Pattern Cognition

I was thinking this morning that I haven’t heard about anyone being “revolutionary” in a while as it relates to a leader of a movement.  That applies to technology, biology, etc… It could be that I’ve been living under a rock (not likely, but I’ll accept that as a possible explanation) or that I don’t travel/read in the right circles.

We don’t hear about the monumental characters who are so persuasive in their words, so committed to their actions, by their presence and determination, they shake the foundation of society and redefine a new water line.  I wonder, has the Internet made the need for one unifying voice obsolete?

In days of Jesus Christ, Oliver Cromwell, Tomas Jefferson, Bill Buckley, Emma Goldman (fill in the name of your favorite revolution here______________), persuasiveness was reflected not only upon what they wrote (or preached) but how they implemented their vision.  In the modern era, say since 1997, the tools of vision communication have become pedestrian: available to many and therefore the message must be that much more compelling to rise above the noise.  The vision and voice of the individual leader has largely been replaced by the revolutionary masses (or hordes, depending on your perspective).

Where have all the revolutionaries gone?

Has technology made them obsolete? Or has technology amplified yet distributed the common voices so that coalescence now occurs at an individual level?

michaelsevilla insights, Soapbox, Trends Online Communities, Tools

For the record, I’m one of them.

The news reporting the average age of a kindle user is a bit dated at this point (ancient, 2 week old), for those that missed it, on a forum site, 70% of Kindle owners reported their age and it turns out the average age reported is 40.

That doesn’t surprise me.  The Kindle  is dedicated to delivering long form content like books, magazines, and newspapers.  Amazon is smart to keep the Kindle targeted and develop future features with this core application and usage in mind.

On a vaguely related note, earlier last week Steve Gilmore proclaimed RSS to be dead and hence blogs and longer form content not nearly as relevant than before (my words, not his); Twitter acting as the grim reaper that made the use, or rather the need, to use RSS, obsolete.  Hence Twitter is a better mechanism to disseminate and propagate information than RSS.

He may be right about short format information.  However, I believe Steve’s broader application to all RSS content based dissemination may miss the mark. While Twitter has proven itself as hugely valuable for updates, announcements, and offers, Twitter’s feeds an ADHD torrent of info porn.  Kindle, as a proxy for longer format content on the other hand is designed for attention centric activities like reading a book or newspaper.

Twitter = jump into the info torrent.

Kindle = jump into a single info stream.

So am I right about the content attention centricity being tightly bound to platform primary usage and demographic profiles are the trailing edge?  Let’s watch text book sales as a crossover usage to the Twitter generation.

michaelsevilla Social Software, Trends Attention, Long Tail, patterns, Social Platforms, Tools

I guess Microsoft‘s OEMs (e.g. Dell, HP) pushed the issue hard enough.

From the social and online community world,  at HiveLive we still have to support IE6, much to the chagrin of our dev team.

So much for pushing forward with Vista

The article

michaelsevilla Trends IE6, microsoft, software, Vista, Windows 7, XP

Love Muji.

Proof that not all American (ok, maybe most still) want over stuffed, super sized, mondo value pack of everything.

Design for purpose, make it appealing without Soviet era utilitarian.

michaelsevilla Trends design, simplicity