confused of calcutta

A few days ago I read a report about the dangers of making one’s date of birth public on the web. “After all, unscrupulous people can make use of that data and commit some sort of electronic theft.”
And I thought to myself, what utter tosh. That’s about as meaningful as saying “Most car accidents take [...]

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Over the last seven years or so I’ve read the Cluetrain Manifesto maybe five times, cover to cover. By that you could probably figure out that I like the book. A bit.
During that time, it’s been my privilege to get to know three of the four authors pretty well, and to count them as my [...]

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Over the last couple of days I’ve been reading quite a lot about the role of social networks as a key influence in voting patterns. Not surprisingly, people have begun to work out that recommendations and collaborative filters mean something for the ballot box as well.
It is in this context that I began to think [...]

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So said Alan Kay, satirising something he said maybe three decades ago. (While at Xerox PARC he is remembered as saying “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”) He was speaking at CIO 08: The Year Ahead, a conference I was at last week at the Hotel Del Coronado in San [...]

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I love food. I was brought up in a home where we really enjoyed eating, aided and abetted by our having fairly good metabolisms. I learnt to cook at an early age: early dishes were concentrated around potatoes, chillies, eggs and onions, all of which i still love. Over the years I’ve learnt to experiment [...]

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I’ve maintained for years that the core of my understanding of opensource came not from Richard Stallman or Eric Raymond but Jerry Garcia, that my understanding of open markets and democratised innovation came not from Yochai Benkler or Eric von Hippel but Jerry Garcia and his cronies. It goes beyond pure opensource, I think my [...]

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Would you believe this? I find it fascinating. Particularly when you consider that we only hear of successful experiments, that there must have been a deluge of failures before this. “So what did you do at work today, Daddy?” “I tried to make a bridge out of water, between two beakers, by shocking the water [...]

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I’m really enjoying reading quite an unusual book right now: Maynard & Jennica, written by Rudolph Delson. I’d never heard of the book or the author before; I’d stumbled across it while looking for Mark Andrejevic’s iSpy while shopping at the MIT Coop bookstore earlier this week. And the reason why I went looking for [...]

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I’ve been very taken with what the people at School of Everything are doing, so much so I had to meet the people behind it; we had dinner together some weeks ago, and I’m convinced they’re really on to something. More on this later, or as they say Watch This Space.
How did I come across [...]

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