To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. — Tom Bissell on creators and creation (via brainpickings)
“We listen to dominatrixes, obsessive compulsives, teddy-bear enthusiasts, drug addicts and nigerian hackers. We seek out these obsessives, maniacs and eccentrics because they can help us get to big, breakthrough ideas. Some of them can show us how mainstream consumers will behave in a few…
by Seth Godin
“Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean we need to pay the slightest bit of attention.
There are two things that disqualify someone from being listened to:
1. Lack of Standing. If you are not a customer, a stakeholder or someone with significant leverage in spreading the word, we will…
(Source: sethgodin.typepad.com)
What If Your Emails Never Went to Gmail and Twitter Couldn’t See Your Tweets?
A new tool under development by Oregon State computer scientists could radically alter the way that communications work on the web. Privly is a sort of manifesto-in-code, a working argument for a more private, less permanent Internet.
The system we have now gives all the power to the service providers. That seemed to be necessary, but Privly shows that it is not: Users could have a lot more power without giving up social networking. Just pointing that out is a valuable contribution to the ongoing struggle to understand and come up with better ways of sharing and protecting ourselves online.
“Companies like Twitter, Google, and Facebook make you choose between modern technology and privacy. But the Privly developers know this to be false choice,” lead dev Sean McGregor says in the video below. “You can communicate through the site of your choosing without giving the host access to your content.”
Through browser extensions, Privly allows you to post to social networks and send email without letting those services see “into” your text. Instead, your actual words get encrypted and then routed to Privlys servers (or an eventual peer-to-peer network). What the social media site “sees” is merely a link that Privly expands in your browser into the full content. Of course, this requires that people who want to see your content also need Privly installed on their machines.
