Dan Winters on APhotoEditor
Make Some Noise
This wasn’t really part of the plan, but since this track is out there we wanted to let you hear it here first, or maybe second. Enjoy
Mike
via officialbeastieboys
Skewed social behaviour. Space as an app.
I get excited about flying, hotels and rental cars. I meticulously track my air miles and flights, logging all the details of every flight I take in FlightMemory. I am happy to be spending hours in the air and nights in hotels around the world, and that’s where I feel most at home. It’s a strange concept for most of my friends and peers but the sense of not belonging anywhere physically is not your standard social behaviour. People look at you weird when you tell them that you love hotel rooms for their impersonal anonymity and the dry smell of cabin air on LH726, your favorite flight from MUC to PVG, especially when you can explain all the benefits over LH728. For some reason our society is not yet geared towards the idea of not belonging to an allotted arbitrary piece of space.
Reading Paul Carr’s firs blog entry about his quest to stay 33 nights in Las Vegas, each in a different hotel has made me understand that, we who abandon borders and mortgages are in fact pioneers of a hybrid between physical space and the cyber space. Actually reading anything by Paul Carr makes me ponder about that, about the society we live in and our mindset of anti mobility. It’s only the bravest and most intelligent people in the world who become expatriates and who travel the world leaving only carbon footprint behind, the rest of us is stagnant. But there is very little the vast majority of us does about it because of this sense of belonging, the sense of being tied down to something. Hardcore nationalists will argue that freedom means owning your own house, two cars and a handful of kids. In my opinion that’s the exact opposite of freedom. Freedom is 3 months at the Intercontinental in Hanoi, Hertz’s Audi A5 in Dallas and a StarAlliance HON status anywhere you fly, and it’s a freedom you can get with your family too.
Most of my life exists in two locations, the internet and my wallet. Everything else is an add-on. House, car, bed, garden, postbox they are like apps. If you like them you can hang on to them but few months down the line there will be a better app, and then you upgrade. You are the platform and you should define the space.
Growing up among worlds – globally enabled childhood
Abstract of the presentation I am submitting for SIETAR Congress 2011 . Let me know what you think!
Title: Growing up among worlds – globally enabled childhood.
Originally a third culture kid (TCK) is someone who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside their parents’ culture. Normally the TCK builds relationships to all the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture are assimilated into their life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of the same background, other third culture kids. This term and definition coined by Dr. Useem seemed exclusive to the children of expatriates and military personnel at the brink of the 21st century. 10 years later it applies to most children who have grew up using and exploring the Internet.
Through the widespread access to the Internet, generation-Y globally can be described as TCK 2.0 – an interconnected social network without cultural barriers and deep roots extending into each continent; an operational, developmental and strategic network of mutually related individuals working within the comforts of their bedrooms. The Internet has shifted the cultural paradigms amongst the millennials and changed each and every relationship from ‘6 degrees of separation’ to ‘Add as Friend’.
However, is the Internet a substitute for building relationships to all the societies, while not having full ownership in any, or is it merely an exploratory escape for established millennials with a sense of belonging? Has the Internet enabled the connected youth to create a single multidimensional e-culture or is there still a disparity between what is being built and a true global culture embraced by the indigenous TCKs?
The Perfect Bookmark
We roam the internet like locust during the plague of Egypt, consuming countless amounts of data in any form imaginable. We get over-saturated with images, videos and text, and there simply isn’t enough time in the day to process all of it especially now with our days being shorter by 1.6 microseconds. We don’t have enough resources to process everything we would like the process, and because of this we reach out to web tools.
Can’t ready something now? Oh there is instapaper for that.
Want an easy way of processing a lot of information? Sure, just use Google Reader.
Want to curate your own newspaper based on what your friends are using? Start using paprli or flipboard.
Want to save any of this information? Well here comes the problem with bookmarks. Over the years I’ve been looking for an ultimate solution for my bookmarks, a service which would keep all of them in a visual form. A system with advanced bookmark management system and an easy search functionality, something which would not only allow me to tag my bookmarks but also put them in collections and inspect visually. For the last 3 years my system, however complicated, looked like this:
Favorite bookmarks: Bookmarks bar in a browser.
General bookmarking: Delicious
Products bookmarking: Svpply
Image bookmarking: We heart it
Articles bookmarking: Digg
Links directory with all my social services linked to: Trunkly
Over past week I’ve been looking at my process, realising how ridiculous it is, and thinking that there must be an ultimate bookmarking solution out there, or at least something good. I started talking to some friends and found a question on quora about visual bookmarking , something I needed, a robust visual bookmarking service with some nice functionality. And that’s when I discovered ZooTool among few other services.
Uncertain of it, I tweeted asking the twitterverse about some recommendations regarding the services available, not surprisingly I got a few answers within minutes, and a nice tweet from @zootool themselves. I checked it out closely and started using it. And it’s awesome. ZooTool manages to painlessly combine all the important features of visual bookmarking without making the product suck. I was stricken by a very thoughtful and appleesque GUI and UX which is intuitive and very easy to use. You can bookmark images/videos/websites/documents using a bookmarklet called “Lasso” which you simply place in your bookmarks tab or using a extension available for Chrome, Safari and Firefox.
When you click on the lasso button it takes you to a ZooTool screen which gives you a list of objects on the website and asks you what you want to bookmark.
You can choose to bookmark the entire website or just an image. It then gives you an option to tag, describe and “pack” your bookmark. Awesome. Naturally you can also share it on twitter, facebook or email it.
It’s a simple and intuitive process, it may take a little longer than delicious, but it forces you to do a good job on bookmarking i.e. adding tags, descriptions and choosing what you want to bookmark exactly.
The ZooTool website itself is a work of art. It has a feel of a series A,B,C and D venture backed company with 60 google and Facebook dropouts coding away in a fancy SF loft. Reality is that the whole website was bootstrapped in Germany by two guys. Which makes this whole project even more impressive.
Check is for yourself but in my opinion it’s the ultimate bookmarking service. I could write all about their functionality but the best option is for you to start using it. You won’t regret it.
Positive:
+ Multipurpose visual bookmarking
+ Deep social integration
+ Great UI and UX
+ Import/Export with visual processing
+ Ease of use
+ European !!
Negative:
- Acts funny with certain types of websites
- No screen/website capture
- Lasso favicon is the standard blank page
- No audio capture / audio annotations
