March 2009
73 posts
What Publishers Need to Learn from Software... →
There was a great exchange on the O’Reilly editors’ backchannel the other day, so illuminating that I thought I should share it with the rest of you. We’ve been discussing the fast-track development…
Print your own notebooks →
Couple of things caught my eye over the last few months, with regard to self-printing. Most recent first - Moleskine have released an intriguing site that lets you create PDFs of contacts, or…
Twitterprompter? →
I like reading Andrew McAfee’s blog. I’ve known him for some years now, and count him as one of my friends. Reading his blog is a bit like chewing on good chillies or drinking decent sancerre,…
Links of the Week →
My crowdsourcing radar used to consist of Google Alerts and
a RSS feed from Technorati. Then I installed TweetDeck on my laptop. I’m not sure if it was the best or the worst thing I’ve
ever done. I…
Busy day →
Got up 0645, suited up, grabbed some joe, and did AV check in ballroom where big Raytheon event held. Then checked bag, grabbed big latte with extra shot, and got psyched. About 30 later I go 55 mins…
Web 2.0 Expo Preview: Will Wright, Sims and... →
Will Wright has been the foundational genius behind a thirty year string of blockbuster games, from the early Raid on Bungeling Bay in 1984 to the first truly fun urban simulation Sim City, a game…
Web 2.0 Expo Preview: Will Wright, Sims and... →
Will Wright has been the foundational genius behind a thirty year string of blockbuster games, from the early Raid on Bungeling Bay in 1984 to the first truly fun urban simulation Sim City, a game…
Energy Tax →
Jeff Zeleny reports this morning that President Obama promised Centrist Democratic Senators that “he will think about his proposal to raise taxes on gas and oil producers, which has evoked an…
design and dasein: heidegger against the birkerts... →
Here and elsewhere in the blogosphere, much ink has been spilled — or rather, many pixels generated — regarding Sven Birkerts’s “Resisting the Kindle,” which contends that the e-reader’s rise…
Given enough eyeballs: Shazam for birds and trees... →
Do you ever look at a bird or a tree and wonder “I wish I knew more about it”? I’m useless with birds. Probably even more useless with trees. In some ways it is strange: I could close my eyes and…
Where are the World’s Most Innovative Places? →
McKinsey mapped innovation based upon the number of patents filed per company, the number of companies filing patents and the growth in patent filing.
By measures such as these, Silicon Valley, Tokyo…
TOC 09 "The Narrative is Changing: Sensors, Social... →
TOC 09 "Reasons to Be Excited" -- Tim O'Reilly,... →
William Reichman: Assessing Cognitive Fitness →
I recently saw Alvaro Fernandez of sharpbrains.com speak at eTech 2009, the O’Reilly emerging technology conference. Fernandez is a Stanford MBA working as a market researcher focused on…
Tish Shute interviews Mike Kuniavsky on things as... →
Tish Shute’s UgoTrade website is quickly becoming one of the prime sites in the field. In the last months she interviewed Andy Stanford-Clark (IBM Master Inventor), Robert…
Undersea eruptions near Tonga →
Scientists sailed out to have a closer look at the eruptions of an undersea volcano off the coast of Tonga in the South Pacific Ocean today. Tonga’s head geologist, Kelepi Mafi, said there was no…
will the real iPod for reading stand up now... →
OK, so first of all: this isn’t an article about whether or not ebooks are a good thing. But I was thinking this morning about the now hackneyed idea that we’re moments away from an ‘iPod moment for…
Wikirank: A Zeitgeist for Wikipedia →
Wikipedia is one of the most significant sites on the web. It produces vast quantities of data and the Wikimedia foundation tries to make all of it available to the public….
Problems you didn’t even know you had. →
Michael Tamblyn: 6 Projects That Could Change... →
A presentation you need to read, and not just for the explanation above of DRM: Date Repulsion Mode, the scale of cool, or why no one with a Kindle gets asked for their phone number in…
By the Charts: Cities are Greener →
All of the above charts courtesy of Jonathan Rose Companies. The original source of the GHG data is: Journal of Urban Planning and Development © ASCE / March 2006. This piece…
Lova Rakatomalala on Twitter and Madagascar. And... →
Lova Rakotamalala has been spending a lot of his time explaining the crisis in Madagascar to the global media.
Embedded video from CNN Video
In a recent blog post, he explains some of the…
Stewart Brand is Rethinking Nuclear →
By Lisa Chacón Monday night Stewart Brand spoke at UC Berkeley on “Rethinking Green.” He went through the requisite slides on climate, population and energy – but with a few twists. He was…
Jeff Howe on Crowdsourcing →
In 2005, journalist Jeff Howe was writing a story about MySpace. He wasn’t interested in the site so much as a social network, but as a tool that creative artists, especially musicians, were using…
Maps of Knowledge →
Previous maps of the relationship between branches of modern science were done by mapping the citations among journal articles. These citations are footnotes referencing previous articles on the…
Vanity Press Plus: The Tweetbook →
Well, someone had to do it, and I think I’m the first. I’ve archived my first two years of twittering to a hardback book. (For those of you who don’t get Twitter, and those who are just…
Clay Shirky's "Newspapers and Thinking... →
Sometimes Clay Shirky astounds us by articulating something we’ve never thought of, and sometimes he astounds us by telling us something many have thought, but never so clearly and so compellingly….
Tom at the Carnegie Council →
Streaming video now available. (Don’t see a place to download.) Word is, this episode has already appeared in the Carnegie Council’s podcast feed over at iTunes if you prefer to take in your audio…
'Soft infrastructure superpowers': Lift09... →
Saving me from having to transcribe my presentation, the very well-organised Lift09 conference got Swiss French Television to film all the talks. So please see the embedded video at…
Countries for rent, and the Malagasy crisis →
Time Magazine offers a surprisingly good package of articles, titled “10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now.” The list is blissfully free of short-lived tech trends, and digs into some larger,…
Droga5’s Puma projection and more nice work →
Puma Lift commercial, agency: Droga5, production company: MJZ, director: Rupert Sanders
It’s Friday so it must be time for another round-up of the nice work that has passed through CR…
Holi - the Festival of Colors →
Last Wednesday (March 11th), people in India and other countries with large Hindu populations celebrated Holi, the Festival of Colors. Holi is celebrated as a welcoming of Spring, and a celebration…
Quietube: YouTube without the distractions →
A quick heads-up on a little Apt project I haven’t talked about properly before. We got bored with all the comments and crud on YouTube, so we built Quietube - think of it as Readability for…
Q&A: Adrian Tomine →
Detail from a 2004 New Yorker cover by Adrian Tomine
US author Jonathan Lethem described comic book artist Adrian Tomine’s contemporary fiction series Optic Nerve as “deceptively…
China in Afghanistan →
ARTICLE: China’s thirst for copper could hold key to Afghanistan’s future, By Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy Newspapers, March 8, 2009 This is a fascinating bit to watch: U.S. troops indirectly…
Why criminalize a fraction of drug use? →
LEADERS: How to stop the drug wars, The Economist, Mar 5th 2009 I personally see a future of very high drug use as we continue to age demographically and seek even longer lives. Spending so much…
Not Your Usual Trends →
It’s great to see Time magazine present some trends that are not obvious, well-worn, are already over. They take a chance in this list of “10 Ideas Changing The World Right Now.“ The line up…
Musing about purchasing and opensource and tenancy... →
There’s something analogous to Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to the adoption of opensource, where people in IT departments prefer the perceived security of being held captive. This is something…
Power Independence = Location Independence →
A solar compactor with “up to five times the capacity of a normal waste receptacle”, the ability to function off the grid enabled by increased solar efficiency and a drop in price. …
Sheffield and the north →
Bleak.
In a word, bleak.
A cliché about the north, but there’s no smog without blast furnaces. After last week’s circumnavigation of Sydney, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Geneva, Sheffield…
Interesting stuff: 'An Open BBC?' Event →
On Tuesday evening Steve Bowbrick — our now former blogger-in-residence - gave his final thoughts on openness at the BBC. Over a period of six months, Steve has been assessing how the BBC has…
Etech session liveblogging: Mr Hacker Goes to... →
(Came in a few minutes late) Greg was a firehose, forgive my errors and omissions. DC is like a university with a really massive ROTC program. If the internet is ethernet, congress is token ring….
Obama Picks Van Jones to be Green Jobs Adviser →
The AP reports:
Author and activist Van Jones will be a special adviser for green jobs, enterprise and innovation in the Obama administration.
Nancy Sutley, chairwoman of the White House…
Introducing MediaCloud →
We’re launching a very cool new project at Berkman today, Media Cloud. Basically, Media Cloud is a platform to help researchers find quantitative answers to questions like:
- What type of…
Will QE work? →
The Great British Experiment begins today, when the Bank of England’s wades into the market to buy £2bn of British government bonds for ready money. Note it down in big red letters: it’s …
Symmetricizing for the long war at home →
SUNDAY OPINION: “The Coming Swarm,” by John Arquilla, New York Times, 15 February 2009.
Arquilla is very good, but like a lot of high-tech war gurus who’ve now switched over to the long war, he…