aaron c beals

it’s a little after the actual collapse, but my brother forwarded me a great video explaining exactly why the economy collapsed. even if you think you know what went on, it’s a very well-done video and worth the 10 minutes to watch.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

perhaps due to my 4-year bout of vegetarianism, i don’t consume massive quantities of red meat (which, it turns out, is a good thing). when i do, it’s usually confined to beef (steak tips, burgers). very rarely do i eat pork… with one notable exception.

now everyone likes their bacon different ways. me? i like it almost-burnt crispy, and the BLT is one of my favorite delivery mechanisms. but regardless of how you like your bacon, you’ve got to love the current state of bacon on the, uh, Internets:

bacon chocolate
the bacon show: one bacon recipe per day, every day, forever
Baconnaise (as seen on The Daily Show)
bacon vodka
vegetarian* shirt
bacon in desserts
bacon salt

and the current reigning king of all things bacon…

the bacon explosion.

http://globalhealthdelivery.org/blog/?p=312

the other night, i read a fantastic article in the New York Times Magazine about one of my favorite Duke players of all time*. it’s a great read if you are a fan of basketball, statistics, or just love an alternate take on what most people consider a solved problem: points, rebounds, assists, blocks, and steals determine whether or not you win the game… right?

( * i have no shame in admitting that i’m a huge Duke fan. i’m not from North Carolina. heck, i’ve never even been there. i just happened to tune into a game when i was 11 years old, using an old radio turned down low so my parents couldn’t hear i was still awake. this was in the days of Hurley, Hill, and Laettner… and i was hooked ever since.)

some background

almost two years ago now, i posted about microblogging. at the time, i didn’t see the value in services such as Twitter, at least in a productive sense of the word “value”. it wasn’t that i thought people would avoid these services — rather, i figured the masses would flock — but my concern was that the constant cycle of tweeting and reading tweets would devolve into a dead-end of inactivity.

i still maintain that Twitter (the other microblogging sites i mentioned in my previous post have all but died out, leaving Twitter alone at the top) has the potential to be yet another information feed to fall behind on, like your email inbox and RSS feeds. however, as time has passed and innovative minds have started building new services on top of the Twitter platform, i realize that these deviations from the original “what are you doing now?” mantra hold the key for the transformation of Twitter into something useful.

dealing with information overload, aka “thinning the herd”

during a recent PIH gathering, i had a conversation with some colleagues about information overload. it’s a conversation i have had many times before, but one of the first with folks who are largely non-technophiles. i always assumed that the information overload problem (except for email) was unique to folks really hooked into the tech realm, but it has become clear that with the proliferation of social networking and information sharing technology, the problem has started to bleed over into the rest of the online world.

the issue, at its core, is this: what do you do with a deluge of potentially useful information? reading it all is a non-starter — you’d spend most of your life just consuming. filtering based on source (website, author, etc) is tricky, because not all content is useful, and it would be a shame to miss a true diamond in an otherwise uninteresting site. you could rely on the mechanical turk or “crowdsourcing” model like that employed by digg or reddit. many people go this route, but i find that the interests of the masses tend toward the middle of the bell curve, whereas my interests (and, honestly, some of the best information) lie on the long tail.

what i really want is to find a select group of people that share the same interests as me (or an one in each interest area) and then together, we’ll share the load of chewing through the mountain of information. if we each take a slice, the value to work ratio will be significantly higher. this is, in essence, the distributed computing model. the difference is that unlike digg, which uses an unbounded pool of computing resources, i want to hand-pick my pool of ‘computers’.

what about Facebook? you have control over your network there, right?

Twitter vs Facebook

in my old post, i said that “the line between Facebook and Twitter is the line between sharing and over-sharing”. at that time, Facebook wasn’t really promoting their “status update” feature, and my notion of Twitter was that it was solely focused on the “what are you doing?” question. now, Facebook has started to ramp up the prominence of the status message in an attempt to tackle Twitter. in fact, the new site design (which should roll out next week) removes the notion of putting your name as the first noun in the status message, allowing you to post Twitter-like messages.

unfortunately–even with these changes–Facebook does not quite do the job, because your network there is comprised of your friends, and your friends do not all share your interests — which is OK! Twitter actually does a much better job of letting you manage information flow, because you do not have to be friends with someone to listen to their feed — you subscribe to someone if you’re interested in what they have to say and unsubscribe if you’re. Sure, one of your friends might be upset at you if you don’t follow them, but if you are willing to take that risk and realize that Twitter is not a social network but an information dissemination tool, you can use it to help tackle information overload.

of course, i’m not saying Facebook is without value. as i said before, Facebook allows us to keep informed about friends and acquaintances who do not have the time or desire to manage a blog. in fact, on Facebook i am very interested in what my friends are “doing right now”. however, in the fight to parse a mountain of information, Twitter–without the overhead of social networking–succeeds where Facebook cannot.

in which i blame Shaq

i consider myself a technophile (aka “nerd” in the minds of many), and in many ways an early adopter of technology, but i also have a realistic view toward my productivity and propensity toward procrastination. given that, i have held back from exploring certain technologies in the spirit of keeping my job, family, hobbies, etc. — social networking and multi-player online games are the two main areas of caution. i will engage in the former when i feel that the value outweighs the cost (read: risk of wasted time), and the latter is right out. don’t get me wrong, i love video games. i just like video games with an end.

but i digress. in order to get invested in a social networking technology, i need a catalyst: either someone to give me a push or overwhelming evidence that real value lies within. so just as my cousins were the catalyst that pushed me into Facebook, The Big Aristotle pushed me toward Twitter. i had heard rumors that his Twitter account was really him, not a poser or someone ghostwriting for him, but it wasn’t confirmed in my mind until recently. being hooked up to the mind of Shaq has been a surreal experience, to say the least. all i need now is for Sir Charles to join Twitter and i’ll call the experience complete.

so i signed up. i’m late to the parade, but i figure that i can’t properly critique something if i’m looking at it from the outside.

there was, to be fair, another reason that i joined. i have been involved for almost a year now in the Global Health Delivery Project (and more specifically, GHDonline). the GHDonline site has been up since June, and we have a great member base and a decent flow of discussion in the communities, but i wanted a way that we could communicate about progress on the site to those interested. since Twitter has started to be an essential part of marketing plans these days, i figured we should carve out a space of our own.

blogging, microblogging, and nanoblogging

so my own Twitter account is something i’m using as an extension of my blog — more in keeping with the idea of microblogging. i’m trying to keep the focus on technology, health care, and other work-related items, as opposed my blog which has historically been wide-ranging in subject matter. of course, i cannot promise that other topics will not creep in over time. but here’s the distinction and the reason i finally saw the light: in the end, my “tweets” will be less about what i’m doing and more about what i’m finding.

as i mentioned above, information overload is a huge problem, and one of the things i strive to do in my blog is to distill out the items that i find interesting and of higher value. of course, interest is purely subjective, but the hope is that others will find some information of value. so if i use Twitter as a means of providing smaller snippets of this information, i am extending the reach of my blog’s purpose. tweeting about where i am and “what (i’m) doing right now” has far less potential value.

what i have found about blogging on topics of interest to me is that–as with this post–writing a full blog post takes a bit of time, which is of course a rarity. as a result, the blog post ideas i have emailed to or texted to myself sit in my inbox, stressing me out as they await the day when they are either acted upon or deleted in a fit of mercy. with Twitter, however, i can post a note about them as soon as i find them, rather piling them on top of my always-growing todo list.

and in conclusion…

the Daily Show on Twitter

Bill Simmons has been talking about it for years, and it appears the NBA finally listened and added H-O-R-S-E to their lineup for the All-Star weekend. i have been talking about going to an All-Star weekend for years, but now i really need to get out there.

i realize that it might be perceived as mildly unpatriotic to post an article on Inauguration Day that slams several of the largest US businesses, but i cannot sit idly by and let this go unremarked upon. after 5 years as a Sprint PCS customer (way back in the day), i made the switch to Verizon Wireless, mainly because almost everyone i knew was already on Verizon, and if i followed suit, i wouldn’t be charged for calls to them. later, when text messaging became popular, VZW offered free texting to other VZW customers, so that was an added bonus. the downside was that they charged you 10 cents per incoming and outgoing text with members of other networks (that price has since become 25 cents). eventually they provided plan add-ons through which you could pay for 500 out-of-network messages for $10/month, lowering the cost to 2 cents per message. but of course, you had to use all the messages or the per-message price effectively increases… and heaven forbid you go over, because then you’re back to paying $0.25 each. i put up with this nonsense, their lack of a GSM network, absolutely terrible selection of phones, and absurdly high data plan rates all because they have the best coverage in the area and essentially give me a free phone every 2 years. oh, and because the other US carriers aren’t much better.

and then, like salt in an already festering wound, comes the news that these wireless carriers don’t actually have much in the way of overhead (costs) for these precious text messages that they dole out at 4 for a dollar:

article in the NYTimes

i was reading my RSS feeds today, and came across this post about an Albanian developer who created an iPhone application that emulates the ancient Albanian lute (Çifteli):

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/01/19/if-you-like-the-oud-youll-love-the-tingalin-iphone-app/

i have to be honest, it takes some getting used to, but this is definitely playing a part in my next album. maybe a hidden track?

not quite as funny now that the burst of the web 2.0 bubble has been accelerated by the rest of the economy, but it’s still highly amusing:

my co-worker Sophie pointed this article in the New Yorker out to me recently. while it initially appears to be an article about “extreme beer”, it’s more of an excellent writeup on the history of Dogfish Head and Sam Calagione. even if you’ve read Sam’s book, this article provides an alternate view into the psyche of Sam and the process that goes into brewing up a radical beer. the article is a long, but if you’re interested in beer and brewing, you’ll likely not notice — it’s an engaging read and well worth the time.