The Airspace
I’ve been negligent to all readers of BlaBeat for about a month now. But, there is a reason why.
I’ve been developing The Airspace, an up-and-coming site-of-reference for the best in culture.
From the About page…
Founded in 2011, The Airspace is an independent online publication staffed with relentless editors, thoughtful contributors, and vagabond managers from colleges and universities across the United States. The Airspace represents scholarship for the sake of culture and intends to uphold that promise in all content we produce.
Our mission is to bring our readers the most comprehensive narratives around emerging trends and ideas in culture. The articles on The Airspace incorporate rich media like video, audio, photography, to bring the stories to life.
The Airspace is vetted, highly edited, and entirely transparent. Culture is the medium through which we see ourselves and the people and things we interact with. But, culture itself is ever-morphing, reiterating and evolving. We approach everything we write, record, and produce as an ongoing conversation between our readers and our writers. Every content page is outfitted with advanced real-time commenting systems to encourage all our visitors to join the dialogue.
Instagram bets Facebook in search of more Likes
Just yesterday, the popular iOS only photo sharing network, Instagram, announced they were updating how Instagram shares images with Facebook. Alexia Tsotsis reported on this for TechCrunch as well.
Under the new features, Instagram will create a Instagram Photos album on your Facebook and upload full size images there as well as a link to the public Instagram URL—all advertised to look “beautiful” on timeline, and it does. The goal of this? To tag onto Facebook’s viral network effects. Tsotsis puts it well when she surmises, “it’s almost like Facebook is functioning here as an ad hoc web interface, no?” Yes, an ad hoc web interface with 800+ million users and a storied history of taking big services and inflating them rapidly (read: Spotify).
Thing is, I’m a fan of my relatively small Instagram network built of amateur photographers. Occasionally I will tweet out an image, but the reason I don’t post any photos to Facebook is because my network there is too bulky, clumsy, awkward and renegade.
Instagram is full of people interested in photography and who are willing to look at my amateur attempts at capturing the world and offer me feedback. It’s safe and comforting because, for the most part, we’re all doing the same thing.
Facebook is the social networking wasteland—a saturated landscape of outlaws and villains—full of people clicking, sharing, liking and propagating content without real insight or understanding (slight dramatization). Sometimes it is best to take a step back into a colony where culture, thought, and trends have a focused center.
Small network enclaves win out right now. That’s why Path and Instagram—my networks with the smallest numbers but most legitimate interaction—win out right now. I don’t want Facebook to pollute that, no matter how many more likes my photos might receive or how beautiful my timeline can look.
Code Year -or- Mending my Mistakes
Code Year, your concept is great for the casual user of technology and your lessons substantial for the k-8 level. But, let’s face it, the people who are attracted to your weekly lessons, the makers of New Years Resolutions, are not the budding class of coders we need. That’s not to say the one’s who keep opening the emails come April won’t learn from what Codecademy has to offer, but that they won’t be building the next generation of applications, protocols and standards by learning at a glacial week-by-week pace. If people really want to code, they should sit down with the holy grail of python learning and work (read: work) their way through. They, then, should consider exploring more tutorials and resources on the Internet—perhaps even paying for some—but most importantly start building their first programs.
Canary exclusive
I’ve been using Google Chrome Canary and Safari as parallel browsers for a while now. But, I’ve finally decided to cut the cord on Safari.
Sure, Canary isn’t the most stable build of Chrome, but it always seems to be the most advanced, and fastest iteration. It’s also amazing to see how often updates for the browser are made.
To make Canary the default browser you have to work in reverse. If you go to app preferences within Canary, it will alert you that you cannot make it the default browser. However, if you go to the general app preferences in Safari, you can select which browser is default. Click Canary, and the transformation is complete.
GoDaddy No Longer Supports SOPA
What lunacy.
Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation — but we can clearly do better,” Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s newly appointed CEO, said. “It’s very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.
They took a stance supporting SOPA, the Internet revolted a planned massive exodus to other domain registrars. GoDaddy.com got weak in the knees and flip-flopped.
The curious part is the inclusion of “Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.” It, of course, being governmental control over the Internet.
The PR nightmare was a flop and now their integrity is nullified. It’d be hard to find an tech savvy user who still respects their company.
I’m still pulling my domain.
Synchronology
Despite our megametrically detailed, optimized and sophisticated data infrastructure, sharing files from one device to another remains a colossal and messy disaster.
After reading Rachel Swaby’s intricate article outlining the past present and future of the “it just works” data sharing pioneer Dropbox, it became impossible not to think about how far we have come, and how far we still have to go.
Founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi had a monumental task to deconstruct when they set out to recreate private network solutions for the average consumer.
As Swaby writes:
Until recently, distributed computer clusters have huddled around a central server managed by an organization. Companies and universities maintained their own server space and dedicated IT team to manage it. That works well internally, but getting files to a machine outside the network turned basic computing into a key-fob initiated, slow-motion train wreck.
We are all universally connected to the Internet but our means of data transfer are so crippled.
Wearing Your Computer on Your Sleeve
Nick Bilton:
The brain that brings all these things together is the smartphone, which after all is really the first wearable computer. Researchers note that the smartphone is almost never more than three feet away from its user. It is often just inches from the bed during the night as well, and has replaced the alarm clock for many people.
As a result, the smartphone is going to be the hub for our information sharing and gathering. Think of it as a force field that will engulf us wherever we are, transmitting power and Internet access to sensors and screens that are tacked to our clothing.
“Years ago, researchers envisioned these tiny computers transmitting information to the Internet,” said Yael Maguire, a visiting scientist at M.I.T.and Harvard . “It wasn’t what we envisioned, but it happened. It’s called the smartphone.”
Our devices exist with absolute proximity to our person. We don’t need sensors on our clothes—they’re already part of the fabric of our lives. For the generation growing up with Facebook from age 13 with smartphones by 14, the smartphone is becoming the primary access point to technology and the internet.
