Disqus - Latest Comments for mark2one

Re: Book Bitch - The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger I...

Mark Ury — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:30:51 -0000

I threw up a little when I saw the trailer. It was exactly what I feared—some shiny Hollywood version with upbeat pop tunes and a "how zany" undertow. I immediately pressed Niffenegger's book to my body to make the hurt go, if only for a while.

Re: Friends versus Followers: Twitter’s elegant design for grouping contacts

Mark Ury — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:32:55 -0000

Great topic Andrew.

As with all decisions, form should follow function. Twitter is an open system, ergo non-reciprocal feeds work well. FB was designed for closed groups, so reciprocity is at the heart of FoaF. Both can be ruined, though: accept too many non-friends in FB; always follow followers in Twitter.

(Flickr is a good case study of "inbetween." Caterina and Stewart started with the notion of "attention isn't always reciprocal," but then added contact granularity to enable item-specific privacy (Contacts/Family/Friends). Again, this is appropriate for a system that is specifically focused on publishing one-item-at-a-time (the photo), whereas Twitter simply lets you protect the entire feed (since no one is going to tag each tweet for privacy).

As Andy Smith noted above, the result of FB and Twitter's design makes them wholly appropriate for very unique tasks—another reason one won't replace the other.

Re: Personal Branding & The Art Of Engagement

Mark Ury — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:24:49 -0000

Leigh, your hair is so pretty!

Here's my resume.

Re: The Network Is My Search Engine

Mark Ury — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:19:06 -0000

When I was a game producer we talked a lot about how multi-user games solved the limitations of non-player character AI. People are just better at processing and delivering responses than the best un-aided algorithms.

Pagerank is no different. It's good—and gets better as more people link—but it's simply not as good as the explicit exchange among people and their own harvested taxonomy.

Re: Why Digital Marketing Is Like Trying To Lose 10lbs.....

Mark Ury — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 11:44:52 -0000

Great headline: check
Perfect (and personal) metaphor: check
Promote family members in process: check
Casual but confidant voice: check

Leigh, have you ever considered a career in marketing?

Re: Why The Flow Of Innovation Has Reversed

Mark Ury — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:29:18 -0000

“Many of the most interesting web services are like Craigslist, at their core, lightweight governance systems.”

Elegant observation Brad. We could probably update Don Norman’s canon The Design of Everyday Objects to The Design of Everyday Relationships.

Today, we’re not just designing the bazaars of conversation—we’re designing the conversation itself, specifying often intangible and implicit nuances of how people interact and create value together.

Re: Is Google a content company now?

Mark Ury — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:18:24 -0000

Google rolled out “gadgets” last year and partnered with a few media companies and ad agencies to demonstrate how you could use Adsense to deliver “apps instead of ads.” I think the MacFarlane deal is similar: trying to provoke producers, media owners, and planners to innovate around distribution, even if the delivery mechanism is hitched to general-purpose search. It’ll probably fail (the demographic is a bit narrow, search is too directional, etc), but it’s a better place to fail than, lets say, Gmail or Googledocs, which generally don’t add much to the bottom-line or improve their premiums.

Re: Clay Shirky and the “cognitive surplus”

Mark Ury — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 21:48:51 -0000

Matt, I think I was being a bit harsh. I reread Clay's speech and noodled my thoughts in a slightly more textured post. Cheers.

Re: Clay Shirky and the “cognitive surplus”

Mark Ury — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 01:25:53 -0000

I’m not sure if there’s a cognitive surplus as much as a surplus of interaction, which simulates participation and creates a faux contrast to “consumption culture.” Shirky’s playing a narrative shell game by contrasting the Wikipedia to Gilligan’s Island. The real contrast is Gilligan and Facebook, which 20 years from now will be similar in context: I wasted my youth watching bad sitcoms=I wasted my youth biting people as a zombie. It’s easy to counter, I suppose, by saying FB is a social utility that “connects” people. But so did television. A lot of us didn’t sit alone: we connected, laughed at how awful the acting was on GI, and agreed that Mary Ann was much hotter than Ginger.

I’m more fascinated with Shirky’s optimism that the grid will somehow rebuffer the cognitive sink rather than just automate our neurosis. The sitcom example is not the counter to the gin example. It’s an extension. In both cases we were finding a numbing alternative to the shock of the system: post-industrial London, post-War America. Today, all the grid does is automate the same instinct to avoid reality. Instead of bad sitcoms we tweet about our laundry, upload South Park clips, and constantly refresh our Wordpress metrics to watch inbound visit volume.

The grid isn’t changing how we think. It’s just changing how we think we think.