Great photos of Medellin http://www.behance.net/gallery/Las-Golondrinas-Comuna-8-Medellin/5910203

Easy product tours with http://bootstraptour.com/

Escrow and payment provider for marketplaces – https://www.balancedpayments.com/ looks good.

https://medium.com/on-startups/ca9a1a6c9da0 See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6380008

http://pandodaily.com/2013/09/10/tech-makes-a-city-great-the-mckinsey-report/

https://github.com/c4milo/boilerpipe

Just watch the video, yey seal (and that it sucks to be a penguin).

And made it into a living space.

Or, “walk the earth”, as they say. Why we need nomads.

Thinking: is the Like for blogging related to the Linkroll (since a link is like a Like)? I should get an email or notification when someone Likes my post. That’s the feedback loop I’m talking about. And Liking should be 1-click. So is adding to the linkroll 1-click?

It is conceivable that there is simply no distributed solution that can compete in user experience with a closed solution like FB and such. But that doesn’t sound like it would be true.

I’m oldschool but I like blue and white. New look today.

Now, the new blogging. Can we reproduce the LIKE in the world of blogging? The feeling of immediate feedback? The one-click micro-payment that has no limits.

Here’s a related thought: why do people think stuff on blogs is more private than stuff on Facebook? (Technically it’s not.) Because more people see it on Facebook. And you get feedback.

Blogs need more feedback. Commenting is too much work. Where’s the LIKE button for blogging? (And I don’t mean the WordPress Like button, that just feel like micropayments to Matt.)

Mmm…

In which India declares dolphins “non-human persons”. Cool. Only one but: humans can be performers. So why not dolphins? Still pretty cool, kinda sci-fi.

“The definitions of ‘national security’ and what constitutes ‘intelligence’ — and thus what must be classified — are unclear.”

Arbitrary standards are more defensible (Pantone example).

How data was misused in the Vietnam war.

In 1977, two years after the last helicopter lifted off the rooftop of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, a retired Army general, Douglas Kinnard, published a landmark survey called The War Managers that revealed the quagmire of quantification. A mere 2 percent of America’s generals considered the body count a valid way to measure progress. “A fake—totally worthless,” wrote one general in his comments. “Often blatant lies,” wrote another. “They were grossly exaggerated by many units primarily because of the incredible interest shown by people like McNamara,” said a third.

I’ve blogged about this before, the US census is an ongoing and fascinating categorization case study.

 

From the article: “By 1970 the government was collecting census data by mail-in survey. The shift to a survey had dramatic effects on at least one census category: race.”

• First, it resulted in a dramatic increase in the Native American population. Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. Native American population magically grew 110 percent. People who had identified as American Indian had apparently been somewhat invisible to the government.
• Second, to the chagrin of the Census Bureau, 80 percent of Puerto Ricans choose white (only 40 percent of them had been identified as white in the previous census). The government wanted to categorize Puerto Ricans as predominantly black, but the Puerto Rican population saw things differently.

 

 

Zipcar is the first site I have ever seen options for the type of English: American, British, Canadian.

Urban decay tourism :) (great pictures)

Never too old to learn.

• I believe in fundamentals.
• Adaptation, evolution. Design = solve the problem. (So changeable design > unchangeable design.)
• Community = group that works together.
• Group -> social -> trust.
• Trust each other to get things done.
• Our environment is everyone else.
• You want to be unique but also fit in. You feel lonely.
• So you form an “identity”, so you can fit in but be apart. A representation of yourself.

Identity:

• Create an outside world we can control. Collect. Music. Home. Friends we trust. World is not so scary then. 
• Can also create inside world we control: yoga, music, meditation, learning, …
• EVERYONE is doing this.

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone” (Thoreau)

Social design = facilitate communication.

• People just need to talk.
• Need identity, trust.
• People need connection.

Social Graph (nodes & edges).

• If you write it out, forms a narrative. Story.
• Narrative leads to identity: this is me. This is what I did.
• The connections give things life.
• Graph is very valuable information.

Stream.

• Don’t hide info, show it all in feed.
• Keeps going, like life.

Collections.

• Pile of things that I like.

Feedback.

• When something happens, send feedback (like, pin, repin, tag, …).

“Virtuous cycle of sharing” -> enough stuff and connections so it grows.

Might as well build things that bring people together.

 

Saved via here (via a trippy duckduckgo search), I found this screenshot of a semantic tagging system that I built and then gave a talk about around 2005/6 or so. The idea was that tags were organized in facets, which gave them some level of meaning (ie. “sanfran” is a place), and from that meaning and from tags that were used together, you could infer more meaning (ie. “peter has been to sanfran”).

Salon.io is pretty interesting. Posting this here to not loose the link (which is also interesting). What an INTERESTING post!

Let’s see:

• New blog at http://blog.petervandijck.com (and WordPress.com’s image import is just magical btw). This was the biggest deal.
• ITTT for cross-posting to Twitter from blog. This is meant to encourage me to blog as opposed to posting on Twitter.
• Turned off bunch of apps on Facebook. No more cross-posting from Twitter to Facebook. Twitter is work-world, Facebook is friends/family who don’t care about my geeky rants.
• Still using Path as my private little Facebook for a few select people.
• Next: set up phone apps for everything.

Perhaps this will inspire me to blog? The problem I’m trying to solve is that of audience.

My first blog post ever. Still pretty good :)

I moved my blog to http://blog.petervandijck.com. I expect this to be a long-lived URL, wouldn’t be surprised if it lasts 30 years. Which means my feed has also changed, those of you who still use Google Reader or something similar, subscribe to https://blog.petervandijck.com/feed/

To a new domain (with redirects), blog.petervandijck.com. I put it on WordPress.com. And may I just say: the moving and importing of content was ridiculously easy. WordPress even copies images from your old site into your new site. Automatically – nothing you have to do. That’s impressive.