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I’ve never found anything I can’t do with it that I had to do before with JavaScript.

It’s less lines of code.

It’s no wonder the machine (however you want to define that, the powers that be, the man, our corporate overlords) is mining our data. It’s always mining something: iron, gold, oil, electricity (although the more elegant term for that is harvesting) – it’s just incredible how much data we produce and how easy it is to mine it.

The Social Dilemna does a good job of exposing that, although I could have done without the cheesy scripted stuff. However, it fails to point out the counterpart to our data, and what is in fact infinitely more valuable: our content.

Every post we make-video, photo, rant, tweet, comment, is like food for the machine. Without content, there is no internet. No one logs into Facebook so they can click on ads or fill out surveys or practice browsing habits. They go for content–to consume others’ and to post their own.

Content self-propagates; the machine doesn’t have to invasively collect it, analyze it, reconfigure it, or present it to its paying advertisers, as it does with data. And there’s mountains of it, and we give it away for free!

One of the interviewees suggests that we tax the machine for its data. That sounds great in theory, but I have a hard time understanding how it could be enforced. Instead, they should be taxed on their content they collect. It’s far easier to monitor.

Better yet, we could demand compensation for the food we’re keeping the machine alive with. Kind of like selling the glut of solar power you’re harvesting with your roof panels back to the utility companies. Let’s figure out how to do this.

So I started swimming. Last night I went 3000 yards in an hour. Not bad for being out of it for a year.
I’ve always loved swimming on a certain level. There’s no impact, just a “plodding along” type of thing. People hate it because it’s boring compared to running or biking. There’s nothing to look at, nothing to discover. I like it for those reasons. With running or biking, you’re always kind of wondering how you’re getting home. You keep your eye out for dogs, potholes, cars… In swimming, there’s none of that. There’s just you and the 25 yards/18 strokes/6 breaths till you get to the other end.
When I was swimming a lot, I guess I was around 12 or so, I did long course at  the local university. The pool was enormous. I remember having visions of the most beautiful lettering, it was green and blue and kept shifting from one word to another. I must have been really oxygen depleted because it was definitely an extraordinary experience.

When it comes to new media, many talented people, top-notch agencies, and renowned print service companies are finding themselves on the outside looking in. Art directors, mechanical artists, pre-press specialists, media buyers, press-operators, etc. are being forced to reckon with the web. Suddenly, they’re being faced with projects that

Clients are demanding it. They aren’t getting more marketing dollars to spend, especially considering the current economic landscape. When reality hits home, that those dollars are better spent online, print-centricity is left twiddling its thumbs.

There is a huge, HUGE opportunity for the dinosaurs, and it all comes down to the solid relationships that have formed over the last few decades. Clients love their agencies. Agencies love their printers. One only has to look at the incredible work produced within the constraints of this relationship to grasp the potential this has once it harnesses new media.

But getting there requires an infrastructure overhaul. Pre-press specialists and mechanical artists need to learn html, css, and cutup. Art directors need to talk wordpress, jquery and ruby. Account executives need to become SEO jedis. Media buyers and copywriters need to get on facebook, twitter, and youtube so they  can understand the mindsets of the new demographic.

And if I owned a printing company, I’d launch an online services department. I’d  go out and hire the best PHP/MySQL web development expert, and the best IT/networking/server master I could find. Pay them well. I’d buy a big, fat reseller account with a top-notch hosting company. I’d promote the heck out of it via, what else, lots of print ads in local magazines and newspapers. Pretty soon, I’d have tons of agency client sites running under my company. I’d be reaping setup and hosting fees. My php dude/tte would be enabling all the crazy web 2.0 stuff that only agencies and clients can dream of. My network dude/tte would be setting things proper on-location. In no time, the new department would be generating revenues far beyond what I’d be getting from print.

It will take lots of time and money, but this is an issue of survival. It’s time for people to dive in.

Best month of the year. Each day is wide open. Seems like this June stretches on forever.

A machine that pours water down a chute with a word at the bottom.

A measuring cup directly underneath each gap between the pairs of letters.

Each cup has the same amount of water in it after all the water has poured down and through the gaps.