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  • Steve Spalding 10:16 pm on July 20, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , working

    One day I am going to convince Borders to give me my own phone line, then I’ll never have to leave.

    Since this is the first one of these I have put together, I constantly find myself tooling around with the format. For example, at first I figured I would just keep writing until I got tired or my pen ran out of ink.

    If history has taught me anything though it’s that working without some kind of constraint isn’t really working at all. People need to give themselves some broad limitations to work within in order to have the structure they need to do something interesting, rather than speed skating towards whatever shiny new object happens to pop up in front of them.

    The constraint I choose for this project was time.

    I am giving myself ten days and a loose topic framework (information) and seeing what ends up coming out of it.

    This realization has been really good for me. Without it I figure I would have devoted way too much time discussing the relative merits of Barnes and Noble versus Borders.

     
  • Steve Spalding 10:14 pm on July 20, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,

    All market analysis should be fully-cocked.

    A much shorter version of the last screed goes something like this:

    Your willingness to try often, take chances, accept criticism and blaze your own trail is worth a Hell of a lot more in a world of me-to copies and content pollution than any half-cocked market analysis.

     
  • I bet Shakespeare and Poe spent a lot of time worrying about efficiency

    Steve Spalding 10:12 pm on July 19, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , ,

    “I bet Shakespeare and Poe spent a lot of time worrying about efficiency.” Actually, they probably did, they just weren’t quite so insufferable about it.

    Fear of digression is core feature of modern man. We hate going “off topic,” because we think it’s not efficient and everyone knows that efficiency is really the only reason we should be communicating in the first place.

    Marketers and Strategists, like myself, don’t help matters much. It’s our job to create neat little boxes out of intellectual chaos so that our clients can at least say something. What we’ve ended up doing is creating a world where people assume good, successful work can only exist if it exists within one of these boxes. It’s six sigma or bust in content town and if you want to argue about it I’ll be sure to throw you some bread crusts in the food stamp line.

    As you may have been able to divine, this line of reasoning is a monumental load of bull hooey. Every really memorable piece of content, every interesting business, every successful creator has done well not because of how closely he has managed to match existing forms but because fundamentally he didn’t care one way or another about what anyone else was doing.

    Successful creators aren’t the jaded artist types trying to recreate every tiny detail of the world in their own image, but they also aren’t the starched suit, pleated skirt corporate types who drone on about market size and value propositions. The people who end up truly changing things are those who understand the rules, why they are there, and when they should be used but aren’t so hamstrung by them that they aren’t willing to do something interesting and different.

    They put themselves out there and leave it to the world to judge them.

     
  • Steve Spalding 10:09 pm on July 19, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , engineer, ,

    Long ago I decided to form all my social and economic theory by watching reruns of Sliders and Dr. Who.

    Since we’re talking about “generating time,” I thought it wouldn’t hurt to take a little road trip into Speculation Land, where technological utopians like myself wax poetic about how bits of silicon may one day save us from ourselves.

    Here’s a bit of personal history. I am actually an Electrical Engineer. Weird, right? I studied Artificial Intelligence at the University of Florida for quite sometime before grabbing my Masters, sticking it in a closet somewhere and buying a one way ticket to the Internet.

    Either way, what always fascinated me about intelligent machines wasn’t necessarily the idea of being able to hold a conversation with my robot butler, but the idea that intelligent software could act as a means for us to copy ourselves in a way that might actually allow us to create more time.

    Imagine a world where everyone ran a piece of space-software on their hyper-computers that understood the types of things that we were interested in, the way we did did research and the methods we used to parse information once we found it. The only difference between the software agent and you would be that the software could act millions of times faster, slicing and dicing data down into summaries that were orders of magnitude more relevant than anything you could find on your own. It almost wouldn’t need anywhere near as much coffee.

    Not only is this kind of software possible in the (relatively) near-term, but it may also be one of the only ways we have of seriously increasing the supply of Attention in our economy.

     
  • Steve Spalding 10:07 pm on July 18, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , ,

    The greatest invention the world will ever see is one that lets us put our Attention on credit. By greatest I mean worst. By invention I mean crime against humanity.

    The term “barriers to entry” as it relates to the Internet is all mucked up. We are convinced that the primary barrier to entering a market is money. Yes, that’s true, in the world that existed before we started handing out bandwidth and teaching everyone HTML, money was a pretty big thing even for Internet folks.

    Now we have publishing, hosting and distribution costs that are negligible. Does that mean that barriers to entry don’t exist? Not by a long shot. Now, the currency isn’t cash it’s Attention.

    We need to look really closely at Attention if we are going to understand where this train is taking business an entrepreneurship in the near term. The amount of Attention we have available to us is fixed. There is only 24 hours in a day, and those precious few hours that we aren’t sleeping, working or spending time with our loved ones are being increasingly taxed by every new post, video and startup to enter the market.

    That end result is that the barriers to enter the web have been steadily increasing for years, and will continue to increase until we either find a way to create more time or to use the time we have more efficiently.

     
  • Steve Spalding 9:53 pm on July 18, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: filter, ,

    You know, I hate to say this but my Twitter followers can beat up your Twitter followers.

    Many very clever people see the web as this magical tool that will make us all publishers, that will democratize content creation in some fundamental way, allowing John and Jane Everyman to share their ramblings on the same footing as national broadcast media.

    While this has turned out to be may more true than any of us would have expected, this idyllic land of popcorn and Unicorns can only be maintained if our ability to filter information starts to catch up with the volume of information that is constantly being added to our lives.

    When you live in a world where every hour a day or more worth of video is being added to Youtube and everyday, major blogs the world over can add 30+ new posts that will inevitable end up near the top of Google, what you are left with isn’t Democracy – not by a stretch. What your left with is the same, basic hyper-concentration of influence that we’ve come to expect from the real world. The only difference is that this time it’s way cheaper to maintain.

    People will always pick the sources that are easiest to find.

    Those sources are the ones that have built the biggest platforms and widest communities.

    It’s becoming increasingly difficult to build those communities.

    The question left in the air then is how long before individual creators get shaken out of the mix.

     
  • I hope to one day shake her hand, because she will very certainly be fantastically strange

    Steve Spalding 9:51 pm on July 18, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,

    Somewhere on the planet there is a publisher who will immediately recognize what I’m trying to accomplish with this book. I hope to one day shake her hand, because she will very certainly be fantastically strange.

     
  • Steve Spalding 9:49 pm on July 18, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , technology

    Tony Stark is my Wingman.

    I’m trying to have a good mix of rants, analysis, aphorisms and good old fashioned, “here’s what I done thought up this week,” in this book. Since it is after 4 AM, let’s take a page from that last column.

    I have never bought a coffee table book before, but today I did, Iron Man: The Ultimate Guide to the Armored Hero. Before you ask, I have been reading the comic for the better part of two decades. It’s funny how a Blockbuster movie success can raise the profile of a previously forgettable hero. Tony has been interesting to me since I was a wee tot for two reasons, the first is that he flies around in a suit of armor, which to the hear of a six year old boy with aspirations of saving the world and a love for futzing with technology seemed awesome.

    The second and more recent revelation is that he is the perfect analogy for what the Information Age can ideally create, a person who truly owns the technology and can transform it into knowledge. Knowledge he turns around and uses to change the world he lives in.

    I readily admit that this is probably a convenient excuse to read more comic books.

    I am OK with that.

     
  • Steve Spalding 9:47 pm on July 17, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: art,

    The main difference between Art and Content is that Art can be worth many times the sum of its parts while Content is often not even worth its parts.

     
  • Steve Spalding 9:44 pm on July 17, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,

    Greed is…Kind of OK, you know, sometimes…

    That last entry was a little bit painful to put on a page.

    It had that weird Gordon Gecko feeling about it that since the end of the 80s we’ve been trying to wash off of the noble pursuit of business. We really want to believe that everything we do is some kind of high-minded pursuit to improve the human condition. This is a good thing. It is a lot better to be a slightly delusion idealist than a shiftless corporate raider any day.

    Unfortunately, the nature of doing business means that we can’t always operate like this and that we should try to be honest enough to take a more moderate view of our motivations. By admitting to ourselves that we are as capable of being ruthless as we are of being selfless, we guard against those toxic self-deceptions that lead to really bad things sneaking up on us.

     
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