Here I blog about stuff on the internet, User Experience, Apple & similar stuff relating to my interests. I also post pictures on Flickr.
For my personal website & portfolio: see MarcoHamersma.nl
Shit that Silicon Allee says (by VentureVillageVideos)
Pretty accurate…
All the lobbying, the lawsuits, the ad campaigns and most of all, the hand-wringing, aren’t going to change anything at all. In fact, instead of postponing the outcome you fear, they probably accelerate it.
The history of media and technology is an endless series of failed rearguard actions as industry leaders attempt to solidify their positions on a bed of quicksand.
"The amazing world of Sound Design
(Source: vimeo.com)
Music as I see it. Written in 10 minutes. I thought it would be fun. Challenge = give yourself 10 minutes to write in any way that you would like about your thoughts on music - any thoughts, any way - ready, set, go! And remember to stop at 10 minutes…and ya I did it too!
Music as I see it.
Alright… Challenge accepted (I cheated with +10 minutes of editing, but okay):
There’s this term ‘Frisson; it’s the shivers of that moment when that amazing song finally reached it’s climax, or that moment when you suddenly realise that this song, these lyrics right here, right now say so much about how you feel. It’s addictive.
There’s music that gets me every time. The combination of lyrics, sounds, textures, melodies and composition which makes it worth it all the time when listening to it. It can make you feel like floating through space with your headphones, or you can completely forget about observing anything through your other senses.
Music can give you energy or excitement, it can give you that rhythm and the atmosphere that you need to get things done. It can put you in that awesome mood, or amplify joy or melancholy.
It is like paintings: Some albums paint a beautiful but sad picture about a neighbourhood, a group of friends or a dystopia, while others are an abstract, but coherent whole. Every time you look into it, you can focus on another detail. Music can be studied, it is made to be listened to. People put their hearts and souls into it.
And yet there are so many people who just think of music as background noise…
(Source: dotdotdotexclamationmark)
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16th January 2012
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Reblogged From dotdotdotexclamationmark
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Notes: 3
Last week, I read a very interesting article about “The dangerous effects of reading”. Among other things, it stated:
In our personal lives we tend to optimize for one of two things: input or output. Reading or writing. Consuming or creating. The environment we live in – the prevailing culture – by default is optimized for consumption. [..] Consuming this much makes you get really good at filtering crap from gold. Everything you pick up to read or watch you are constantly thinking “Does this suck? Is this cool enough to continue doing? Is it cool enough to tell others people about?” I think we should all agree that getting faster at judging things is bad, but I think the real danger in having a super-efficient-filter is that your default mode is exclusion – you reject long enough and you lose the ability to create things that pass your own filter.
That made me think about my own behaviour concerning these things; I am filtering a lot. After sleeping on it, I decided to sort out the ways I get my share of interesting articles and other stuff. I’d like to share my conclusions with you:
Twitter is very temporal; What someone says now isn’t usually relevant tomorrow; It’s like checking the pulse of your network by seeing what people are saying and what is happening in the world. This means there is also a lot of not-so-interesting stuff. I usually read tweets in burst and then decide if (and when) I want to read any articles that pop up. A couple of times a week I start up Instapaper and read through articles that I wanted to read with more attention.
RSS Feeds
5 years ago I used to read my RSS subscriptions with the same frequency as Twitter (I was subscribed to up to 120 feeds at one point). That’s very different nowadays; I have less time, have a different outlook on things and of course Twitter is around. I’m still checking some categories every day (usually because of feed volume), while I let others pile up for weeks. Some feeds have such a volume of articles that they completely overwhelm other feeds with quality content, and that’s the problem; there’s no balance. It’s another bucket of content I have to filter.
Treating input
Reading the above article made me think a lot about how I treat this input. I still like collecting interesting things, but I don’t want to constantly filter stuff on all places where I subscribe to content (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google Reader, etc…), and because I check Twitter more often than others, I’m not only filtering noise, but also articles that I have already read. It’s like a chore, and - as the article states - it changes your ‘default filter’ for new content.
I asked people on Twitter how they used RSS and I got some pretty nice replies. Not everyone agreed about the use of RSS, but I came to a conclusion that worked for me: RSS is for quality content with low/no noise that is not necessarily related to time1 , and doesn’t have a high volume.
Clean up
Following this realisation, it was time to clean up my Google Reader 2; I took the time to reevaluate my subscriptions, removing novelty feeds, linkdumps, niche-news feeds that I don’t read because of ‘present bias’ and feeds that I probably won’t miss. My most important change was that I moved a lot of high-volume feeds out of Google Reader and into Twitter (mostly tech reporting3). The goal was to have a list of nice articles waiting for me when I would have the time, not feeling pressured to read through them because they stack up or I might miss something.
Now what?
Now of course I’ve only really thought about the role of Twitter and RSS subscriptions, so what about Tumblr and Facebook? Although I also filter on those places, I don’t really see content on both as stuff I have to read and I don’t catch up when I’ve missed something 4.
At the moment I’m pretty content about the result so far, but it’s still going to require the occasional tweaking. Although I thought a lot about this stuff, in the end a lot of decisions regarding “what belongs where”, will still be made irrationally, not that there’s a problem with that. It’s just good to sometimes reevaluate how you receive and act upon information in this information age.
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Less urgent stuff, no daily reports, but stuff which you aren’t expected to have “watercooler conversations” about the next day. ↩
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I use Google Reader as a platform, but I never use the web application. I use the amazing Reeder apps for iOS and Mac. ↩
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Tech writing, like essays and research have higher chance of staying in my RSS Reader. ↩
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You will find Tumblr blogs that produce quality articles in my RSS reader, not on my dashboard. ↩
How Trello is different - Joel on Software
Quite an interesting realisation.
Which reminds me, I completely ignored that “pages” data structure whilst writing my thesis. I never touched Pages or Microsoft Word until the very end for a PDF version.
Played 453 times.That’s Eric Wahlforss reading our team’s requirements for a new office building.
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7th January 2012
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Reblogged From marcoinberlin
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Notes: 2
Auch…
Probably the most exciting year for me so far – a bit of a rollercoaster ride– but amazing. I moved to Berlin, living on my own for the first time and started working at SoundCloud. I wrote my thesis and graduated, met some of the coolest people I know here and learned so much about myself, life, and of course my work. It’s been enlightening.
Best of luck and happyness to everyone for 2012, let’s all do our bit to make the world a nicer place, okay?
