confused of calcutta

2007 has been a good year for me. There is much I have learnt, much that I have enjoyed.
And one of the things I have enjoyed, and enjoyed tremendously at that, is discovering Randall Munroe, via my son.
If you haven’t done so already, start reading xkcd. Here’s an example:

If you have, but you didn’t know [...]

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“I am always for getting a boy forward in his learning; for that is a sure good. I would let him at first read any English book which happens to engage his attention; because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book. He’ll get better books [...]

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As the name of this blog suggests, I was born and brought up in Calcutta. I have no way of knowing for sure, but it seems reasonable for me to assume that my core thoughts about privacy were formed during the 23 years I lived there.
It’s a crowded city. A lot of middle-class people live [...]

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Last night I referred to this article in the New Yorker, and promised to revert to it today. So here goes.
The central premise is worrisome for someone like me, brought up in a culture of reading: that it’s not just my biased perception, people really are reading less. Why worrisome? Because of the implications of [...]

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Whenever I come across a new social media tool, I don’t tend to jump in just to be cool, I’m way too old for that. [Sometimes I have to wait anyway, because the thing is in private beta and for some reason private betas find it hard to cross the Atlantic, even in the 21st [...]

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And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions:
Joel, Chapter 2, verse 28 (The Bible, King James Version)

I can convince myself of anything, and often do. But [...]

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A few days ago, I saw this story about people being advised to return their library books on time in order to avoid their credit ratings being affected.

I think this is wrong. It’s like telling people not to do stupid things and stick them into Facebook in case their job prospects are affected. I [...]

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Couldn’t resist this. Tweitgeist. A word cloud formed from scraping the words off the last 250 Twitter “tweets”.  Again, something I can see as having real value in the enterprise, especially if I can have multiple clouds, each showing a different population of tweets. Thanks to Pistachio for the tip-off.

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It must be all of thirty years since I first read one of Harold Leavitt’s books, Managerial Psychology; since then, I’ve dipped into the book a number of times. But not as often as I’ve dipped into a more recent book of his, Hot Groups. Or, to use its more formal title, Hot Groups: Seeding [...]

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There have been a number of comments on my recent posts re Twitter and the Enterprise; I thought it would be worth while spending a little time answering them in some detail. First, let’s take a look at the questions:

How can a system that uses messages restricted to no more than 140 characters be useful?
What’s [...]

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