confused of calcutta

With over 12 gig of music in my iTunes, I’ve been playing with different approaches to choosing what to listen to. And trying to learn from them, taking a vicarious look at what Generation M may do.
Why? I think I’m straitjacketed, anchored and framed with my own experience, and (whether I want to admit it [...]

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Thanks to David Terrar for pointing this out to me. Great article on The New Laws of Digital Technology from The Pfeiffer Report.
The Laws in brief:

More features isn’t better, it’s worse.
You can’t make things easier by adding to them.

Confusion is the ultimate deal-breaker.
Style matters
Only features that provide a good user experience will be used.
Any feature [...]

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When you see the sheer number of articles floating around on Microsoft versus Apple, or Google or, The Next Big Thing, it’s not surprising that there’s a tendency for your eyes to glaze over. A Road From Damascus Experience, where scales zoom upwards and attach themselves to your eyes.
I guess you feel the same about [...]

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There’s always some stimulus to write a post about something. It may come from something you read, something that comes up in physical conversation, something you see while surfing the web, whatever. And sometimes it’s none of these, it’s your personal muse.
I tend to think of this stimulus, this spark, as the thing that sets [...]

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I’m sure you’ve done it hundreds of times. Gone on a random walk around the web, triggered by something you saw somewhere. Well, it was my turn yesterday.
I was getting my head together preparing for a long-delayed post. WordPress Dashboard up, the specific New Scientist article (that triggered the post in the first place) beside [...]

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Chris Locke pinged me about this. It seemed only right that I tried it out on Cluetrain….
Very interesting. I’ve played with it for a while, but have yet to try the whole shebang on an Amazon Upgrade Program book. Will do so pretty soon, but probably not tonight. Tried it vicariously anyway.
The software stayed up [...]

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One of the questions I used to pose to the graduate intake here was this:
How do you think people will interact with information in five years time? Will it be analogous to (a) bloomberg.tv (b) Excel (c) Green Screen (d) Google (e) XBox? [I avoided giving them (f) Blue Screen of Death]

All I was trying [...]

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I was preparing for what will probably become my next post, triggered by something I read in the New Scientist. I couldn’t link to the full text of the article, it was hidden behind a Premium Wall. And it made me go off at a tangent, mid-post.
Most journals nowadays provide their print subscribers with free [...]

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[With due deference to Simon and Garfunkel: A Simple Desultory Philippic. Great song]
Kathy Sierra on what might happen if Sudoku was given the Big Tech Company and Big Marketing treatment. To be found here. Loved it. A lesson for all of us as to how we make simple things complex, useless, unworkable. Don’t miss the [...]

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Thanks to Jonathan Peterson of way.nu for pointing me at Robert X Cringely’s recent post on Google, Microsoft, Intel and Yahoo, whom he terms “the four pillars of personal computing circa 2006“.
I usually agree with most of what Cringely says. For once I’m not sure.
And it’s not because he uses the term Four Pillars either [...]

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