A friend helped me do a bit more research to document how much of the original supply we have already used, and I leaned on the Google chart toolkit to put up pretty charts of who is doing the most extracting for each of the resources listed.  Click on through to see my entry - Non-Renewable. (Note: It looks the way it should in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Sorry Internet Explorer users.)

From watching the video, the argument is interesting.  In short, he claims that the big gateway sites - Google, Facebook, etc. are increasingly using algorithms to tailor information to their viewers, only showing them what they want to see and ‘hiding’ from them all other information, be it boring or unpleasant or disquieting or what-have-you.  Ultimately, he claims, this threatens the dream of the Internet as the great connector.  These algorithms, he claims, are in the same seat as the Newspaper editors of the 20’s, and need to be programmed to include the lessons learned from those times - editorial balance, etc.

From this short presentation, though, it looks to me like he does a lot of his own filtering of facts in order to set up this equivalence between the newspaper editors of the ’20s and the algorithms of today.  The biggest difference is that in the 20s, most people saw exactly 1 newspaper, and that’s how they got their picture of the world.  On the web, you choose your sources of info.  Most people have many, and everyone can have as many as they like.

The Internet is an information marketplace and a filter marketplace.  There are any number of different kinds of filters - each person decides which ones they use, and the market as a whole decides which ones become popular.  Moreover - even the big ‘fitlerers’ that he fingers - Google and Facebook - don’t block out any information.  You want to see what your conservative friends are up to?  Click on their pages.  Facebook’s response?  It’ll show you more about them.  Want to learn about any topic at all in Google?  Search for it.  Nothing’s hidden.

The argument here boils down to a claim that lazy people who aren’t interested should be given a default mix that has broader boundaries.  Yet, there’s no reason to claim that once a particular website / filter / presentation of information becomes popular it suddenly has to change it’s magic-mix that made it popular in order to make sure people get a a balanced picture.  If people want a balanced picture there is no barrier to them getting it, besides habit.  Why does any particular website have to be paternalistic about what info it shows its users?  “They want Justin Beiber, but we’ll give them Greek Philosophy.”  It’s silly.

Should a website make it’s filter explicit and adjustable?  If people want it, then there will be websites that do.  All the rules of open markets apply.

Here’s the recipe, with all the changes:

Spelt Pancakes
Makes 12

1 1/4 cup spelt flour
1 Tbsp silan (date honey)
1 3/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 beaten egg
1 cup thinned yogurt (yogurt with enough water to give it the consistency of milk)
2 Tbsp butter, melted
1 tsp vanilla

1. Combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt & cinnamon.
Separately, combine the egg, butter, ‘milk’, silan, and oil.
Add egg mixture all at once to flour mixture.
Stir just until moistened.
Let sit for ~10 minutes.

2. Grease pan w/ butter - heat.
For standard-size pancakes, use about 1/4 cup batter.
Cook slow over medium heat - about 5 minutes on each side.

Enjoy!

It’s the Steve Jobs assessment that doesn’t sit well with me. You just don’t grab dominant market share in areas where you didn’t even have a footprint without having a deep understanding of how the market currently works.  It’s also misleading to claim the Apple has no significant online or social media presence.  iTunes doesn’t obey the rules of the open web, but it is certainly both an online and social destination.  By any metric you’d like to use, it’s one of the top destinations of the Internet.

Go check it out.  I’ll wait.

I don’t know about you, but after seeing this, I immediately thought of Facebook.  Every time Facebook changes anything, all streams are a-flutter with people forswearing the new, pining for the old.

What did Flickr do right?

1. They didn’t force change on me, they let me choose it.  They even tempted me in and stimulated a desire for the new.
2. Once I jumped over, they helped me understand how to operate in the new environment.
3. They worked hard to put a smile on my face when it was all done.

Well done.

Conway’s law (in my words):
Any organization that creates something is doomed/destined to create something that is a mirror image of its own organizational structure.

I’m doing some consulting work for a small organization that is spread out over two continents.  Two continents, about 10 computers, and probably no official full time employees.  The fellow who runs it does so out of love, and he hires people to handle issues as they come up.  There have to be at least 4 or 5 technical folks with their hands on these machines.  Maybe more.  Truth is - I don’t know how many there are, because I’ve never met them.  I don’t even know most of their names.  One fellow I can catch on skype, but I don’t have his phone number.

And the systems of this organization look exactly the same way - a scattering of programs and computers that are cobbled together by a mess of scripts that either don’t interface with each other, or do so in a totally unique and unpredictable way.  When something breaks, it’s an archeology exercise to figure out how it was built and what went wrong.

The organization wants to fix the problem by finding ‘a better computer person’ to add to the group.  Meanwhile, the rest of the bunch still have their fingers in their part of the mix.  If they really wanted to get things shaped up, they’d either hire a serious full time person to take on the whole picture, or at least insist that all the people involved have a regular conference call.  Without that, Conway’s law is going to keep us all poking away at a scattered bunch of misaligned things that don’t come together into anything cohesive.   

From this viewpoint, I’ve noticed an interesting effect.  The latest movies I’ve seen and the latest video clips play through my head on a kind of re-run, sometimes for days, usually with no added insight or enjoyment.  My mind rescreens them, for whatever reason.   It seems like they are more sticky if the emotion of the first watching was stronger.  As if the emotion has waves that play out over the course of days.

The media I consume - consumes me.

More motivation to watch what I eat.

It’s email, it’s live chat, it’s a wiki, it drags and drops files from the desktop, it embeds itself everywhere. Garden walls comes down. And it’s open - it’s just the beginning. Think whiteboard, think document collaboration, think task tracking, think project management, think collective web browsing. Zing!

You can see a demo and dig deeper at the Google Wave Site. Mashable gives you a distillation.

My wheels are just starting to turn on this one…sensing big potential…bubble, bubble.

Dr. Stephen Wolfram demonstrated Wolfram Alpha yesterday at Harvard.  The video (embed below) gives us tons of mouth watering scenarios, video of Dr. Wolfram typing, but almost no views of the product performing.  It sounds like it’s working.  It sounds like he’s demonstrating something quite amazing.

Hat tip to Joel Katz for the heads up.

Stay tuned…