confused of calcutta

There were quite a few interesting comments on a recent post of mine, where I’d outlined a community participation rule-of-thumb I’d been using for a while, which I repeat here for the sake of convenience:

For every 1000 people who join a community:
920 are lurkers, passive observers
60 are watchers, active observers capable and willing to kibitz
15 [...]

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I had a strange postcolonial upbringing.
Imagine this: Calcutta, 1965. The Dalhousie Athletic Club, in the middle of the wonderful green lung that is the Maidan. (In fact I think the Dalhousie Athletic Club’s maidan branch was colloquially referred to as the Maidan Club, but I could be wrong).
I’ve just had my first tennis lesson, and, [...]

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I had the pleasure of meeting Tom Malone shortly after he’d published The Future Of Work, at Supernova 2004 (thanks to JD Lasica for the coverage), where we were both speaking. [If you're interested in what a 21st century firm will really look like, you must read Tom's book, especially in conjunction with that of [...]

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For those who remember where this conversation started, I used the term Four Pillars to describe search, publishing, conversation and fulfilment, and asserted that it was only a matter of time before enterprise software consisted of these four “pillars” and not much else. If you weren’t around at the start, reading this and this might [...]

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A few months ago, I asked for feedback as to how I could improve this blog. I got a bunch of comments back, some visible, some as e-mail to me, some verbal. They seemed to fall into four main groups:

(a) Could I include a mini-glossary of terms I regularly use, such as Because Of Rather [...]

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Max De Pree. Herman Miller.
The more I find out about the man and the company, the more I am intrigued and even enthralled.
Just take a look at their web site. There’s a little tab that says “What we do”. And when you ‘lift’ that tab, this is what it says:

We study work and living environments [...]

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Thanks to Clarence Fisher for focusing my mind on this. I think everyone should read Clarence’s recent post on Access Versus Participation; I was reading through the Jenkins paper at the same time, preparing to link and comment, but Clarence has done such a good job that I can save myself the effort.
Education is lifelong. [...]

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It must have been late last year that Sean pointed me towards an Economist review of Edward Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds; and yes, I bought it, read it, and it probably influenced my joining Second Life soon after. Not that I’ve done enough in Second Life, I guess First Life time prioritisation is hard enough as [...]

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This is from David Berlind via Doc Searls. Do you know the person who’s lost the iPod that David found?
Which reminds me. I have always wanted to change the way people “procure” software, using blogs. Why can’t I just post “Is there someone out there with something that does this?” and see what happens. Relationship [...]

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Numbing down: The art of playing with numbers in order to make things seem to be what they are not.
I guess many of you, like me, wonder “How did they do that?” when looking at something novel and unusual. It’s good to be curious.
As against this, do you ever wonder “How could they possibly know [...]

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