WIRED Review: Issue 14.07, July 2006JARGON WATCH WORD: BLACK HAWKS. n. Pl. Helicopter parents with an especially militant mentality. They hover over their kids' lives through college, waging war to give them unfair advantages.
LAWRENCE LESSIG - WHERE THE TRUTH LIES. Discusses Inconvenient Truth and Al Gore. The media's own inconvenient truth being easily manipulated by those whose "salary depends on our understanding" the facts (to reuse Gore's favorite Upton Sinclair quote.) The result is the perfect storm for obfuscation.
Many will ask if this campaign will have an obvious sequel. If Gore's right--if "our ability to live on this planet is what is at stake"--how could he not run?
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE HIT, by Chris Anderson. (of "the long tail.") Lots of statistics on the decline of popular media, like a 20% decline in album sales since 1999. Today's top rated American Idol with 18% viewership wouldn't have made it into the top 10 with that kind of market share.
Instead of the weak connections of the office water cooler, we're increasingly forming our own tribes, groups bound together more by affinity and shared interests than by broadcast schedules.
The hierarchy of attention has inverted--credibility now rises from below.
Adapted from The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.
WIRED LIST OF TOP 40 COMPANIES SHAPING THE FUTURE. Google, Apple, Samsung, Genetech, Yahoo, Amazon, Toyota, GE, News Corp, SAP were the top 10. Interesting investment prospects here…
SIX TRENDS DRIVING THE GLOBAL ECONOMY.
1) PEOPLE POWER. First was the Industrial Revolution, then Information Age, now we have armies of amateurs happy to work for free. Call it the Age of Peer Production. From Amazon.com to MySpace to craigslist...based on user-generated content. The tools of production...are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale.
2) VIDEO UNLIMITED - Any time, any place, any format, any screen -- there's always something on.
3) PERSONALIZE IT.
4) GOING GREEN. For some companies, going green is generating serious greenbacks.
5) BUY IT NOW. Forget old-school R&D. These companies purchase their ideas one startup at a time.
6) ALL-ACCESS ECONOMY. Closed systems are dead. From software to supply chains, open is the new standard.
HIS SPACE. On Rupert Murdoch, News Corp and the MySpace acquisition. Murdoch on Google, "I like those guys, but there's a bit of arrogance. They could have bought MySpace three months before we did for half the price. They thought, ‘It's nothing special. We can do that.’"
THEORY ON CREATIVITY. Conceptualists, peaking early, creating their masterwork at a tender age (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Orson Welles, Maya Lin, Wolfgang Mozart) verses Experimentalists, blooming late, doing their best work after lifelong tinkering (Mark Twain, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig van Beethoven.)
[tags: WIRED Magazine]