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An article in the Atlantic has been making the rounds on the Internet today (at least here in North Carolina) as it highlights local entrepreneurs. Durham’s Kickstarter Kids highlights a trend in the Triangle, typically known for big IT and pharma. With one of the most educated populaces in the nation, the Triangle (the NC region encompassing Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill) is becoming a hotbed for small start ups and creative ideas. Durham in particular has undergone a renaissance in the past five to ten years, attracting residents and businesses to a downtown that faded as the tobacco industry moved away.
So what are they doing? They’re making custom bound journals by marrying technology with just-in-time printing capabilities, using technology to create custom clothing, and making doughnuts (hey innovation needs fuel).
Durham is a great example of how a once industrial town can reinvent itself through an educated populace, creative thinking, and technology/innovation.
Forget the aesthetic of 180-gram vinyl. So yesterday on yesteryear. And nevermind the Internet when it comes to co-creation and consumer ownership of the creative process. The ultimate music aficionado and audio cultural curator is (still) the master of the mix tape. Yup, the cassette. Never has there been a sign of personal affection and affinity for one’s friends and loved ones than taking the time to blend them a mix tape. It take a lot of thought and even more time. It’s a creative pursuit that aurally profiles one’s persona.
And never has there been more of a resurgence of casette-focused labels than today. Just check out: GoldTimers, Hyperdelic, and Retrograde Tapes to start. And of course the granddaddy of them all, ROIR, who’s been issuing cassettes for over thirty years.
Where unfettered creativity still percolates two standard deviations out, and out of view from most. Personal creativity, created alone, shared with another, small group of friends, or like-minded aficionados.
Yesteryear’s castoffs become our cheap tools to craft new and evocative expression. The personal. The building blocks of aural culture. Like today’s fashion designers surreptitiously trolling vintage stores, picking over yesterday for tomorrow’s haute couture, later reconstituted for the H&M and Target racks.
They never left us, we just think we keep leaving them.
The U.S. Census Bureau Center for Economic Studies has long supported (for the past ~5 years) an online system for pulling area-based employment and residence data using a visual map-based selection tool called OnTheMap. This software is fairly intuitive and fun to use, but can also be quite useful in exploring a specific market or region to understand where workers live and work, and how that has changed over time.
OnTheMap is useful for more than work location, however. It’s a multi-layered mapping tool, with companion data on demographics, earnings, industry characteristics. We’ve also used it to identify exact metropolitan statistical areas and radius ranges, to find transportation routes, greenspace, and tribal and military lands, and to simply better understand a physical marketplace.
For years, organizations like the Census Bureau relied heavily on point-in-time estimates, tables of statistics and physical and static maps for data exploration like this. As new systems come online, are developed further, and improved over successive versions, our ability to access information from our desktops is not only facilitated but empowered.
Indie rock band Kaiser Chiefs have put an spin on their latest album release that makes innovative and resourceful use of social networking to drive CD sales.
The band is selling a customizable CD: Buyers can select 10 tracks from an available 20 to include in their CD, and then choose combinations of and adjust several available graphic components to create their own cover art. Once completed, a buyer’s customized CD is made available on the band’s site, where other buyers can opt to select your production (plus, you get royalties for every purchase of your produced version). The site even tracks purchases made of each version produced, allowing buyers to track how their version is faring against other buyers’ productions.
It’s not only a great idea, but a well executed one – This process, if cumbersome, wouldn’t provide any type of incentive for fans to engage with it. But putting together the CD is simple and fun. Check it out here.
Infomous is a dynamic and intuitive navigation solution – perhaps soon to pop up on websites you visit. Web developers for content-rich sites have integrated word cloud and tablet-style flip navigation over the past few years, but this is a solution that seems to combine aspects of both: reference triggers and dynamic script. The tool is currently available in preview/beta version through a relationship with the provider, but will roll out later this year, ready for embed. More info at Infomous – they have a demo up for world news, a version for sports news, entertainment news, science news. It’s easy to explore and find links to try.
Pantene has introduced a new product line, natureFUSION, which is contained in packaging mostly sourced from sugarcane plastics. The plastics are comparable to their petroleum-based cousins, but production of sugarcane-based plastics require significantly less fossil fuel resources. (Proctor & Gamble estimates conversion to this form or plastic will reduce its fossil-fuel consumption by 70 percent, as well as its greenhouse-gas emissions by 170 percent.)
In echo of other comments already made throughout the blogosphere, this is a notable step in the direction of sustainable manufacturing practice. Pantene is Proctor & Gamble’s largest beauty brand, and the move by this established player ought to have ripple effects in consumer demands from and production of consumer packaged goods.
I had the opportunity to attend TEDxRaleigh a few weeks back. While the event was interesting enough, there was one thing that has really stuck with me. As filler, they showed some videos from other TED events, one of which was David Blaine’s TED talk about how he held is breath for 17 minutes. It’s a great video, filled with the trial-and-error of any innovation process.
The moment that really stuck with me is when, after going to great lengths to create the illusion of holding his breath, he has a revelation: Just figure out how to hold your breath for a really long time. There’s the simple solution.
Sometimes, looking for the shortest route from point A to point B isn’t the best solution. More often, you just need to do it. It’s a hard lesson to learn, and even harder to put into practice.
More than likely, you’ve encountered a “meme,” an article, photo, video or other digital file type which disseminates quickly through the Internet. These nuggets of information drop into our computer screen at the speed of digital transfer, and are propagated faster than fact checkers can say ‘misinformation’.
Which is not to say that every meme is a lie…But when dealing with information that can’t necessarily be verified, how can you be sure which is which? For those of you who have ever found yourself questioning whether the Tweet you’re reading is truth or meme, help is on the way. Researchers at Indiana University have developed a tool called Truthy, which analyzes the diffusion of Tweets in order to detect whether they are genuine groundswells of social sentiment or intentional spreading of misinformation.
The tool’s algorithms are complex and use several data input streams, including Truthy-user feedback, to identify misleading memes – a great use of Web 2.0 to improve data analysis system architecture. Check out the tool and see if you can spot any fishy memes!
