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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
The good news is that the renewal rate was high enough for App.net to be profitable and self-sustaining on a forward basis. Operational and hosting costs are sufficiently covered by revenue for us to feel confident in the continued viability of the service. No one should notice any change in the way the App.net API/service operates. To repeat, App.net will continue to operate normally on an indefinite basis.
The bad news is that the renewal rate was not high enough for us to have sufficient budget for full-time employees. After carefully considering a few different options, we are making the difficult decision to no longer employ any salaried employees, including founders.
It’s a tough sell, really, to say that the service will chug along just fine without a dedicated team to keep it flourishing. Once people are no longer invested in it, their attention shifts elsewhere and projects like these often become lifeless entities, mere shadows of what they once were.
It’s a true shame, really. I had high hopes for App.net and its potential to thrive. But alas, it seems they were ill-prepared to deliver a crystal-clear message to the world at a time when such clarity was in dire need."
Most of my Minecraft experience is limited to the iOS edition. But when I see this sort of stuff, I remember why I love the desktop edition. This particular image comes courtesy of the Minecraft Reddit.
This is a fun collection of locations from “The Godfather” from around New York City as they sit today. So many of these locations are like home to me, as many times as I’ve seen this film. Fun to walk down memory lane. Weird to see the old house with a minivan in front of it.
I met Andy Nelson as a junior at University of Colorado. It’s all a little fuzzy to me now, but I think that would have been around 1993, maybe ’94. We were both heading in to RA positions in the dorms and ended up on the same residence life team: Baker Hall.
He was in film school at the time, I was in J-school, and we were both goons for movies. But there are people who enjoy films, celebrate the craft, and collect them on then-VHS tapes, and there are those who invested heavily in laser discs. The latter group developed a special relationship with the films they viewed, diving into “Special Features” and “Alternate Endings” long before they were cool. Choosing to listen to the director’s commentary track on a new addition to their library before the main audio track because — who are we kidding — that’s the more interesting stuff, anyhow.
Andy was a laser disc person.
My final graduation project senior year was a documentary film that covered the making of Andy’s graduation project, a short film shot on location at the Denver International Airport. Yeah, long enough ago that we could bring in lights and cameras and film in the terminal without actually paying for a flight.
We lived together for a while after college. We have files of ideas for scripts and projects in mothballs. In spite of best intentions — and some terrific ideas, of course — time and circumstance never saw favor for us to finish.
Then, in 2011, after some years of cajoling, I managed to talk Andy into joining me for a friendly podcast in which we might just muse on movies we like. We did one on Raiders. Then we did one on Temple of Doom. Suddenly we were meeting every single Thursday night like clockwork. After 20 years of trying to actually make movies with this guy, the project we get to stick is a podcast in which we talk about movies. Strange tides.
Andy lives in Phoenix now. He has a fantastic family — they totally outclass him in all the best ways. His was one of the few ports in my drive which gave us a night to do a few shots (the kind in a glass) and set up a fun shoot (the kind with a camera). We went with a poker theme, as we’d just done The Sting on the podcast and I wanted to do an aged piece for Andy, something we might composite into a movie poster some day. Funny thing is, I don’t actually know if Andy is any good at cards. After all these years, we’ve never played.
To Andy, I owe great thanks for so many things. He is an inspiration to me in his love of his craft, and he teaches me more about the art of the story with every conversation. He operates with a machine’s efficiency, putting my own efforts at productivity to great shame. But more than anything, he’s a man of honor. In my own efforts to live true to myself and my word to others, I have Andy as my ballast, always in my head, reminding me what it means to be strong. I’m deeply proud to be working with him and look forward to many years to come.
I didn’t know I had discovered Gina Trapaniwhen I first discovered Gina Trapani. In fact, I’d been reading her work for years before I made a more personal connection with the writer herself.
Gina is the founding editor of Lifehacker.com, one of the most addictive websites for enterprising nerds interested in living systems, and she’d been noodling around my computer in the form of selected Gmail plug-ins she’d written. At the time, I wasn’t in the habit of putting names to developers behind the software I was using, content instead to download and click and strive for freeware as often as possible.
When I quit my job to freelance in 2006, people became more important to me. Not just people, but creative people. That’s when I began to take note of great work, and of the great people behind it. It’s when I developed a taste for favorite bloggers outside of my own circle of nerd friends. It’s when I started to read bylines.
Gina, insofar as she is a technologist and entrepreneur, also taught me to think about marketing in a new way. She is a member of a caste of professional creators that invests heavily in her community, representative of the shift in the market conversation that puts weight not just on the product but on the maker of it. In following Gina’s blog, Lifehacker, her show (This Week in Google), I was able to learn enough about her as a person to inform me about the decisions she made in the products she created. This affinity made me more inclined to continue my relationship with her as a customer of her scripts and her writing and more curious to investigate new projects she launched.
I had been a long-time supporter of her social data aggregation tool, ThinkUp, as an open-source project. I’m thrilled to be one of the first round of backers of ThinkUp as a commercial project launched in the last few weeks. It’s a testament to her great savvy as a technologist and community wrangler that this is turning into such a useful and well-intentioned product.
I photographed Gina beneath the Geisel Library on the UC San Diego campus. If you’ve been following Gina for any time at all, you’ll note that one of her key defining characteristics is just how damned nice she is. Seriously. You’d think she was medicated how nice she is. The tagline for her company is, “It’s nice to be nice.” In thinking of what I wanted to capture in the frame, I couldn’t think of anything other than, “Get Gina mad.”
That’s remarkably difficult to do.
I tried insulting her. I tried calling her names. I tried making faces. It all just rolls of her back. Finally, I said something about a hot story on Fox that morning and she bristled just in time to catch a nice, sturdy growl. Then she laughed.
We shared a delightful walk that day on the UCSD campus, sharing thoughts and insights from social media to parenthood. And while our paths haven’t crossed since, I’m honored to have shared this brief time to connect with a great spirit.
To Gina, I owe great thanks for her work as an advocate in open source, and as a model for positive and engaged interaction online. She’s an inspirational creator and a warm and charming individual to boot.
When I met Joe, I was a corporate refugee. We had each joined the communications department at around the same time — Joe from outside, me as a transfer — and ended up as two legs of a three-legged public relations stool. At the time, I was brought in as the nerd to handle “new media” relations — bloggers, web relations, and the like. Joe, the press.
But we were both journalists, having traded in the press badges to go corporate at a time when corporate communications were changing radically.
We struggled together. The organization was under constant fire from the media, and keeping up with requests and pitches was a constant fight. I watched Joe manage the deluge with aplomb, not only kicking back eloquent and refined responses to media inquiries but maintaining a constant flow of new angles for key publications, always fighting to keep the organization moving forward in just the right light.
Ultimately, our time was not long in the department. The organization didn’t have a clear vision for the conversation they’d wanted to have with the market while we were there, which made for a poor fit. I was given the alumni association for a brief period, and Joe moved on, but I’ll never forget my time working with him, our introspective lunches, and his keen observations on the industry.
To Joe, I owe my deepest thanks for changing the way I think about corporate communications, for approaching the media with a producer’s eye, and for refining what I understand as proactive placement. Joe’s one of the best. I’m honored to be in his professional orbit.
