Perry

Hewitt

Author: Perry Hewitt

  • "The cloud" — way better than the buzzword

    Cloud Terrace is astonishing — it’s a wire mesh cloud with 10,000 crystals hovering over a reflecting pool at Dumbarton Oaks, a DC-based research library and collection (and host of the WWII era Dumbarton Oaks conference).

    Curious what else they get up to down there? Researchers are now blogging some of the pieces in their collection.

  • Parsing Chinese political memes

    Exploring tragic, funny, and clever Chinese political memes — fascinating observations about “memes as the street art of the censored web” by An Xiao Mina recorded at Personal Democracy Forum 

  • Let the bidding begin: new gTLDs visualized

    Today’s the big reveal for who applied for a new gTLD. Looks like brands went for proprietary names: Barclaycard, XEROX (really?) and nominal nonprofit AARP, and some of the more compelling generics. Above is the list of English language gTLD applications visualized with wordle. The larger words indicate where there are multiple applicants, which results in bidding — good luck to those vying for .home or .app!

  • Exploring Chinese internet censorship

    Lots of interesting thinking in Cambridge in the last few weeks about internet censorship in China. For those of you who missed it, last Monday, June 4 marked the 23rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and spurred online discussion about what was and wasn’t clearing the censors.

    I think a lot about ways in which what we see is victim to implicit filtering – captured well by Eli Pariser in The Filter Bubble – and it’s fascinating to see different ways censorship as an explicit goal plays out.

  • The once and future grail: Interop

    Thanks to Nathan Matias for a terrific liveblog of Berkman’s Interop book event with John Palfrey and Urs Gasser last night. The need for interoperability isn’t new (see Cesar Brea’s 2002 post on Competition and the Role of Standards) but the scale at which it can be achieved in a internet-enabled world of open APIs is dramatically greater.

    Overall, Palfrey and Gasser find that the benefits outweigh the risks, and paint a picture of smarter cities and reduced redundancy (surely many people in the U.S. have a drawer full of obsolete mobile phone chargers). Before we realize the full value, I’d wager that there will be more than a few examples of interoperability information flow being used for nefarious purposes — particularly since so many enterprise IT security protocols are based on practices over a decade old.

  • What will gamification look like in 2020?

    Pew Internet recently issued a report featuring divergent opinions on gamification, and asked respondents to consider how gamification might fit into people’s day-to-day digital lives by 2020. I agreed more with the statement that it would be “implemented in many new ways for education, health, work, and other aspects of human connection.”

    My take is that gamification will play a central role because it can capture existing offline behaviors for personal and professional behaviors and make them visible in compelling new ways, as the Quantified Self community does. Digital can take the near-universal human instinct to measure and improve and make it visible for the benefit of individuals (“how’s my running routine really going?”) and institutions (“how can we motivate and empower lower performers?”).

    Susan Crawford points out important risks in blindly following a game-driven approach: “if everything was a game, no one would have a reason to invent; any metric corrupts, as people shape their behavior to ensure that they come out on top. There have to be other routes to excellence in work, health, and education…” This is an important corollary to Michael Sandel’s recent thinking about the moral limits of markets — there are distinct hidden costs to a society wholly driven by price-tag or gamified points systems.

    Both individuals and institutions have interest in some level of gamification to achieve badly-needed improved outcomes in health or learning. The need for effective approaches within both longstanding entities like the Department of Health and Human Services and new educational initiatives like edX is too great not to consider gamification as a meaningful part of the solution.

  • What makes a video go viral?

    When people starting calling/texting/emailing me on Monday about Harvard baseball’s inspired version of “Call Me, Maybe,” I had a sense it might captivate people – but I didn’t predict how much. The video’s been picked up everywhere from Good Morning America to New York Daily News to Mashable, with views closing in on 880,000 at the time of posting. It’s hard to predict what catches people’s imagination, but there are a few elements of this video that makes it ripe for sharing:

    • Harvard as a brand captures people’s attention. Harvard in a online headline will dramatically increase page views, as journalists who cover education know. This video featured Harvard prominently but plays against Harvard stereotypes as well — it’s a bunch of guys on a decidedly unglamorous road trip, lipsyncing to pop music. They’re all wearing Harvard caps, but these are regular guys you might have gone to high school with, having a good time.
    • There’s a lot that’s visually unexpected in this video. It’s shot driving along a highway; there’s a seeming incongruity of the sise of the guys and the size of the van, and more of them keep popping up, Keystone cops-style.
    • Good God, this song is an earworm.
    • It’s funny, really funny. From the guy sacked out in the back left throughout to the use of a phone prop to the player with his head thrown back at 2:28 (“Baaaaby!”), this is hilarious choreography. Well done, Conner Hulse and crew.

  • Getting ready for the campus tsunami

    The early Web radically democratized culture, but now in the media and elsewhere you’re seeing a flight to quality. The best American colleges should be able to establish a magnetic authoritative presence online.

    David Brooks, The Campus Tsunami

  • Tying transaction to check-in

    The friction inherent to the foursquare check-in becomes a harder sell in an attention economy full of competing distractions – the value had better be high. Today, foursquare announced a partnership with OpenTable. Marrying the “Explore” feature’s social reviews by friends with the transaction and history of OpenTable’s reservation system is a big win, especially for travelers. It’s desktop web for now, but here’s hoping the app version isn’t far behind.

  • edX is here

    edX is a joint partnership between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to offer online learning to millions of people around the world. edX will offer Harvard and MIT classes online for free. Through this partnership, the institutions aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of online learners and to improve education for everyone. More.