Theoreti.ca

I just discovered Hugh MacLeod and in the course of browsing his cartoons stumbled on this gem:

Somewhere along the line I figured out the easiest products to market are objects with “Sociability” baked-in. Products that allow people to have “conversations” with other folk. Seth Godin calls this quality “remarkablilty”.

For example: A street beggar holding out an ordinary paper cup cup won’t start a conversation. A street beggar holding out a Starbucks cup will. I know this to be true, because it happened to me and a friend the other day, as we were walking down the street and a guy asked us for some spare change. Afterwards, as we were commenting about the rather sad paradox of a homeless guy plying his trade with a “luxury” coffee cup, my friend said, “Starbucks should be paying that guy.”

Actually, my friend is wrong. Starbuck’s doesn’t need to be paying the homeless guy. Because Starbucks created a social object out of a paper cup, the homeless guy does their marketing for free, whether he knows it or not.

Although I suspect he does. I suspect somewhere along the line the poor chap figured out that holding out a Starbucks cup gets him more attention [and spare change] than an ordinary cup. And suddenly we’re seeing social reciprocity between a homeless person and a large corporation, without money ever changing hands. Whatever your views are on the plight of homeless people, this is “Indirect Marketing” at its finest.

This, along with a recently read post by Doc Searl, leaves me wistfully wondering why I never hear this kind of talk from the marketing people I know. Not that I want to encourange any of them to think up new ways to exploit the homeless.

On the subject of organizing yourself I just came across the Hipster PDA. It is essentially a bunch of coloured index cards and clips. It is an alternative to the PocketMod which I blogged before.

I have to blame my sister-in-law and Shawn for getting me into this organizing binge.

Yep is the best new software I’ve come across in a while. Yep is to PDFs on your Mac as iPhoto is to images and iTunes is to music – a well designed tool for managing large collections of PDFs. Yep can automatically load PDFs from your hard drive, search across them, tag them and let you assign tags with which to organize them. It also lets you move them around (something I wish iPhoto did) and export them to other viewers, e-mail and print.

Thanks to Shawn for pointing me to this.

According to Reporter’s Notebook: Highlights from the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association a lifetime member of the AHA was knocked down and arrested for jaywalking in Atlanta. Others were stopped and warned.

No one seems to be suggesting this was a move to intimidate historians. This AP story suggests the policeman was not on duty but was hired by the Hilton Hotel to “direct pedestrians to use crosswalks”. Is it normal for hotels hosting conferences to hire off-duty police to discourage jaywalking?

Well I’m back from vacation. We (the family) went to the South of France, Barcelona, and Italy. Lots of pictures – so many I may never download them

In a column in today’s Globe and Mail, Doug Saunders critiqued Jeremy Rifkin for ignoring the hidden immigrant labour upon which a European life of “deep play” is built. Intrigued, I went looking for what “deep play” is, and here is an interview that defines it, Claiming Our Primary Role in Our Society and Global Economy; An Interview with Jeremy Rifkin. Deep play is all the meaningful activities we engage in from art, religion to culture. It’s what we work to make time for? Is it play? Is it deep?
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Dear readers, I’m back from vacation. In order to entertain you, I personally visited a number of sites of interest around new media and communications technology in Eastern Canada. The beaches of PEI had nothing to do with the research expedition!

GeoffreyRockwell.com, my personal site (along with its mirror at McMaster) has been updated with a design by Alex Stevens. I have added a “publications” page with preprint PDFs of many of the papers I have written and published. Enjoy …

In an entry before on the Academical Village I speculated about hybrid campuses that have both virtue and physique (virtual and physical extension). Now I want to put this another way: How can the intersection of art and technology be expressed in a campus or building? I am interested in examples of buildings designed to house art and technology programs, research and development. Are there ways the design of space can facilitate the desired interactions and exhibit the intersection of art and digital technology? What would Jefferson design?

Two campuses come to mind as example, IT University of Copenhagen – The ÿrestad Building is being purpose built to house a new university around IT that includes Aarseth’s Game Studies unit. If you look at the animations you can see features like the use of glass, large atrium, and projections that suggest an architectural implementation of the values of the new university (which are direction-finding, forthcoming, and accountable.) Openness and transparency is probably a better word than “forthcoming” – I suspect something was lost in translation.
The second, and older, example is the MIT Media Lab: Wiesner Building that was designed by I.M. Pei in 1985. MIT is now added a new building next to it, see the Plan #54. Just as interesting is the Gehry Stata Center for CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab).
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Tuesday I went to the 2004 convocation where Daniel Lanois was honoured along with our third cohort of Multimedia students. Convocations are an emotional event for me – after all the marking and lecturing I can give the students a hug and feel joy for them. These rituals are not meaningless, they orient us to what has been achieved and allow us to be our best for a moment – to congratulate students rather than critique their work.
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