Recently I read an article in Wired, “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains” by Nicholas Carr in the June 2010 edition (adapted from his upcoming book The Shallows). I thought it was thought provoking because I’ve been dealing with some personal focus fragmentation issues.

As someone who writes software, I often need long uninterrupted blocks of time to concentrate. This is a fairly well known phenomenon that most hackers experience, but I’d found while trying to start my latest startup I was spending a lot of time on Twitter, blogs, email, and other online / marketing tasks. I found it almost impossible to ignore the distractions.

We want to be interrupted, because each interruption—email, tweet, instant message, RSS headline—brings us a valuable piece of information. To turn off these alerts is to risk feeling out of touch or even socially isolated. The stream of new information also plays to our natural tendency to overemphasize the immediate. We crave the new even when we know it’s trivial.

My solution to this has been trying to apply a certain amount of discipline. I’m trying to forcibly block out chunks of time by turning off all of these forms of media delivery. My initial results have been very promising, I’ve been able to get a lot more code done, at the expense of being a little less engaged with Twitter and email.

His other point in the article, though, appears to be a general attack on hyperlinks.

By the end of the decade, the enthusiasm was turning to skepticism. Research was painting a fuller, very different picture of the cognitive effects of hypertext. Navigating linked documents, it turned out, entails a lot of mental calisthenics—evaluating hyperlinks, deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats—that are extraneous to the process of reading. Because it disrupts concentration, such activity weakens comprehension. A 1989 study showed that readers tended just to click around aimlessly when reading something that included hypertext links to other selected pieces of information. A 1990 experiment revealed that some “could not remember what they had and had not read.”

This particular point has caused a small stir on the web with various articles asking questions like: “Does the Internet Make You Smarter?” and “Is the Internet Making us Smarter or Stupider”.

Intuitively I feel like the conclusion that hyperlinks are somehow bad for cognition to be too simplistic. I don’t think we should start writing without hyperlinks, they’re just too valuable. Hyperlinks are the foundation of the web. I thought it was an interesting enough idea to experiment with, though.

I created a simple way to experience pages without the links. I put together this small bookmarklet that hides links and have been checking out various online sources. The links are still there, they are just made to look like the rest of the text in the page.

The experience is different, but it’s subtle. I think it might be useful to use this to read complicated content once without links, and a second time to follow up on the linked content (creating two experiences of the same content).

If you play with this bookmarklet, let me know what you think and what your experiences are.

Neil deGrasse Tyson on NASA, and its effects on the dreams of a nation.

Nobody’s dreaming about tomorrow anymore. NASA knows how to dream about tomorrow. If the funding can accommodate it, the funding can empower it, the funding can enable it. Yeah you need good teachers, no doubt about it, but the teachers come and go cause I go to the next grade. Teachers can help light a flame but I need something to keep the flame fanned. It’s about the effect of NASA on who and what we are as a nation.

What we have been as a nation, perhaps for a while there, we took it for granted. I see the most powerful particle accelerator in some other country. The fastest trains are built by Germany and are running in China right now. I see our infrastructure collapsing. No one dreaming about tomorrow and everyone thinks they can put a bandaid on one problem or another.

The most powerful agency on the dreams of a nation is currently underfunded to do what it needs to be doing and that’s making dreams come true. And at a half-a-penny on the dollar… How much would you pay for the universe?

It’s 15:13:31 o’clock, do you know where your barcode reader is?

Here’s a fun hack using QR codes, qrtime.com – a QR Code Clock. Not very practical as a timepiece, but I could see this as a fun piece of dynamic QR artwork that could be placed somewhere.

Some pretty thought provoking ideas about currency and its implications regarding creativity, abundance, and the digital world. Not sure if I agree with all of it, but still interesting.

Web 2.0 Expo NY 09: Douglas Rushkoff, “Radical Abundance: How We Get Past “Free”

Found via FriendFeed user “Complex Days”

I picked up a copy of 1Password a while back when it was on sale. I have to give a brief plug for it, it’s a very nice piece of software. You never realize how many passwords you’re managing in your head and how bad your passwords are until you have something like 1Password managing them.

Gadget geeks love spec sheets. When the iphone was first released, many gadgeteers sneered at the device, no GPS? Insanse! No video? Crippled! No removable battery? Scandalous! 2MP camera? What a piece of crap!

When I first got the iPhone, and being of a technological bent, friends and acquaintances would ask me about the iPhone’s ‘revolutionary innovations’. Surprising many, I would say that there was little technically new or innovative with the iPhone. There were devices with touchscreens, browsers, email, etc… long before the iPhone. Even interface gestures were a very old area of research.

What Apple did that was innovative was approaching the mobile device from a completely different perspective. Instead of a phone that happened to be able to do some computing-like tasks, they came at it from the approach of a pocket computer that also happened to make phone calls. This sounds like a trivial distinction but it makes a big difference.

The touchscreen is not a bullet on a spec sheet. The touchscreen is a an expression of this philosophical approach to the mobile experience. It allows you to ‘paint’ any interface you want onto the device and allows you to iterate that design over time. This is exactly analogous to the development of the GUI, software based buttons and interfaces allows much greater flexibility than anything hardware based.

I’ve seen some of the coverage by tech bloggers, including Scoble, about the Nokia N97 device and I hold to my position that this marks a failure for Nokia. To be fair, the specs and the design of the device are actually quite impressive. I think Nokia has done an excellent engineering job with this device. Looking at videos and its capabilities, it’s quite sexy. The problem is that it reflects the same philosophical approach to product development that the mobile industry has had for years. The touchscreen feels like a tick-mark on a spec sheet and not an embodiment of a different approach.

Both the blackberry storm, and this new Nokia seem to have this same problem. If they can somehow just bolt on a touchscreen onto their existing OS/device, they’ll not only have feature parity with an iPhone but exceed it on every count. Unfortunately, that’s not why the iPhone is great, a touchscreen does not an iPhone make.

Apple: Aluminum MacBook X-Ray Makes Perfect Desktop Background: “”

Technology in x-ray always looks cool to me.

(Via Gizmodo.)

I’ve been using our new product VibeMetrix to read materials on social media tools, and general philosophy of social media marketing. It’s interesting how many slight variations there are on the theme and what people think it means.

I while back I ran across this slideshow by a local Boston social media expert Marta Kagan that I thought was pretty informative and entertaining. Been meaning to share for a while but I’ve been busy writing code.

I know we’re used to thinking of it that way, but I think that image belies the nature of the company or what it’s rapidly evolving into. Google has created some pretty cool technology, have some of the best and brightest working away in the Googleplex, but are they a technology company?

I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about Chrome, Google’s really interesting new browser, but why are they releasing a browser? I’ve been contemplating Google’s unique position in the tech space, and the fact that they make almost none of their money in that space.

If you take the perspective that they are not a technology company, why would they want to do this? If they’re not a technology company, then what? Google is in the business of advertising. Granted, their approach is very hight tech, but at it’s core, the vast majority of their revenue comes from ads.

Taking that view one possible motivation for creating their own browser comes into focus. What are the most popular browser plugins for Firefox? Ad blockers. If you control the browser, and you’re an advertising company, you can keep people from ignoring your ads.

I’m sure creating the “browser as OS” or possibly just improving the browser experience as a more stable platform for google apps, or possibly a development platform for Android were part of their reasoning for releasing Chrome, but at the moment they make almost no money from those types of efforts. The one thing I haven’t heard anyone talk about, and that I wouldn’t totally discount is the control of the ‘advertising channel’. I wouldn’t be surprised if Chrome either will intentionally lack a plugin architecture, or, at a minimum, will involve a vetting process that “for your safety” conveniently also disallows ad blockers.

It’s interesting to look at their actions in this way. Google is an advertising company and becoming more so each day.

In the embedded summize results I made in this post about politics the rapid fire tweets are counting down the required delegates for Obama to clinch the nomination. It’s kind of odd, you can almost hear a crowd of people counting down, a slow motion times square on new years eve. It’s a really interesting pattern.