It's me, Pete... from the podcast.

Apple’s Lineup

We often talk about Apple as a company that does things a little differently when it comes to marketing. You know, that whole “reality distortion field” gets hauled out from time to time to talk about how Apple hooligans fall for the company’s emotional industrial complex as they line up to buy their 7th consecutive iPhone.

By comparison, Apple has a contrarian approach to the market. They sell primarily on function and secondarily on features. They focus messaging strictly on brand lift rather than that which lifts the sector. They limit their line width and depth to those products that offer core functionality and let the economy spring up around those products supporting fringe needs. That’s why we don’t see a waterproof iPhone, for example, and see a robust market for accessories that fill the waterproof need.

While that’s clear if you’ve been watching Apple for a while, it became so much more clear yesterday at the company’s iPad Air 2/Retina iMac announcement.

I find this image fascinating, not for what it presents, but for what it omits. This image made the presentation twice, reinforcing Apple’s core product line. But, what?

From right to left, we have the iMac, presumably the retina model, the engine in Apple’s consumer desktop line. Then comes the MacBook Pro Retina, the flagship of the company’s laptop line. Then, the iPad and iPhone, measuring sales in the multi-hundreds of millions of units around the world and propelling the company to riches since the iPhone launch in 2007.

Then we have oddities. The Apple Watch sits at the end of the line, a product largely shrouded in mystery, unreleased in a wearables market that can only graciously be described as confused based on current competition in the space. We have no reliable data on how this product is going to perform, and it targets segments that range from teens on the low end to the top 1% on the high, a segment spread wider than just about any other in Apple’s catalog.

Still, unreleased.

And whither the Mac Pro? The trashcan rocket ship positioned at the highest of the high-end power hogs — the editors and engineers looking to eke out every last cycle — is nowhere to be found on this lineup of Apple’s usual suspects.

This image is important because it represents in clearly what is important to Apple. It’s an example of the kind of focus long legendary at the company, the practice of saying 1,000 no’s to every yes. Even better, it represents a pure example of marketing actively developing on a global scale. Focus on the products that leverage the internal strengths of the organization in the development of them. Differentiate to satisfy the needs of the majority of potential users in a segment. Demonstrate those products satisfying those needs effectively and clearly across channels.

Apple’s communications success is less the result of some sort of magical hypnosis than it is the application of clear, pure, and unadulterated marketing skill embedded across the company. It’s often taught, though rarely applied. And that, as it happens, makes all the difference.

Connected Courses drives context and collaboration

One of the core tenets of my courses at Marylhurst University is context. When we work to define context for our study, we provide a framework for broader understanding of the world around us. We’re then able to see how we impact culture, and how culture thereby impacts us in return. 

I love this stuff. I’m sure most of my students hate me by the time we’re through with our time together. No, it’s not a new thing, but it’s my thing, and I’m sticking to it. 

That’s why I’m so excited to be participating in ConnectedCourses this month with talented educators and thinkers. The premise: 

Connected Courses is a collaborative community of faculty in higher education developing networked, open courses that embody the principles of connected learning and the values of the open web.

In short, we’re studying together the promise of federated learning, learning that counts on educators and learners building their own platforms and connecting them together using open web technologies. These instructors have been building courses calling on students to publish their own blogs, learning in public, syndicating the results of their studies in a way that leverages collaboration in a new, exciting — and terrifying — fashion. 

I’ve been teaching using a closed platform by comparison, Moodle. Moodle is a wonderful open source tool, but the implementation of it at my institution is closed, a space in which students are able to connect with one another — the 15 or so students in their own cohort — but isolated from the braintrust outside the university’s walled garden. 

As a result, students lose control of their work when finished with each course. But what about their opportunity — their obligation — to contribute to the body of knowledge? What about their ability to control the work they’ve done, to share it beyond the confines of the course? These things pain me each time I cross a brilliant insight from my students, and it’s becoming more and more clear to me that part of my role as an instructor goes beyond lectures, probes, and assessments. It’s about teaching students to contribute more fully as a member of our society. 

Even as my own institution’s technology defaults to closed, I’m heartened by two things. First, I have been consistently supported in my own meager experiments to push the classroom experience with new tools and experience with media. Second, our own Dr. Nathan Phillips, director of our Center for Learning and Technology, invited me to join this course. That speaks volumes toward the institutional awareness of change and the promise of greater, broader connections to come. 

Robin Williams

Photo: Ken Hively

Ihnatko’s Epic List of CBS Orchestra Clips

Andy Ihnatko does the yeoman’s work of building the resume for Letterman’s band:

Here’s a coincidence for you: earlier on Monday, a friend of mine and I were talking about late-night talk shows and he praised The Roots as being every bit as good as The CBS Orchestra.

I didn’t disagree with him per se. But I had to raise the point that Late Show With David Letterman presents The CBS Orchestra with many, many more opportunities to show their range and talent than The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon creates for its band, and they’ve had 30 years in which to show off. The band doesn’t just play the show out to commercial and back again. They’re also the house band. Over the past thirty years, they’ve backed up every style and genre and generation of musical guest. I hope The Roots are given the same opportunities (because they’re a terrific band) but I doubt it. It’s a shame, because in their Late Night and Late Show incarnations, Paul Shaffer’s band has proven an immense range and depth of skills.

The whole piece is wonderful and includes a set of clips I had to watch from start to finish. Catch this. It’s so, so good.

Greg Klassen Wood and Glass Furniture

Greg Klassen makes tables and wall hangings. He expertly weaves the grain of the wood as a topography, splits surfaces with blue glass, and suddenly you’re looking at winding rivers and subtle landscapes.

Jonathan Foley at Chautauqua on the Global Food Shortage

Jonathan Foley just wrapped up his time on the Chautauqua Amphitheater stage discussing the future of food. To preview his talk, here’s a snippet of his editorial today in the Chautauquan Daily:

You’ve probably heard it many times. While the exact phrasing varies, it usually goes something like this: The world’s population will grow to 9 billion by mid-century, putting substantial demands on the planet’s food supply. To meet these growing demands, we will need to grow almost twice as much food by 2050 as we do today. And that means we’ll need to use genetically modified crops and other advanced technologies to produce this additional food. It’s a race to feed the world, and we had better get started.

To be fair, there are grains of truth in each of these statements, but they are far from complete. And they give a distorted vision of the global food system, potentially leading to poor policy and investment choices.

To make better decisions, we need to examine where the narrative goes off the rails.

The whole piece, and his subsequent talk, is supremely eye-opening. It’s a sober review of the data and a surprisingly bearish view of GMOs when presented through his lens. Worth checking out. And for those who weren’t able to make it to the lecture, here’s his talk, “The Other Inconvenient Truth: How Agriculture is Changing the Face of Our Planet,” from TEDxTC.

Terpstra on Tags in OS X

Brett Terpstra has been digging deep into tag performance across the Mac ecosystem. Losing Spotlight comments exactly as he describes in this post is what originally pushed me off of tagging in the first place. As with all things Terpstra, there’s much to get from his investigation and given some of the changes he points out here, I might just be able to get back into tagging myself.

Tags are generally safe within the OS X ecosystem, from Darwin tools to iCloud sync, but third-party tools can wreak havoc on your carefully-crafted tagging system. As a proponent of tagging, losing tags inadvertently is a fear (and one shared by any tagger). I’d like to keep this resource growing and would appreciate your input.

Here’s more background on tags in Mac OS.

“The Putter”

The Putter from shaun bloodworth on Vimeo.

The Putter is a delightful short film by Shaun Bloodworth showcasing the work of Cliff Denton. Denton is a putter, or more fully, a putter togetherer — a man who puts together scissors by hand.

Everything plays well in this film, from the light on the silver in these delicate close-ups to the mesmerizing music courtesy of The Black Dog. Take four minutes and learn something, then go buy a pair of these things from Ernest Wright & Son for about $68.

Facebook, Trust, and Ethics

Alex Wilhelm at TechCrunch:

The average Facebook user has something akin to an unwritten social contract with the company: I use your product, and you serve ads against the data I’ve shared. Implicit to that is expected polite behavior, the idea that Facebook won’t abuse your data, or your trust. In this case, Facebook did both, using a user’s social graph against them, with intent to cause emotional duress.

This story keeps getting better and better. The real trick here is that Facebook did, in fact, have permission to do this. Explicit permission, in fact, which we all agreed to in the 10,000-word license agreement we all signed to use the service. That we didn’t read it is on us, the users.

But that a license agreement we may have signed years ago grants permission for psychological manipulation flies in the face of ethical, informed consent. It’s legal, it’s just not right.

More Data, More Misery

Seth Godin:

More information doesn’t always make us happier. At some point, improvement turns into a game, something to be won or lost, completely losing the point of the project we set out to do.

Sophie’s Eye and the Olloclip 4-in-1

This is the first year in about the last ten that I haven’t brought my complete camera rig to our annual Chautauqua pilgrimage. It was sad to leave it at home — I’m a touch awash without it — but I’ve been working straight for weeks and I’m tired of the weight. So, I decided that I would write it off with the excuse that I would be shooting exclusively with my iPhone 5s and see just how far I can go with my pocket camera.

Lots to report on that front, which I’ll certainly do at some length later. For now, I have to sing the praises of the OlloClip 4-in–1 lens. The photo at right was taken with the 15x macro attachment with the iPhone, handheld, of a sputtering and hungry 12-year-old and, in spite of a few focus issues, I’m in love.

So, the four lenses. When you buy the attachment, you have a wide angle (roughly double the iPhone’s field of view) and a fish-eye (180˚ with appropriate bubble view) screwed into either side of the black slide-on attachment. Unscrew these lenses and built into the attachment itself is the 10x and 15x macro lens. It really is an elegant solution to a challenge otherwise solvable only by way of software. The Olloclip lets you get back to the truth of the glass, and some really cool images as a result.

I’ll be posting more throughout the week as I try to shoot a piece of Chautauqua that I haven’t shot before.

Niche Networks for Professionals

With the growth of Facebook it’s practically axiomatic that starting a new social network is akin to a start-up aspirin. So, we guide most clients interested in cultivating a network around their audience to leverage the existing dominant tools and networks to do so. LinkedIn and Facebook have their warts, but if your objective is straight audience share, it’s a lot more work to build your own when your audience is likely fed up with too-many-logins-itis.

But that’s not to say that there isn’t a case to be made otherwise. Jon Bischke over at Techcrunch offers a brief rundown of a few pro-level networks whose audience is not well served by the big players:

But there’s an area where signs are emerging of “different networks for different types of people”: professional networking. We’ll start with the obvious. LinkedIn is the dominant professional social network. It has become the system of record for the online resume for many professionals. And the growth of LinkedIn as a blogging platform shouldn’t be underestimated.

Dave Winer Defines the Blog

Dave Winer:

It’s an important distinction because we need a word for what we do. The word we used was usurped by people who clearly felt threatened by blogging. I’m glad the Times is dropping the pretense that they were blogging. Hopefully they can exit with as little fanfare as possible, and let us continue to try to develop this art, without their interference.

The blogosphere is a curious space, where competing interests and priorities can create a delicate balancing act. Having cut my teeth as a journalist, I know firsthand the pressures of maintaining a pure and honest intent, while also taking into account the practical and economic realities of the information economy. But every so often, a luminary of the blogosphere steps in to offer a wise and steady hand. Don’t miss the chance to read the whole piece – it’s brief, but absolutely worth your attention.

Share My Shame: Buckaroo Banzai

This week over on The Next Reel, we begin our short (but hopefully fun) Guilty Pleasure Series with Buckaroo Banzai. Andy’s never seen it. I don’t get that guy sometimes.

We chat about the world building that the filmmakers infused this film with and find big and obscure films with which to compare its world building. We discuss the actors from top to bottom and how they all infuse the film with great energy, helping to create this world that feels fully formed, even if the script is a bit convoluted. We talk about how the film was received and how it became a cult favorite. And, inevitably, we spill out a few quotes from the film because, well, it’s full of them. We have a great time talking about Pete’s guilty pleasure this week so check it out!

Elizabeth Gilbert on Creativity Surviving its Own Failure

This is a lovely and short presentation from Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat, Pray, Love,” on the trials of writing her second book which, according to her, bombed. Her exploration of this movement toward becoming bulletproof is something from which we can all likely learn something. My favorite image:

So think of it like this: For most of your life, you live out your existence here in the middle of the chain of human experience where everything is normal and reassuring and regular, but failure catapults you abruptly way out over here into the blinding darkness of disappointment. Success catapults you just as abruptly but just as far way out over here into the equally blinding glare of fame and recognition and praise. And one of these fates is objectively seen by the world as bad, and the other one is objectively seen by the world as good, but your subconscious is completely incapable of discerning the difference between bad and good. The only thing that it is capable of feeling is the absolute value of this emotional equation, the exact distance that you have been flung from yourself. And there’s a real equal danger in both cases of getting lost out there in the hinterlands of the psyche.