Week 32

People Love Craigslist

Thanks to Michael Nielsen's share, I read an article titled "What Can We Learn From Mess". I'd like to add few thoughts of my own on this subject.

I know a woman who uses, likes Craigslist a lot. Well, correction; She uses and loves Craigslist a lot. I am using the word love here, and we need to think about why that is, and how it came to be. It's not an easy relationship to form with your customer, especially on the Internet where people can theoretically desert you in seconds, rather than hours or days.

Some speculation:The spartan look and feel of Craigslist could be a factor in this loyalty... That, combined with the fact that Craigslist carries so much data inside it could entice a user who like to discover things (who doesn't?) to use the system more.. Isn't that the rage these days, in movies, TV shows? Find some artifact! Combine this symbol with that one.. Push the button ... at this time.. Wake the Transformer.. whatever. It's like saying, here is a magic wand (very simply looking wand essentially just a stick, you can wave it around), but if you know how to use it, you can do great many things with it.

The domain Craigslist carries data for could also be a factor. Data domain is literally everything. It's life. It's like, mastering Craigslist means mastering life. That is one way of looking at it. Searching the Internet on Google is also on the same wavelength, but Craigslist actually connects people willing to do some service for someone else, so looking for something there is more like looking for a connection. It is livelier.

Hence, the bottomline could be this; sharing the most recent data about people, their life, events is king. That is why I also have great hopes for new augmented reality apps that started showing up on Android phones, and lately on iPhones. It's about real people, real data, and it is uptodate. Point it to some building, you can receive all "likes" people had on this building, that site, this statue, etc. It gives people more flexibility, freeing up their time, which means better productivity, happier, more satisfied customers at the push of a button.

Another example of how 3W is changing another aspect of life; With the help of new technologies, people organize in different ways, and all of these ways are on-demand, decentralized managed through an electronic hub, which, by all intents and purposes, easily replacable and replicable. Enter GPeerReview.

Traditional journals provide two services:

Find capable reviewers who give feedback, and recommend whether or not the journal should endorse a paper.

Publish papers by making them easily accessible to other researchers.

With modern technology, it is no longer necessary for these two services to be tied together. Authors should be able to:

Publish now and seek endorsements later.

Seek any number of endorsements.

GPeerReview attempts to makes it easy for authors to seek post-publication endorsements of their works.

Well or to watertube.. It's called Poparazzi. It looks pretty fun.

Advertising. 60s. Politics. Big City. Put it all together, you get one of the hottest dramas in TV land today; Mad Men. The show revolves around a successful advertising guru Don Draper, a character created specificaly to reflect on a society torn between two waves. Through Draper, we witness life in an economy whose main actors are now white collar workers. Advertisers "dream up" new ways to sell, they analyze society, try to exploit its wishes, its language, past. It is no coincidence the show starts off with Draper working on a challenging project, in a restaurant no less, on a napkin. Meanwhile he strikes a conversation with his waiter, who is black, he is asking him why likes certain product he uses and what would it take him to switch to his customers' product. Right there, we have "mind work" which can be achieved in a restaurant, on a napkin (mobile work), and en environment that brings, needs to bring, all aspects of society together; Draper is talking to a black man. The fact that this is seen a "taboo" back then is painfully made aware to us through a restaurant manager who chides the waiter for "talking too much" to a (white) customer.

But bigger forces are at play here. For Draper, the waiter is not black, nor white; he is a potential customer. His wishes, preferences are important to him, and once we hear them, we understand they are not much different from our's after all. The man is a human. He has a wife, kids, and money he can spend. We get to know one another, understand the world little better.

First episode is full of similar storylines. A faster paced economy brought all aspects of society together who never came into contact before. A Jewish businesswoman, an owner of a department store in Manhattan, has bigger plans for her father's business. Her father sold to Jewish people alone, she wants to sell to everyone. All kinds of prejudices come to surface during their first meeting; Male / female, majority / minority relations are all there in bare display.

But most interesting character is, still, the show's intended focus, Draper. He is fairminded and least prejudiced among anyone around him. He is respectful to women as much a man in that age can be, is open minded, and overall, curious about things around him which is why he is probably successful in his business to begin with. While his co-workers are on womanizing, ethnobashing, caveman bonding trips, he talks to people, wants to understand what makes them tick. He is an ideal of sorts, someone safe to associate with, and through him we start exploring the beginnings of a world that carried much of the seeds of what we are still grappling with today. Drape is torn; first part of the first episode we are made to believe he is some sort of fast living bachelor, drinking, smoking, sleeping with women, but before the show closes, we find out he is married, has two kids, living in suburbia in a post-war, 2. wave industrial nuclear family setting that is awefully familiar to us.. Drape has two lives, and it is perfectly fitting that his character is created at such a crossroad in a society who is leaving something behind and walking towards unfamiliar territory. The starting sequence of a man falling through high-rise buildings says it all: The show is about post-modern man looking for his soul.

Construct a Building One Slice At a Time

I am convinced that in near future, buildings will be constructed by spraying the necessary materials for a building one milimeter slice at a time; which, once combined, will form a building. This is not some scifi vision either. 3D printing which involves materials such as stainless steel is already here. The next step for constructing something such as a building only needs an increase in scale, and finding some way of cleverly combining materials that make up a building. Man I saw the sh.t in my mind's eye: A huge horizontal, flat builder bed with huge tanks of liquid raw materials hooked up to it; the architects feed their CAD design into this machine, and it just starts "building".

What happens to construction workers?

Well f..k the construction workers. There is no need for human driven mindless building in this setup; the whole thing goes from design -> construction .. automagically.

Da future. Better believe it.

An interesting disagreement in evolutionary theory is about our distant ancestors: Some claim we have an aquatic past, meaning our real ancestors lived in water, that we did actually descend from the land apes. This theory sounds interesting and plausable in many levels. Apparently skills such as mastering speech requires concious control of your breath, which land apes cannot, but a creature living in water would need to. There is also the issue of nakedness; land based evolutionary theory suggests that we shed our hair once we lost the use for it - however aquatic theory says all naked animals, such as rhinos, elephants have an aquatic past, and if our evolutionary path followed their pattern, it would mean our ancestors did not shed their hair, the claim is we never had it to begin with. In water hair would be of no use.

Aquatic ape theory has been brought to conciousness by Alister Hardy, and popularized further by Elaine Morgan. Her TED talk can be watched here. It's an interesting idea. I have to say, seeing creatures like Michael Phelps, I am tempted to aggree with this view.. The man is a fish! :)