Indiana Holmes 

Went to see Sherlock Holmes today starring two great actors -- a total waste -- one of the dumbest two hours of movie ever. Teens like it, it's sort of a cross between Raiders of the Lost Ark and Harry Potter, with yes, a little of the puzzle-master Sherlock Holmes.

The kids are likely to think "You know this literature stuff ain't so bad," but this is not Sherlock Holmes it's Sherlock Potter, or Indiana Holmes. But not as entertaining. Sigh.

Bad bad bad bad. And there's going to be a sequel, clearly, involving the evil and demonic mastermind, Professor Moriarity.

What is seduction? 

To seduce someone is to: 1. Find out what they want. 2. Give it to them. 3. The way they want it.

All three elements are necessary.

I put this together as a response to a well-meaning commenter on my Person of the Decade piece yesterday, who observed that I was an "old" person who had done all the work being honored while in his 40s (and 50s!). I didn't ask for details, but I assume they meant that such accomplishments are usually the province of younger people.

This didn't feel right to me.

So I started thinking.

Not to brag, but I was also very accomplished in my 20s and 30s, and in my teens I was precocious. But as an adult, which I am now, I am capable of seduction. And you couldn't launch something like RSS or podcasting, without the ability to seduce people. Because they won't move unless they get what they want, the way they want it. It never occurs to young males to seduce, because to get what they want they just have to look young and virile. Which they are very good at! If an older male wants to get some action he has to seduce. Therefore evolution taught at least some of us to do this. And that's the skill you need to make something like podcasting work.

So don't be surprised if old (I hate that word) people make great contributions in the arts and technology. There are certain things, those that require seduction, that we do much better than younger folk.

Example: Why it's smart to publish Realtime RSS now.

Coming sooon: The Bluetooth Watch 

Like Checkbox News, the Social Camera and the Twitter Camera, this product is just around the corner. Someday soon we'll all have watches that do Bluetooth.

Here's the pitch.

Earlier this decade Microsoft started an effort they called the Smart Watch. It pretty much failed. Some people wore watches with keypads, presumably so they could do calculations or write memos. You'd have to have fingers about 1/100th the size of human fingers for that to work. I'm sure there were lots of other early attempts to digitize watches, but in the end, watches are good for telling time and not much more.

The reason -- to be ergonomic a watch has to be small. But to have a decent user interface a watch has to be big. Too big.

That's why the functionality that could have conceivably gone on our wrists is now in our pockets -- on smart phones, Blackberry, iPhone, Droid.

In-our-pocket is the wrong place for quick text messages. They should be on our wrist!

Enter Bluetooth.

I don't know the economics but I imagine a digital watch could be made to look beautiful and also to have a mode where it couples with our phone and acts as a receiver for text messages. That way every time someone DMs you on Twitter it could show up on your wrist, with a little vibration only you feel.

I considered calling this the Twitter Watch, but enough with Twitter. They get too much free publicity.

Discuss!

PS: I know there are Bluetooth Watches, but they got it wrong. The display should be the whole watch face, not a sliver of tiny text beneath an analog watch face. And it's nice they can show you the caller ID, but I don't get nearly as many phone calls as text messages. A watch could display 140 characters, if you temporarily displace the time display (until you click the face to dismiss). The ones that try to be an MP3 player or cell phone are just as ridiculous and doomed to fail as the smart watches of the 90s.