"TED is not simply “engaging” & “entertaining” but a specific type of entertainment that is increasingly out of touch & exclusionary.

…appears that whole TED brand induces laughter from many of those skeptical of corporate speak & techno-jargon. At first, I thought I was laughing alone; however, it turns out that lots of other people are equally unimpressed by the current state of TED…I’m not the only one who does not take TED very seriously or worse, views the whole project as suspect…

Perhaps the biggest complaint I heard was that TED smells of corporatism…

So many of the TED talks take on the form of those famous patent medicine tonic cure-all pitches of previous centuries, as though they must convince you not through the content of what’s being said but through the hyper-engaging style of the delivery…

As Mike Bulajewski pointed out in a Tweet, “TED’s ‘revolutionary ideas’ mask capitalism as usual, giving it a narrative of progress and change.”"

"What's different about Radiolab (&…changing about the web) is that it *is* a production…one of a very new kind. Radiolab is actually post-blog & post-livestream…not aping oratory of old or raggedness of new…a hybrid that takes lessons from the past, recent & deep.

That's where…web journalism is headed…"No one wants to read a 9,000-word treatise online. On the Web, one-sentence links are as legitimate as 1000-word diatribes—in fact, they are often valued more."

While this might have been true at one point, it simply no longer is…at The Atlantic, there is a very strong positive correlation between length of post & readers attracted. The genre conventions of blogging are changing. Few old-style linkblogs exist & a whole culture has developed around the longread. New online publications…look beautiful.

This is the Radiolab effect extended: expect less pretension to authority, greater understanding of one's nodeness, but greater respect for the production culture of the pre-web era."

Structures, in the sociological sense, constrain human agency. And for that reason, I see John Pike as a casualty of the system, too. Our police forces have enshrined a paradigm of protest policing that turns local cops into paramilitary forces. Let's not pretend that Pike is an independent bad actor. Too many incidents around the country attest to the widespread deployment of these tactics. If we vilify Pike, we let the institutions off way too easy.

"This essay inaugurates a series of stories on the ways that protesters have shaped technologies to fit their needs -- and how technologies opened up new space for their messages.

Let's start with what seems self-evident, but what I'm sure is more complex than it appears: Occupy is different from the protests that preceded it. To be honest, I'm not sure anyone can explain why. The list of factors contributing to its outstanding run is long: economic circumstances, a distance from the enforced patriotism that followed 9/11, disappointment on the left with Obama's presidency, the failure to adequately regulate banks, the neverending foreclosure crisis, the Adbusters provenance, severe cuts to social programs at the state and local level, the language of occupation, and the prolonged nature of the engagement.

But among those factors, technology plays a central role…"

As you get closer, the landscape gets scrubbier, with empty lots separating the buildings like gaps in a smile. A man may walk down the street in welding gear. Pull into the parking lot of BioSpaceX, a shiny new building originally intended to house biotechnology startups. Walk through the doors. You're at Moonbot.

"…new way to connect w/ the people you follow & find interesting. We spend so much of our lives connecting w/ people online that we forget the value of tangible interactions that happen in the real world. Quarterly wants to bridge that gap by allowing anyone to subscribe to influential contributors and get physical items in the mail from them. It is like a magazine, but instead of receiving words on a page, our subscribers receive actual items that tell a compelling story crafted and narrated by the contributor.<br />
What kind of stuff will I get? A blend of original, exclusive, & consumer items that are timeless, practical, exciting, & fly under the radar. We don’t want to fill up your house w/ clutter, & we’re mindful of the waste that each of us generate every day. But we also recognize that consumption isn’t inherently bad, it’s just a matter of making smarter choices about the things we surround ourselves with.<br />
Each product should reflect on the person who selected it…"

"This piece in The Atlantic by Alexis Madrigal deals with an interesting case in technological evolution: the stabilization of a technical objects, which in this case in the so-called graphing calculator."

"You know when a cat falls, it always lands on its feet. Thomas Kane was the kind of scientist who saw a cat fall and wanted to deduce the biophysics of the trick. In a series of experiments, he dropped cats and photographed them at high-speed, then broke their movements down into mathematics. Then, he had a trampolinist (in a spacesuit!) perform similar motions to imitate the feline. The images of the cat appeared in LIFE Magazine and the International Journal of Solids and Structures. In the latter, Kane's model of the phenomenon is superimposed on Ralph Crane's photographs."

"This week, I talked with Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google, about the time he spends with random people studying how they search for stuff. One statistic blew my mind. 90 percent of people in their studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page! I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all.<br />
<br />
"90 percent of the US Internet population does not know that. This is on a sample size of thousands," Russell said. "I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for. At the end I'll say to them, 'Let me show one little trick here,' and very often people will say, 'I can't believe I've been wasting my life!'""

"…two very different dudes…different positions…different objectives…both written in essentially the same style, with common characteristics both superficial—a smart but very informal voice that reads like a long email from your smartest coolest friend ever—& structural:

…both conjure a sense that the piece is almost being written as you read it…slightly chaotic & totally thrilling…both let you inside their heads…But!—they don’t let you all the way inside. There’s plenty withheld…here’s the genius of the style: they don’t tell you much at all…

I tend to zero in on this kind of writing because I aspire to do more of it myself, & to do it better. Working in public like this can be a lot of fun, for writer & reader alike, but more than that: it can be a powerful public good…When you work in public, you create an emissary (media cyborg style) that then walks the earth, teaching others to do your kind of work as well. And that is transcendently cool."

[See the great comments too.]

"Manning finally felt like himself, like he didn't have to hide anything. "i mean, i dont think its normal for people to spend this much time worrying about whether they're behaving masculine enough, whether what they're going to say is going to be perceived as 'gay'... not to mention how i feel about the situation..." he wrote. "for whatever reason, im not comfortable with myself... i mean, i behave and look like a male, but its not 'me'"<br />
<br />
It's incredible to think that as Manning was allegedly passing off the biggest data leak in US government history, he was experimenting with a different kind of transparency and public display of previously secret information. He rode the Acela. He went into gas stations to buy cigarettes. He did normal things. <br />
<br />
A few months later, after Lamo told military officials he knew about Manning, Manning was arrested and he's been held ever since. He's awaiting a trial to find out if he'll be courtmartialed."

"Despite looming budget cuts, the library is flourishing and putting out some of the most innovative online projects in the country"

"The lions guarded the doors when the main branch of the New York Public Library was dedicated in May of 1911 and they watch over it still, rather haughtily looking over the heads of visitors to one of the world's great libraries. Yet over the last 100 years, and particularly over the last 10, everything about the storage and dissemination of knowledge has changed. The lions still guard the building, but the information's gone out the back door, metastasizing in the new chemistry of the Internet.

With all this change -- not to mention a possible $40 million budget cut looming -- it would be no surprise if the library was floundering like the music industry, newspapers, or travel agents. (Hey, man, we all get disintermediated sooner or later.) But that's the wild thing. The library isn't floundering. Rather, it's flourishing, putting out some of the most innovative online projects in the country. On the stuff you can measure -- library visitors, website visitors, digital gallery images viewed -- the numbers are up across the board compared with five years ago. On the stuff you can't, like conceptual leadership, the NYPL is killing it."

"Collectors covet mid-century design for a reason: The clean lines and bright colors of the 1950s are beautiful. But there was more to the era's design considerations. The burst of creative energy that followed World War II spurred consumption by creating an endless array of new products, and when those were in short supply, new forms (and colors) for old products. The production of beauty was placed in the service of consumerism and anti-communism.<br />
<br />
American Look showcases this design-industrial complex of ideas in beautiful Technicolor. Created in 1958 by the Jam Handy Organization, a large commercial filmmaking concern, with funding from Chevrolet, the 23-minute film surveys the landscape of late-50s aspirational life from interior dining sets to new work machines to speed boats. Taken together, the objects in the film paint a portrait of the variety of things that only American capitalism could deliver."

"It was the best fake Twitter account ever, deftly satirizing Rahm Emanuel, and elevating the Tweet and the f-word to the level of literature. But the mystery writer was never revealed - until now"<br />
<br />
"That moment was both when we caught the first glimmer of intelligence smoldering in the mayor. Not just anyone quotes Mamet's American Buffalo back at FakeDavidMamet. And maybe that quote could be seen as the key to @MayorEmanuel's twisted narrative. It's only tweets, unless they're motherfucking true.<br />
<br />
Of course, nothing he said ever actually happened. But crazily enough, a fake account sputtering out 140-character jabs in the voice of a lampooned major political figure somehow tunneled to wherever it is that the realest reality is kept and pulled it out, soaked with beer, covered in celery salt, and laced with profanity. His tweets were true like a joke or a dream or a three-chord song about sniffing glue."

"Does Facebook have to go the extra mile to support activists? …preliminary work has been done to create a special complaint reporting process for NGOs & other activists…<br />
…certainly don't seem to be under any obligations to provide special treatment. But if Facebook really is becoming the public sphere—& wants to remain central to people's real sociopolitically embedded lives—maybe they're going to have to think beyond the situational technical fix. Facebook needs to own its position as a part of The Way the World Works & provide protections for political speech & actors.<br />
…protests & overthrow of Ben Ali were just beginning of story. Hopes are high, but…so many times in global south, exit of one corrupt dictator usually means entrance of another. To avoid that fate, politically active Tunisians will be using all of tools at disposal, including & maybe especially, Facebook. In fact, Rim said, it's already being used to debate how to create a new government & a better Tunisia."

"“Someone once accused us of doing nothing but following our whims to their every logical & illogical conclusion,” Jim Coudal says. That is, more or less, exactly right…<br />
Coudal makes physical products, internet tools, & other oddities, any number of which will suck up an entire afternoon if you stumble upon coudal.com. That is perhaps the best way to describe the 50-year-old: He’s a master of the type of ephemera you would probably be playing with if you didn’t have to do your own job…When Coudal Partners started to execute its own ideas, the firm became its own favorite client. “The way we describe what we are now is we are a creative-design and advertising firm with no clients.<br />
“We’re of the school that if you have an idea that you think might work, the answer is not to talk about it for four weeks. The answer is to try it & see what happens,” he says. “If it goes down in flames, that’s fun too.” "<br />
<br />
[Also profiles of Alexis Madrigal, Emily Pilloton, Geoff Manaugh, among others.]

"I don't want to rule out ever turning off comments again, but I do know that we'd execute very differently. Oddly, I'm heartened that we've developed enough of a reputation as an open and good place to talk about technology that the inability to interact on the site is perceived as an "epic fail," as one reader told me. We are a community now; certain rules have emerged.<br />
<br />
And here's the other lesson I learned, which may be more generalizable. I'm an experimenter and so are many of the staffers here at The Atlantic. We've been tremendously lucky that most of the things we've tried have worked. But you don't always experiment for the good times. You need to have things not work sometimes. There's nothing like a (very) public learning experience to focus the mind on the things that matter for your site."

"In the days since WikiLeaks began releasing a small percentage of its cache of 250,000 cables sent by State Department officials, many people have tried to think through the event's implications for politics, media, and national security.<br />
<br />
Writers pulling at the knot of press freedom, liberty, nationalism, secrecy and security that sits at the center of the debate have produced dozens of fantastic pieces. We're collecting the very best here. This page will be updated often. New links will be floated near the top of this list.<br />
<br />
Send suggestions to amadrigal[at]theatlantic.com."

"When professional writers, especially ones trained in the literary arts, see horrifically bad writing online, they recoil. All their training about the value of diverse (or, you know, heteroglossic) societies and the equality of classes goes flying out the window. Social media acts as a kind of truth serum, as Marshall Kirkpatrick likes to say: This is how the masses of people talk. This is how the masses of people write. Not moonlighting bloggers. Not the 20 million NPR listeners. But the other 300 million people trying to LOL their way through boring days at office jobs or in Iraq.<br />
<br />
I think we confuse the ability to see what everyday writing looks like -- and probably has for a long time -- with a change in how people write. Toss in that the traditional (usually religious) practices and sayings around serious topics like death or childbearing have lost valence, and you get people just saying what comes to mind. It's not always pretty."

"1. Statistical Literacy: Making sense of today’s data-driven world.<br />
2. Post-State Diplomacy: Power and politics, sans government.<br />
3. Remix Culture: Samples, mashups, and mixes.<br />
4. Applied Cognition: The neuroscience you need.<br />
5. Writing for New Forms: Self-expression in 140 characters.<br />
6. Waste Studies: Understanding end-to-end economics.<br />
7. Domestic Tech: How to use the world as your lab."

"Competition in the snack chip market has reached such a level that the molecular composition of the chip-containing bag as reflected in the magnitude of its sound could cause a firm to lose customers!<br />
<br />
This is a miniature portrait of Robert Reich's hyper-competitive supercapitalism at work. And though it is fundamentally a silly story, it's not only a silly story."

"1. The phrase "reading revolution" was probably coined by German historian Rolf Engelsing. He certainly made it popular. Engelsing was trying to describe something he saw in the 18th century: a shift from "intensive" reading and re-reading of very few texts to "extensive" reading of many, often only once. Think of reading the Bible vs reading the newspaper. Engelsing called this shift a "Lesenrevolution," lesen being the German equivalent of reading. He thought he had found when modern reading emerged, as we'd recognize it today, and that it was this shift that effectively made us modern readers. …" [More here http://snarkmarket.com/2010/6155 and, on the images, here: http://snarkmarket.com/2010/6161]

"mobile devices tapping on wireless networks can exert a powerful social influence, as we've all noticed. They could help tip the scales towards denser city living, or at least shorter commutes, for the wired workforce."

"In a country where so many gamely adopt the latest new gadget, we need our Thoreaus, not to stop the profusion of technology, but simply to remind us to use them well. There are spaces shot through our massively complex society to find "Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity!" by simply deciding to look for it.<br />
<br />
Take another grave and important personality of the time, Abraham Lincoln. His views on technology, delivered in a series of speeches on "Discoveries and Inventions" in the years directly after Thoreau's Walden, were more positive. For Lincoln, technology did not debase humanity, as Thoreau would have contended, but it also wasn't a magical staircase leading to a better world under the label of Progress."

"The slowness of books, the habits of mind they build, Shteyngart suggests, may be a key to knowing what it's like to be inside oneself, not part of the crowd or the audience or Twitterverse. "Reading is difficult," Lenny says to Eunice. "People just aren't meant to read anymore. We're in a post-literate age. You know, a visual age."…<br />
<br />
We all have a million reasons for why we don't use the gadget & stream for what they are good for, and then put them away sometimes to take a walk or read a book. Instead we reload, reload, reload. Refresh!…<br />
<br />
"This is all happening too fast. I can't adjust as a human being to what's required of me digitally. The analog part of me is like grains of sand: it's all slipping away." <br />
<br />
Gary the man is perhaps the best argument for his book. He is hilarious and true, but he can't deliver us something that transcends our moment in real-time. The Gary Shteyngart Show might be shticky or interesting or smart, but it would not be Super Sad True Love Story."

"A few days ago, an 11-year-old posted a video of herself responding to online critics with a foul-mouthed piece of little girl bravado. She was so profane and mildly amusing that she became, in Gawker's words, a "microcelebrity among Internet tween scenesters."

"While we’re out scour­ing San Diego that after­noon, our allies leap into action. Fin­ished images are appear­ing in real-time. Every few min­utes I’ll check the Drop­box app on my iPhone, see some­thing new, announce it to the group, and every­one will gather around the tiny screen and ooh and ahh...This is the new utility belt: Twitter...Google Docs...Dropbox...So if these are the tools, what are the skills? Jane McGo­ni­gal has already fig­ured this out. She calls them the ten col­lab­o­ra­tion super­pow­ers. And in par­tic­u­lar, I think the first three are key:

"Welcome to 48 Hour Magazine, a raucous experiment in using new tools to erase media's old limits. As the name suggests, we're going to write, photograph, illustrate, design, edit, and ship a magazine in two days.