confused of calcutta

No, not the album by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. I’m a tad too old for that.
Instead, it’s about this. A 1949 album, “an audible anthology of modern poetry read by its creators”, edited by someone called Lloyd Frankenberg. And the album is a Long Playing Microgroove Record, the first I’ve bought in twenty years.
Amazing stuff. [...]

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Some of you may have read my earlier post on Michael Schrage’s recent article in the Financial Times, pointing out some of the pitfalls associated with computers in classrooms. Some of you may even have seen Clarence Fisher’s almost-angry but later calmer response, a reaction similar to mine.
Why did we respond initially that way? Because [...]

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….Like shells upon the shore
You can hear the ocean roar
In the Dangling Conversation
And the superficial lives
The borders of our lives……Simon and Garfunkel, The Dangling Conversation
 
Doesn’t that describe everything a blog shouldn’t be?
The words “You can hear the ocean roar” came zooming into my head when I read Malc’s Steve Wozniak telephone story. An absolute hoot.

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There continues to be movement in the microformats meets identity space. Doc Searls’s IT Garage recently had a piece on MicroID; comments and conversations took me to Claimid as well; so the space which I always associate with Subterranean Homesick Hardt is beginning to get busier.
As with search and with syndication, we can get as [...]

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I look for situations where someone I like and trust has a radically different view from me on any particular subject. Because I think I can learn from it.
Here’s a recent example. Michael Schrage, someone I’ve never met, but whose works I have enjoyed reading, wrote recently in the Financial Times: The “edutainers” merit a [...]

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We have a Foundation.
The Foundation covers tin and wire and connectedness and storage; it deals with the bits and bytes; it is independent of vendor or device, agnostic on platforms and driven by community standards. Any device any connect mechanism any form of information anywhere anytime. All recorded and archived and searchable and retrievable.
On top [...]

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I was looking for Doc’s D-I-Y IT article in Release 1.0, couldn’t find it in a shareable form and went for a ramble on the net as a result. Found Doc’s IT Conversations piece on the same subject. Read it. Again. And I saw the Stewart Brand quote again.
Form follows funding.
Fascinating.
So, when we buy opensource, what [...]

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As part of Foundation and Empire, I have already signalled that I wanted to look at the impact of opensource on the IT construction industry (something Doc Searls covered in detail a few years ago in Release 1; I hope to link to it sometime tomorrow).
Humour me and come along for a slight detour.
In a [...]

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Or not, as the case may be.
One of my favourite pieces of apocrypha. (Ex-boss, if this is not true, blame Stu Berwick). And even if it is not true, it should be. So there. Ex-boss of mine on stage somewhere, part of a panel. Some other member of panel unwittingly says something like “With [...]

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I was pretty upset at not being able to make PC Forum this year (conflicting priorities at work). Nevertheless I kept in touch with it by reading what I could in Release 1 and in Rafe  Needleman. [Esther: I’ll still try and make Flight School on my own time and money, it was great last [...]

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