confused of calcutta

Do you remember LIFE magazine as it was in the 1960s? Amazing photojournalism. I was fourteen when it closed, and since it was one of my favourite reads and I was one of those fourteen-year-olds, I asked my father why.
And he said “It grew too big and too successful“. Now that’s an extreme summary of [...]

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This post was triggered in part by a story in today’s Wall Street Journal, where an apparently biased survey suggested that millions of teenagers were buying alcohol online in the US.
The phrase “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” appears to be well over a century old, so I’m not treading new ground here; I think it’s [...]

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I used to be bemused, confused, even slightly irritated, decades ago, when I read stories about broad all-encompassing patents given on things that were patently public domain for millenia. Examples are attempts to patent the curative properties of turmeric, or the name and style and quality of basmati rice. Read this and related stories if [...]

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I’m still reading Pip Coburn’s The Change Function, where, amongst other things, he tips a number of winner and loser technologies.
It must have been over twenty years ago when I read William Murray’s Tip on a Dead Crab. In those days, if you were into sporting mystery, the only choices you had were Dick Francis [...]

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My father, and his father before him, were financial journalists; and for a while so was I, until my father died suddenly in 1980.
They had an unusual approach to vertical integration as practised in those days. They wrote pretty much everything in the journal (with the help of a faithful few), edited it, printed and [...]

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Following on from a variety of posts in the blogosphere (including his own), Dennis Howlett has written a serious and considered kernel for what could be a really worthwhile discussion on Project ROIs. Please do read it and respond accordingly, Dennis makes an open invitation calling for participation.
In a strange kind of way, maybe we [...]

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Paul Cox commented on a recent post of mine, where I cited The Openness Aversion. Here’s Paul’s comment:

Its easy to belittle the owners of intelectual property in the manner that you do. I doubt your readers would agree with you if they had earned valuable intelectual property.
It would be my experience that the value [...]

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MissRogue does her usual Come-From-Left-Field bit and explains why she takes extreme positions when discussing traditional and viral marketing. Well worth a read.
At the risk of being more extreme than Tara (as if that’s possible :-) ), I don’t think there is any middle ground on this.
Marketing is now about customers co-creating product, recommending to [...]

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Cory Doctorow pointed me (thanks, Cory) at this recent article from the FT: A closed mind about an open world. In it, James Boyle makes some very interesting points, I can only recommend you read it.
Here’s a sample quote from the article:
Studying intellectual property and the internet has convinced me that we have another cognitive [...]

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Great phrase from Miss Rogue. A post that deserves analysis and comment, but the phrase is worth a post all by itself. Thanks, Tara!

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