Category: Four pillars

There are many books that get called laugh-out-loud funny; often, it means nothing to someone like me, brought up in a home where giggles and snorts and guffaws were de rigueur while reading. We didn’t just laugh while reading Wodehouse or Thurber or Benchley or Parker or Marx; we managed to laugh even when the music in the background was courtesy Leonard Cohen. Which it often was.

So when I call a book laugh-out-loud I mean it. And so to:

Recommendation 6: (Book, and soon-to-be film)

Cosmic Banditos. Allan Weisbecker. Quantum mechanics mixed liberally with potent substances, shaken, stirred, then even more liberally garnished with explosive substances. Made me laugh enough to hurt. Soon to be released as a film, I know I’ll go to see it against my better judgment. Part of me wants the memory of the book to stay plain and uncorrupted in my head; the rest of me knows I have to see it. Because.

Ever since the Wii crossed our threshold, I’ve been fascinated by it. But I’ve kept away… I’m not entirely happy with the potential interaction between WiiMotes and ICDs. Nevertheless, just watching people young and old playing on the Wii, from sports to fitness to education, I felt there was something about the interaction that would have an enterprise payoff. [In the past, I’ve had a similar feeling about EyeToy, but it only went as far as considering its use as an icebreaker at offsite meetings.]

Today, thanks to a tweet from PRGeek, I went and took a look at this video. Head tracking for desktop VR displays using a WiiMote.

We’re not talking games any more. More and more, we will see enterprises spend real money on usability, on visualisation tools, on ways to support people who would otherwise be disenfranchised.

Incidentally, thanks to a tweet from LifeKludger, I went and took a look at this. Pointui. Providing “touch” features …. when you don’t have a finger….

We’re going to see a lot more of this; opportunities for us to take “consumer” tools and transform them, mutate them, into things the enterprise can use. But not every enterprise will be able to use them; we will need to understand a lot more about open architectures and reusable components before we get there; we will need to be much more agnostic about devices and platforms before we get there; and we will need to have understood the importance of enfranchising an army of people currently sidelined by our incompetence.

Yesterday, as I came through immigration at Heathrow Terminal 3, the Border and Immigration Agency officer was very helpful, commenting that I should take a look at the IRIS Scheme and consider signing up. So I did. And I probably will sign up.

And in that strange serendipitous way these things happen, I came across this completely unrelated site while Stumbling (I try and Stumble for 15 minutes a day, freshens up my thinking). if you ever wanted to know just how different irises are, i guess Rankin’s research will convince you. I found the images fascinating. Here are a few examples:

Rankin himself seems to be an unusual guy. I have no idea what his first name is, doesn’t appear anywhere that I could see. His bio makes interesting reading.

Phillie Casablanca recently observed via Twitter that “following @gapingvoid and @scobleizer is like listening to one end of a telephone conversation. When they’re on a conference call.”

I found this comment fascinating. As far as I can make out, the primary reason Phil would get this sensation is because he’s unable to see the tweets that Hugh and Robert are responding to, and as a consequence he’s unable to place the context in which these two are tweeting.

Why is this the case? This will always be the case where two people have asymmetric connections in any social network that works like Twitter works. In fact, where you have gregarious and extreme social animals like Hugh and Robert, if anything the effect is accentuated. If Hugh has twenty times as many people he’s talking to, when compared to Phil, and their overlap is 5%, then you see what happens. 95% of the conversations that Hugh is in are only partially visible to Phil, and Twitter is colourless without context.

Yessirree, Twitter is colourless without context. It becomes boring, insipid, tasteless. And ultimately very frustrating.

So what does this mean? I wonder. There are a number of possibilities.

One, people de-friend those who exhibit this contextless behaviour. [Please understand, this is not because either Hugh or Robert are choosing to make noise by posting often. This would be a wrong interpretation. It is only because they are in more conversations with more people that such an effect happens. And that per se is not wrong.] Let’s call this “natural deselection”.

Two, people learn to filter this effect manually, develop a scanning habit that learns to skip the contextless tweets.

Three, twitter itself gets a granular control facility that allows people to balance out the gregarious. Not sure how it will work, but there could be a possibility that a person is restricted to seeing the tweets between a friend-pair provided both sides of the conversation are friends. But then this would only work in the open @person conversations.

Four, the twitter topology itself shifts towards a trusted network model, where friends of friends are friends as well. This may be unattractive to many early adopters.

I for one don’t care. I think it is right that I am symmetric about my connections, anyone who follows me I will return the favour. So far I haven’t refused anyone once they pass a simple sanity test which consists of a quick scan of their friends,  tweets and blog page where available. If there is no information available, I wait.

I believe there is a lot of serendipitous value in Twitter, value that I don’t want to throw away with the wrong rules. So I won’t be deselecting people as yet, I want to learn more about this medium and what it can do.

Early days yet.

Views?

2007 has been a good year for me. There is much I have learnt, much that I have enjoyed.

And one of the things I have enjoyed, and enjoyed tremendously at that, is discovering Randall Munroe, via my son.

If you haven’t done so already, start reading xkcd. Here’s an example:

If you have, but you didn’t know Randall wrote a blog, check this out.

And if you’ve done both already, but you’ve never seen Randall, then take a look at this video of him speaking at Google.

So goodbye 2007, the year I discovered Randall Munroe. And thank you Randall Munroe, for making me laugh, so often and so easily.

Laughter is good. Let’s all hope for more laughter in our lives in 2008.