Twitter just launched its own wine label, Fledgling Wines, with proceeds going to nonprofit Room to Read. This fodder was too much fun for me not to sniff out and cover for my latest SFWeekly piece (keeping secrets about anything Twitter isn’t easy — at least not for me!). Just as fun was my most recent visit to Crushpad (photos below), when I got to help friends Chris Sacca and Crystal English do some grape sorting for their wine label, Lowercase Wines.
Twitter, CrushPad and Room to Read talk about Fledgling Wines:
Good art makes you think. Great art makes you feel. And then there’s the art that drowns out the divide between these two tongues. The Swell Season’s music falls slowly into this third category, stealthily overfilling your proverbial paper cup with a friction of words and song.
The lyrics aren’t as textured as, say, Belle & Sebastian’s. And, as illustrated in the video below of a recent desk performance for NPR, the duo’s sound doesn’t necessitate many instruments; at one point they ask the audience to play the part of a string section. But somehow, the undulating cadence that strings it all together breaks you apart and puts you back together in a constant, involuntary shift — one which submerges you, then immediately pulls you up for air, then submerges you again. The rhythmic push/pull of the momentarily delicate, then swiftly rough, sound of Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglováswells’s voices swells up your consciousness with every gasp you take in between.
Simply put, their music is the sort of creation of something out of nothing that surfaces your inner seasons.
The Swell Season’s next album, Strict Joy, is due out Oct. 27th. Take a listen; if their music doesn’t sway you in this uncomfortable, refreshing way, go seek the art that does. Or, if you can, make it.
Below: The song from the 2007 film “Once,” for which the duo won an Academy Award.
“…after being awake for 10 and a half hours, night owls had grown more alert, performing better on a reaction-time task requiring sustained attention and showing increased activity in brain areas linked to attention. More important, these regions included the suprachiasmatic area, which is home to the body’s circadian clock. This area sends signals to boost alertness as the pressure to sleep mounts. Unlike night owls, early risers didn’t get this late-day lift.”
My Own Sleep Experimentation
Heh. This reminds me of my sixth-grade science fair project, for which I talked my immediate family into staying up for 24 hours and taking a series of exams, administered every four hours, that tested different cognitive abilities. (One of my versions of an MRI scan? Catching a ruler while someone else threw it to the ground; where your hand landed on the ruler was measured as an indication of your relative alertness. Hey, I was 12 and rulers were cool, ok?) The results of my clumsy little experiment were consistent with what Scientific American claims in the article above.
In the midst of doing some research for my project, I had learned about polyphasic sleep (popularly known as the Da Vinci sleep schedule, since the artist was a believed adopter) in which one can theoretically shrink their daily required rest to 2-6 hours via sleeping multiple times in a 24-hour period. The idea was to extend the amount of time you’re awake every day by sleeping more efficiently.
I never quite took to the whole napping concept, but when I was in high school, I slept an average of 4-6 hours per 24-hour period. It was the only way I could sustain my Reese-Witherspoon-in-”Election” schedule, in which I traded rest for Key Club meetings, swim practice, and a year’s worth of AP Physics crammed into a six-week program. Yeah, I was that girl.
Phi for Sleep?
Since then, I haven’t really committed to one sleep schedule for a prolonged period of time. I wonder if there’s some sort of REM-related golden mean (sleep:awake; daytime:nighttime) that’s simply evading me. Because eight hours is about as unrealistic as the eight glasses of water I’m supposed to drink daily.
It’s been 25 years since the now-staple game, Tetris, was developed. Alexey Pajitnov, now 54, chats about the creation of his brainchild, which was (naturally) something of a side project as he was working on his research in artificial intelligence in the Soviet Academy of Sciences. If you think claiming royalties in the US is complicated, try doing it in the Soviet Union. In 1984.
I have to say, I’m surprised by the fact that Dell actually acknowledged the criticism my blogging cronies and I and have issued towards their condescending and out-of-touch efforts to market to women. And so quickly. We’ve seen startups do this, but it’s kind of rare that a hardware company would pay so much attention to the chatter online. That’s cool, and I commend the company for that.
The problem is, the response is lame. I realize it would take them more than a few days to go back to the drawing board and/or take back what they created. Because that’s what they’d essentially need to do. The site’s marketing is so misguided, they’d need to start from scratch — even drop the whole concept of creating a site geared at women. We know you want to sell us these things, but they are computers, not purses. C’mon now.
But instead of issuing a place-holder type of response (i.e., “thanks for your feedback, which was x, y, and z. Hold your horses; we’ll be back with something better soon”), they made a couple of copy tweaks to their “tech tips” page, and added this preface:
Editors Note: Some of you have read this article over the last several days and will notice a few modifications. You spoke; we listened. Thank you for your ongoing feedback.
In terms of what they actually modified, I think they softened up the whole “you’re fat and stupid, and buying a netbook from us can fix that” message. Or at least the fat part. They still list “get smarter” as one of the things a netbook can help women do. But that doesn’t even begin to remedy the fact that all of this messaging is categorized under the umbrella of “tech tips” — or that the whole site basically screams, “omg you guys! math is hard, netbooks are fun!”
But I don’t condemn Dell for trying to save face. I think it’s cute.
I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. You see, Dell just released “Della,” a portal to sell notebooks to women. Let’s set aside the fact that the site looks like a JC Penny ad and the name sounds like Saturday Night Live fodder; the site’s content is so ridiculous, I’d be insulted if only I could take it seriously enough.
Take a look for yourself here. Let’s skip three of the four things women apparently care about (”products,” “featured artist,” and “giving”) and go straight to “tech tips.”
This is where I learned that “tech” means “netbooks,” which aren’t just “cute” and can “check my email,” but can help me “get smarter,” be healthier and even “chill out.” Heck, they can even help me get in on this whole cloud action. So this little piece of hardware is required for me to store information online. Hmm.
Dell, dude, you just don’t get it — which is why the ladies won’t anytime soon, either.
Apparently, when the NY Times online merged with IHT’s website, they redirected IHT to the nytimes.com global homepage, essentially removing IHT’s archives — and in a way “deleting” Crampton’s portfolio (from these specific sites) of stories he’s written over the years. In his own words:
On a personal level I am horrified that I can no longer see all my stories. The IHT logo on this blog used to link to a search of the IHT website for my articles. On a professional level, I am appalled that the NY Times would kill all the links back to the IHT website. Imagine the power of combining two sites with a Google rank of 9 instead of killing one.
If you’re in the business of news media, you’ve had an interesting week. Between The Boston Globe’s imminent threat of getting shut down, to the launch of the new Kindle, to the “Future of Journalism” Senate hearings, the tension between old media (read: traditional newspapers) and new media (online content) seems to be reaching a boiling point. In short, newspapers are afraid of getting cannibalized by the online industry due to fast-shifting business models and changing ways in which people are consuming news.
There’s much fodder for discussion in this debate (or futile fight against a fast-paced evolution), which I’ll discuss in a future post. But let’s focus on Crampton for a moment. The interesting thing here is that he built his career portfolio online, so he’s outraged that one day, it can just — poof — disappear.
One of the bi-products of moving news online (with pretty much everything else) is a reliance on our digital trail as a proof of history — and thus an inherent assignment of power to those who own the means to publishing that trail. This isn’t a necessarily bad thing; in fact, digital publishing makes it easier for us to store the same content in different places for safekeeping (the flip side of which, of course, is piracy). But it’s something to keep in mind as we continue to move forward.
This morning the rumor mill started running again, this time fostering speculation that Apple is in talks to buy Twitter. I won’t bother you with the details of the supposed transaction (*cough* $700M *cough*). The more interesting thing here is that, if the unlikely rumor is true, Apple would basically be buying a massive, seemingly ever-growing bag of information it will need to properly mine in order to effectively market and monetize — if it even wants to creep into the online search industry.
Why Twitter?
Why would Apple buy Twitter? Why would anyone buy Twitter? Well, among other things, it’s a searchable, real-time index of information about what is happening right now. And this information spans from news to corporate feedback (e.g., complaints/questions to companies like Comcast). And that’s powerful, especially as the service grows in popularity.
Mine Your Tweets
But don’t be fooled; Twitter’s not a “just add water” acquisition. Sure, it’s massively growing, and it has seeped into the mainstream seemingly overnight — thanks to the Oprah effect. But, as we’ve seen with the latest hysteria around Swine Flu, an incoming hoard of information tends to feel less like a stream and more like an avalanche. So making sense (or cents) off of this information requires a bit of automated, intuitive prioritizing — the type of prioritizing inherent in Flickr’s Interestingness algorithm, for instance, which bubbles up the site’s most “interesting” content on a timely basis.
When you want to find out what’s really happening right now in relation to, well, anything, you don’t want to waste time sorting through thousands upon thousands of somewhat related musings — or worse, inaccurate information. This is why mainstream news can’t and won’t use Twitter in it’s current state to feed their news tickers. To use Twitter as an independent search, the service needs to surface its most relevant content.
What About Hashtags and Follower Counts?
Sure, Twitter has a band-aid search mechanism (hashtags; “#”) that allows one to search for information that’s properly tagged, but among its other handicaps, a hashtag is blind to credibility — just as a user’s follower count is.
Right now, Twitter recommends a list of users to follow (and in turn the number of followers for that select group of people grows), but that recommendation is editorially based and therefore unscalable and decreasingly relevant as the service grows. When Twitter’s user base was small, a user’s large follower count meant something — that what they Twittered was interesting, even. But this simple measure doesn’t account for gaming the system (read: following people to gain followers) or — more importantly — locating the most relevant information, right now (read: can Jimmy Fallon tell me what I need to know about Swine Flu?)
Cooking Up a Secret (Apple?) Sauce
In creating a Twitter algorithm (”secret sauce,” if you will), the following factors can be considered. This list is by no means exhaustive; I’m including it here for illustrative reasons only:
Behavioral data: e.g., number of times a tweet is “favorited” (i.e., bookmarked) and/or re-tweeted (i.e., shared)
Meta data: e.g., a tweet’s (and its source’s current) location. This is especially relevant for breaking news-related twitters.
Credibility: This one has moving parts. To determine a tweet’s credibility, you need to link information about the source with information about the content. On the source (i.e., Twitterer’s) level, this includes factoring things like a user’s history on the site (for instance, how many of their relevant tweets have been bookmarked/shared?) — and the credibility of those who follow this user (i.e., the followers’ history on the site), as well as that of those who share/bookmark the information.
You can quickly begin to see how complex an effective Twitter content mining tool could be. But the bi-product of building one can help solve some of the service’s core growing pains via organically shifting the focus from people (and hence blind, follower-based popularity) to content, for instance. Sure, things like follower counts can still exist, but they’ll be given some context.
Mining for Google’s Gold? Probably Not.
Given all of this, one can’t help but question the likelihood of this acquisition, especially given that this suggested move into the online search industry would prime Apple to more directly compete with Google — which it’s ironically under current speculation for being in bed with. Whether or not Apple is actually headed in this direction is anyone’s guess, and I suppose acquiring a company can be an easier first step than building a search team from scratch — unless, of course, you’re not trying to build an online search product (which I’m still unclear as to why Apple would choose to do).
In any case, mining data will arguably be a necessary piece to Twitter’s next development stage — whether or not Apple (or anyone with enough cash) decides to buy Twitter, or if Twitter decides to grow up on its own. The service can be anyone’s gold mine — anyone who is diligent enough to mine for that gold, anyway.
