I’m currently working on a more detailed post about the bigger topic of “gamification” but I saw something this morning that I wanted to create a quick response to.

Clinton over at Everything to Everything just posted an effusive article about Prezi, a new presentation building app. He shows, as an example of what Prezi can do, a presentation by Mojo on their Gamification service. I found that I had the same reaction to both Prezi and Mojo: they’re window dressing at best and dangerous at worst.

As much of a cliché as it has become, I am a firm believer that content is king. You can add all the badges and animations that you want but boring content is still never going to resonate with people. Going further, you potentially risk overshadowing your content with flashy presentation. Gamfication, in an admittedly nightmarish extreme, even has the potential to induce addictive behaviour.

One of Prezi’s testimonials inadvertently makes my point for me. Umair Haque, in discussing his use of Prezi, says that his audience responded with “Nice content – awesome presentation! What did you use to make it?!” Does that not seem backwards?

We often get caught up with our technology and gadgets and take for granted what they can do.  Two MIT students accomplished an amazing feat when they managed to get photos from near-space for $150 worth of items.

Their photos are actually pretty impressive from the inexpensive GPS/Camera equipped cell-phone.

After reading the story this week that NASA and Google are working on a way to extend the Internet beyond the confines of our planet was intriguing.  Of course I love hearing about anything that has to do with space exploration, and the concept of extending the Internet into space is interesting and strange at the same time.  Of course, if that first manned mission to Mars ever does happen, the journey is no doubt going to be a long one (several months at least), being able to browse the Internet would be nice .

Now…according to the article in the Ottawa Citizen about this, it will take nearly three minutes for the signal to travel from the earth to the source.  I guess instant messaging and real time communication are somehow out of the question.

What was interesting, is that the key technological hurdle needing to be overcome is the ability for a signal to be smart and be able to deal with disruptions and connection problems.  The new concept is called “Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN.  If a signal is blocked, the server can sense this, can save the content and send it on when the way is clear.”   We are constantly building web applications that rely on communication with other systems, sometimes asynchronously.  While there are mechanisms that can deal with disruption to a certain extent, this concept is interesting in that one could be sure that a transmission would arrive eventually, even if the system accepting the message isn’t available immediately.

I’ll be interested to see if this is one of those space program advances that actually helps us on earth, or if its just a cool idea that doesn’t yield any practical application.

This post is a commentary on the article that appeared in the Ottawa Citizen on August 16th of this year (a popular source of information for my posts in this blog, and yes the paper was still on my desk at the time I wrote this) in response to Mark Bauerlein’s book “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30″.

(more…)