We now have a growing and fascinating array of tools with which to share information with others, “social” tools. Having spent some time recently thinking about why we share (posts here and here), I wanted to spend some time sharing my thoughts with you on the topic of what we share; in a few days’ [...]
By JP
– May 24, 2010
This is a follow-up post to one I wrote nearly three months ago, Musing About Sharing and Privacy. This time, I’m trying to focus on just one thing. What makes people share. Incidentally, while talking about sharing: if you’re interested in privacy I would strongly recommend you read this post by Danah Boyd and this [...]
By JP
– May 23, 2010
There was a time when people had real beards and real names and real jobs. People such as Theodatus Garlick pictured below, one of the world’s first plastic surgeons, and perhaps one of the world’s first daguerrotype photographers. [Incidentally, I am grateful to the delightfully named Increase Lapham, whose wonderful collection of cartes-de-visites and cabinet [...]
By JP
– May 14, 2010
Chichen Itza photograph courtesy JuanRojo If you’ve been following this blog for long, then you’ll probably know that I’ve been interested in a number of themes to do with information and its implications on business structures and process. You will also know that every now and then, I use the arenas of food and music [...]
By JP
– May 4, 2010
The world keeps changing. There was a time when all the conversation related to a blog post could be found in the area around the post, the blog itself. Nowadays things are somewhat more complex. Today, if I want to find out how my post is being received, I have to do a number of [...]
By JP
– April 26, 2010
My thanks to Bob Davidson (oybay on flickr) for letting me use the wonderful shot above. Those of you who know me well will also know that I have had a soft spot for the writings of John Seely Brown and John Hagel for some time now. [I've found 15 mentions of the word "Seely" [...]
By JP
– April 25, 2010
Image courtesy of Drew Douglas duly attributed here The photograph above was taken at a rugby league game in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, in September 2008. In it you can see young children and older youths watching the game from rooftops adjacent to the stadium. Tho photograph below, nearly a hundred years earlier, shows [...]
By JP
– April 5, 2010
Do you remember good old everyday comics? Not manga, nor the kind of stuff people treasure in polythene wrappers and pay a million dollars for. The stuff you touch and read and laugh at and with. At home, we were brought up on a rich diet of comics; I must have read my first comic [...]
By JP
– March 8, 2010
I love chess for a variety of reasons. The sheer breathtaking beauty of the game, as evinced here, in “Fatal Attraction”, Edward Lasker v Sir George Thomas nearly a century ago. The characters it throws up, as in Jose Raul Capablanca and Efim Bogoljubov. And the way chess teaches us about cause and effect in [...]
By JP
– February 16, 2010
Note: My thanks to Orin Zebest for all the photographs, provided via Flickr on a Creative Commons Attribution Licence. Orin, you’re Ze Best. And I’ve left all your original titles in!. Note: I had some trouble with the photographs when viewed via the permalink. I’ve reloaded each one from a different “source” and with standardised [...]
By JP
– December 31, 2009
I have the privilege of spending time with many startups, in a variety of guises: as incubator, as advisor, as investor, as chairman, as well-wisher, friend and supporter. The startups differ widely and wildly: they range in size from a handful of people to hundreds; they have annual burn rates in the thousands and in [...]
By JP
– October 11, 2009
I spent some time with the family wandering around Pompeii at the weekend. It was a wonderful experience; while I’d been there before, it was a long time ago: the technology of archaeology has moved forward apace; and I was twenty-five years older. [We'd gone to Sorrento for our honeymoon in 1984. We decided it [...]
By JP
– August 12, 2009
I woke up this morning with blepharitis in both eyes. Not sure how it happened, but there you are. A considerable inconvenience, having to reschedule everything, go to the eye hospital, queue up, get seen and diagnosed, pick up the prescription, get the medications from the pharmacy, then go home. Start applying the stuff. You [...]
By JP
– July 13, 2009
I was born into a journalistic family in the fifties. My father was a journalist, as was his father. The family business was journalism. Financial journalism. Their models of vertical integration included owning a printing press and shares in ad agencies and restaurants. Which meant that as a child, I was pretty used to hearing [...]
By JP
– July 12, 2009
A few decades ago, I read a book called AI: The Tumultous History of The Search for Artificial Intelligence, by Daniel Crevier. In it, the late and brilliant Donald Michie is quoted as saying something like this: AI is about making machines more fathomable and more under the control of human beings, not less. Conventional [...]
By JP
– June 28, 2009
There’s a common mondegreen to do with Killing Me Softly With His Song: apparently, people hear the first words as “strumming my fate with his fingers” rather than “strumming my pain with his fingers”. But the title of this post is no mondegreen: Yes, there’s now a decent guitar app for the iPhone: PocketGuitar, available [...]
By JP
– March 23, 2009
I’m one of those soppy sentimental types who had “a football in his throat” and cried when watching Love Story in the early 1970s. I’m the kind of person who enjoyed listening to Herman’s Hermits. I can remember going to the cinema to see Mrs Brown You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter with my brother in [...]
By JP
– March 8, 2009
I have some friends who talk to me exclusively through Facebook. My phone and my e-mail are displayed there for my friends. But most of the time, they talk to me through Facebook. Currently, the number of Facebook friends is somewhere in the 700s. They cover my family, my school, my university, my church, my [...]
By JP
– February 9, 2009
Been meaning to write about this site for some time, just never got around to it. Take a look at this: Just looking at the table doesn’t really do it justice, so I would urge you to visit the site. As you mouse over the chart, you get blown-up examples of each type of visualisation. [...]
By JP
– February 3, 2009
[Update: Joi has clarified what he meant, both in the comments here as well as on his blog. Do make sure you read the comments and his post. We learn through openness and transparency in our dialogues.] I’m a fan of Joi Ito. I’m a fan of Creative Commons. But I am not a fan [...]
By JP
– February 1, 2009
There’s mosquitoes on the river Fish are rising up like birds It’s been hot for seven weeks now, Too hot to even speak now, Did you hear what I just heard? The Music Never Stopped: The Grateful Dead There’s a fascinating study out in the latest First Monday, the “peer-reviewed journal on the internet”. Marko [...]
By JP
– January 11, 2009
I blame James Governor, Tim O’Reilly and Ross Mayfield for this post. James first got me thinking about the phenomenon of asymmetry in modern communications as a result of DMing me a few days ago with his Asymmetric Follow post, an absolute must-read. He then followed it up with another, looking at Dopplr rather than [...]
By JP
– December 8, 2008
[Apologies in advance. I woke up at 1am, unable to go back to sleep, with no cricket to watch, with the residue of San Francisco time still in me, and so I started writing from the hip.] I think of many things as projects; in doing so, I use what I assume to be fairly [...]
By JP
– November 22, 2008
Henry Ford is credited with saying something along the lines of “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they’d have said ‘faster horses’ “. That particular quotation gets trotted out fairly religiously every time the issue of the innovator’s dilemma comes up, helping to point out the apparent perils of listening to the customer. Henry [...]
By JP
– November 11, 2008
When I was around ten years old, my father introduced me to this poem: It was an inflection point for me. Until then, I had always thought of poets as creative people who expressed themselves in verse when caught by the muse; as artists who penned off heaps of poems in seconds flat as and [...]
By JP
– October 30, 2008
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