Prok Prokofy Neva
Jaikus from Prok
Thursday, 24 May 2007
Wednesday, 23 May 2007
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yes but is that a good thing or a bad thing?
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I don't think you should accept either a Nikon or a Canon or anything. That is, if you're just "some guy" with no source of income for what you do, then perhaps you'll need to put out the tip jar, take the Nikons. But if you run some consulting agency or podcast with advertising, I don't think you should take blogola unless you have it clearly demonstrated as an ad. Like the Mobil ad space in the New York Times on the oped page which is purchasable but has a clear demarcation. What I don't like about all this ESC and MOU and whatnot purchased blogging is that you can't tell the reviews from the ads. And that's deliberate. IN fact the bloggers want you to think that writing and interacting with the brand is all just one cool stream that you are immersed in and nobody ever ever has to be critical or think of consumer advocacy because it's all just an endless party. Well, bullshit, it's not.
I think you have your integrity to think of. If you appear at conferences and get interviewed in the media as "an industry expert" I think you owe it to yourself not to be "bought" by toting a Nikon that they GAVE you so that the brand tag sticks out somewhere. That's like being one of these bought-and-paid-for sports stars. Journalists and bloggers shouldn't be athletic stars and movie stars, they should be the antennae of the race.
Monday, 21 May 2007
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People find it so hard to give to adults. They aren't cute. They aren't perfect. But if we took that $100 for every laptop, and gave it even just to start with, every medical worker and every teacher in the poorer African countries where their governments are either failed states or kleptocratic authoritarians, and made sure that those families had salaries to buy the basics and begin to work toward education and betterment, there'd be a context for all those laptops for their games. Isolating out children is emotionally manipulative, and it implies that it is hopeless to help adults, or it is necessary to make children be the cutting edge and not allow adults to retain a leadership role for what their societies need.
It's the entire licentious extremist "child-centric" concept run amok even into foreign policy. Did African leaders ask us to provide each child a laptop? Did even organized childrens' groups or child advocacy groups working locally in Africa come up with this idea? No, of course not. Those groups look for more basic things, ranging from clean water to grants for radio stations where kids and their advocates can have a voice in conflict areas. More basic stuff.
No, this concept emerged from the wealthy, wired, and disconnected West -- disconnected not as to wires or Internet, but disconnected to the realities on the ground.
Should we hold laptops, the Internet, or virtual worlds like Second Life hostage until other areas of development like water or education catch up? Of course not! I hate faux third-worldism with a passion. Nobody told the Internet developers to shut up until there was clean water, yet they scorn virtuality and Web 2.0 using that argument.
That's not what I'm saying, however. I'm saying don't carve up the issue unnecessarily to generations, or to functions like "a cool laptop". Give a salary to help a whole family, and among other things, they might chose to buy a cheap laptop...
Sunday, 20 May 2007
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The question is whether you could keep this instant and dynamic enough all the time, to have the resources to devote to it, like the Twittervision and Flickrvision -- it's endless, all the stuff happening in SL and other worlds. Where would you make the cut? What slice to take? Because include too much, and you have the virtual world itself all over again.
Include not enough, and it's boring. Will Wright had a hive snapshop of the Sims Online, one snapshot, showing the concentrations of buzz -- this many were building, this many were kissing, this one were dancing the tango, etc. It was neat, like a conversational piece, but then what? The green dots on the map of Second Life already give us some of what the purpose of the hive capture wants to do.
The talkshoe thing is distracting if you've gotten used to the big scroll inworld.
That's what I like about the theory of Twitter, anyway (not its reality). You get the answer to the question "WHAT are YOU DOING". So you have the YOU as the green dot, the WHAT as "in build mode" and the doing "laying my house foundation". You want this to be opt-in, though, so that it doesn't invade privacy. People build community voluntarily, not be scaped data. So you let them give the 3-d Twitter mode that they flick on and it yields presence, mode, activity or object or place, "Prokofy is in Winnipeg in edit mode changing a texture". It's not going to be superfascinating I'll bet because most people will shut it off when they are in "clicking on my sex poseballs" mode.
Saturday, 19 May 2007
Jaikus from Prok