Here are a few shots taken from around the place I grew up in Colorado. It’s been a long time since I lived here, but I have never forgotten just how arid and stark it can be. There is a beauty here, but it’s a harsh, unrelenting beauty. The plants are tortured and frail or designed to torture others. As are the animals. Behind everything is the backdrop of the mountains, from where our hope comes (here, in the form of water).
I hope you enjoy.
Following my post about using the iPad recently, I’ve spent some time using more of the content-focused apps. As I mentioned before, the iPad has turned out to be a great device for consuming, reading and just experiencing media. This has obvious benefits for video, and many of the examples I’ve seen have made use of multi-media and show off the screen. But I tend to read a lot. I tend to read news from content publishers (BBC, Guardian, Gizmodo) and blogs.
One of the first apps I downloaded was Stephen Fry’s “FryPaper” app. It’s basically Stephen Fry’s blog manifested as an iPad app, and it’s one of the most exciting things I’ve seen. This isn’t because it’s swish, flash, or gimmicky. Indeed, it is none of those things. It simply provides the content from Stephen’s blog in a format that is very, very easy to read on the iPad. It seems to focus on simple design, and that’s it. It’s got a very limited set of features, all of which I’ve used—like using the sharing feature to tweet or email links to individual articles.
So, why is this so exciting?
Because it’s a glimpse of the future of well-published stories. It’s a snapshot of a time when anyone can buy/download an app for a single blog, and get all this content beautifully laid out.
So, I contacted Stephen’s FryPaper person, Andrew Sampson of SamFry about building FryPaper.
Here is that quick interview:
Zach: Why make an app for a blog? What does the iPad bring to the table that a browser doesn’t?
Andrew: Stephenfry.com’s blog is a very popular website in its own right. We wanted to offer that content in a newspaper format, for free on the iPad. We wanted to show how you could strip back other contend and concentrate on what was popular. Less is more, was our rule. It was a good first stepping stone for our company to develop an iPad App on our own.
Zach: What did you have to consider in designing it?
Andrew: We considered that the iPad is a new device and that whilst newspapers and magazines are glamouring for it, many would argue that a user interface is yet to be defined. We went for the most elegant and simple user interface we could develop. We also wanted to make sharing it easy. I might add that I don’t see how magazines and papers will be able to sustain the large multimedia elements of their initial iPad offerings. It’s brilliant that they did but it cost them a fortune to produce the content, let alone the app itself.
Zach: Any major challenges or hurdles?
Andrew: Cost. We were very lucky to find a Canadian firm that presented their credentials and production pipeline from the beginning. We’ve had many false starts on app development in the last year, primarily because of cost. Marco Tabini and his team became SamFry’s partners for FryPaper.
We were also lucky to secure the sponsorship of G-Technology by Hitachi. This was the first time we’ve ever had another company believe in what we were doing. They showed extraordinary faith and trust in us, even to the degree of letting us design the sponsorship placements within the app. It only adds up to two ads but boy, it’s allowed us to fund the FryPaper for iPhone, which is due out in the next few weeks.
Zach: From your experience, is there any advice you’d give to someone wanting to build a similar content-focused app?
Andrew: Be confident in the depth of your content. Stephen, Nicole, our graphic designer and I, have a strong focus on design. We think content and the user interface synergy is the single most important aspect in delivering electronic content. It harks back to our traditional theatrical beginnings.
Zach: Thank you Andrew!
Image taken from stephenfry.com.
I was recently asked a very interesting question via formspring. An anonymous person asked me:
I think the ability to “filter” — to absorb information from many sources and produce a useful result, quickly — is what really defines the “digital native.” Your thoughts?
Below is my response. I’d be interested in what you think.
Interesting…
Ok, so this idea is pretty loaded: it’s full of meaning. “digital native” is a phrase which is semantically rich, and possibly not very precise. It sounds like the kind of topic which could have an entire book’s worth of words written to describe the meanings.
I’ll take one crack at it, though, by using a subject I better understand: linguistics.
In linguistics, we talk about different kinds of language users. Generally, there are native users and non-native, with many exceptions and all sorts of complications when you start looking into the ethnography of the topic. But, essentially, native language users absorb a language through their childhood (the ability to “acquire” language in this way seems to disappear around puberty), and they develop a fluency in it. Many linguists believe that this also shapes their thought patterns—i.e.: a native of English thinks in English in some way. Most at least agree that there is also cultural acquisition of some nature too. It’s all context.
Now, if I don’t speak a language and I want to learn, I can learn through what many linguists call “competencies”. The idea is, very basically, that people think and learn in different ways, so develop different tactics. So, some might have a natural tendency to learn words, grammatical forms and therefore develop strategies which allow them to learn vocabulary. Others use a communicative competency, and learn by trying to communicate rather than learn a form and learn basically through trial and error. (It’s closely tied with personality: some people are happy to make mistakes verbally, others are more happy to learn on their own etc…).
I’m going this circuitous route, because I think the way someone learns a non-native language might be a helpful metaphor for the way people work with trends with which they’re unfamiliar. So, in this metaphor, a “digital native” will have the natural acquisition and competencies which come from existing in an online (I assume that’s at least part of what you mean by “digital, by the way) world. They’re used to many sources, ubiquitous connection, visual information on any topic instantly, multi-media content and hardware that’s actually quite complex to use. The thing is, to a native, it’s not a very conscious thing. Someone born into an interconnected world would be more frustrated with NOT being able to find out about anything, about not having some form of connection to information and by being unable to understand their hardware. Filtering information is less of a conscious act and more of a subconscious process. They live in a very full world, so they have already developed ways to work with all this information.
You might see more clearly the idea of native and non-native through different competencies, and perhaps whether the way someone thinks and frames their conscious efforts are affected by the presence of connection. Does a “digital native” think to try terribly hard to remember someone’s phone number, working out some sort of pneumonic or rhythm to memorise it? Or would they only have to if their connection were severed?
So, this is a long road to one context in which filtering might be a part of the competency of a “digital native”. I don’t, however, think it’s definitive; any more than saying someone who can pronounce the “th” sound is therefore defined as a “Native of English”. There are myriad concepts which are begged to be explored in the idea of being a native anything: context, competencies, aspirations, metaphorical constructs etc etc etc. But, I think the idea that someone born into a community which has lots of information will develop a certain fluency in dealing with it. They might think differently, or simply have had the tools in their “hands” for longer—moving from conscious cerebral thought about information to more subconscious, automatic use of digital tools. Filtering, in this construct, is a competency—a skillset and general tendency of a digital world. Natives would be better, non-natives would have to learn by comparing with their own skills and adapting.
But, I think the phrase “digital native” could be too full of loosely-encoded meaning to be very precise, or even useful without a wider, shared understanding of what you mean by it.
A couple weeks ago, I wrote to my MP to raise concern for the so-called “washup” of last-minute legislation being used to push through the now highly-controversial “Digital Economy Bill.”
My reasons to write are several, and I will devote some more time to explain these later, but wanted to post my MP’s response verbatim (my address removed only.)
Philip Dunne, MP Ludlow
23rd March 2010
Dear Zach,
Thank you for your email of March 17th regarding extreme internet laws.
For nearly twelve years, the Government has neglected this crucial area of our economy. We believe a huge amount needs to be done to give the UK a modern regulatory environment for the digital and creative industries. Whilst we welcome aspects of the bill there are other areas of great concern to us.
We want to make sure that Britain has the most favourable intellectual framework in the world for innovators, digital content creators and high tech businesses. We recognise the need to tackle digital piracy and make it possible for people to buy and sell digital intellectual property online. However, it is vital that any anti-piracy measures promote new business models rather than holding innovation back. THis must not be about propping up existing business models but creating an environment that allows new ones to develop. That is why we were opposed to original clause 17 and are still opposed to clause 29 which props up ITV regional news with BBC License Fee payers money.
The Government’s failure to introduce the Bill until the eleventh hour of this Parliament has given rise to considerable concern that we no longer have the time to scrutinise the many controversial and detailed measures outlined in their proposals. We fully appreciate these concerns. However in certain areas, including measures to allow website blocking in certain carefully proscribed circumstances, there has been substantial debate in the House of Lords. I also believe they should be debated in the House of Commons before we agree to them. Only if we are confident that they have been given scrutiny that they deserve will we support them.
IT is also worth pointing out that many of the fears about the Bill’s proposals are not entirely accurate. People won’t be discunnected from the internet without due process. And it will only be a small minority of people who consistently infringe copyright who are disconnected, not the average person who happens to have done so once or twice. Even then, they may be able to reconnect using another ISP immediately and without penalty.
Please rest assured that my colleagues in the Shadow Culture, Media and Sport and Shadow Business, Innovation and Skills teams will do everything in their power to work towards legislation that strengthens our digital sector and provides the security that our businesses and consumers so desperately need.
Thank you again for taking the time to get in touch.
Yours sincerely
Philip Dunne MP for Ludlow
Following a tweeted link to “the funniest comment thread ever”, I spent a few minutes laughing at the expense of hundreds of confused Facebookers. They had been leaving comments on a ReadWriteWeb blog post about a recent venture with AOL to share login access. It took me a few seconds to get the joke: there were scores of comments like:
The new facebook sucks> NOW LET ME IN.
and
please give me back the old facebook login this is crazy……………..
and
All I want to do is log in, this sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
One of the RWW team confirmed in the comment thread that these were genuine: that the traffic was coming from Google referrals using search terms like “facebook login”.
Hundreds of Facebook users googled for the Facebook login page and, landing on RWW’s post, left comments expressing how frustrated they were with the new layout and their inability to login.
Even after RWW put up the following message in the post, people continued to complain:
Dear visitors from Google. This site is not Facebook. This is a website called ReadWriteWeb that reports on news about Facebook and other Internet services. You can however click here and become a Fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook, to receive our updates and learn more about the Internet. To access Facebook right now, click here. For future reference, type “facebook.com” into your browser address bar or enter “facebook” into Google and click on the first result. We recommend that you then save Facebook as a bookmark in your browser.
This is hugely funny, until it becomes sad.
After a few pages of befuddled (and often abusive) lost Facebookers, the comments started to contain more genuine commenters observing their enjoyment of the confusion, trollbaiting, and teasing the confused crowd. Some were genuinely clever (*likes*), but many followed the basic forum trajectory of ridicule.
What struck me, however, was my own ignorance in this. I had no idea just how many people rely on services like Facebook who don’t have even a basic grasp of how they’re doing it. The fundamental “browser” metaphor makes it pretty clear that you need to “be” a certain place in order for things to work the way you expect them to. Even without some form of teaching, that level seems too obvious not to get.
But it clearly isn’t. The implications are potentially worrying. Hundreds of people were able to leave comments on a site that wasn’t their destination stating their outrage and confusion. One commentator made a good point about them being lucky that ReadWriteWeb is a relatively benign place to accidentally land; but what if this were a post about Wells Fargo or a health insurance company?
Like many near-geeks, I’ve helped friends and family on technical issues in the past, and there is a level of assessment involved: Where do I need to start to get them using this? But nothing prepared me for this.
This may be hilariously funny, and it might be disconcerting, but it’s most definitely a lesson.
Image “Noob” by @keeg via flickr, Creative Commons By, Non-Commercial license
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Matthew 22:37-40
I have been struck, at various times over the years, that the Church isn’t all it’s cut out to be. I mean this almost literally. I’m thinking of the “church” as a pattern—like a tailor uses—of how to live, just now. It’s not that it can’t be altered, embellished, customised, and stretched—these are right and useful. It’s more that the pattern itself is often distorted, or badly copied.
What we know of Jesus’ life is full of relationships, and the “Kingdom of God” he talks about is built through the interactions of parts of his “body”—the people of the church. There are whole bunches of metaphors around who we are and what we’re called, but the prime message is about getting along and looking after one another. His definition of who’s in, and who’s out isn’t particularly clear—something I’m sure will raise some eyebrows—and included prostitutes, dodgy businessmen, lawyers and murderers. The only group he seems to have no time for are the religious.
Holding a weekly service has been the definition of church for a very long time, especially among protestant Christians and especially in the West. It seems that often church means attendance at a weekly service. It has become part of our language:
ʻI have church on a Sunday,ʼ ʼIʼm off to church,ʼ ʻWeʼll have a big roast after church,ʼIn the new Testament, the word most commonly used for church is ecclesia, which means: ʻa called-out company’—but for what have we been called out?
A couple years ago, I was thinking of a project our “church” had been involved in: the Noise. The Noise is an annual event which brings together literally scores of villagers to help one another out in practical ways. Over the past years, it’s tackled elderly folks’ gardens, public paths, school buildings, and family’s houses.
As something to look forward to each year, it’s hard to beat. I cannot think of a single place where I’ve seen young people and very old people and everyone in between helping out and simply sharing a common love. Needs are met, relationships forged (and mended) and people of all ages work, and laugh, and eat together. It’s a picture, to me, of what I think I mean by “community”.
But, what struck me was the idea that a noise only lasts for a moment and quickly fades. It also lead me to think that the church wasn’t being church, except at this time of year. Please understand, I don’t mean that nothing good happened all year, but that something of the essence of a love-driven community was only really experienced during these few, summer days.
Eventually, I started thinking that instead of a “project”, perhaps we should think in terms of a framework, or a network, or another platform for experiencing and sharing this love actively. I called the initiative “resound”—a noise that keeps going.
What follows are some of my thoughts, slightly updated, from the time.
Resound’s principles include:
ʼ15 Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that confess his name. 16 And do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased.ʼActive love or ʻlove in actionʼ is a primary facet of Christianity itself. Jesus repeatedly challenged lip-service and religiosity and his teachings are littered with examples of a love so deeply held that it motivates action. We read (1 John 3:17-18):
ʻ17 This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? 18 Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.ʼWe are also told that if someone needs food and we say: ʻBe blessed with food,ʼ but do not feed him, we are uncharitable. Relationships form the basis of our faith in Jesus.
Christianity is described as a relationship with God through Jesus. Fellowship plays a vital role in humanity. We use language to interact, we are capable of loving without reward, and we are born into families which (ideally) teach us to get along. I do not believe that all of this charity, love, and fellowship is to be a reward for ʻbecoming a Christian,ʼ. It should, rather, be a consequence of the Love God has so freely given us.
I believe that the Church is present and active in the community, and that its ʻneighboursʼ are a huge part of its life. In traditional weekly services, there are several members whose roles are obvious (preacher, singers, musicians, and—unfortunately —the technical team) and those whose role is needed but less obvious (deacons, elders, and those who count offerings). For the most part, however, the church comprises people whose role is not so much unobvious as undefined. There is no precedent in the Bible for people to have no active role in the church. If this means that there is only so much that can be done in a Sunday service, perhaps there may be more outside this which requires their attention. Many people who cannot preach can paint. Many who cannot sing can scrape old paint off an elderly ladyʼs house. Resound offers a framework for more peopleʼs ministry. It should offer support to natural village networkers as well as to handy(wo)men.
As part of being ʻin ministryʼ through doing practical needs and building relationships, Church is taken outside the church. I believe that our acts of worshipful service are as spiritually significant as the songs sung and prayers proclaimed within the walls of a special building. Without discounting the need and importance of worshipping and gathering together, Resound offers a chance to put principles into action and let the Spirit free to minister. If we find our neighbours difficult to love and serve, surely we will not find anyone easier.
