October 2008
43 posts
Upcoming Call Queue for iPhone →
Quite a while ago (er, actually a year ago) I read a couple of great posts by Tim O’Reilly outlining his wishlist for iphone apps and the potential for mobile operators to enhance their…
Sharing Ideas is a good idea →
Nice NYTimes write-up of Johnny Chung Lee, the guy who released all those cool videos of wii controller modifications (like a 3D feel head tracker). Turns out releasing all his ideas so…
Google Books - the prophet margin →
Terrible pun, sorry. Anyway, in a recent post on Google Books, I linked to a fab New Yorker essay Future Reading. It takes a grand view of library and cataloguing of books from Alexandria to…
WatchObama remembered his lines better? Boing Boing
Google extends Book Search →
Google finally settled their (US) wrangle with book publishers, which means Google will unlock their display of book content, with reciprocal ad revenue share to publishers. Google published an…
“Shortly after midnight, the bunker’s computers reported that an...”
– His reward? A demotion to prevent embarrassment to his superiors. Stanislav Petrov - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Prime real estate →
I was looking through the latest issue of Edge, where Daniel Kahneman, the 2002 Nobel Laureate for Economics, was having a conversation with a bunch of luminaries that included Richard Thaler,…
Martha and Dank Redux: Thinking about Cloud... →
It must be nearly ten years since I first read Larry Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. When I read it, I remember being very taken with one of his early stories,…
Jennifer Bussell on eGovernment, corruption and... →
For the past decade or so, there’s been a movement to bring computers, telephones and other “information and communication technology” into developing nations to increase economic development and…
“Voter suppression can be difficult to prove. Suppression tactics —...”
– Modern US Democracy in Action.Salon.com News | Where the GOP could get dirty
Eno's Blooms →
The Long Now Blog » Blog Archive » Eno Blooms Brian Eno collaborates with Peter Chilvers for an iphone app…that basically ticks every box for me… In a similar vein, I’d love to see …
Musing gently about traffic and information and... →
One of the themes that recurs quite often in the conversations I have is that of the next 50 billion devices. While people argue about the next 3 billion people getting connected, and while people…
links for 2008-10-20 →
Welcome to the Shared Digital Future | www.hathitrust.org “HathiTrust is a bold idea with big plans. As a digital repository for the nation’s great research libraries, HathiTrust…
Rands In Repose: FriendDA →
Rands In Repose: FriendDA: “The FriendDA is a non-binding, warm blanket agreement that offers absolutely no legal protection. I’d suggest if the idea of legal protection is even crossing your mind…
Meeting Hell →
Meetings are a big productivity killer that you can control by working together better. Studies have shown the cost of meetings, you probably spend a week per month in meetings, and you can
Crowdsourcing, humor, participation →
It’s been good fun hanging out in Barcelona with my fellow speakers, both the wonderful organizers like Juan Freire and Ismael Peña-Lopez and guests like Carol Darr, Andrew Rasiej and…
WatchVia
Wikitecture - Radical Collaboration in... →
Many of the precepts that began with Open Source (collaboration, shared IP, crowdsourcing etc.) are migrating from software development into a series of ever more surprising disciplines. Today…
Musing gently about complex adaptive systems and... →
Take a complex adaptive system. Introduce network effects. Introduce artificial scarcity. Prepare for meltdown.
It’s one way of describing what happened during the New York Blackout. As the grid…
design engaged the first →
I’ve ‘just’ come back from this splendid conference thing called Design Engaged. Everyone else there seemed to be an interaction designer, a recovering interaction designer or knew a…
Visualizing Political Bias? →
Andy Baio and Joshua Schachter created this fantastic Firefox plugin that Visualises Political Bias on Memeorandum (a US-centric political news+blog aggregator) by highlighting perceived…
links for 2008-10-09 →
[xiles.net] File Manager: NexusFile, Font Manager: NexusFont A nice collection of freeware utilities by JungHoon Noh (노정훈), a Windows programmer from Seoul Korea. I particularly like his…
links for 2008-10-09 →
[xiles.net] File Manager: NexusFile, Font Manager: NexusFont A nice collection of freeware utilities by JungHoon Noh (노정훈), a Windows programmer from Seoul Korea. I particularly like his…
Purging Voter Rolls →
The Times has a disturbing article this morning about the wholesale illegal purging of voters rolls going on in many of the swing states.
Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at…
The 3TIER Tour →
If I told you that the air in a corporate office building filled with PhD holding climatologist and atmospheric scientists felt positively electrified, you might think I was a little off….
Book Review: The Chinese Dream →
The Chinese Dream - A society under construction, by DCF, Neville Mars and Adrian Hornsby. Publisher 010 says: What if you built the whole mass of western europe in 20 years? What…
It Was A Send-Up, But The Language Is Horribly... →
Creative Review’s “Bold new identity”, as (most of) you realised, was a spoof but the convoluted terminology used to describe it was, largely, genuine…
The language used in the post was…
All Their Base are Belong to Us →
Under the auspices of the Management Lab I’m getting together later this week with a group of very sharp people who think about companies and how to change and improve them. We have a pretty…
Core/Periphery Network →
Core/Periphery Network Originally uploaded by Ross Mayfield
I consider this a core pattern:
“The end-goal for vibrant, sustainable community networks is the core/periphery model….
Stop Press for October 2nd →
Nascent: The Future Is A Foreign Country - “Think about how somebody from just half a generation ago would try to parse that sentence: “He’s reading his phone.” It sounds like something out of a…
Customer Service is the New Marketing: Interview... →
The Internet changes the power relations between companies and customers. Social technologies like blogs, social networks, ratings and reviews etc. allow customers to share experiences; good and…
Fan cultures in radio (3) - TOGs or "This Ordinary... →
This week we are publishing a series of short posts from researchers who have been studying the online behaviours of listeners and fans of BBC radio. Today’s post comes from Matt Hills and Amy…
If products are people too, let them have a... →
My first post on the Pulse Laser, in my newish role as an advisor to S&W, brings me to consider one of Jack and Matt’s mantras: that products are people too.
As Matt said in his talk at Reboot…
slow strategy →
Warning - regular people might want to avoid this one. It’s a rather pompous and oblique post about ‘planning’. One of the smartest things Richard ever said was that he didn’t read…
SYSTEM SHOCKS →
A top-level conclusion from my book Brave New War is that security in the future, from economic to physical to environmental to social, will be measured by our responses to a never-ending series…