Contrived transparency

There's no faking authenticity! I'm still not to my dual-ending posts, so for now suffer through linkhell...

After giving my vague thoughts on transparency to the future of tomorrow (aka bored college kids), I found this nugget from Aaron Brazell on contrived transparency.

The Apple Tablet

iPhone was obviously Apple's beta of a tablet. But with Big Fruit Co. getting into consumer electronics, doesn't it make sense to move ever further away from the computer while still using the computer for the core device in the home?

An Apple tablet won't be thought of or pitched as a computer any more than the iPhone was. It will, however, still include OS X, swanky hardware, an SSD drive, etc. It will be a mini-computer. But to the consumer, it will simply be a magical tablet capable of doing almost everything the average user does.

Check online bank account, surf the web, etc. are a given with Safari. So how about a nightlight/clock/alarm clock? Or an ever-changing slideshow device (which allows you to stream any Apple TV or Flickr or .Mac photos)? Best yet, a true Universal Calendar. This ties to Google Calendars, allowing an entire family to coordinate schedules. School calendars, work vacations, birthdays and dentist appointments all easily retrieved and shared throughout a house.

Form factor will be key, so the tablet will pretty much be about the size of a Kindle, only thinner and more elegant. No orientation. No handedness. Just a gleaming sliver of silver and glass. A TV on steroids. The iHome.

Notes on transparency on the web

I'm giving a talk tonight on "radical transparency on the web" and what it means. Not sure if I can condense it as I'd like, but I definitely wanted to cite my sources here...

Jason Calacanis

The Attention Blog (web archive)

Problogger

Brandfailures

Wikipedia

Reality Me

Dave Winer

Covenant Quality

Here's a link to the presentation (PDF)

All good things...

If you watched "Star Trek: The Next Generation" you'll know what is coming. In the next month or so (before we go on our annual beach pilgrimage) I'll wind down blogging on this site.

Before I do, however, I'm working on a couple of longer posts. Something I intended to do this year, as per Steve Rubel's advice, was to do more long-form writing.

While I am not tired of talking tech, I think I need to focus my energies elsewhere for now-- I can always drop a post onto Download Squad or TUAW, after all. I can't be as snarky (well, maybe on DLS), but it'll get my tech blogging yaya's out, which is the point.

Instead, I'm going to focus my energies on my Scruffy City blog. It's my Knoxville blog, where I have recently come into contact with some truly amazing East Tennessee tech bloggers, pundits, good folks, etc.

I feel it is important, at this time, to direct my energies into my family and my city, because that's where I can have the most direct impact. And let's face it-- so few people are reading this it just isn't worth it any more. Besides, the world is full of ranty tech blogs. I like to think I'm helping reduce the noise part of the signal-to-noise equation.

Two posts are coming, then that's all folks. One will discuss the good side of tech, and the other, the dark side. Enjoy.

The Ultimate Mashup in the Sky with Diamonds

Just finished reading ReadWriteWeb analysis of the Google App Engine and I immediately thought of Apple. The companies are BFF's now, which makes me question everything the Big G does and how it might fit/fight a future Apple directive.

Google App Engine is a huge thing, potentially. Huge for Apple too. Imagine integration with iPhone. Let's face it, while installed apps will shortly take over, cloud-based apps or cloud-aware apps on iPhone are the future of computing. Among one of the potential opportunities: finally the ability to sync everything. That's a lot of moving parts, but something we're working on already, right?

Perhaps I'm being optimistic. But I can see a lot of future B2B action between Google and Apple. The more the two brands co-mingle, the greater they become. And ultimately you need a lot of inertia to displace Microsoft in the business space. While I love FileMaker to death, I have to wonder what a "real" data system via Google could do with an OS X front-end that works similarly (but better) to Access. Would that be the "all in" needed to make the iWork suite compete?

Hire life-a-holics

I feel like I'm in a time-warp, since before SXSW I was really busy, then got busier during SXSW, then got really sick, and I'm only now reading through Jason and C.K. and Duncan's round-robin regarding "workaholics." I remember hearing about it, but didn't have the bandwidth to read up on everything. I had an opinion at the time, but given certain issues in my own life lately, plus some of the comments made around the issue at hand, now's the time for me to chime in...

Basically, if you hire lifeaholics, you'll be fine. I noticed one commenter suggested the book "Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Mihaly talks a lot about this, of course (I'm just now finishing this book). But the bottom line is pretty much a cliche: "if you love what you do, you don't call it work." Workaholics have no balance, no flow, no real life because they drudge through the bullshit because the bullshit is in and unto itself what they are fighting for and against. Sad.

Lifeaholics, on the other hand, embrace what they do and who they are. They strive for balance and they achieve flow in their work because the LOVE it and wouldn't want to do something else. I only worked for Jason for a brief period, but having seen plenty of bloggers come and go will tell you: this is the secret. Lifeaholics don't say stupid shit like "I don't have time for that" when they are really saying "I'd rather piss around on Myspace for a few hours instead of following up on stuff that matters."

I'm not sure one can teach this level of passion. I think you either have the hustle or you don't. I think many of us (myself included) can use a re-awakening of this passion, and events like SXSW certainly help. But ultimately you're getting people who either love the game, or hate to even watch. I have no patience for the latter and nothing but admiration for the former.

The tech industry is blessed with lifeaholics who start companies and lead the charge publicly, but cursed with a bunch of lazy ne'er-do-wells to man the IT departments of every Fortune 500 company. I've been fortunate enough to befriend a number of lifeaholics, and hope to count myself in their ranks. Where things bog down is when we have to interface with the workaholics, their dour attitudes and smug complacency that merely stinks of the meeting rooms and make the rest of us look at work as drudgery.

But I've said enough already, you get the point. Back to life!

fun but silly dream app

So I wound up getting sicker than I've ever been for as long as I've ever been just after SXSW, otherwise I'd have written about SXSW already. That is still "coming soon" in part because I want to listen to some of the sessions I missed.

However, of utmost importance is this really stupid idea for an app. I certainly don't have time to roll it myself, but here's hoping some clever hack out there can do it.

Basically I'm looking for a web page where it takes a random flickr photo, pairs it with a random tweet and mashes them up to look like one of those stupid inspirational posters (the ones all the rage in call centers across the globe to build morale).

I've whipped up a manually-generated one here.