confused of calcutta

I’ve written two posts about capillary conversations so far (linked for your convenience here and here), and they seem to have elicited a reasonable level of comment and question.
Three questions seem to repeat themselves:
How often should I tweet?
What should I tweet about?
When should I take the conversation offline?
These are not simple questions, and we will [...]

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Regular readers of this blog will know my views on enfranchising those that are currently disenfranchised, be it for physical, economic or social reasons. More specifically, I try and do whatever I can to push towards a goal of ubiquity of access to information, to information tools, and to connectivity. Which is why the very [...]

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I’ve been playing around with FoxyTunes, installing it in Firefox, getting the TwittyTunes extension. And it’s not just because I like music. I think what’s happening here is very powerful.
Let’s start with Twitter, it looks harmless and gormless, what possible use could it have? After all, what can you do in 140 characters? Let’s [...]

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There’s something I find truly fascinating about the way we converse. At home, when I was growing up, the house was always full of people, of different ages, speaking different languages (primarily English, Tamil and Bengali), waltzing between bilateral and multilateral conversations. At school, it was more of the same, except the ages were less [...]

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Don’t worry, I am not about to become a sudden expert on physical geography; this is about a different kind of relief map. The Sellar and Yeatman kind. I loved 1066 and All That, loved And Now All This even more. Which brings me to the point of this post.
The extended title for And [...]

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I had some fun trying to pick my 50 best albums for 1971, and it looks like some of you enjoyed it as well. As my dad used to say, “repeat medicine until patient dies” (and no, he wasn’t a doctor, it was a phrase he used when executing squeeze plays in contract bridge; I [...]

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Sometimes I think we use terms like community and social network and collaborative filtering and mashing as if they were all going out of style; we pontificate about their pros and cons and pass judgment about all kinds of things. We’re in grave danger of believing our own propaganda, believing that all the value to [...]

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Right now there’s a lot of buzz about Davos, both pro- as well as anti. Part of the anti-buzz is generated by the “artificial scarcity” of the event, its inaccessibility.  And talking about inaccessible events, that brings me on to TED.
I love TED. Even though I’ve never been. [I have actually paid out of my [...]

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I guess I’m slightly fanatical about music made in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There was so much wonderful music made during those days. So I thought I’d try constraining things differently in a pretend Desert Island DIscs selection.
I decided to choose exactly 50 albums from my collection.
Too difficult.
Still too many.
So I decided [...]

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Noticed a cartoon in today’s Wall Street Journal suggesting that with the credit crunch and the stock market slide, we weren’t going to be inundated with credit card applications in the post.
And it made me wonder. Is spam recession proof? Will it fragment? Will I continue to get Nigerian begging letters and pharmaceutical offers but [...]

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