Trello will end up being one of my favorite new web apps of the year. It’s a digital version of index cards mixed with a pin board. It is simple, really fun to use and I just cannot help recommending it to everyone I know.

Fred Wilson has a great post on how he came to fund SoundCloud, an online network for sound junkies. He was repeatedly approached by the SoundCloud team for funding, but it ended up being a single slide that finally sold him.

His post reminded me of what it was like being at art school and working on a new piece. Getting started was real easy, I just sort of had at it, little doodles in my sketch book until an idea would emerge. “Ok, portraits!”. It was not until my piece was done that I would get to sit and finally understand what I had been working so hard on. In the case of my portrait project I had been working on the idea of “permanence in time and place”. What it meant to “be somewhere”. The process I went through is very similar to working on a new idea for a business, something I am sure the SoundCloud team was going through.

It can take a long time, even years, to know what it is you have actually been working on. Not the problem you are solving, but the vision you are driving. This seems counter intuitive because it begs the question, has all your work been aimless?

It is a discovery process leading to a more solidified version of the spark that got you rolling. Ideas look very different in your head than when others begin to interact with it. It is rare to know what you’re working on from the very beginning. But it is certainly your job to to figure it out with deliberate persistence.

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.

My concentration at University was in photography so I’ve always been fascinated, and sometimes confused, with image manipulation software. Two of my favorite photographers are Paul Strand and Alfred Stieglitz who were driving forces behind the art of photography as we know it today (at least, that is what I remember). Both were active in promoting straight photography, i.e. manipulation free photography. The idea was to capture a scene as it appeared.

This seems simple and obvious, however, it is neither. There are numerous ways to manipulate a photo, even outside of software, which deviates it from this idea. Cropping. Dodging and burning. Double exposure. Over exposing. Off focusing. Retouching. Coloring. Etc. These actions change a photograph and even the act of photography into something else. Not better or worse, just something else.

What straight photography is great at is forcing the artist to focus on the scene he is presented with and manipulate himself to get the most interesting shot. He is to think of the light as his paint and adjust his camera accordingly. Imagine if the paints resting on a palette were changing a mile a minute. Would a painter just start slapping his brush wildly around the canvas hoping for something to materialize?

To a straight photographer, 80% of their job ends once the shutter flickers. The remaining 20% is done processing the film and printing prints that stay in line with capturing the scene as it appeared.

This is all just a long winded way of saying that I do not know what to make of Photoshop’s deblurring plugin. I have more questions than I do answers so I find the video below both absolutely amazing and painfully annoying.

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.

I created a quick form to help find items on eBay when all you have is the eBay item number… I use it several times a week so I thought others may like it.

eBay Item Finder

FYI: It works best when you are logged into eBay.

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