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Wednesday, March 29, 2006 |
Geekonomics. Why abundance sucks, and other unexpected lessons of the game economy. By Edward Castronova from Wired magazine. [Wired News: Top Stories]
Or, as Jorn put it in blinking the piece: Without scarcity there's no game .
6:33:28 AM 
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Everywhere OS. "The real problem for Microsoft is it has invested about as much money as the Gross Domestic Product of more than a few African nations in an operating system that became out-of-date about a year before it was due to ship. The simple fact is we don't need another desktop operating system. We need an Everywhere OS." [unmediated]
6:32:11 AM
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Selfish Gene: commemorating 30 years of landmark genetics book.
On Edge.org, John Brockman writes,
The toughest ticket in London's West End last week wasn't for a new mega-hit musical from Cameron Mackintosh, or a new play by Tom Stoppard. The people who flocked to The Old Theatre were greeted by famed British radio and television presenter Melvyn Bragg ("Start the Week") with the following opening words:
"They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines."
The words are from The Selfish Gene, by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. And the evening was a celebration of the thirty year anniversary of the publication of his classic book. (...) Physicist and computer scientist W. Daniel Hillis has noted:
"Notions like Selfish Genes, memes, and extended phenotypes are powerful and exciting. They make me think differently. Unfortunately, I spend a lot of time arguing against people who have overinterpreted these ideas. They're too easily misunderstood as explaining more than they do. So you see, this Dawkins is a dangerous guy. Like Marx. Or Darwin." Part of Dawkins' danger is his emphasis on models derived from cybernetics and information theory, and that such models, when applied to our ideas of life, and in particular, human life, strike some otherwise intelligent people numb and dumb with fear and terror. Some have called the cybernetic idea the most important in 2000 years...since the idea of Jesus Christ. And that would make it one of the most dangerous ideas.
Link to archived audio (1 hour 22 minutes, and in two formats: streaming, or downloadable 75 MB mp3) and 12,000-word transcript. Speakers: Daniel C Dennett (Tufts), Sir John Krebs, FRS (Zoology, Oxford), Matt Ridley, Ian McEwan, Richard Dawkins, FRS (Oxford), Chair: Melvyn Bragg; Organiser, Helena Cronin.
[Boing Boing]
The Selfish Gene is, of course, available at amazon.com.
6:31:54 AM
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iBeth on HOA reform legislation in Florida: Gosh I hope this bill passes. I've already written to my legislators about it. Among other things, the bill would limit terms of board members and ban associations from filing liens and foreclosures for amounts under $2500. But after reading...
6:31:03 AM
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more content objects..
I've gotten some feedback on my content objects post, and I'm realizing that I should expand and clarify a bunch of things.
In a world of content objects, there are no copies. There are no mp3 downloads. Special Edition DVDs are obsolete. We think we want to own this content because we've only known audio and video content in a world of masters and dupes.
The content sits online in one place and one place only. There are no intermediaries. You interface with that content by calling it up from the source server which transcodes a stream best suited for your access device.
In the master+dupe world, there are 1 million instances (read:paper copies) of The New York Times in circulation each day. In the content object world (read:online), there is only one NYTimes.com that gets 22 million unique visitors to one instance. If we continue this loose analogy, we can make the argument that accessing music through iTMS is like distributing web page content by downloading pdfs.
The difference between video captured to media during the production process and your final content object is the meaning conveyed through the final edit. A content object is curated. A content object can also be inserted as a whole or in part into a playlist, making it part of a greater content object.
Content objects are neither blogjects nor spimes though they share many of their underlying ideas of and rely on a confluence of emerging network and processor technologies in order to work. Content objects are probably the close cousin of blogjects and Project Xanadu. But I need a little more time to figure out the lineage.
I used to complain that our content shouldn't be married to our objects. Now I realize that our content shouldn't be bound to their particular instances.
(Original post here. -kc.) [unmediated]
6:30:26 AM
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