A fascinating and thorough look into Silicon Valley and one of its key arteries, Y Combinator, in "The Viral Me" by Devin Friedman in GQ Magazine. Here are some key quotes:

YC lesson one: Your smartphone is now, or will be, your basic interface with the world... YC lesson two: Fuck the business plan. Throw your thingy up as soon as possible, see how people use it, and change it to fit what they want.

Devin does a superb job of immersing himself into valley culture and language while maintaining his critical distance. Some of the best parts of the article are classic reporting from conversations where you wish you could be the fly on the wall to hear more than the snippets we get such as:

"FB can already tell when you're about to break up with someone: certain communication patterns emerge"

Maverick Meerkat -- the latest incarnation of the popular Ubuntu OS -- was released on Sunday, and I thought I would mark the occasion by reflecting on my experience as a Linux desktop convert.

A quick disclaimer: If you're looking for a review of Ubuntu 10.10, you won't find it here. However, you'll find in-depth reviews at both OMG!Ubuntu and WebUpd8, just two of the many fine blogs dedicated to all things Ubuntu.

About a year ago, I realized that my own burgeoning conception of internet politics was at odds with my software and hardware choices. My strong stance on a free and open internet was becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile with my love of Apple products. I found myself writing anti-Apple blog posts from the comfort of my Macbook and decided that something had to give.

After some research, I sold my old laptop (say what you will about Macs, but they sure have a high resale value) and purchased a new one with Ubuntu pre-installed from System76. Since the day it arrived in the mail, I haven't really looked back.

The experience has been overwhelmingly positive. To begin with, everything, including adding songs to my not-yet-jailbroken iPhone, worked right out of the box -- dispelling myths about compatibility problems. As well, just like when I switched to Mac so many years ago, there's a certain romance to learning your way around a new OS. I imagine it's a bit like learning a new language.

As part of the research for my thesis, I've been digging into the history of imageboards -- things like 2ch and Futaba Channel in Japan (beware, the links may take you places that are NSFW), and of course the infamous online funhouse that is 4chan (notice that I'm not even providing a link).

Almost every piece of internet low culture has its origins on these boards, and trying to understand how it is that these anarchic behemoths, with their low-tech interfaces and puerile user-bases have become such a force on the contemporary web is a fascinating challenge. I'm sure I'll elaborate on this more over the course of the month (like any grad student, I will happily talk to you about my own research while feigning a passing interest in yours), but for now, I just wanted to get down (on paper?) an idea that popped into my head recently.

I think one of the reasons these sites are so prolific is that they function -- in a cultural sense -- as a microcosm of the web itself. What I mean is that it's possible to think of popular culture in the age of the internet as just one, gigantic archived imageboard.

Let me explain. These boards work on a simple premise: whenever someone replies to a post, that post is moved back to the top of the list of active threads. This is known as 'bumping' a thread (or age-ing if you're Japan). If you think of cultural artifacts as posts on a giant image and message board (we'll call it /pop/), and us as the users, then we're all dutifully bumping things -- back to the top of our twitter feed, our RSS reader or even just our inbox -- as we move through our little corner of the web.

A revolution in 3D printing is upon us, and it has been driven by amateur robotics enthusiasts. The 3D printer is not a tool that is limited to making robots - 3D printers can be used for home fix-it jobs and a wide variety of other projects.

"A MakerBot is an affordable, open source 3D printer. It's a machine that can make things. It's your own little factory!"

The MakerBot costs about a thousand dollars, and it employs software that can create and break down a 3D modeled object. It then feeds that data to a 3D printer which is essentially a plastic modelling machine that melts and remolds plastic into any desired shape. The name MakerBot derives from the fact that it is a type of robot, and also from the fact that it is capable of making things, but also because the MakerBot was built by enthusiasts who themselves like making robots. There are several huge events every year called Maker Faires which are full of home-made robots, many of which have been created by this MakerBot. The enthusiasm of its users indicates that the MakerBots are catching on, albeit currently within a small early adapter group.

The beauty of the MakerBot is its broad applicability: it can be used to build anything out of plastic. The MakerBot can build other bots, but it can also build any object you can imagine: stuff for your home, garage, toys, models, you name it.

These 3D printers are really just consumer versions of fabrication technology that is used industrially in factories and shops all around the world, but cost anywhere from $25,000 to $250,000. What makes the MakerBot revolutionary is its relatively cheap cost and small size. As more people learn about them and understand their potential applications, a lot of small business will begin taking advantage of this, either to create unique branded products, or to fabricate new parts, or even to fix old ones.

At five years old, YouTube serves two billion videos daily and is a dominant player in the global media industry. Taking a step back, it's interesting to consider how YouTube got here and what the relationship between Google and YouTube has produced.

I've been thinking a lot about what makes the work I do and the ideas I have different from my contemporaries. Rather facetiously, I talk about the internet as a new religion embraced by the masses in search of salvation. By resisting internet orthodoxy, I deliberately try to see our society and its relationship with technology in a unique manner.

This begins with refusing to use the same jargon and phrases as others, and playing with words to find more accessible and meaningful ways of explaining trends and phenomena. The internet is full of technical concepts that have exclusive and rigid meanings.

Yet the power and resilience of the internet is derived from its open nature, so it only makes sense that we embrace freedom when we talk and think about related ideas and concepts. I do this by generally distrusting technical authorities, including early adopters, technology executives, and I.T. admins. I respect their knowledge, but always question whether their perspective has the potential to be transfered to people who aren't in a position of technical authority (the vast majority of us).

When it comes to the world of social media, which is both technical and non-technical, elitist and also accessible, I find myself consistently frustrated by the level of "group think." In contrast to other technical areas, social media accommodates anyone and everyone, so jargon isn't an acceptable vocabulary to control the discussion and analysis.

What you commonly find is a spoken and unspoken orthodoxy, rules that dictates how tools should be used and people should act. The problem is that this stifles innovation and doesn't allow for the kind of true experimentation we should be seeing in this sector.

Public relations, marketing and advertising people lament the rash of social media experts who project their own industry orthodoxy onto an emergent discipline. Few understand the dynamic involved when in a long chain of diverse individuals and organizations who have a range of expertise culturally acclimatize their own networks and friends.

The seeds of this kind of internet orthodoxy were sown in Ursula Franklin's definition of technology as being "how we do things around here". The variable comes in how we define where we are, with the internet collapsing space into time and everyone being "here" at some point in time.