The Story of Stuff

I believe this video has been around for a while and it has spread widely, yet I watched it only today and I’ll suggest it anyway, just in case someone has not watched it yet.

The Story of Stuff is a video documentary about the life-cycle of the products, from the materials’ extraction to the disposal. It’s  a very direct (and in some points, arguable) video, but it’s really worth of a look.

P.S. I was particularly interested in the happiness indicator, in case you’re interested too take a look at the Genuine Progress Indicator and at the Human Development Index.

Related articles by Zemanta

• In schools, a cautionary video about America’s ’stuff’ (ecoearth.info)
• Video Teaching Children To Respect The Planet Called “Anti-Capitalist” (alan.com)
• Filling The Textbook Gap With A Film Worth Watching: “The Story of Stuff” (takepart.com)

People not supposed to use a PC

Recently I had to introduce the PC to a complete newbie; since the person is a 60 yo person with little digital education I looked for the easiest and fastest way to get her browsing, mailing and chatting.

I found Eldy, a basic sw interface intended just for these purposes. In 5 minutes I had my mother (the “student”) looking on the web for recipes or for weather forecasts. The program is free, available in Italian and English, and includes the following functions:

• Browsing
• Mail
• Chat (also Skype)
• Text editing
• …

All function are provided through a very simple, big-scaled interface, requiring only left-mouse button to navigate.

I haven’t had the chance to test it thoroughly but so far I’m very satisfied, it seems to go really in the right direction of what older (and younger?) people may need to approach the web.

As a final note I may add it would be nice to have Eldy as a standalone OS working on a basic and cheap PC (the Nettop?)

Moving in (a new pc)

Last week I switched to my new notebook, a Samsung NC20 (running fine so far, amazing battery capacity e portability!); of all the stuff to do when changing pc, migrating iTunes is by far the one I was most concerned about. I looked around for some solutions, I didn’t want to lose my playlists, podcasts and playback history, but I found only pages-long solutions involving 1/2 tools.

I solved my problem with a pragmatic, mechanic approach:

1. Set up iTunes in the new pc
2. Move iTunes directory (the one with the podcasts, videos, and config files) from the old pc to the new one, overwriting the one created by the installation
3. Edit, in the new iTunes directory, the file “iTunes Music Library.xml” and, with the find&replace command, replace the old (wrong) path of the old system with the new correct ones, pointing to your actual libraries.
   

   Upgrade of iTunes library path

4. Start iTunes, music library with playback history and podcasts should all be there; the only thing I had to do was to subscribe again to the podcasts (which were listed and contained already all audio files)

Forgive me for the very brief and undetailed explanation, if you have any comment or need further explanations let me know!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Add a consolidated library view to iTunes (macworld.com)
• Syncopation syncs multiple iTunes libraries (macworld.com)
• News: iTunes 8.1 causing syncing issues with older iPod shuffles? (ilounge.com)

adMITted!

So we are… after one year of tests, meetings, chats with alumni I received the admission offer by MIT Sloan! Thanks to everyone who helped, advised, recommended or just listened to my single-topic discourses for the last year!

Image via Wikipedia

Even though I haven’t realized it completely (MBA, 2 years in Boston and so on) I can’t wait to attend to the adMIT weekend at the end of february.

I’ll keep you updated!

PS. I started in this post to use Zemanta, a content support for blogging, mail writing, … take a look!

Unconscious collaboration

We are all well aware of the amazing results that masses of people could produce by collaboration. Wikipedia is the most evident proof of how many not-specialized people can contribute to a bit of a huge project and together compete (and sometimes surpass) with field professionals (about this you can take a look at this TED talk and this book).

Google Flu screen

More than that, it fascinates me thinking what value the “unconscious collaboration” could produce. If we take the recent Google Flu we have an insight of what potential has the information produced by millions of people (in this case web researches). I believe the elaboration of this huge amount of data opens new scenarios and applications. Some time ago I came across to a proposal of using the localization data of mobile phone users to derive information about traffic (anyone aware of a follow-up?). One problem about these applications is the privacy, but this should be dismissed by the fact that millions of data point are merged together with no chance of backtracking.

In my view we will see more and more application of this concept, far from the traditional marketing applications, with completely new objectives (as tracking flu’s pandemic in Google Flu, got any new idea?). Furthermore I believe that the spread of internet-connected, electronic devices will definitely boost this data production by making it even more pervasive.

Who can point me a good overview about spimes?

TED: Ideas worth spreading

I’d like to post this link to TED conference website, signalled to me by all-knowing Marco, a conference which hosts short (but very inspiring) presentations of “thinker and doers” regarding a large spectrum of topics, from technology to arts, from enterteinment to science.

 Just start with this one.

The Long Tail (How endless choice is creating unlimited demand)

Keeping on reading border-line economic books, I’ve tried this one from Chris Anderson, the editor in of Wired Magazine.

The Long Tail is about market niches and how they can be profitable in a scenario with low distribution costs (as iTunes, Netflix and so on…).

Typical long-tailed graph (ex. x-> products and y->sales)

Longtail image refers to the sales trend in which high sales (on the y-axis) are concentrated into top sellers (the green-coloured part) which are the ”Hits” or the “Blockbusters” but a relevant part of sales’ volume (which corresponds to the area) is present also in the long tail going rightward (yellow coloured). Usually these niche’s products cannot be sold by classic bricks-and-mortars shop but they can be sold by online store (as niche music for iTunes or whatever products for eBay) where handling cost tend to zero and you have no shelving costs. The book relates this effect also to democratization of production’s tools (as cameras or recording equipment) and of distribution (as eBay, self-publishing tools or YouTube).Suggested, also for the chapter about Wikipedia, where Long Tail applies on the supplier side rather than on the demand side.

Self-Publishing tools

During the reading of “The long tail” (I expect to post the review soon), I’ve found a very useful service called Lulu. It’s a site which offers self publishing services for books, photo books, calendars, cds/dvds, music etc… It’s very interesting because you can upload your work and having it sold on the website store (with very high margins on sales, about 80%) and also on other well known stores (as Amazon, Barnes & Noble and so on).

Fees are quite cheap and copyrights are ensured to the author. I haven’t used it yet but I’d like to publish something, sooner or later!

Suggested for all wanna be content producers/resellers or only for who wants to share their content with their friends.

A very useful service

I’ve found a site that offers free web space to host any kind of files, there are 500MB of free space available without bandwidth limit. In addiction files hosted aren’t deleted if not downloaded for a certain period. Since my last migration I’m hosting there my blog files and I’m very satisfied of it, I suggest you to try it out.

Moving (again?!)

I hope this is the last time, but because of some issues with my previous hosting service now I’ve migrated to WordPress.com, it’s a nice and very basic free blog hosting; I hope this is the right one!