ASH-10 Notebook

Updates from August, 2009

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  Pete Ashton 1:24 pm on August 14, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: community (2), Hyperlocal (2), newspapers (2)

  A quote taken out of context from here:

  Many people still read home-delivered print (more than you might think). Print readership isn’t directly measurable, but there are plenty of research tools that all report a decline in frequency — and along with it, engagement with civic life.

  This bugs me. I’m not doubting that engagement with “civic life” drops when you remove the source of information about it. I’m just wondering what it gets replaced with. I feel more engaged with civic life in my city than I ever did when I actively bought print media. I’d like to think I’m not unusual in that regard.

   

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  Pete Ashton 7:26 pm on August 7, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
  

  Someone said the other day there’s nothing new about this stuff. I think the stuff was related to social media tools but let’s assume it was because it’s true. With a few exceptions all these things are nothing new.

  So why are they interesting? Two things:

  1) Accessibility. All these tools are either absurdly cheap or free (with restrictions or hidden time costs). This is the Printing Press or Photocopier argument. 

  2) Mass adoption. As Lord Shirky says, bigger or more us radically different. When you move from 1000 to 1000000 people doing a thing the nature of that thing changes. 

  So it’s all about access. That’s all that’s new really.

   
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  Pete Ashton 8:08 pm on August 2, 2009 | 2 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: aggregation, Hyperlocal (2), talkaboutlocal

  Been thinking about what you might call “hyperlocal aggregators” of late. It’s not a novel idea by any stretch but possibly a natural next step. Say you’ve got a load of blogs, forums, etc about a local area. How do you deal with all that stuff? Group blogs like Jon Bounds’ Brumblr network are a possible solution but they do tend to follow the 80/20 rule of participation and still act as a bottleneck. The Hyperlocal Newswire is another possible solution but it’s more search based than perhaps I’m thinking.

  I keep returning to I Can Has Cheezbuger for some reason, not so much for the system they use but for the notion of letting stuff bubble up through activity. Or maybe Flickr Interestingness is the thing. Popular isn’t the thing here. I don’t care if lots of people have looked at a thing but I do care if a few people found it really compelling. How do you measure that?

  And, ultimately, how can this be connected to a specific geographic place?

   
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  Pete Ashton 12:23 am on August 2, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: curation, data, process

  Post the Collective Memory stuff I’ve been thinking, what are these for anyway? Once you get over a certain number of links it’s incredibly doubtful that the casual reader is going to follow more than a few, even moreso when there aren’t any descriptions next to the links.

  Probably best to think of them as part of a process, the creation of a pool of raw data to be used in some way.

  Actually, here’s a nice example. I dumped all 1200 of my TTV photos from Supersonic in a movie because I haven’t had time to select and process the 100 or so that will stand alone. Someone has taken section with Jarboe, slowed it right down and soundtracked it with some of her music.

  Nice bit of remix culture going on there.