confused of calcutta

Thanks to David Benbennick for the Zen koan-like sight of one thumb opposing.
Whenever you’re in a conversation about identity, two things come up regularly:

The need to support confidentiality and secrecy and privacy of information

The need to support confidentiality and secrecy and privacy of identity

I, for one, am distinctly underwhelmed by the arguments for either of [...]

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Doc pointed me at Network Weaving. And I spent some time reading up what they’ve said and done. And rather than say any more, I’m going to leave it at that and just recommend you go read them.
There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear. One thing’s for sure. Cluetrain is getting both [...]

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When the dream came
I held my breath with my eyes closed
I went insane, like a smoke ring day
When the wind blows
On The Way Home, Neil Young

Have you ever watched what happens when a gust of wind hits a smoke ring? Blows it to smithereens, makes it “go insane”. Do it sometime, just for a laugh. [...]

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I look at every comment made on my blog. I try and find out who the commenter is. If someone links to me, I try and find out who it is and what they’re interested in.
Manual collaborative filtering. It’s not about ego. In fact, I don’t understand why someone would blog if that someone wasn’t [...]

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I love chess. And if there was a particular game that made me start loving it, it was this one:

The game was between Edward Lasker and Sir George Thomas, London (Oct 29, 1912). It went as follows:
1.d4 f5 2.Nc3 Nf6 3.Nf3 e6 4.Bg5 Be7 5.Bxf6 Bxf6 6.e4 fxe4 7.Nxe4 b6 8.Bd3 Bb7 9.Ne5 O-O [...]

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Have you ever been in a position where you had to say something was “off the record” to a journalist, and then worried about whether it would stay that way? And does it matter anyway?
Apocryphal story. Kenny Dalglish was at a press conference announcing the return of Ian Rush from Juventus to Liverpool. And one [...]

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I’m in the middle of moving offices, with all the packing/unpacking/throwing away it entails. There is a cathartic feel to it.
And, for an information ferret like me, there is enormous temptation to stop and read bits of things I have resolutely refused to throw away. Occasionally, I give in to that temptation. To read. Never [...]

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Over the last five years, my thoughts and actions have moved more and more into a community-driven, market-standard-based, opensource-influenced, platform-independent and device-agnostic IT world.
This was not always the case.
Originally I was comfortable with the notion that TCOs for enterprise IT were optimised by strategic vendor relationships, and that one could outsource many of the problems [...]

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Like everyone else, I had heard rumours and read the odd blog post about Mark Thompson’s Fleming Memorial Lecture last night. [Mark is the Director-General of the BBC]. And I thought to myself, it could just be possible that the Beeb were about to get it. Then, Malc of Accidental Light bludgeoned me into reading [...]

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To me this particular Empire is all to do with proprietary behaviour, be it about Lock-in Layers or Digital Wrongs or Intellectual Property Wrongs.
So let me tell some stories.
I found the picture below in Tantek Celik’s Flickr, getting there via Matt: ComicPress via my own WordPress dashboard. Thank you Tantek. Thank you Matt.

Tantek wondered about [...]

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