Today’s Important Twitter Lesson

Courtesy of Andy:

“the tweet of yours most likely to be read by a star-tweeter is snark about them”

Yep. It’s true.

Kurzweil BS’s Facebook

In an otherwise worthwhile interview with Ray Kurzweil, there is this:

Is Facebook helping people live longer?

Facebook is enabling us to share knowledge and achieve the wisdom of crowds. By being able to harness the wisdom of 250 million people, now on Facebook, we can ferret out the truth of what’s going in the world very quickly. We can see this in recent political events. From a practical perspective, it enables somebody with a new idea or new insight to share that, for it to spread virally through these kinds of knowledge-sharing sites.

It really does foster freedom and democracy, and not just on the political level but even things like health and medicine. Patients are going to their doctor’s office, armed with the latest knowledge. By being part of the community of people who have their condition, they’ll be more knowledgeable than the doctor. [This] changes the nature of the relationship.

Kurweil is a futurist, and no dummy. I think he was simply being courteous here — Facebook might be many things, but it ain’t helping people live longer.

That aside, I simply cannot wait for Kurzweil’s version of the future to happen:

There are early prototypes of where I think computing is going. To make devices smaller and smaller, they are more and more convenient, but we actually don’t want to look at a tiny screen. We’d like to actually have full immersion screens that we sort of live in. We are going to put these devices in our eyeglasses. We can just create a virtual screen that’s large and hovering in air that’s high resolution. Electronics will be just woven in your clothes or your belt buckle. The display will be augmented reality, and we’ll be online all the time.

Cool. Just like Manfred Macx.

Vermont

Ya can’t beat the scenery…

Unethical

That’s the only word I can think that properly describes this.

I would like to understand why it’s not unethical, and how it could be considered proper journalism.

Demise of Journalism, Part 168

The State releases national media’s desperate attempts to score an interview with the then-missing Sanford:

National media blitzed Gov. Mark Sanford’s staff, offering big ratings and, possibly, a sympathetic venue in an effort to land the first interview with the governor after his six-day trip to Argentina.

In addition, a blogger and state leaders reached out to Sanford’s office to try to coordinate a way to “push back” on the growing mystery surrounding Sanford’s absence.

The behind-the-scenes maneuvering is detailed in e-mails released by the governor’s office this week in response to The State’s request under the freedom of information act.

This (that is, the institution of journalism) is all-too-cozy with its sources to serve the public’s interests.

Definitely NOT Perfection

I was there. This NYT article is a complete work of fiction:

It is certainly hard to measure, achieve or proclaim perfection. Every person in the park — indeed, every person scattered around every corner of the five boroughs — probably has his or her own criteria for perfection, especially the New York City variety. Is it sitting on a stoop? Out on a third date? Being happily asleep?

Yet, if you were to invoke this highly subjective word to describe one evening in the middle of Manhattan island, in the middle of summer, in earshot of the expectant tunings of the instruments, you could do a lot worse than late Tuesday.

So … it was the perfect New York night.

Um, no.

It was so overcrowded. People were complete a-holes, stepping on top of everyone’s blankets, foods, and heads.

Fights broke out.

OK, not actual fisticuffs, but serious yelling matches.

Not perfection.

Proof:

Why Google Chrome OS?

Google moves in on yet another market:

… Google has upped the ante yet again with its plans for a new operating system based on Google Chrome.

The new operating system, aptly named Google Chrome OS, will be an open-source operating system initially geared toward netbooks, Google announced in a blog posting late Tuesday evening.

What’s not all that clear in the news that’s out so far is that this is simply a new Linux distro. So it’s not really all that groundbreaking.

And what’s troubling about this announcement is, given that Google’s business model revolves around data-gathering and data-tracking (to feed their ad business), you can be sure this OS is going to monitor and track everything you do, instead of “just” monitoring what you do on Google.com and Google-related websites.

Simply a guess, but why else would they get into the OS business?

Journalism Is Doomed

Politico:

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to “those powerful few” — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it’s a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.”

The offer — which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters — is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

It’s like watching car go over a cliff, in slow, slow motion.