Tag Archives: interviews

How Zach Seward gets his news

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Chiefly, though, I make sure I don’t rely on other people to find stuff for me to read. I mean, I do, of course; everything I’ve described so far is powered by other people. But I feel strongly about also hunting for material on my own, which is why RSS remains a huge part of my life. I subscribe to 881 feeds, although recently, in a moment of sanity, I decided to focus on about 200 of them that I find most valuable. (To pick those choice feeds, I mostly followed the advice of Marco Arment: “RSS is best for following a large number of infrequently updated sites.”)

[...]

RSS is frequently said to be a dead technology, which is silly on a lot of levels, but I don’t begrudge the many people who say that, for them, Twitter has replaced RSS. It’s just that I place a premium on reading stuff that others aren’t and don’t find that my Twitter stream reliably reaches into the bowels of the Web.

Zach Seward — Getting the News

The Setup: An Interview with Amber Case

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I sometimes run a very old version of The Sims to optimize living conditions for two people with busy lives who want to achieve maximum happiness and self actualization. I run simulations of floor-plans and then try to find places that are similar to those floorplans. It took two years to find my current place of residence, and not only is it cheap, but I can run Sims whenever something seems odd in the house. Turns out that an errant chair or a table configuration might cause undue friction and, over time, decrease joy and happiness. It’s difficult to step outside of life and watch it from an isomorphic architecture view in 30x speed, but the Sims allows you to do that. It’s kind of my version of debugging life, and it’s another reason why I have a PC lying around. I don’t play the game unless I’m trying to figure out a more optimal living condition. I don’t use this religiously by any means, but as more of thought experiment.

Amber Case — The Setup

The Local-Global Flip, Or, “The Lanier Effect”

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The Local-Global Flip, Or, “The Lanier Effect”. Absolutely fascinating interview. Two technologies on the cusp of going mainstream: self-driving cars and (dis)assembling robots. Also, technological efficiencies tend to have a positive benefit to the already wealthy (you save more money) but a negative benefit to the already middle-class or poor (you don’t have any money to begin with). What do we do when machines can do it better?

Q&A: CMN’s Rusty Lewis and Jon Beck about new advertising options for College Publisher

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Q&A: CMN’s Rusty Lewis and Jon Beck about new advertising options for College Publisher. CMN’s new managed WordPress offering is required to use their advertising software, ultimately meaning they still take a cut of the overall revenue.

Q&A: Rusty Lewis on CMN’s new business model

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Q&A: Rusty Lewis on CMN’s new business model. It just hit me: College Publisher inadvertently made it cost-effective to hire a developer and host it yourself. Student publications who don’t, and instead pay $2K/year for a terrible CMS while also donating their advertising revenue to CMN, aren’t long for this world. I can’t believe College Publisher would stick this to 80% of their clients.

Ev Williams: The Challenges of a Web of Infinite Info

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Ev Williams: The Challenges of a Web of Infinite Info. According a co-founder of Twitter, “what’s ‘dead’ is the original model of the web, which was completely distributed and decentralized.” Instead, large corporations will own huge tracts of land of which netizens sharecrop small plots. The corporation will control how the community operates and how individuals form their identity.

This future is slavery.

Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell on the future of software

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The biggest thing for the near future is auto-cars, which will change everything… The costs are there right now. The Google car actually was cost-effective. Think of no traffic congestion, highways that can hold 30 times as much traffic. Half the energy costs. It just goes on and on. The only issue is how powerful will be the Luddites.

[The chief objection of the Luddites will be] the Schumpeterian creative destruction of entrenched interests. For example, every Teamster, cab driver, UPS driver, all these drivers will need to be retrained. Insurance will drop to a fraction of what it costs now. People don’t understand how horrible the average driver is. The number of body shops will be 20 percent of today. It’ll be disruptive, and they will not go away without a fight. Of course, bars will do a great business because drunk driving will be OK.

The first phase will be to keep the seat belts and seats facing forward. After a while the passenger compartment will become a more communal experience, with a table, a desk, a video screen, etc. Think about being dropped off at a restaurant and the car parking itself a mile away for $3. In San Francisco, as I remember, it’s currently over $20 for parking.

CNET Q&A with Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell (via Kurzweil A.I News)

Thoughts on Twitter (as it applies to education)

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Susie Bartel, a University of Oregon journalism student in Feature Writing 1, is writing an article about instructors using Twitter as a part of their curriculum. She requested I offer my opinion on Twitter as it applies to education. The questions are hers via email; I thought I’d respond on my blog so she could link to it as primary source material (even paragraph by paragraph thanks to WinerLinks).

Susie: When did you start using Twitter? Was it for personal, professional, or educational purposes?

I’m almost positive I joined Twitter in April 2007, although I don’t think I started using it regularly until that summer. Since episode 1, I’ve been a regular listener of Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech. I believe I heard Twitter mentioned first in this episode, and signed up shortly after.

In 2007, all use of Twitter was experimental. There was no distinction between personal, professional, or educational. It was a new tool, and people had to invent how to use it. Since the beginning, up until about three weeks ago, I used Twitter as a mix of all three. I posted images from awesome vacation sights, scored a two-year gig at Publish2 by tweeting “I want to live in startup land”, and tapped the knowledge of people smarter than I by tweeting questions I’ve run into.

Susie: Have you always been open to using Twitter?

Yes, until three weeks ago.

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