Recently in trends Category
The New York Times ran an article this week describing how old school speakeasys are having a resurgence, with no other purpose other than nostalgia.
On a nondescript block in Williamsburg, not far from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a new bar and restaurant called Rye opened last week.Try to find it.
There's no sign out front. The facade, an artfully casual assemblage of old wooden slats, gives the place a boarded-up, abandoned look. It does have a street number, painted discreetly on a glass panel above the front doors, but that's it. Like a suspect in a lineup, it seems to shrink back when observed.
According to William Gurstelle, author of Absinthe and Flamethrowers: Projects and Ruminations on the Art of Living Dangerously, says the most satisfied and successful third of the population is eager for some risky business.
From his guest post on Boing Boing:
I found that moderate, rational, risk takers, that is, those with scores between the mean and one standard deviation to the right are the people who are most satisfied with their lives. I call that area "the golden third" because it's roughly 1/3 of the population. Studies (and there are several) show that people who take just a bit more risks than average, that is, those who live their lives in the golden third, tend to do better than average. They tend to be more satisfied with their lives and more fulfilled. To me, that's a stunning conclusion.
So in the spirit of risk-taking, something old and something new:
Downhill longboarding (at insane speeds) [go to 2:20] and a flip-tastic new free walking highlight reel.
In the late '90s, activist, provocateur, and aging hippy John Barlow began calling this drift [toward digital socialism], somewhat tongue in cheek, "dot-communism." He defined it as a "workforce composed entirely of free agents," a decentralized gift or barter economy where there is no property and where technological architecture defines the political space. He was right on the virtual money. But there is one way in which socialism is the wrong word for what is happening: It is not an ideology. It demands no rigid creed. Rather, [the digital revolution] is a spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, aggregation, coordination, ad hocracy, and a host of other newly enabled types of social cooperation. It is a design frontier and a particularly fertile space for innovation.
NYT: Wired is ad-starved and propped up by Conde Nast; online readers vastly outnumber subscription readers.
Innovation in online media business models would help right about now. Can we aggregate that?
Richard Florida - whose "creative class" theory I spoke about before - recently wrote a blog entry on the merits of high-speed rail and its place in the economic recovery (crisis/opportunity).
To review, the "creative class," he states, will be an important socioeconomic group if this nation stands a chance going forward. Our nation was ruled, first, by an "agricultural class," then a "working class," and finally a "service class." But Florida says it will be the "creative class" that will drive our ace in the hole: innovation.
His three necessities for a thriving "creative class," or the Three 'T's:
1. Talent, or the need for a highly talented, educated, and/or skilled population
2. Tolerance, or the need for a diverse community and a "live and let live" ethos3. Technology, or the need for technological infrastructure necessary to fuel an entrepreneurial culture.
Talent is tied to our education system. President Obama, are you listening?
Tolerance, as Friedman wrote in The World is Flat, is a cornerstone of every thriving society in the world. (And the United States were built for tolerance.)
Technology, or rather a technological infrastructure, is important. And although you may not think about high-speed rail as a technological advance, it is. But it isn't being employed enough, especially in America.
High-speed rail. It doesn't sound important, interesting, or particularly life-advancing, but it is. This isn't the Monorail to EPCOT that we're talking about.
It is 95.6 miles from New York to Philadelphia. Driving time is roughly 1 hour 49 minutes. Utilizing the current fastest high-speed rail? 36 minutes! And North America only needs 12 rail lines (one per mega-region; see below). It even makes us happier. (Emphasis mine.)
Philadelphia becomes a veritable suburb of NY, its commute time shrinking from nearly two hours to slightly more than a half hour. Washington-NYC and Boston-NYC become hour-and-a-half trips. San Diego becomes a bedroom suburb of Los Angeles. And commute times shrink considerably across Cascadias' main cities: The time to get from Portland to Seattle shrinks to just over an hour, while travel between Seattle and Vancouver is reduced to less than an hour. It would take just slightly longer than an hour and a half to get from Charlotte to Atlanta. And commutes between Dallas and Houston and Dallas and Austin shrink to an hour and a half or less.
Better high-speed rail connections promise considerable economic efficiency gains. And they also promise to relieve the psychological burdens of commuting by car. Research by behavioral economists like Nobel prize-winner Daniel Kahneman finds that long car commutes are among the things that most adversely affect our happiness.
Tweet, tweet. That's where it's at right now (and probably will be for a while).
Where the people go, so we go. Follow us, or sign up and come follow us: twitter.com/memeticians.
Phone updates, micro-blogging, and - my favorite - the aggregation possibilities. (See: Twitter Trends). What's not to like.
Cincinnati, have no fear. Shadow Hare has your back. Armed with a taser, handcuffs, pepper spray, and nifty superhero outfit, Shadow Hare, a 21-year-old "crime fighter," is patrolling the streets and fighting crime.
From a local news write-up:
Shadow Hare is not alone in his quest to fight crime. He heads up a group of men -- and one woman -- called the "Allegiance of Heroes." The members communicate with each other in online forums. Among the members are Aclyptico in Pennsylvania, Wall Creeper in Colorado and Master Legend in Florida.
"I've even teamed up with Mr. Extreme in California -- San Diego -- and we were trying to track down a rapist," said Shadow Hare.
Check out the Heroes Network picture with tags. These guys need marketing help with their superhero names. Tothian? Nostrum? Are these crusaders or new brand-name drugs? (Thx Tricia).
Is Facebook becoming too popular? Do social networks have a tipping point? ReadWriteWeb calls it the reverse network effect. To understand the network effect, think about the fax machine. The first fax machine was worthless. Absolutely worthless, because it couldn't send the fax to anyone else; no one else had a fax machine. The more people that purchased fax machines, the more value each machine had, i.e. the bigger the network, the better the network.
A reverse happens when the scale of the network drives away users. Is Facebook too popular? Maybe. Skype, they say, will be one of the only networks immune to it.
Skype gets more useful with each new user, and each new user promotes Skype, consciously or unconsciously, for his or her own reasons. Even better, the cost of providing the service goes down with each new user, and that is really unusual (a function of Skype's P2P architecture). Google and PayPal also benefit from each new user, but they still have to service that user, and that costs money. In the case of a video service such as YouTube, the servicing cost is significant. So Skype really is in a league of its own when it comes to network effects, and that is why it may become the world's largest telephone company and the biggest economic success story of the Web 2.0 era. (Google Voice, having just thrown its hat in the ring to battle Skype, will be interesting to watch. My bet is on Skype.)
MySpace topped out and, once Facebook came along, it was relegated to second-class status. Well maybe that's overstating it - it still serves it's original purpose for bands and such.
But now Twitter is coming up in Facebook's rear view mirror. What next?
My Facebook crave never reached even modest levels, but I have a page. I reached a tipping point recently when some undesirable outcomes and unforeseen visitors started to ruin my experience. I think that's when the reverse started for me. I immediately cut to 20 friends and hid myself. Why 20? Why not? I had to draw the line somewhere. This even led to an embarrassing conversation where I told a friend that he made the cut, only to realize soon after that he did not. Marc, I swear you were number 21 (just missed)!
Okay, so all women don't drive like this, but it is funny. You might want to turn down the volume, though; it's really annoying. (thx, shaun)
Watch more YouTube videos on AOL Video
cre⋅a⋅tiv⋅i⋅ty - the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.
Creativity, the forefather of innovation, is paramount. As Americans, our chief export for years has been the fruits of our innovations. Especially in the struggling global economy, we'll need to strengthen our strong suit to stay relevant. So that means we need to be more creative. How do we do that?
One of the preeminent thinkers in the field of creativity found the zone. You know the zone. You've been in the zone. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it the flow. You've felt the flow. You know the flow.
Creativity is a fickle beast. Csikszentmihalyi claims that only two elements come into play when finding the zone: skills and challenges (see chart). If your challenges are greater than your skills, you'll find yourself apathetic, worried, or anxious. If your skills are greater than your challenges, you'll find yourself apathetic, bored, or overly-relaxed. Feeling of arousal in the former and control in the latter signal a close proximity to the flow. It's there. We just need to find it. And we need to find it fast.
If you get it right - if your challenges and skills grow together - you're in the flow. That's where we all want to be. It is the state of "intrinsic motivation." It is a self-powering, serendipitous feeling that comes about when work and play overlap.
Csikszentmihalyi found nine byproducts of "feeling the flow:"
1. Clearer goals
2. Higher degree of concentration and focus
3. Loss of self-consciousness
4. Distorted sense of time
5. Direct and immediate feedback to action
6. Balance between ability level and challenge
7. Sense of personal control over actions
8. Activity becomes intrinsically rewarding
9. Increased awareness of action results
In the past, Kottke has talked about the nearly identical realm of "relaxed concentration." He gives examples from sports and entertainment, among others. Csikszentmihalyi calls it "focused attention," but that is a distinction without a difference. Either way, all else falls away save the task at hand.
Knowing how to find the flow is important, especially with the upcoming rise of the creative class. Yes, green-collar jobs will be extremely important and creativity must play a role in that, but the creative class in general will be the backbone of the American ideal in the near future. If we are to continue the longstanding tradition of the US as trailblazer and leader in the global economy, creativity must be fostered. Innovation will die if creativity is stifled. Innovation will stall if creativity is just left alone. Innovation can only thrive if creativity is actively pursued. This shall be our task.
Dr. Richard Florida uses the term "creative class" and found it's existence tied directly to three requirements (or the three T's):
1. Talent, or the need for a highly talented, educated, and/or skilled populationThat's it. That's all we need for creativity. Then we match skills with challenges and get in the zone. And off we go. Happy. Healthy. Wealthy. Wise.
2. Tolerance, or the need for a diverse community and a "live and let live" ethos
3. Technology, or the need for technological infrastructure necessary to fuel an entrepreneurial culture.
