"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.”"

"According to a source with knowledge of the project, the idea is simple: these nondescript boxes will be in 7-Eleven stores across the country and act as a sort of P.O. box for Amazon purchases. Once a customer makes a buy on Amazon’s website he can select a 7-Eleven close to work, or on the way home and have the package dropped off there.<br />
<br />
When the package is actually delivered, the customer receives an email notification along with a bar code to his smartphone and heads to the 7-Eleven. There he’ll stand in front of the locker system, which looks like the offspring between an ATM machine and a safety deposit box. The machine will scan the bar code on his handset to receive a PIN number. He’ll punch that PIN number and retrieve the package."<br />
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[See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packstation ]

"Robin is absolutely right: I like lists, I remember everything I’ve ever seen or read, and I’ve been making course syllabi for over a decade, so I’m often finding myself saying “If you really want to understand [topic], these are the [number of objects] you need to check out.” Half the fun is the constraint of it, especially since we all now know (or should know) that constraints = creativity."

"Some of the teachers I remember most from college are the ones who would say something like: “Listen. There are only two movies you need to understand to understand [whole giant big cinematic movement X]. Those two movies are [A] and [B]. And we’re gonna watch ‘em.” (I feel like this is something Tim is extremely good at, actually.) It’s a step above curation, right? Context matters here; so does sequence. So we’re talking about some sort of super-sharp, web-powered, media-rich syllabus. I always liked syllabi, actually. They seem to make such an alluring promise, you know? Something like:<br />
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Go through this with me, and you will be a novice no more."

"My top two choices, however, stood tall as perhaps the best stock I’ve had the pleasure of reading on the web, both in terms of their scope, but more interestingly about how they treated their content and audience. There’s a pattern here that I enjoy. I’d like to introduce you to them, and hopefully in the process make a bit of a point about the direction I want the web to take in the next year."<br />
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"I suppose I’m hungry for curated educational materials online. These are more than lists of books to read: they’re organized, edited, and have a clear point of view about the content they are presenting, and subvert the typical scatter-shot approach of half the web (like Wikipedia), or the hyper-linear, storyless other half that obsesses over lists. And that’s the frustrating thing about trying to teach yourself things online: you’re new, so you don’t know what’s important, but everything is spread so thin and all over the place, so it’s difficult to make meaningful connections."

"Art consists of ideas, execution, and filtering; plus the consistent, repeated delivery of these elements. You’re welcome to mix up the ratios any way you want: an artist may not have tremendous ideas but she might be masterfully skilled; or a clever and capable artist may only work for a short while. True giants of art do everything well and for a long time, but not everyone is or should be a giant."

"You’ve either shipped, or you haven’t. You’ve either poured weeks, months or even years of your life into bringing a product or a service into the world, or you haven’t.

"I love this map. I love that the map shows the location of the store relative to the neighbourhood it lives in but then, literally, leaves the rest up to the person using the map turning the whole thing in to a bit of an adventure. "Go to the corner of Market and Castro then head towards Bernal Hill. If you hit the 101, turn around because you've gone to far. Welcome to the Mission: Tell us what you saw." I wondered what the people in Duboce Triangle had ever done to warrant a three-dollar surcharge on everything but this is San Francisco where you learn to suspend your disbelief about these kinds of things."

"Clark Aldrich is quite right to wonder why people don't model the strategies they advocate. "My biggest gripe is how can a person unabashedly present information that breaks every rule they praise? How can a 400 page book containing one case study after another conclude that interactivity and dynamic content is necessary for effective learning? How can a lecturer drone on and on about the wonderfulness of social networks because they reward the individuality of the user, and still wait until the end to solicit questions?" In my own case - 90 percent of the teaching and learning I do, I do right here, on my website. Talks and stuff add some multimedia to the content. My site isn't a game because I'm not really advocating games. It is (a node in) a professional community, and that's what I model."

"Gladwell suggests people w/ the best stories are those whose jobs involve lots of sitting around w/ their colleagues; cricketers, for instance, or pilots. I'd suggest it's not just the sitting around, it's sitting around while half paying attention to something else (the match, automatic pilot). This leaves enough room for proper story-telling, for holding court, not interrupted by sniping, conversation or one-up-person-ship...I'm still not sure that story is that important to stories. You know, all that beginning, middle, end stuff, narrative arc...Games people go on about it all the time, ad people are convinced they're masters of story miniatures. I think, very often, story is just something to hang all the important bits on. & not in a significant, meaningful way, like a backbone or scaffold...more of a coat-hanger. The actual stuff that connects isn't about plot or narrative; it's texture, observations, images, jokes, juxtapositions, felicitous phrases & little moments of aha."

"Introducing San Diego's first bicycle driven food delivery. Manivela Delivery is a group of riders from our diverse local bicycle community. Our motive is simple, offer delivery from anywhere and bring it to you on a bicycle.

"I’ve been particularly taken with the Botteries: The World’s Last Hardware Event by David Greene & Mike Myers ... a vision of returning to the English countryside, with everything you require brought by bots of all sorts: communication, rooms, walls, even pets. ... we’ve actually reached a place very similar ... rapidly seeing a world of use as needed, rather than purchase & storage. Blu-Ray is the world’s last media hardware event, it’s download from now on. Netflix & Lovefilm ... Spotify ... We’re starting to live in a world that would have been unimaginable 5 years ago, where ownership is severely debased as a good quality. We’re even seeing the world’s last physical retailers disappear. ... Russell ... was talking about how everyone has a junk room. What if you could ship that to Amazon or someone & pull bits back as you need them? We don’t want cloud computing, we want Big Yellow Internet Storage. & then you could have a smaller house or flat. It struck me as very Archigram-ish."

"A Cambridge, Mass., delivery company is using industrial tricycles to deliver goods in efforts to curb global emissions."

"allows merchants to tap in to Amazon’s network of fulfillment centers and our expertise in logistics. Merchants can store their own products to our fulfillment centers and then, using a simple web service interface, fulfill orders for the products."