Does the subway bother you? Sometimes, but it has now become a habit. Mustang — we have wind, crazy wind. It’s a cold desert. It’s very loud. Around 12 midday, it stops everything. People stop to walk in the day...... The breakdown of your customers: Nepalese, Tibetan, Himalayan are 75 percent, 25 percent are foreigners.
What does a "re-imagined" publishing platform look like? A bit like Tumblr, with a pinch of Pinterest and a sprinkling of Reddit's ranking system. .... "Our ideas are much farther along than our product. Medium is only a sliver of what it could be."
takes submitted content such as text and photos and organizes related items in collections that multiple people can review and add to. Instead of being listed chronologically, posts getting the highest user rating will appear at the top
a collaborative, lightweight way to express themselves online with images and text ..... people should be able to publish without “the burden of becoming a blogger” and worrying about developing an audience. The layout looks a lot like Pinterest, but contributions include both pictures and text. .... Currently, anyone with a Twitter account can read and provide feedback on the new platform but only a limited group of invited friends and family can post.
Medium is seemingly put together with parts from other sites: posting is simple and template-based, like Tumblr. Posts are organized into collections, like Pinterest. And within those collections, the posts are promoted by readers, like Reddit.....
The site's interface may be its strong suit.... As for written content, the site is fundamentally no different than Slashdot. .... Obvious used a Tumblr post to announce Branch, a tool designed to facilitate conversation online.
Web-based discussion site Branch...... a simple way to post to the Internet without taking on the responsibility of a personal blog brand. .... combines "the intimacy of a dinner table conversation with the power of the Internet." .... hopes to turn Internet monologues into online dialogues ..... By allowing users to pick who they want to talk to, Branch opens the diversity of the Web but prevents the discussion from turning into Internet noise. .... "We want it to be a place for you to talk about all the things that are happening in your world."
called "the next big thing in Web publishing" .... The reason this is different than the tools around today, like Tumblr or Twitter or Word Press is that it supposedly values quality, while also lowering the barrier to being a blogger. .... Medium will make the Internet easy, beautiful, and high quality all at once. .... Who gets the book deal for the Been There, Loved That, for example? ..... Medium looks and works like Pinterest, Tumblr and Reddit. Tech blogger Mathew Ingram called it "a cross between Tumblr and Pinterest" ..... "Right now it just seems like a Frankensteinish PinTumblReddit," wrote Gizmodo's Mario Aguilar. It's a blog that sorts things differently than blogs out there today. ..... "There are seeds of a backlash against the beautiful chaos the web hath wrought, the desire for a flight to quality. There will be new ways beyond ease of use to harness the creative powers of the audience," writes Benton. Even if Medium doesn't define that revolution, it reminds us that the Internet is not dead, and that it continues to evolve.
Both platforms seem to be very optimistic in nature, aiming to get each and everyone of us to share our ideas and thoughts in a clean and productive way.
With Medium, they aim to inject a dose of collaboration into Web publishing and distance it from print publishing practices. They also want to raise the quality of content.
Through Medium, readers and contributors alike, are able to interact with one another at a “level of contribution they prefer.”
an embeddable discussion platform called Branch. .... he is widely credited as the inventor of the term “blog” itself .... Obvious focuses on Internet software and “systems that help people work together to make the world a better place”. Besides developing its own projects, it also invests into promising, “philosophically aligned” start-ups, such as Beyond Meat – the company which aspires to perfectly replace animal protein with plant protein. ..... The project mixes blogging and social networking, borrowing ideas from Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Twitter and pretty much any other successful Internet media platform. Posts can contain text and pictures, and are displayed using modern, minimalistic design. .... Medium aggregates posts by topic instead of by author, and assembles them into “collections”. Every post can be rated by users, and highest-rated posts will always appear on top of a collection. ..... should be equally appealing to both the casual readers and dedicated bloggers. .... Branch – an online discussion platform that has been described as “Twitter with no character limit”. Branch can be embedded to any website, and host discussions or comments on any topic. But the most interesting feature is that any conversation can “branch” into separate posts. .... it is interesting to note that some features and the overall design of Medium look somewhat similar to recently relaunched Digg.
They inspired a boom in self-publishing with Blogger, then turned the world to 140 characters with Twitter. Now Ev Williams and Biz Stone have launched two new websites – Medium and Branch – in what they hope will prompt an "evolutionary leap" in online sharing. .... people can read, view and vote on content without worrying about developing their own audience. .... Branch is the place for Twitter users to have more in-depth conversations with each other. You can start your own "branch" and invite other Twitter users to join you. There is no need to set up a separate Branch account. .... "Between articles, blog posts, and tweets, the internet is dominated by monologues. So we want to build a home for dialogues online, by combining the intimacy of a dinner table conversation with the power of the internet." ..... Branch brings the simplicity of Twitter and a more expansive, specialist conversation that can be found on Quora. Its success is more likely to be judged on the quality of conversations and return rate of its users, rather than the number of sign-ups. ..... Medium is not meant to be a repository for the badly-lit photos of a bazillion users. ..... What will be interesting is how both Medium and Branch affect Tumblr, the lightweight blogging platform whose biggest threat is being overwhelmed by low-quality content posted without a second thought.
"While it's great that you can be a one-person media company, it'd be even better if there were more ways you could work with others." .... Williams, Stone and Goldman were also investors in Branch Media, a New York startup that came out of private beta Monday. .... Stone, meanwhile, has a side project: He's signed with camera-maker Canon U.S.A. to work with acclaimed Hollywood director Ron Howard to produce one of five short films that will be based on photos sent in by consumers.
Is Medium going to be as revolutionary? That seems unlikely — but it’s still interesting. .... collaboration and the crowdsourcing of quality content are two of the core principles that Medium is based on .... What else is Pinterest but a collaboration platform .... while the Obvious founders say they want to make it easier for people to publish and share content, you could argue that Tumblr pretty much has a lock on that phenomenon ..... Of course, both of the things Evan Williams is famous for also looked either unnecessary or unimpressive, and in some cases both. Blogger was cool if you were a geek and wanted your own website, but it was far from obvious at the time that self-publishing was going to become something huge or crack open the media industry in a fundamental way. And Twitter looked so ephemeral (not to mention the ridiculous name) that many people dismissed it as a plaything for nerds that would never amount to anything. .... it looks a lot like a mashup of Pinterest and Tumblr. .... one of the things the platform does that is unlike both Blogger and Twitter is it subverts the notion of the author as the most important thing about the content. .... Medium is focused more on the value of the content, regardless of who is producing it or voting on it. .... it feels like a mashup of all the other tools that are out there rather than something with a compelling feature of its own .... certainly an interesting piece of an ongoing puzzle.
Obvious–a sort of idea incubator that’s “more of a philosophy than a company or product”
it is based around well-designed templates like Tumblr, and can be heavy on images, like Pinterest. ..... For now, Medium sounds like a potentially large collection of online forums, not much more. Yet, given the meteoric track record of its developers in the past, Medium has a much better than average chance of success. Indeed, it will be interesting to see if Medium can reach anywhere near the level of success that Twitter has enjoyed.
[With apologies to Wallace Stevens, the finest poet to ever serve as vice president of the Hartford Livestock Insurance Company.] .... Obvious is the most recent iteration of the company that created Blogger, Odeo, and Twitter. .... Odeo was a podcasting service that never really took off — 20 percent ahead of its time, 80 percent outflanked by Apple. ..... the underlying structure of Medium, which upends much of how we think about personal publishing online. .... When the Internet first blossomed, its initial promise to media was the devolution of power from the institution to the individual. Before the web, reaching an audience meant owning a printing press or a broadcast tower. It was resource-intensive, and those resources tended to congeal around companies ..... The political blogosphere — the cacophony of individual voices on both left and right circa, say, 2004 — evolved toward institutions, toward Politico and TPM and The Blaze and HuffPo and the like. ..... Personal publishing is like voting. In theory, it’s the very definition of empowerment. In reality, it’s an excellent way for your personal shout to be cancelled out by someone else’s shout. ..... That was when a few smart people realized that there was a balance to be found between the organization and the individual. The individual sought self-expression and an audience; the organization sought sustainability and cash money. ...... What’s most radical about Medium is that it denies authorship. ..... it degrades authorship, renders it secondary, knocks it off its pedestal ..... The shift to blogging created a wave of new individual media stars, but in a sense it just shifted traditional media brands to a new, personal level. ..... Sites like Buzzfeed are built largely on reshuffling the Internet, rearranging work into streams and slideshows. ..... When you click on an author’s byline on a Medium post, it goes to their Twitter feed (Ev synergy!), not to their author archive — which is what you’d expect on just about any other content management system on the Internet. ...... “Instead of adding a category to a post, you add a post to a category.” .... Medium’s posting interface brought back super-pleasant memories of Blogger’s old two-pane interface. Felt like the Clinton years again. ..... The mass of quality content is much higher too, of course, but it’s surrounded by an even-faster-growing mass of not-so-great (or at least not-so-great-to-you) content. ....... Medium believes in editorial judgment — but everyone’s an editor. ..... good stuff being buried beneath something inconsequential posted 20 minutes later ..... Branch is based on the idea that web comments are shit and that you have to create a separate universe where smart people can have smart conversations. App.net, the just-funded paid Twitter alternative, is attractive to at least some folks because it promises a reboot of the social web without the “cockroaches” — you know, stupid people. Svbtle, an invite-only blogging platform, is aimed only at those who “strive to produce great content. We focus on the writing, the news, and the ideas. Everything else is a distraction.” ....... modernized with nice typography, lovely textures, and generous white space ..... the white flight argument — the idea that the privileged flee common spaces and platforms once they stop being solely the realm of an elite and become too popular ..... That the web’s pressure to Always Keep Posting New Stuff leads to a lot of dumb stuff being posted. It’s a critique of pageview chasing, a critique of linkbait, a critique of content farms, a critique of SEO’d headlines — a yearning for something more authentic ..... Is this Blogger or Twitter, or is it Odeo?
Branch I find more intriguing. I don't know what it is.
Collaborative publishing might save Medium. That might be the opening.
I might share photos on Medium to see if they rise up the ranks! Once they allow me in, that is.
Someone once asked Sam Walton if retailing can be reinvented again. Oh yes, he said, it can be reinvented over and over again. That might be extra true for publishing.
I desperately did not want the Bourne franchise to end with the third movie, but made peace that it did. But it did not die when I thought it did, just like Bourne keeps living on in the movies. Word is Matt Damon wants to come back as Bourne. I can't wait.
"Mr. Bond, you have a nasty habit of surviving!"
I prefer Bourne to Bond. Bourne is the best the CIA has to offer, and they turn on each other. That anti-establishment theme adds depth to the relentless action.
And then there's Manila traffic. Can't beat the Third World when it comes to traffic chaos. That and slum living. A chase in the slum is breathtaking because you don't know what's around the corner.
I watched it at Kaufman. I walked over. And I walked back. It was past midnight. I jogged. It was thrilling. For one I got lost. It is harder to navigate the streets when there are no people, few cars.
I like them both, but if pushed I'd say Matt Damon does it better. He can look more cerebral, more vulnerable, more conflicted, and more determined as necessary.
the corrupt U.S. Government agency behind the programs to create super-soldiers — is left to menace another day ..... the movie’s lack of story is apparently not a problem for most people. Not only did the movie debut at the top of the box office this past weekend, but the movie’s critical notices (which have been amusingly split) include praise for its momentum, its “turn-your-brain-off” qualities, and the sheer breathlessness of the experience of the film. As Tim Robey of the Daily Telegraph puts it, “Caveats come later: while it’s pulsing on screen, you won’t want to be anywhere else.” The critics at the screening I went to seem to agree that summer movies aren’t about story, but about spectacle. As long as you have enough memorable scenes of special effects or action in there — for example, Jeremy Renner wrestling a wolf, which he then goes on to punch in the face — then people will want to see it...... in almost every clash between culture and commerce, it generally pays to be cynical, sadly.... It’s not that The Bourne Legacy is a good movie in and of itself, perhaps, but that it reminds people of enough other good movies that they still manage to find the viewing experience worthwhile. (Plus, you know, wolf-punching.)
This right here is another movie to wait for. I predicted it will be made right after the event: The Bin Laden Operation.
the gritty world of assassins, spies and government cover-ups ..... With franchise scribe Tony Gilroy at the helm, most feel confident that the film will, at the very least, stay true to the tone that Bourne Identity director Doug Liman, Bourne Supremacy/Ultimatum director Paul Greengrass and Jason Bourne himself, Matt Damon, established in the first three films. ..... we touched upon the Bourne franchise, his hopes for Bourne Legacy, and what his involvement may be in the future of the franchise ...... There’s been talk about you joining Jeremy Renner in Bourne 5. Producer Frank Marshall said that was his dream ..... He’s awesome, and you know, he’s one of my favorite actors and I believe him in that world. You know, when Paul and I talked about maybe doing one, years ago, where we pass it off to somebody so the franchise can continue with someone else, Renner was the first guy that we talked about.
Bourne 5 could see a triangular struggle. The two have teamed up, but only remotely. There is just too much relentless pressure for them to get together physically, but they coordinate acts. And because both of them have similar operating styles that confuses the agency. The agency does not know which one of them they are dealing with at any one point in time. Although the agency knows both of them are out there. But as Pam Landy says, "If you don't see them, they are gone."
So it's the agency at their tails, and them fighting some non state actor elsewhere which is even more evil. Some leftover element of the Al Qaida perhaps whose individual operatives are no match to these two super soldiers. These walking talking robots, super humans, computers, machines, humans, cyborgs, Matt, is that you?
Physicists talk of parallel universes. The Legacy is a parallel universe.
ever since writer/director Tony Gilroy conceived the project, the door’s been left open for Matt Damon to return as Jason Bourne in a fifth installment (we’ll just call it Bourne 5 for now). ..... Bourne Legacy overlaps directly with events in the Bourne trilogy. Moreover, it appears that plot points from Bourne Ultimatum reappear in Legacy, in order to set the storyline of the latter in motion..... My dream is that in the next one we see Matt and Jeremy team up .... the non-fractured mindset of Renner’s character
I have a name for Bourne 5: The Bourne Resurrection.
Where do the two get their resources? They know the agency so well they dip in at will into the agency's resources. But they are like this startup that just can not join forces with the big, old corporation. The agency is the big, old corporation.
So here's the plot. The two team up remotely, accidentally. They get into a fight with a terrorist organization. And the agency keeps getting in the way. They manage to infiltrate the terror organization to prevent a major catastrophe.
Wait, I am taking away from the tension between the agency and the super soldier. The agency itself is the best enemy the super soldier can hope for.
The chief architect of the Bourne franchise, Gilroy was pissed when his script for Supremacy, the series’ second, was pummeled into pure whiplash action by director Paul Greengrass, thus softening what he had planned as a tale of redemption. In retaliation, he only turned in a hasty, pissy rough draft on Ultimatum, described by Damon as a “career-ender.” In a 2009 New Yorker piece, he claimed to have never watched it
Jason Bourne was part of a top-secret government project. Turns out he was not the only one and after an intelligence failure, as the US government is shutting down the project which is killing every soldier in the project, one of them, Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) escapes..... He teams up with the doctor (Rachel Weisz), who used to administer performance-enhancing medications even as the US government tries to hunt him down...... The original "Bourne" series was exciting because Bourne was an assassin trying to find himself. He was a man of conscience who had killed a guy he knew he shouldn't have. Amnesia and conscience had made a potent mix there...... Though this part does try to build these two elements up, the attempt lacks lustre. Aaron is only trying to find himself and not remember himself. And secondly, the bit about him having developed a conscience is so poorly developed that this one small flaw takes the sting out of the film...... Thus you don't feel as much pull as you did in the "Bourne" series because the emotional base is not built well enough..... Aaron is thus as much of a quick thinker and doer as Bourne was and is a good fighter and evader of authorities. There are some good chase sequences as well. The actors live up to the expectations..... What's missing are some more hand-to-hand fights and a shaky camera, two staple elements of the original series. The camera here is too steady, and the close-ups during the fights too close for comfort..... Yet, the theme of a powerful and power hungry nation creating monsters of mass destruction to control the world to their own advantage, and then unable to cope when just one backfires, is strong enough
If a medal could be awarded every summer to the movie that most handily exceeds pre-release expectations, my vote for this season would go straight to The Bourne Legacy. Predictions — even early reactions — weren’t too sanguine. How could a Bourne movie possibly function without Jason Bourne in the middle of it? Isn’t Matt Damon vitally necessary to making these flicks tick? Also, how would the franchise fare with its screenwriter, Tony Gilroy, in the director’s chair, rather than the more obviously virtuosic Paul Greengrass, who handled the last two? ...... It’s not so much a sequel as, if you like, a para-quel, overlapping the story of Jeremy Renner’s new rogue agent with the familiar saga of Bourne’s amnesia-stricken reappearance and quest for answers. Bourne never shows up in person here, but he’s a structuring absence around which Gilroy dances with flair. ..... enhancing the field abilities of its agents, both physically and intellectually, by the use of experimental drugs ..... the same high-tech instruments of pursuit that Bourne had to outwit. ..... Renner brings a variation on his impudent Hurt Locker stoicism to bear on this: it’s nothing to do with him that the character lacks Bourne’s tragic air of a little boy lost, and is correspondingly less compelling. ..... rapid, detailed and unpredictable storytelling which never needs to push us far forward in time: call it top-flight running on the spot. ..... there’s nothing here on a par with that astonishing Moscow stuff in The Bourne Supremacy
I have a better plot. The CIA knows the two of them are out there. And it is still chasing them. The two of them don't know about each other. So when the two intersect with the agency, the agency keeps confusing one with the other. That sometimes plays to their advantages, sometimes to their disadvantages. Finally they come to know of each other's existence, but they still never get to meet. And the movie ends. The tension is still there. Between the agency and the super soldier gone free agent. And there is a girl. Instead of amnesia the tension comes from not knowing the other exists.
