A campaign about nothing

A fun retrospective on the pc wars that hardly seem a battle now.

This rings many bells.

Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet)

View more documents from David Gillespie.

Dan Lyons talks tablet revolution in Newsweek

Under the banner headline "The Hype Is Right Apple's tablet will reinvent computing" Dan, aka Fake Steve, talks about the inevitability of the iPad (or whatever it will be named) and the impact it will have on media, creativity and life in general. Here are a few key graphs:

For people like me, who produce content, this change is both great and scary. Great because the techies in Silicon Valley are giving us powerful new tools for telling stories. Scary because the old ways of telling stories are about to become obsolete, and if we cling to them, we'll be washed away. In the past we've all worked in silos. "Print people" had one way of describing the world. "Video people" had another. But the silos are getting crunched together. It's as if for most of your life you could get by speaking only English, but now you need to learn a bunch of other old languages, and, what's more, you must then master a new language that is evolving out of the DNA of all the old ones.

This is phase two of media on the Internet. Until now, in phase one, we've used this new platform to do the same old thing. We take stories from newspapers and magazines and put them on Web sites. We publish books on Kindle. We put TV shows and movies on Hulu or YouTube. This is what happens when a new medium emerges. When TV first came out, the networks hired radio stars like Milton Berle and produced variety shows—radio with a camera. Over time, people like Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law), David Chase (The Sopranos), and Larry David (Seinfeld) came along and created a new way of telling stories. Oddly enough, those three guys were born within a few years of each other, in the 1940s, just as TV was getting started.

The Internet today is a lot like TV circa 1950. But we are about to take an evolution-ary leap. That's why all this hand-wringing over the dying newspaper business is so misplaced. In 10 years the print newspapers we have today will seem as quaint and primitive as those old Uncle Miltie shows. Heck, the Internet we have today will seem quaint and primitive too. Chances are the cool stuff won't come from people my age (I'm nearly 50) but from the kids who are growing up with these digital tools the way Bochco, Chase, and David grew up with Uncle Miltie. Keep thinking bigger. And bigger. If you see a gatekeeper, imagine what could be when the lock is busted.

I continue to shake my head.

Core values. Please. Howard. Go back. Before. It's. Too. Late.

Repeat after me: "iDon't mess with iPhone users."

A theme song for the post-crash, crowdsourced, social media age?

Always ahead of his time, Martin Mull recorded this song, "Flexible", for his Normal album, released in 1974. This clip is from a recent cover by Ned Rifken. Enjoy.

Great Mary Meeker presentation on mobile web.

Snagged the link to this presentation from Henry Blodgett @ SAI. Excellent report on the transformation, the juggernaut that is.

Creativity. Are you teaching it today? Are you embracing it today? It's not too late to start thinking different.

8 key trends and some foresights for the next 5 years.

More great thoughts via media futurist Gerd Leonhard. Here's an appetizer:

1) We will soon see the emergence of many different kinds of iPhone-influenced Netbook-like devices; some will be Apple-made but most will not...In addition to the high-end, fully-loaded and perhaps still rather expensive versions that many of us in the so-called developed countries will gobble up, low cost and more basic editions for the developing markets will be sold in the 100s of millions (think India, China, Indonesia...). These smart gadgets will have very low energy consumption and therefore extremely long battery life, may even sport basic solar-power options, and may ultimately cost less than 30 USD, or even be 'free' (why bother to sell the box if you can make a lot more $ with selling services.... Nokia?)

It is these mass-market yet very smart and networked devices, together with cheap or free wireless broadband that will really revolutionize reading, newspapers, books and education; not to mention our music, TV and film consumption habits. Content commerce will be completely redefined as a consequence. As BTO told us a loooong time ago: "You ain't seen nothin' yet."

2) Very cheap or free wireless broadband - at fairly high speeds, i.e. at least 2MB / sec - will be available in most places, particularly in the booming new economies of Asia, India, Russia and South-America, and a bit later, in Africa. Funded by the likes of Google and by the future 'telemedia' conglomerates, governments, cities and states, wireless broadband will probably reach 3-4 out of 5 people on the globe within 5-8 years. User-generated & derived content (UGDC for those of you that must have an acronym ;), virtual co-production, mobile editing and instant network sharing will explode by a factor of 1000, making control of distribution a very distant concept of the past. UGC or UGDC may make up to 50% of the global content consumption by 2015. Consumers will be (co)-creators, marketers, sellers and buyers, and come in a hundred variations, from totally passive to totally active. Then, indeed, filtering, culling and curation will be the key to success.

3) Collective blanket licenses that legalize and unlock legitimate access to basic content services via any digital network will emerge, and are likely to take over as the primary way of content consumption, around the world (but in Asia, first). Just like water or electricity which is readily available when moving into a new home, the basic access to content will be bundled into access to digital networks, i.e. via ISPs, operators, telecoms, portals etc. This shift is starting with music (as already done by TDC in Denmark, and Google in China), and will be quickly followed by films, TV, books and newspapers.
Read the full post (and more) on Gerd's blog.

Saw this on an artist friend's blog and had to post it here. Going for a walk now.