories to be accesible all the time and reading the article made me realize how inefficent i’ve been in capturing them.
I really like articles like this becaues they make you think about where the world is going and wonder how human interactions and functions will change. It touches on how humans will change when we no longer have to remember stuff. I already don’t remember phone numbers beceuase of your cell phone. What if you don’t have to remember people’s names and interactions and you free you mind to be more creative. Just imagine – that’s what i’m doing now….
This video should get you going for the upcoming year. If it doesn’t then you’ve got bigger problems:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6wRkzCW5qI]
I recently saw the movie Doubt with Philip Seymour and Meryl Streep. Both of them are awesome (as usual) and the movie really delivers. I was hesitant to go see it as who wants to see a movie about nuns creating drama – sounds really boring. But, it is fast paced and captivating. Some thoughts:
I’ve been a big flickr fan for years. I take a lot of photos and that’s always been my favorite spot to put them. Flickr‘s been great at pioneering the 2.0 photo experience. They were the first to have a photostream view – not just albums. And they were the first to have tags which allow you to organize your photos in a better way. However, they haven’t done much lately. Sure, they added videos which is GREAT but that’s about it. The look hasn’t changed, there aren’t many new features and i feel that they are getting out developed by facebook’s photo experience and Google‘s Picasa. Sure those sites have different goals for their photo experience but at least they are moving forward. What’s Flickr done for me lately? Nothing.
Both Facebok and Picasa allow you to specifically name who is in each photo. Facebook does this by “tagging” a photo with a user and Picasa does this by analyzing the faces in the photos. Both are brain dead simple to use and are really slick. I’ve always used Flickr’s tags to do this with thier photos but i’d like to more specifically associate a photo with a user.
I also think that Flickr could make the “editing” of photo metadata easier. The order a picture shows up in your photostream is effectively the date you took it – but if you upload a photo much later, you have to go back and manually adjust the dates so it appears in the right spot. Flickr has always made title and description editing amazingly simply by keeping it in-line but adjusting the date and privacy of a photo still takes you to another page. Why can’t they make that easier? Same thing with setting a group of photos to a later date. This is too hard to do.
The bottom line is that i still love Flickr but i feel that it’s getting stagnant. i’m starting to think that Flickr has officially become a Yahoo company and not a nimble startup. And i don’t want to hitch my wagon to something that is in maintenance mode. I knew this day would come and i think the day might finally be here. I think i could say the same about delicious too. That site could have been much bigger than it is.
I’m wondering now – where should my photos go? What’s going to be be even better. I don’t like how Picasa is only albums but i do like how they are at least getting better and better. Is there a 3.0 photo experience that i can use?
Last week i saw the movie Slumdog Millionaire and it was amazing. Easily the best movie i’ve seen yet this year. It’s a story about an orphan in the city of Mumbai, India who rises from the depths of poverty to become filthy rich on the strength of his intelligence.
Some thoughts:
Ours is, after all, an age when cross-cultural impulses inflect everything from music to presidential elections. And Slumdog could hardly be more cross-cultural: a romantic adventure set in India, financed in Europe, made by English filmmakers, featuring Muslim characters speaking Hindi, with a climax hinging on the answer to a question about a French novel. And it’s a blast.
Don’t let the above points distract you. This movie is AWESOME and you should go see it. It’s my leading candidate for best movie of the year.
A good post today by Chris Anderson about completely changing jobs every 3 years. He writes:
When I was at The Economist, there was a policy to rotate everyone every three years. The idea was that fresh eyes were more important than experience. “Foreign everywhere” was the mantra, and around your second year in Cairo, you could expect to get a call from the editor asking you to consider Mumbai or Sao Paolo–ideally two places you’d never been to and knew nothing about.
I’ve changed jobs every 2 years and do find that if you don’t continue to challenge yourself and learn new things, you can get complacent and bored.
Another interesting point about the post is the connection with Macolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers, which talks about how people achieve success. Anderson writes:
I was thinking about the three-year rule while reading about Malcolm Gladwell‘s observation that it takes 10,000 hours to become truly expert at something. If you really throw yourself into a job, you’ll spend 60 hours a week working. That’s 3,000 hours a year (allowing for vacation), which means you’ll hit the 10,000 hour mark a few months after your third year.
What do you think – how often do you try something new?
Here are my top albums of 2008. It was a toss up between MMJ and Dylan but when i looked back at my total plays for 2008 in my iTunes, it was no contest – i’ve played MMJ a bunch mor
Honor Roll – these albums have one or two good songs but not enough to be a “top” album of 2008 but i did like them:
An interesting article (Read the Article at HuffingtonPost) was sent to me today about the “quarterlife crisis” that people experience around the age of 22-26.
This is a common statement i’ve heard by many people. I think much of it stems from the expectations of family and society (aspirational TV, for example) going up and the realities of the world coming down (ability to get a job and succeed being that much tougher)
When the expectations and reality are conflicting, people get frustrated. Combine that with the trend that people move around so much and don’t have a solid “base” and you get a crisis. We’re malnourished in our relationships.
I can’t read an article like this and not immediately go bak to the book “Generation Me” which i wrote about here: http://loo.me/2008/05/15/generation-me/ Check it out.