via awesome people hanging out together.

A blog isn’t about the feelings of the company, but rather a personal look at the writer. You can’t assign a blogger a story and hope the audience doesn’t get the fact that they have no idea what they’re talking about or worse yet, they don’t really care.

Readers connect with a blogger. They know things about them, they laugh together and sometimes argue over points in a story. It’s a give and take relationship that not everyone can handle.

- Jim Dalrymple.

The internet is about connecting people, not creating a repository of information.

First, Valve play tests the hell out their games. They are intimately aware of when a chamber is too laborious, too complex, or introduced before the player has learned the lessons they need to satisfyingly solve the puzzle in a reasonable amount of time. This is essential testing that must be performed again and again to find a delicate balance providing a sense of progress and accomplishment with just enough challenge.

via Rands In Repose: Two Universes.

The play testing that goes on in the big business of video games makes total sense for designing of educational experiences, except no one can really design the educational experience of another, and education is not merely a consumable experience like a video game.

So then why do it? I  hate that question because I don’t think about blogging like that, it’s something I do—it is a part of me, it is how I have learned to think about things and share them all at once. It has been the single greatest element of my professional life over the last seven years, and it has opened up an avenue of creativity and joy I would be less happy without. That’s it, quite simply it has made me better.

That is probably the most important lesson I try to impart on the students I’ve had in ds106, but I fail many more times than not. I  know it’s a hard lesson to “teach.” You must experience it, live it, feel it, want it—-it can’t be lectured at you. I recognize that, and I accept it—although begrudgingly.

I completely agree with Jim’s take on the power of blogging. Like he says, though, it can be a hard sell to others. While it feels right to me, Jim, and others, maybe it is not right for everyone. Is it wrong to expected everyone, especially one’s students to get into it? Is there some kind of failure occurring if the vast majority of students never catch the blogging bug?

But what seemed to be the centerpiece of the keynote was Tumblr’s new plan for advertisers (i.e., Tumblr’s monetization strategy). Tumblr will be rolling out a new, two-pronged advertising schema. Advertisers will be allowed access to the Tumblr Spotlight, a portion of the site that new users can browse, which Mr. Karp called a “major point of discussion.” Mr. Karp is also letting advertisers into the Tumblr Radar section of the site, which heretofore only featured sites chosen by Tumblr. Mr. Karp did not elaborate as to who the advertisers will be or the nature of the ads.

via Betabeat.

The ads are only invading the dashboard and not people’s actual sites, which is probably the best possible way to do it. Still I must wonder if we are hitting the high water mark of the tumblr civilization?

tumblr is an awesome place to hang out, let’s hope the proprietors don’t screw it up.

This lack of platforminess is what makes many iPad magazine apps impotent. They end up in no better a position than a printed magazine. There are no routes by which you can directly get to their content. You can’t point in. You’re forced to go through the “front door” to get anywhere. And it’s a door usually weighing several hundred megabytes and infuriatingly difficult to unlock.

The reality is — because of the way in which we share content — we almost never even see the “front door” anymore. (Which indicates that the long-term value of an ‘issue’ drops precipitously with time.) If you find a piece of great content inside one of these apps, at most you can say: Hey! There’s something interesting in there! Just download the app, swipe right ten times, up three, then tap to remove the text, rotate to landscape mode and I swear there’s a great article in there! You gotta trust me. Which, of course, almost no one follows all the way to the interesting thing.

via A pointable we [3/3] — Satellite — Craig Mod.

I am not posting this to complain about iPad magazines as much as I am to say that your website’s front door isn’t as important as you might think.

Portal 2 will receive a suite of level creation tools called the “Perpetual Testing Initiative” on the PC and Mac Steam platforms starting May 8th.

via The Verge.

Dang. Looks like I may have to get Portal 2 for my mac. And some magically conjured time to actually use it.

Cargo-Bot is the first game on the App Store developed using Codea, an iPad app for rapidly creating games and simulations.

…

Cargo-Bot was developed by Rui Viana using Codea. After creating an initial prototype he spent several months polishing and perfecting his design. The completed Codea project was then imported into the Codea Runtime Library and published as a native iPad application.

via Cargo-Bot.

Will iOS become viable option for development tasks, or will the computer always be the “truck” needed for all developers?