Seven on Seven – Rhizome

Asides,

In April I’m going to be participating in an event called Seven on Seven put on by Rhizome. “Seven on Seven will pair seven leading artists with seven game-changing technologists in teams of two, and challenge them to develop something new — be it an application, social media, artwork, product, or whatever they imagine — over the course of a single day. The seven teams will unveil their ideas at a one-day event at the New Museum on April 17th.”

Cool Touch Interface

Video, ,

While reading Michael Arrington’s essay Why Desktop Touch Screens Don’t Really Work Well For Humans I came across this video, which I thought was pretty cool.

Hopefully this whets your appetite for whatever comes out of Apple tomorrow. Should be an interesting day for WordPress.com as well: whenever Apple does a major announcement we blow past all our previous traffic records. The current one-day record is 63.5 million pageviews.

Ask Matt: Tips On Public Speaking

Ask Matt

I get asked a lot about tips on public speaking because I do it so frequently. Positive response when I give a talk is generally proportional to how relaxed I was when giving the presentation and on good days I’ll get comments like people were able to relate to what I was saying or that watching me calmed them down. I don’t mention this in the video, but besides breathing and remembering the audience is there to see you do well, the best way to relax is to know your material down cold. I’ve lived and breathed WordPress for almost 7 years now, so I can talk about it for hours without thinking twice. I think practicing and knowing your material well comes across most in your body language which probably affects how people perceive your presentation more than what you say.

https://videopress.com/v/VSvor57H

We recorded this before Scott Berkun’s new book Speaker Confessions was out, which I recommend now.

Trying out Nexus One

Asides, ,

This week I’ve taken the SIM card out of my iPhone and put it in the Nexus One, which I’m going to try to stick with for the next week. I love my 3GS, but I’m just hungry for something else as the iPhone has felt a little stagnant lately, and the Nexus has the most beautiful hardware — it’s a pleasure to hold and look at. So far I’m really happy with the screen, the grass live background, the Google and Facebook contact syncing, news/weather widget, Google Voice (!), and I’ve gotten pretty accustomed to the UI. (Only other Android device I’ve tried was the G1, and that lasted 10 minutes.) I’m not impressed with the email application IMAP support, the app store seems a bit anemic, and the camera application crashed once when I was trying to take a picture. I’ve found equivalent apps for the most-used stuff on my iPhone.

Facebook McAfee

Open Source

Facebook is offering its users a 6-month free trial of McAfee and promoting it heavily, and even forcing people to run a scan before they can reactivate a hacked account. They’re “not aware of another free Internet service that takes this much responsibility for helping people keep their accounts secure.” (Didn’t Google promote McAfee through Google Pack at one point?) I think this is a laudable step, more security is intrinsically good, but I have to suspect this is more about revenue than security. They will probably make many millions of dollars from their users installing or buying McAfee as a result of this.

Modern versions of Windows include free tools like Defender which are just as good and appear to have less of a performance impact on the computer. But if they really wanted to have a long-term impact on desktop as a vector for attack on web services I’m surprised they didn’t start, sponsor, or promote an Open Source equivalent of McAfee. This seems like a space very well-suited to address with an OS tool in the digital commons, much like a Windows anti-spyware equivalent of SpamAssassin, with self-updating rules and a completely transparent process.