Category - tools

Useful information about tools for conquering the new paradigms

Today in #TMITM: Nearer My God To Thee

I’m beginning to detect a trend here:

From Recode:

“The American car industry, in the 1950s, dominated the world,” author Andrew Keen said… “Twenty years later, the American car industry had collapsed because they produced cars which were death traps.”

“I think we’re at a similar time in the digital economy,” he added, referring to the prevalence of advertising-driven tech products. “Consumers will and are coming around to the realization that this business model is not in their interest…

…“I think Mark Zuckerberg has been rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic with these latest reforms at Facebook,” Keen said. “I’d like to see him really acknowledge the problem and deal with it directly and come up with radical solutions.”

And while I’m at it:

Keen argued that Apple is “in a better position than Google or Facebook” because its business is not dependent on collecting and monetizing consumers’ data, which he refers to as “surveillance capitalism.”

Listen to the podcast:

Or wait for the book.

Or, maybe somebody can please do the math, and figure out “how much would it cost 2-billion people to actual pay outright for Facebook to substitute for its ad-driven revenue?”

I might be willing to pay as much as I do for Netflix or Spotify.

Maybe.

A Note About This Week’s Digest (June 4, 2014)

To the Vast Legion who read my Weekly Digest:

What you’ll be seeing this week if you follow all the links in the digest (or just scroll down from the main page of the website) is mostly photos from an event that I covered on Sunday – the inaugural iteration of the Farmers Market at the Amqui Station, recently relocated to a park in Madison – the neighborhood locals like to call “Northeast Nashville” (because, you know, EAST Nashville is now SOooo hip and trendy… ).

My weapon of choice these days, the Olympus E-M1 with battery grip, 12-40 f/2.8 lens (24-70 equivalent) and built in WiFi.

My weapon of choice these days, the Olympus E-M1 with battery grip, 12-40 f/2.8 lens (24-70 equivalent) and built in WiFi.

The camera I’m using now – Olympus OM-D E-M1 – has its own built-in WiFi transceiver, which makes it really easy to send photos from the camera to my iPhone and then up to Instagram, Facebook, or whatever. During the event I sent about a dozen images to Instagram, and tagged them with “#blog” which also sends them to this website and posts them here.

The result is not ideal – I wind up with an individual blog post for each image that I send to Instagram. That in turn sends a glut of posts to my Facebook page, to the occasional annoyance of my Legion of Followers there.

Like everything in the digital world, it all works, sorta.

What I would really like is to have a tiled window sort of thing, maybe 6 images total, where the panels rotate to display different shots (kinda like my Instagram account looks when when you view it in a desktop browser) Then all you’d have to do is look at that one window for a few seconds and you’d see a bunch of the images in that one place without any additional effort. I haven’t quite found the app, plugin, or embed yet that will do that, so I’m stuck for now with individual posts and one image to each.

There are also a couple of images that I’ve siphoned out of the “Portals of Stone” collection and posted to Instagram… I guess I’m trying to see who else in the vast reaches of that universe might like to see images of medieval stone ruins cast against a modern deep-space sky. So far the reactions are very favorable but not exactly vast. I’ll keep plugging away at it…

Thanks for subscribing….

–PS
June 4, 2014

When Business Is Like “Twister”

Michael Lovett and Chris Deline

Nice to see a little “ink” for my friend Michael Lovett and his partner Chris Deline for their online marketing and social media venture, Fairly Trill in David Ross’s new online e-news site, NEKST.biz

“I’ve spent most of my professional life in a contorted game of Twister,” says Michael, in a bit of understatement about life as a creative entrepreneur in the too-often web-disconnected world (where sometimes shit works, and sometimes it doesn’t).

I’ve known Michael for a couple (several?) years now and have come to rely on him as my resident web guru. Whatever you see on this site or the others I run has been largely due to his behind-the-scenes engineering. He’s got WordPress pretty well wired, is reliable and dependable, and I recommend him heartily for anybody who is thinking of setting up or needs help maintaining a WordPress installation.

He’s also one of the more interesting and down-to-earth people I’ve met in my (almost) 20 years in Nashville (I think he’s been here for about 3 of them), and somebody I’m proud to consider a good friend.

Nice write-up, Michael and Chris.