email me: chris@chris-karath.com
September 2009
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Gallery sized white room. Got here early enough to stake out a seat next to a power cord. Hooray for being able to keep the Pre charged.
-- Sent from my Palm Pre
-- Sent from my Palm Pre
-- Sent from my Palm Pre
Not much bigger than my bedroom at home.
-- Sent from my Palm Pre
Middle seat this time. Not as nice as the window and having the row to myself on the first one.
-- Sent from my Palm Pre
The hats and shirts in the stores have Greenbay and Wisconsin on them, but other than that, I could be anywhere.
-- Sent from my Palm Pre
Schmeil, shamozzle... Ilm of to Milwaukee then New York.
-- Sent from my Palm Pre
I want to hear your 
Back from Jimmy Johns with Adam and Comfort, grabbing drawing gear from their car. TV and drawings!
-- Sent from my Palm Pre
A picture of Jennifer and I, Sherry posted on Facebook today that she took a week ago in the park.
Jennifer Birthday cake
Another stealth shot of me taken by Jennifer while cutting her birthday cake. She is a stealth photo ninja. Again I didn't even notice her take this photo, until I saw it on Flickr.
Picture above is me, Natalie and Sherry who is due with her second in October.
Beautiful weather and really nice path that starts in the back of an elementary school with some seriously elaborate playground gear. Nice conversation and an all round nice afternoon.
Random Non-Sequiters
A few thoughts on Twitter, feeds, connections and advertising.
Currently all of twitter searchs' trending topics relate to Kanye West on the VMA's.
Geeks. Twitter is not for you anymore. It's mainstream. It's been mainstream for awhile. Not only that but it's going to take the entire country's attention span down a little more.
It was said once upon a generation ago, that MTV, shortened people's attention spans. There was even a couple years where people began to talk about Youtube shrinking attention spans further. Twitter is going to have them beat I think. Or perhaps the feed or wave that twitter will become apart of?
Speaking of shrinking. My tweet count (giving and receiving) has been shrinking as well. A couple years ago I followed 50 people and I couldn't keep up with them, I had to cut back. Now I follow 86 people, and I don't find keeping up with them a problem at all. Twitter stays useful, but frequency and novelty wears off and tweet counts take a hit.
Wish I could say the same about my Google Reader List. That continues to grow and grow and no matter how much I subdivide it, I read only a tiny fraction of it.
We are now connected with anyone in the world that can manage to find a way online. Finding a way online gets easier and easier every year, and if you are living in the US, the price of getting online is now as low as an internet enabled cell phone, or a $199 notebook with access to free wi-fi. Pretty much everyone who wants to be connected to the internet, that you are likely to want to connect with, is connected to the internet.
Billions of people available to you then. Millions? Hundreds of Thousands? of Companies, now just a keyboard click away, yet attention is still finite. There are still only the same 24 hours a day. Technology can now fill your every waking minute with more information than ever dreamed of, yet evolution hasn't changed you, you can still only have contact of any meaningful length with a handful of people a day. But we want more, signal from the noise, the cream off the top.
So people are making software that is going to edit all this for you. Facebook already does this. If you follow alot of people, they don't show you everything, they know you can't keep up, so they weight people you talk to more, give them higher priority, they take into account people you've "liked", if you click on pictures they show you more pictures. Software is being written, not to connect you to a shared experience, but to continually create a highly specialized individual one just for you.
"Did you see the latest [blank]?" No, soon you probably won't be able to answer that question, for anything beyond the biggest, lowest common denominator's of topics or at least you won't be able to answer that question of anyone except someone whose profile is very close to yours. The software providing you your individual experience won't have shown that to you. You click on cats, it was a dog story, it will never even show up in your scroll.
You can forward the link to your friends though, publish it to your feed. But most of them won't click on it, won't read it, at best they'll make a mental note to check it out later in case you bring it up again later. It's not that they don't think it will be interesting, it's not that they don't value your forwards, but the computer is giving them a more personal feed than you. The computer knows what they like and is better at holding their attention than you are (or it will be very soon at least.). Don't worry though, the computer knows your friends too. And when several of your friends click on the same thing and give that thing their attention, the likelyhood will rise that the computer will highlight that very same link to you. Deny those links from your friends enough times though and the computer will slowly stop showing you them. The computer will be the first to know if your friendships start slipping away. Maybe at a certain point it will even ask you "Do you want to remove John Doe from your friends list?"
You might even say yes, because you are so connected. You'll still have the dozen or so friends and family and a dunbar's number worth of connections and acquaintances that evolution has equipped you to deal with, plus a 1,000 or two more people's names who you somewhat recognize. Foremost among all these will be your computer's feed, because it knows what you like. It knows what you've been talking about lately and knows what you are likely to be interested in, and you'll pay attention to it, but it will be so personal that you won't share it with anyone else. You won't share all of it anyway, maybe glimpses of it, but no, not all of it. Not the part based on your private journals, or the part based on your medical records, or the fact that for whatever reason you click on some hollywood starlet's photos just a little more than you'd care to admit too. You won't share the complete GPS mapping of your exact movements for the last 5 years, even though the part of your feed that connects to your phone knows that.
You'll read the most interesting things. Watch the most interesting videos. Listen to the most interesting music. And yes, get the most relevant ads. And a computer feed will have your attention. Will be in your top 5 if not top 3, if not top 1.
I'm in advertising. It's my job to get people's attention, at my best I help find the right people and advertise to those who can use and benefit from the information I'm charged with delivering. But once you start hanging out with the feed, once the feed is your best friend. Once you are a demographic of one and your time and attention is completely gatekeepered for you by this feed, well then, my job is going to be alot lot more difficult isn't it?
P.S. I read thru the above once, I added a few more comments along the way. I didn't read it again though, frankly I'm surprised you did, and in anycase, My Google Reader and Twitter are calling me, I don't have time to read this a third time ;)
Another pic I took with Jennifer's SLR. Caught a really devious glance. Sometimes you just hit the shutter at the right time.
On my way in to work today I drove behind a Smart Car. Really cool little car. At $13,450 it seems pricy for something that small, but I bet it would be a blast to drive around in.
-- Sent from my Palm Pre
