BigShinyThing

Writing in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell reports back from the the world of Nathan Myhrvold, ex-Microsoft zillionaire and founder of Intellectual Ventures, a business designed to produce genius-level innovations on demand.

The skinny? World-changing inventions are often dreamt up almost simultaneously by a number of people, only one of whom generally gets the prize of fame and success. To Myhrvold and his crew, this suggested that inventions and innovations are ‘of their time’ — when the cultural and technological conditions are just-so, innovations like the telephone or calculus will appear, not just to one genius, but to many clever thinkers, around the world. So why not put together a top team of eclectic ‘general specialists’, and try and tap the zeitgeist for some revenue?

Intellectual Ventures was founded to sniff out ideas ‘in the air’, patent them up, then license them out for fun and profit. It doesn’t exactly claim to have any geniuses around its table of big thinkers, but there’s at least a geeky obsessiveness about their cross-disciplinary expertise and interests. Whatever. Their process works.

According to a new study suggesting that instant messaging (IM) actually represents “an expansive new linguistic renaissance”.

Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis at the University of Toronto, Canada, say teenagers risk the disapproval of their elders if they use slang, and the scorn of their friends if they sound too buttoned-up. But instant messaging allows them to deploy a “robust mix” of colloquial and formal language. In a paper to be published in the spring 2008 issue of American Speech, the researchers argue that far from ruining teenagers’ ability to communicate, IM lets teenagers show off what they can do with language.

“IM is interactive discourse among friends that is conducive to informal language,” says Denis, “but at the same time, it is a written interface which tends to be more formal than speech.”

He and Tagliamonte analysed more than a million words of IM communications and a quarter of a million spoken words produced by 72 people aged between 15 and 20. They found that although IM shared some of the patterns used in speech, its vocabulary and grammar tended to be relatively conservative. For example, teenagers are more likely to use the phrase “He was like, ‘What’s up?’” than “He said, ‘What’s up?’” when speaking — but the opposite is true when they are instant-messaging. This supports the idea that IM represents a hybrid form of communication.

This is not news to us at BST. My dad is in his 70s and an excellent text messager. A recent text reads (sorry dad) “Thks 4 mess re 23rd”. He uses abbreviations just like the kids do. Why? He’s a linguist by training so he just gets it.

Source: New Scientist.

…because they’re weird, mostly toxic and have hyperbolic folds and surfaces. We especially love these ones, loving photographed by David Doubilet for a gallery recently uploaded by National Geographic magazine. Enjoy.

Mike Brodie — aka The Polaroid Kid — documents outsider Americana in astonishing one-off polaroid images. Read this interview and check out his work here. He also runs a rather excellent site for polaroid photographers, PLRDS.COM

Call us contrarian when it comes to over-hyped new tools, but in our experience, early adopters end up with a lot of useless old tech piled in the back of their cupboards (Newton MessagePad? Check. First generation Nokia WAP phone? One of those as well. Sigh). We’ve pissed away enough money on not-quite-fit-for-purpose ‘innovations’ that we even waited until O2 dropped the price a hundred quid before buying the obviously-bloody-brilliant-from-day-one iPhone.

So pardon the lack of excitement we’ve shown thus far for microblogging poster-child Twitter. We’ve never been much interested in the third latte (or second line) inspired textual ramblings of ad execs and VCs, or the geeky late night geekings of geeks. But Twitter seems to have transcended the demographics of its early adopters, and is now not just mainstreaming, but actually helping people. Data point — evidently Twitter users in China alerted the world to the recent earthquake even before the US Geological Survey picked up on it (and that’s their job!). While closer to home, we’re finding that microblogging Twitter-stylee actually fits nicely into our post-FaceBook networked world of intimate strangers (and intimate strangeness!). All part of the ongoing Great Adjustment of social meaning. Go on. You know you want to.

If you’re interested, we’re darrellberry and bigshinything on Twitter. Share your Twitter IDs in the comments to this post, if you want.

People get ready. Both Google and FaceBook have this week announced APIs (Google Friend Connect and FaceBook Connect, respectively) which enable ‘any site’ to be aware of identities and social networks — turning the web inside out and focussing (finally!) on people and their interactions rather than content and its location. We’ve been banging on about this since 1994, and think it’s about bloody time, frankly.

Big news (and probably a harbinger of the demise of bespoke social media aggregators like our recent fave FriendFeed). Read the press releases and phone your favourite VC. Now.

This door-dropped card from Hackney Council offers their considered opinion on the subject — Yellow Pages is the only branded item on their list of useless waste (think engine oil and foil) to be put in their green recycling bins. We think they’ve got it about right.

Buster Bennett (previously of legendary Hoxton nights Antisocial and Family) has been running his latest night, Nuke Them All, for a while now. But he’s got a problem — he can’t keep a venue. Nuke was initially hosted at the charming Bethnal Green lapdancing joint, Images. But then the council got wind of it and pulled its licence. So it moved to The Edge, a basement venue on Commercial St. The council did the same thing (do they have clubkid spies or something?) So Buster, showing typical clubland enterprise, moved it to an an abandoned pub. Y’know, like the rave kids do. Then the police shut that down too. Buster’s positioning of Nuke as ‘the most lawless creative gathering ever’ is starting to look a bit too prescient.

We can’t resist quoting in full Buster’s comments on the original eviction, as reported over at Jonty Skrufff’s Skrufff.com:

“It’s the same old story, and exactly why we left the gentrified Shoreditch triangle in the first place. What happens is some wanky trust fund son of an estate agent decides to buy up a flat next to an already established strip club then complains about the noise; specifically; the noise, the giant walking pyramids, the cake fights, the glow in the dark horses, the nudity and our clientele generally. But still, why move there in the first place?”

Why indeed! We’re with Buster.

[Photo ©2008 Darrell Berry]