Happy Birthday Reader

It’s surprising to me that more people I know have not dropped their cable television service. I’m not really sure why, but I do know that the cable and service provider landscape in five years or so will look nothing like it does today.

As online video grows so will its demand and one day will become our primary form of video entertainment. I can point to the success and growth of services like Netflix and Amazon’s Rentals, but these are just scratching the service. We will continue to see more and more interesting services released.

This means that television providers will look nothing like they do today and in fact new ones will emerge. The current providers and television manufacturers can run feeds in to a home and make a great looking tv, but this no longer matters. What matters is software as it allows for new forms of distribution and more interesting viewing experiences. And since software matters, it will be software companies that take over the reigns and create the layers of our viewing experiences.

This is going to continue to be a great space to watch.

NYTimes Sues The Federal Government For Refusing To Reveal Its Secret Interpretation Of The PATRIOT Act

GigaOm has a great article on real-time information, Is more real-time information a dream or a nightmare? in which Mathew Ingram touches a bit on the idea of information filtering. It is not a new topic, but one I have been thinking a lot about lately. Living in an era of information overload, is there a need for better filtering?

It is easy to ignore what we don’t want and focus on what we do. I flip through my twitter feed and just glance for keywords that find interesting. If a keyword stands out then I will read it. This is very much the same when I am reading news sites or blogs. I just scroll until I see a title that have an interest in. And with email, I ignore most of my emails not from real people, Gmail’s Priority Inbox helps a lot with this. I decide what information I interact with and do not feel overwhelmed with information.

I agree that filtering and finding will play an important role, but I believe that our biggest skill will continue to be that of ignoring. Yes, I believe ignoring to be a skill and one that we will need to work to improve as new forms or channels (augmented reality) of information emerge. Not so much that we can ignore everything, but so we can ignore what we don’t want or need. There is a possibility that it will be near impossible to turn things off, short of being dropped in the middle of a National Park.

Information is both empowering and unsettling which is I think why LOLCats are so popular. It gives the mind a break, you can just sit back and flip through image after image of cute little kittens. Unfortunately, it is probably not the right kind of break.

It feels like I am starting to wander, probably because this is a very difficult topic to come to any conclusion on, so I am just going to stop.

Taking chances was fun and easy when we were young, we just did things with little thought. We’d climb up on the counter looking for cookies. We’d grab a hammer and some nails to build forts for our friends. We’d get up in the middle of class to use the bathroom, without raising our hand. Hell, we’d jump out a second story window on a dare. Of course, this was until adults told us not to.

“Don’t do that!”

This order was drilled in to our heads enough times until we no longer took chances. We began to second guess our decisions and failed to push forward without endless thought. Eventually, we stopped thinking all together. Slowly, we became compliant.

Sometimes it may seem the only way to stop improper behavior is to tell someone what not to do, but there is a better way. If we can focus is on what we can do, the world opens up and options naturally formulate in our mind. What we considered restrictions before, become opportunities.

We realize that taking chances is a safe and fun way to live life.

Years ago, living with my grandfather in Brighton, UK, he would often remind me, “all you need to build a town is a Church and a Pub”. That all you needed was a place for people to congregate and socialize. Once those institutes were in place, people would begin to gather. The first “settlers” would then get be the ones who define that town’s culture with their own flavor of religion, political and social views. If the beliefs of that town were popular enough, if lots of people identified with it, the town would grow and become more powerful. One’s physical proximity was important to the towns survival so it was a matter of convincing others to move there.

For some time now proximity has not mattered as new digital towns and countries are built and dismantled everyday, often around a common interest. These towns are constantly shifting, growing and shrinking, with new ones being born everyday. The more quickly they grow, the faster the culture changes.

TechCrunch’s article We No Longer Live In Actual Countries But Digital Ones touches on this idea, discussing XKCD’s “Map Of Online Communities 2”.

It’s interesting to think of the world we live in as a collection of digital countries. Each with its own set of guidelines, norms, leaders, gatherers, cultivators, etc. The best part is we get to join most any one we want and can move between them in seconds.

All you need now is a computer.

*Photo, The Lanes, by James Bjerkholt

St. Petersburg Times writer Andrew Meacham wrote a poignant and important piece on resident Neil Alan Smith who was killed by a hit and run driver.

Hit-and-run victim was quiet and dependable, co-workers say

The perception and the poor valuing of “roles” is saddening.

Marc Hedlund, founder of personal financial site Wesabe, has a candid and interesting read on Why Wasabe Lost to Mint. There were many rumors running around as to why it failed over Mint which he wanted to address.

The best conversation on the topic is happening over at Hacker News, but I thought I would throw in my personal opinion as I was a early user of Wesabe and was sad when they shut down.

When Wesabe launched it was perfect timing for me as I couldn’t stand the available personal finance software such as Quicken. I signed up and started using the service right away. I recommended it to everyone I knew. The mental hurdle of providing one’s personal financial data online was an issue, but I was able to convince some people.

Then Mint launched. Others started to tell me about it and that I should sign up. In return, I would show them Wesabe as a better option, but there was something about it they did not get. Plus they felt it looked amateurish and untrustworthy.

It has been awhile, but from what I remember about Wesabe, it was less focused on a replacing existing software, software people understood, and more focused on new ideas. Ideas I think people were not ready for.

The great thing about living in a bubble is that everything works in your favor. You are living under your own rules so why wouldn’t it? Not only that, but it is comforting, you can focus on what you find interesting and ignore the rest of the world. This is great for building software, making music, writing, etc. Your level of output can explode.

There’s just one thing…

You can easily forget how the real world works. There are new sets of rules people are adapting to everyday and you can easily fall behind.

I am not saying that you should fall in line, but is it really a bad idea to pop your head up every once in awhile to see which rules you want to ignore?

My grandfather always reminds me that relationships are what’s really important in life. That the people we choose to surround ourselves with will help bring happiness and interest to our lives.

Steven Johnson shows just how important interacting within our network is in developing new and interesting ideas.