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Showing posts from December, 2014

Yerdle - On Trust and Community

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Many of us look for ways to be more efficient users of our planet and the stuff on it. We try to recycle, up cycle, bicycle, and every other cycle out there to ensure that we aren't just using up her resources.  That's why when apps like Yerdle come up and offer us a new way of reusing our old items people are quick to jump into it and use it to do just that.  Yerdle was everything that we had never seen before.  It was a unique auction like system that allowed people to post items that they had lying around in closets and the garage and get "CREDIT POINTS" for them.  Then you were allowed to use your credit points to bid on auctions for other people's items.  The highest bidder wins and then pays a small fee for shipping. The poster prints the label that Yerdle sends you via email, then takes the package to their local UPS store for delivery.  That easy.  Well, that was then, and in just a few short months Yerdle has made it very clear that they have other

The New Aesthetic: The Great Pretenders

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Let me begin by stating that I have not had such difficulty assimilating the contents of an article in quite some time. I am referencing the WIRED article written in 2012 by Bruce Sterling titled An Essay on the New Aesthetic.  As I read, I found it difficult to keep up with all of the various and turbulent metaphors in the reading.  It was like watching a bouncing super ball in a concrete room. Did you see what I did there? I began to wonder if in fact Bruce Sterling really knew what he was trying to talk about in his descriptions of the New Aesthetic.  I managed to gather a few key points from his essay that make an attempt at defining the New Aesthetic. The article is older, but the ideas presented are timeless. The New Aesthetic is according to Sterling; A creative movement A Collective Internet based Built by and for working creatives All very true points, I like to take this one step further and say that not only is it these descriptive terms but the New Aesthet