January 2009
54 posts
MaV-Eric in Davos →
Do you find you never have enough time on your hands? I am always busy, especially now that credit is crunchier than burnt toast with a topping of unbuttered peanuts from a jar that had been…
Everyblock's Dilemma: How Do You Open Source... →
This morning Adrian Holovaty announced that he will be open sourcing Everyblock. Everyblock is a site that crawls local data sources, aggregates the data, and then surfaces them geographically….
Lauren Luke: the makeup amateur turned YouTube... →
Lauren Luke is not a very likely celebrity. A 27-year-old single mother from South Shields, Tyneside, she lives with her 10-year-old son, Jordan, her mum, sister, twin teenage nieces and…
What is a Smart Grid? →
Our future grid will pull together a complex and far-flung set of technologies
The trouble with writing about the smart grid is that the news is moving so fast. Witness: Obama just…
Four short links: 30 Jan 2009 →
Two serious links and two fun today, thanks to Waxy and BoingBoing:
EveryBlock Business Model Brainstorming — Adrian Holovaty’s project was funded by a Knight Foundation grant that’s about…
The Smart Growth Manifesto →
Obama is stimulating. Davos is deliberating. C-levels are eliminating. Wall St is recriminating. Welcome to the macropocalypse: no one, it seems, can put the global economy back together…
links for 2009-01-25 →
FreelanceSwitch Hourly Rate Calculator Interesting calculator to figure out how much you need to charge hourly to meet your financial targets. The only thing I’m not certain about is how…
The future of Reading →
Last week I took part in O’Reilly’s Ignite session a micropresentations style affair (nice change to talk, instead of organise…) I tried to outline my thoughts on the ‘Future of…
Inauguration Moments and Links →
Like many people around the world, I was stirred by the inauguration of President Obama. Listening to his speech, I wanted to share a couple of the bits that stood out for me, as well as a few…
The Cloudworker, Layoffs and The Disposable... →
Table of contents for Cloudworker
The Cloudworker’s Creed
Cloudworker Economics
The Cloud President, Obama
Is There a Cloudworker Culture?
The Cloudworker, Layoffs and The Disposable…
Locking away information in companies →
I’d thought I’d publish another of my briefing notes I’ve sent to clients, in this case, about the popular (but in my opinion, mostly harmful) desire to ‘lock down’ access on corporate wiki to other…
Will Someone Please Invent iTunes for News? →
The Media Equation - Will Someone Please Invent iTunes for News? - NYTimes.com “Those of us who are in the newspaper business could not be blamed for hoping that someone like (Steve Jobs) comes…
Duncan Campbell: Stumped by curveballs →
Last week, the defence secretary, John Hutton, said that it was time for our European allies “to step up to the plate” and send more of their troops to Afghanistan. How distressing to see a…
The Cloudworker, Layoffs and The Disposable... →
Table of contents for Cloudworker
The Cloudworker’s Creed
Cloudworker Economics
The Cloud President, Obama
Is There a Cloudworker Culture?
The Cloudworker, Layoffs and The Disposable…
Is ad-supported journalism viable in a... →
While a great deal of what I write here is underinformed speculation, this piece is unusually speculative and underinformed. It’s possible that I’m flat out wrong about the idea I’m developing…
social networking in reverse →
A quick note to point out LittleSis, an “involuntary Facebook of powerful Americans,” a project of the Public Accountability Initiative funded by the Sunlight Foundation. It’s something like a…
Brokers and Research and Trading -- Oh My! →
The best part about being a conference chair for Money:Tech is the opportunity to see what’s happening on the front lines of the FinTech and Securities businesses. No surprises here:…
Interesting ICA talks in Feb 09 →
Not sure of my travel plans, so might not be in/near London at the right times, but these look like interesting talks for Jan/Feb 09 (in case you’re reading an archive :-)… Peter Greenaway on…
meet the new schtick →
I did a presentation for a group of Guardian folk a couple of years ago. I wrote it up here. It was fun. And more importantly for me, it was useful, because I’ve been doing some variant…
Google Earth brings masterpieces from Prado museum... →
Armchair tourists who are used to travelling the globe with Google Earth can now use the same technology to crawl all over the masterpieces in one of the world’s most famous galleries: the…
Playing for Change →
About a year ago, Norman Lear showed me this project he was helping finance. Mark Johnson, a young record producer was traveling around the world getting street musicians to record “Stand By Me”…
Denial: on the beach, the road, the drowned world →
For a lover of cities and an inveterate optimist, a curiously persistent thread over the years here has the destruction of cities. From an older entry on visions of deserted cities in films to…
A business model for open source hardware →
The price of a typical gadget reflects two factors: the cost of making it and the price its inventor is charging for the intellectual property in it. Often the second can be many times…
Making Work for Ourselves (Part One) →
Suppose that you and ninety-nine other people are stranded on a desert island. You are lucky, in that the island has all the natural resources - water, food, materials to build shelter - that you…
Four short links: 10 Jan 2009 →
Here are four fun links to set the tone for your weekend: high risk money, productive failure, consumer-grade BitTorrent, and architecture criticism for the rest of us.
How Porsche hacked the…
Four short links: 10 Jan 2009 →
Here are four fun links to set the tone for your weekend: high risk money, productive failure, consumer-grade BitTorrent, and architecture criticism for the rest of us.
How Porsche hacked the…
Alexis Petridis on the corduroy suit →
Miuccia Prada recently caused a degree of consternation by sending a model down the catwalk in a $1,855 teal corduroy suit. On the one hand, it looked rather lovely, and what Prada says goes….
RMI Introduces New Oil Imports Map →
Breaking our dependence on fossil fuels isn’t only a solution for halting our climate changing emissions, it’s also about gaining energy independence and being cautious about when we reach …
Video: CES 2009 - Mind Flex →
A sceptical Bobbie Johnson tries out Mattel’s mind-controlled obstacle course
12-step recovery program for America from Great... →
The Twelve-Step Recovery Program For American Grand Strategy
from
GREAT POWERS:
America and the World after Bush
By Thomas P. M. Barnett
1. ADMIT THAT WE…
Only connect →
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only…
Objections to wikis in companies →
I was searching through my notes this morning and found a response I’d given to a consulting company about their approach to supporting/using wikis within schools. The original note was an email I’d…
“Damien Hirst is very rich and he is not stupid. His most daring work of art was...”
– David Galbraith’s Blog » Blog Archive » Goodbye to all That
Galbraith is consistently my Zeitgeist commentator of choice (and a nifty curator)
Two Thousand and Nine - Grab it by the BALLS
justonemorething:
Am I the only one looking forward to this year? All I see is facebook status’s, twitters, tumblrs and loud shouting in the street about how people really do NOT want to go back to work, or even get out of bed.
etc…
London Coffee Houses of 1765 →
“On alternating Thursday, a gang of freethinkers - eventually dubbed the “The Club of Honest Whigs” by one of its founding members, Benjamin Franklin - met at the coffeehouse (in the shadows of St…
Apple's Outliner →
Wow, Apple’s new version of Pages includes a proper outliner Great stuff…nice to see outlining as a writing/thinking tool getting prominence and actually being decent (MS Word’s…
Mining social media for insights →
I’m writing this more for personal reference than any sort of analysis, but I like the idea of capturing notes here, without feeling like I need to do any analysis (a bit like how I share things…
Watch
Oh, Onion, we loves you.
Via Mr Wheatley
Did you lose your data? →
Take this 1 min Open Rights Group Survey…quite a startling exercise.
Early access to a book's development →
O’Reilly’s ‘Rough Cuts’ are a great idea - books in progress that you can subscribe to as they develop. Here’s one for Google’s SketchUp app. This open authoring progress seems to have…
The forgotten perfect ebook device →
There’s a lot of ebook devices out there (Kindle, Sony reader, Iliad et al), and obviously the iphone/touch and other mobile phones. The one technical feature that I think makes a device suitable…
Mobiles give Africa's farmers the chance to set... →
Every week without fail, sellers come to trade their meat, vegetables or animals in the dusty marketplace of Katine in north-east Uganda. Yet a closer look reveals something unusual: a series…
Hiking in Hong Kong →
Who needs a rucksack to go hiking when you can take a wheelie case? As well as strappy sandals, a summer dress, a Time Out city guide, a big fat novel, various hair products and unguents, and…
The financial crisis: Reasons to be fearful →
A new year is usually a time for hope. But today many of us are full of doubt. The financial crisis has brought wave after wave of bad news, replacing the old certainties with a sense of dread…
Work and The City, Frank Duffy (2008) →
Short books are often better books - The Eyes of the Skin; Undesigning the Bath; In Praise of Shadows; Peter Zumthor’s books; the Writer and the City and Pamphlet Architecture…
Advertising’s Folly →
This is a bottle of Tide detergent. It costs about $7 at your local market. It has less than $1 of ingredients in it. The rest is packaging, marketing, “shelf space fees” and profit….
The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2007) →
This is a book that I almost didn’t read. Like The Long Tail or Here Comes Everybody, for instance. Both books I own but don’t feel the need to read, feeling that I’ve already having…