Day: 5 July 2006

So said Kurt Vonnegut Senior, as reported by his son Kurt Jr in A Man Without A Country. Unusual little book, a perfect antidote to the pain caused by listening to that mp3.

I love chess quotes. There’s something about them, this weird juxtaposition of images.

Malcolm is a close friend of mine. As is Sean. And recently, kicked off by Sean, we started becoming last.fm friends as well.

Malcolm’s genteel response to me was something along the lines of “Happy to accept you as a friend, but no way do I want to be associated with your taste in music” :-)

I think there’s a serious and worthwhile point in his comment, despite his taste (?) in music. As we learn more about the use of collaborative filtering in Four Pillars, we will discover ways of performing Boolean operations on many “lists”. Give me only what is common between Sean and Malcolm. Show me only what they differ on. Give me a Top 10 and a Bottom 10 of my last.fm friends’ interests.

For music read books, for books read wiki pages, for wiki pages read stocks and shares, for stocks and shares read enterprise data. The principle’s the same. People who did this also did this which you didn’t do. Would you like to see the common bits or the uncommon bits?

Search as a means of data cleansing and repair. Syndication as a means of determining leading indicators, pull-from-the-future. Conversation as a means of testing morale. All with Add A Subtract B Venn Diagram CDE. The possibilities are endless.
Enterprise blogospheres tend to go quiet when the political environment is tense, unlike external blogospheres which go into orbit. I have many ideas as to why, but I need to watch for a while and work it out. Currently the information pool on such events is thin.

Victor Meldrew. I’ve provided the Wikipedia entry for the convenience of those who have not been exposed to One Foot In The Grave on UK television. His catchphrase was “I don’t believe it”.

That was my reaction to listening to this mp3 of a recent speech that has been quoted more often than Shakespeare. If you don’t believe the transcripts, then just listen.

http://media.publicknowledge.org/stevens-on-nn.mp3

I am gobsmacked. No further comments.

Apologies to those who have seen this already; I hadn’t caught up with my reading, and only came across this yesterday. The Economist carried a story where a group of shoppers acted as a smart mob and aggregated their intentions in order to convert purchasing power into demonstrable landed value. And the shop they targeted welcomed them with open arms, to the extent that they shut the doors to other shoppers and gave them ad-hoc goodie bags.

You can read the story here. Or Google it.