People love photos. They always have. It’s the crappy snapshot of you and your sister at 3 and 5 playing on the new swing set in the backyard that is your favorite. It’s not the technical quality of that photo that makes it special. It’s the emotional connection. The brilliance of Instagram isn’t just about…
Category Archives: society
The Internet Is Worth Protecting
I’ve been on the internet more than half my life. I consider myself a digital native. Today many people are protesting the SOPA and Protect IP Act legislation that threatens the internet. This threat is real, as this legislation breaks some fundamental things about how the internet works. If you are interested in the technical…
IIW Fascinates Me
Since the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW11) last week, I’ve been reflecting on how far we’ve come – and how far we still have to go. My Google ID, Yahoo ID, Facebook ID, and even my own domain’s OpenID can all be used to create and maintain accounts around the internet. Many services also have connections between…
Media disruption – it’s all about the audience
Another Must-read from Om Malik: For the media industry (which is video, music and print), there has been one more, and perhaps the farthest-reaching, failure: the inability of the folks to grok that today’s audience is not tomorrow’s audience. It goes without saying there’s a whole generation of folk that has either grown up, or…
I Shared What?!?
This is a sophisticated crowd at the Internet Identity Workshop, full of people who are very aware of the issues around identity, security, and privacy. Joe Andrieu is showing his brilliant and simple tool “I Shared What?!?”. Login at http://isharedwhat.com/ and see what gets shared with apps on Facebook when you allow them access to…
Why politics is important…
Politics can make a difference. And it all starts with ideas. Some ideas are more universal and meaningful than others. My children are the center of my world—and when I think about the issues facing our nation right now, I think about what that means for our girls, and the world that we’re leaving for…
Just How Big Was It?
Some figures… CBS News commissioned the same group to analyze the crowd size at the Stewart-Colbert rally it used to estimate the crowd at Glenn Beck’s August rally. The CBS numbers: Beck drew 87,000 people to his rally, Stewart and Colbert drew 215,000. Excerpt from: Just How Big Was The Stewart-Colbert Rally? | TPMDC Plus…
We have good reasons to be angry
These are scary times, there is no doubt. but I hope in the end people focus on what we can accomplish, not just what we fear. Bill Clinton recently put it well… Clinton exhorted the crowd to “keep on being mad. But concentrate your anger so that it clarifies your judgment instead of clouding it….
Yes on 19… (California)
I’m backing California Proposition 19, even though I’m personally disinterested in marijuana. Paul Buchheit makes the argument beautifully, so I thought I would share. Not only is prohibition an attack on our basic right to control our own bodies and minds (a philosophical point which most people probably don’t care about), but prohibition also provides a…
That one teacher
I was lucky – I had several. Not all of them were perfect, but each was perfect for me. They made a difference for lots of kids, and for me, they made all the difference. I was never an easy kid to teach. I was called precocious, which I think was a nice way of…
