Tim's posterous

Google Earth: Hiker’s Edition


Today, Google Earth released a new edition of its desktop app which hikers, runners and cyclists are going to love. They call it Google Earth 5.2. I call it the Hiker;s Edition. One of the new features allows you to recreate the path of a hike or bike ride by ingesting geo-data from one of your GPS devices. The visualizations show you the speed, elevation, and other stats from your hike, which you can see as an animation inside Google Earth.


If you collect other data about your trip, such as your heart rate or other body monitoring stats, those can be overlayed as a graph below at the bottom of the screen. I’d love to see an iPhone or Android fitness app that takes advantage of these new capabilities.


Another new feature in Google Earth is the ability to launch a regular Web browser from within the desktop app. Hopefully, that is the first step towards bringing Google Earth completely from the desktop to the Web. Otherwise, it might end up like Second Life.


Below is a video Google Earth product manager Peter Birch made of his bike ride to work.


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James Murphy - LCD Soundsystem's last stand -The Guardian Guide

"I was at a club not dancing, because I didn't dance. For years, I never danced," Murphy says. "I was on ecstasy and I was peaking, and then the DJ played Tomorrow Never Knows and I lost my marbles. But I also had a very important revelation, which was that the way I was feeling was actually me. It wasn't the drug. It was me. But you know, I never took ecstasy until I was 30. That's important. When it comes to drugs, I'm a big proponent of the boat-sails-wind analogy: your life is a boat, the sails are your emotions, and drugs are the wind. When you're a kid, your boat is small and your sail is huge, and drugs are like a hurricane. So you need to get to a point in life where you have a big enough boat to navigate the weather."
via guardian.co.uk

A lovely analogy that I can see myself using when the time comes!

Defeating the Dark Side of Social Networking

Six Recommendations

To try to respond to conversations about their brands in social media, companies would do well to consider six sets of actions:

¶ Develop a "social customer management" strategy that includes technical and business process components designed to engage customers in conversations on the Web.

¶ Automate as much interaction with customers as possible, so call-center workers can put the best approaches to work repeatedly. Clarabridge, for example, makes automation software to help with this.

¶ Reduce the time it takes to respond to Web postings from weeks to hours, or even minutes. Attivio's real-time analytical software can help companies quantify and react to customer opinions, for example.

¶ Connect marketers with product development staff to build a bridge from the conversations happening on the Web to the goods and services your company produces. Dell's IdeaStorm is a great example.

¶ Balance your resources between fielding customer phone calls and responding to what's happening on the Web. Of these six actions that Accenture recommends, rebalancing these resources is perhaps the hardest, especially since customer management software may not easily consume information coming in through the Web.

¶ Prioritize which customers demand the most immediate attention, and come up with a plan to ensure a timely response based on how valuable they are.

From http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2010/tc20100325_074058_page_2.htm

Mad Men: A Foucaultian take

I previously offered a Weberian reading of The Wire. And now I'm equally convinced that Mad Men is an outstanding Foucaultian deconstruction of contemporary American capitalism. In some ways the two play off against each other very well. The Wire is concerned constantly with norms, rules, duties: to whom am I responsible? What are the uses and limits of public law? Should I uphold tradition? How can I live in multiple moral orders (family, community, city; public, private) simultanteously? How to overcome the 'irrational rationality' of bureaucracy'? The Wire is a sociology of Kantian moral questions. If one were being very high-minded, one might say it is another 'answer to the question 'what is - or isn't - Enlightenment?'', certainly inasmuch as it appears driven by a tragic moral sense that society ought to be able to do better.

Mad Men, meanwhile, is concerned constantly with desire, egos, aesthetics: what do I want? Who can I fuck? How can I throw off morality? It is a sociology of Nietzschean ethical questions. Most importantly, in contrast to The Wire, it is empty of any moral hierachies (it lacks an Omar) or notions of Enlightenment, and in that respect is genuinely genealogical. The Wire confirms Walter Benjamin's dialectical slogan "only to the hopeless is hope given", whereas Mad Men has nothing to say about hope or hopelessness, only contingency and strategy.

The first Foucaultian trope is to perform a 'history of the present'. Mad Men is self-evidently not about the 1960s, any more than Discipline and Punish is about the late 18th century. It is about us today and the contingencies through which we came to be so. One very smart way that Mad Men goes about this is to shift our habitual understanding of when a key historical break occurred. We typically equate 'the sixties' with the late 1960s, with 1968 as their epitome. But this is only what the self-important baby boomers want everyone to believe, on the solipsistic basis that they insist on having changed the world, not their parents.

Mad Men overthrows this assumption, with a similar disdain as Tony Judt pours on the Western boomers who think throwing rocks in Paris was ...

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Doppelganger Week on Facebook: Better Than Sharing Your Bra Color?


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Doppelganger Week on Facebook: Better Than Sharing Your Bra Color?

Facebook users have found a way to top the sharing your bra color meme: Celebrity Doppelganger Week.

We’ve been seeing status update after status update about this new meme pop up into our Facebook feeds. A quick search of Facebook explains exactly what’s going on:

“Doppelganger week! During this week change your profile picture to someone famous (actor, musician, athlete) you have been told you look like…. and repost this message.”

We have no idea how it started, and frankly we don’t care: the result is still both interesting and hilarious, depending on who your friends think they look like. We’ve seen posts on this all the way back to Tuesday, but it only recently picked up steam.

It is actually better than the Bra Color Facebook Status meme? We’re kind of fond of the bra color meme, but guys and girls alike are jumping on the doppelganger bandwagon. Let us know what you think of this newest trend in the comments.


[via Inquisitr]

Tags: 25 things, facebook, viral, Viral trend


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