Tag Archives: ideas

Thomas Brand, writ­ing about the impor­tance of set­ting the right expec­ta­tions:

 The most valu­able part of set­ting expec­ta­tions is telling the truth, even if the truth means you don’t know, but are will­ing to find out. I am much more likely to remain a cus­tomer of com­pa­nies that treat me with respect by set­ting expec­ta­tions, and stick­ing to their word.

So true. Trying to set a false expec­ta­tion or try­ing to cover up that you don’t actu­ally know the answer may have short-term ben­e­fits, but in the end the cus­tomer will find out the truth. If you’re up front and hon­est with them from the start things work out much better.

Shifting: The Newspaper

…on the web, it’s impos­si­ble to main­tain the fic­tion that you can gather a sin­gle pub­lic together in one place. There’s always going to be one link fur­ther that you never explored, or one site that is totally dif­fer­ent from you. And I think one of the things that the web does to jour­nal­ism is that it gives lie to the notion that jour­nal­ism can ever rep­re­sent “the pub­lic.” And that makes us cyn­i­cal about news.

Jeremy Keith, writ­ing about spend­ing a day at CERN:

According to most estab­lished social and eco­nomic the­ory, noth­ing should ever get done at CERN. It’s a col­lec­tion of thou­sands of physics nerds—a mix­ture of the­o­rists (the ones with black­boards) and exper­i­men­tal­ists (the ones with com­put­ers). When some­one wants to get some­thing done, they present their ideas and ask for help from any­one with spe­cific fields of exper­tise. Those peo­ple, if they like the sound of the idea, say “Okay” and a new col­lab­o­ra­tion is born.

Warren Ellis, How To See The Future:

The most basic mobile phone is in fact a com­mu­ni­ca­tions devices that shames all of sci­ence fic­tion, all the wrist radios and hand­held com­mu­ni­ca­tors. Captain Kirk had to tune his fuck­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tor and it couldn’t text or take a photo that he could stick a nice Polaroid fil­ter on. Science fic­tion didn’t see the mobile phone com­ing. It cer­tainly didn’t see the glow­ing glass win­dows many of us carry now, where we make amaz­ing things hap­pen by point­ing at it with our fin­gers like god­damn wizards.

via Daniel.

Not sure when they launched but the topic pages that Evening Edition added are inter­est­ing. Syria’s one exam­ple I dug up. They seek to answer three ques­tions: What’s hap­pen­ing? Why you should know about this? and What now?

At the bot­tom there’s then a list of related sto­ries sorted chrono­log­i­cally. Cool to see some real-world exper­i­men­ta­tion with explain­ers. It’s prob­a­bly a lot of edi­to­r­ial work to craft those sum­maries but the pay­off is worth it, I think.

New! New! New! (not yet)

When you let it be itself, every­thing on the Internet belongs to every­thing else. The walls tech peo­ple try to raise, to con­vince investors that there’s dol­lar value there, are fake. They don’t hold any­thing behind them that has any last­ing value. The only things that stand a chance are things that flow. And for that, the walls get in the way.

Postmodern Tourism : An Interview with Pico Iyer:

I think that what she must have found, and most of us do too, is that home is essen­tially a set of val­ues you carry around with you and, like a tur­tle or a snail or what­ever, home has to be some­thing that is part of you and can be equally a part of you wher­ever you are. I think that not hav­ing a home is a good induce­ment to cre­at­ing a meta­phys­i­cal home and to being able to see it in more invis­i­ble ways.

via Daniel.