Watch where you're going! : New [to me] Media Sunday • 18/365 •

When you walk, where are you looking? Do you watch the ground, kick pebbles and avoid stepping on cracks? Do you look all around and take in the scenery? Is your gaze in the clouds, trees or building tops, so you almost bump into light posts? Or are you texting into your phone and missing all of it?

At some point in my childhood someone must have told me that I was wasting life by looking down as I walked. Some kind of "stop and smell the flowers" advice that has stuck with me enough to make me wonder whether I should be looking up or down when strolling along. It's a dilema. 

Take the beach for example. The scenery is beautiful, but there are treasures in the sand, too. Imagine all the shells that would never be found if everyone was only looking up. I took this picture on Daytona Beach today. There were bazillions of these washed-up jelly fish. There's no way I was going to be texting while I walked around there, or even looking up and around, because I might step on one of those slimy suckers!

Necessity is the mother of invention. This weekend I learned about an app that eases the burden of deciding one over the other, texting or talking. Now you can text into your phone while seeing where you're walking all at once. I downloaded "At Once" and tried it. Kind of funny. Worth the free download to try it out. You can tweet, Facebook, email, LinkedIn and Google Buzz, all while seeing where you are going. 

It doesn't offer any solution for if you are chewing gum at the same time, though. If you download and play with it, let me know what you think? Is it really useful, or just a funny gimmick? 

New (to me) Media Sunday • 9/365 •

Sometimes I play games for work. Really, for work! New technology, new trends, news and events – are all twists and turns along the professional and personal roads we navigate. I can't be an expert in everything, but It is my job to be aware. 

Beginning today and henceforth, on Sundays, I'll share a new (at least to me) thing or two that I'm dipping my toes into. I would love your feedback if you're using these. How are they affecting you, how do you see them affecting the world?

Social media has brought us all together. Facebook is King right now, and as I mentioned in "Nostalgia at the speed of technology," we are becoming less expressive because of how close together we are. It's kind of like the population in general – once upon a time we lived far apart in farms or houses or shacks. We would visit our neighbors and we knew all about them. Then as population exploded and we moved into apartment buildings, sharing the same walls, we stopped even speaking to our neighbors much less getting to know them. 

That kind of separation is against our nature, though. We are social creatures. So the next logical step after the great migration to Facebook is segmentation. We'll see more and more subcultures crop up again, where people feel safe to express themselves in a certain way. 


This Sunday's two medias are a product of that segmentation. 

Path

Path is an iPhone app. It's a social network that runs only on pictures. You are only allowed 50 friends, so they will most likely actually be your friends, and you are only allowed to post pictures, so they will see what you're up to. You tell your story with pictures. Fun! Drawback is your friends all have to have iPhones, too. Because of that, I haven't used it enough to judge it well. 

Quora

Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it.

It's a wiki for q+a. Where it gets segmented is that you "follow" questions and categorize them and each question can become a story. You'll see questions ranging from, "What are the best running snowshoes?" and "Do the majority of founders of tech start-ups come from wealthy families?" to "If I'm not happy with life, should I commit suicide?" 

Quora makes it easy for you to follow your friends from other places, so right away you're in a group that you recognize. Jury is still out for me as to how useful it is, or whether it's just a very interesting way to spend time.

Are you using either of these? If so, what are your thoughts?