December 2008
66 posts
Musing about the customer perspective: Part 2 →
My thanks to those of you who commented, tweeted or wrote to me about my post on the customer perspective yesterday.
Some of the questions raised were such that I felt a follow-up post was of…
Mapping: Infrastructure and Flow →
I love airline route maps. I’ve fallen asleep staring at the tangle of possible journeys so often that I sometimes confuse the capillaries I see with my eyes closed with the red paths of…
O'Reilly Media on Twitter →
Laurel Ruma (@laurelatoreilly) just did a quick census of the number of O’Reilly employees on twitter. She came up with 74 twitter accounts out of about 300 employees worldwide, plus five people…
Pumas, Ocelots and Monkeys →
Originally uploaded by TwoLittleLlamas We´ve left the animal sanctuary after 4 weeks. We were going to stay longer but left for a few little reasons, mainly an injured toe (alex), two…
Year in Review 2008: Best in Cities →
As we look forward to the new year, we’ve also reflected on the old, and rediscovered some of the great events, innovations, interviews and debates that 2008 had to offer. For the next week, we…
O'Reilly Media on Twitter →
Laurel Ruma (@laurelatoreilly) just did a quick census of the number of O’Reilly employees on twitter. She came up with 74 twitter accounts out of about 300 employees worldwide, plus five people…
Thinking About Wendell Berry's "In... →
I’m just reading a Wendell Berry essay from 2000, entitled In Distrust of Movements, reprinted on a blog with the inspired name The Irresistible Fleet of Bicycles. I was going to just tweet…
Thinking About Wendell Berry's "In... →
I’m just reading a Wendell Berry essay from 2000, entitled In Distrust of Movements, reprinted on a blog with the inspired name The Irresistible Fleet of Bicycles. I was going to just tweet…
Madeleine Bunting: Darwin shouldn't be hijacked by... →
Next year there will be no escaping one man and his legacy - 2009 will be marked by television series, books, debates, conferences and exhibitions devoted to Charles Darwin and his two…
Less killing, more kissing: new breed of computer... →
A new generation of designers and developers is putting the social element back into video games, using online networks such as Facebook as platforms to turn people from across the world into…
Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama.com: The Power... →
What do Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama.com have in common, besides their extraordinary success? They are organizations that are infused with IT in such a way that it leads to a qualitative…
TV drama: The Shield versus The Wire →
In 1989, David Simon, a young Baltimore reporter, was allowed to spend a year as a police intern with the city homicide unit and write about it. Why anyone agreed to this unprecedented…
Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama.com: The Power... →
What do Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama.com have in common, besides their extraordinary success? They are organizations that are infused with IT in such a way that it leads to a qualitative…
Admiring Bill Gates →
Dare I say this on O’Reilly Radar? I admire Bill Gates. If I had a vote for Person of the Year, Gates would get mine. Let me explain why.
This year, Gates made an important and potentially…
Hal Roberts: Should we worry that Google is... →
My friend and colleague Hal Roberts is taking on one of the hardest research questions in the space of internet and society - the surveillance of the internet. If surveillance is done in certain…
Scientists Hack Cellphone to Analyze Blood, Detect... →
Fascinating story in Wired about how scientists have hacked consumer cellphone cameras to do cheap and quick blood analysis. Anlysing blood for signs of disease and infection previously…
Gethin Chamberlain reports on life inside Mumbai's... →
Amid a narrow warren of side streets close to the mosque that dominates the skyline on the edge of the mega-slum of Dharavi, in the heart of Mumbai, a young boy tilts his head back and stares…
Internet connection cut between Europe, Asia and... →
Millions of internet and telephone users across the Middle East and south Asia are struggling to get connections after damage to undersea cables linking Europe, Africa and Asia took down a…
Wikipedia and Nature →
I love the RNA Biology journal’s new guidelines for submissions, which state that you must submit a Wikipedia article on your research on RNA families before the journal will publish your…
The New Capitalism - in video →
Further to my New Capitalism note last week, here are two short films I’ve made for the News At Ten. And if you want some bedtime reading, you can download the full 3,000-word essay (oh yes) …
Hard Work and Practice in Programming →
At the Program For the Future event commemorating the 40th anniversary of Doug Englebart’s “mother of all demos” in 1968, I was privileged to hear an inspired rant by Alan Kay about the…
2009 Predictions: Collaboration and Social... →
Forrester analyst Gil Yehuda offers a perspective of Enterprise 2.0 collaboration as either driven by IT, or from the bottom up by the Line of Business, what he calls tech populist. And given…
Whitepaper: The glittering allure of the mobile... →
Mobile advertising specialist Alan Moore, founder of the communication consultancy SMLXL, was asked by Microsoft US to write a paper on the future of the mobile society. It is…
Copenhagen, Melbourne & The Reconquest of the... →
The Strøget in Copenhagen Photo credit: flickr/PDXdj, Creative Commons license
For ten weeks this summer, a twelve-block stretch of Ste. Catherine Street in Montreal was…
Benjamin Zander at Pop!Tech 2008: How Fascinating! →
I’ve talked about Benjamin Zander and his inspiring presentations before (such as here and here), but I stumbled on another one today on the Pop!Tech website. (Pop!Tech is a…
And lo, for Google did pass down its Zeitgeist of... →
Sitting on top of the world’s largest research tool, Google is in an unrivalled position to detect trends in music, politics, retail and everything else the public searches for online.
This…
Grace Jones in Chocolate →
Image has always been an integral part of Grace Jones’ music career, her visual identity being almost as important as her voice. The artwork for her latest album, Hurricane, designed and…
Supermarkets? No, thanks →
Tom Moggach reports on the local food-buying cooperatives that are taking the country by storm
Golden Notebook Update: Even More Marginalia →
A screen is an extremely limited amount of space. We knew when we started The Golden Notebook Project that we could only fit about seven readers comfortably within the margins of the…
Whitepaper: The glittering allure of the mobile... →
Mobile advertising specialist Alan Moore, founder of the communication consultancy SMLXL, was asked by Microsoft US to write a paper on the future of the mobile society. It is…
Tom Service: How YOLA is changing children's lives →
Last Saturday in Los Angeles, conductor Gustavo Dudamel made his debut with a new orchestra. Not some chamber-scale off-shoot of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he takes up the music…
Technology, a Geological Force →
The theory of “mineral evolution” — the idea that the Earth’s rocks are dynamic “species” which emerged over time, sometimes in concert with living things — is a radical new idea introduced by…
Chains. Pyramids. Undo →
Managed to total the Prius today which is I guess, to be expected when you do a hand break turn in heavy snow. Should have bought car insurance. A chain of events kind of morning -…
For Me For You →
Shared by Guy
I wish whoever gave ms this flu wore a bloody mask
In Japan you are more likely to wear a mask to protect other people from your germs, whilst in many other countries the…
RC JOURNAL: Social Software Networks →
One of the arguments against the focus on community resilience rather than big global fixes (to broad economic failure, etc.) is that it is too slow to implement. Instead it is argued that a…
Conern over London parks vote →
This just in from the E-government Bulletin:
“An online vote to decide how to share a pot of four million pounds of improvement funds between 10 of London’s parks has been announced by the city’s…