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My thanks to Dominik Hofer for the wonderful photograph shown above Did you ever get the chance to read Blink? In that book,  Malcolm Gladwell said something like the following: We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction. Now this is something I’ve believed [...]

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’ [...]

If you’ve heard me speak at conferences over the last few years, then you’ve heard me say this: It took IBM 40 years to “become evil”. It took Microsoft 20. It took Google 10. It took Facebook 5. It took Twitter 2.5……. Actually nobody “became evil”. Becoming evil is not suddenly getting easier. What we’re [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

sometimes i irritate myself iii: j’adoube, originally uploaded by incidental music. For some time now, we’ve all been leaving digital mouse droppings all over the place as we wander around the web. And people have gotten good at analysing what the droppings mean. What you “touched”. When. For how long. Sometimes this information is actually [...]

Whatever gets you through the night it’s alright, it’s alright It’s your money or your life it’s alright, it’s alright Don’t need a sword to cut thru flowers oh no, oh no Whatever gets you thru your life it’s alright, it’s alright Do it wrong or do it right it’s alright, it’s alright Don’t need [...]

Note: This is a follow-up post to one I wrote a few days ago, The Facebookisation of the enterprise, given the kind of interest it generated. People seriously interested in the subject may wish to read my nine-part series on Facebook and the Enterprise from 2007. The first part remains my most-read post,  apart from [...]

Imagine an “enterprise” world where: You chose your own phone You chose your own portable computing device (which may be your phone) You chose your own desktop computing device (which may be your television) You chose the operating systems you put on these devices In other words, the IT department had “lost control of the [...]

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 [...]

Today, at a time when Facebook announced passing 200 million members, there are still people who think that social networking sites and tools are a fad, an irritation, a waste of time. It doesn’t matter what you tell them: you can mention the role of such sites and tools in the Obama campaign, in the [...]

I like reading Andrew McAfee’s blog. I’ve known him for some years now, and count him as one of my friends. Reading his blog is a bit like chewing on good chillies or drinking decent sancerre, there’s a lot of value in the aftertaste. It lingers, pleasurably, and makes you think. A few days ago [...]

From a recent McSweeney’s: Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition). Sarah Schmelling’s done a great job taking Hamlet and rewriting it as if it occurred as a series of events reported in your Facebook News Feed. Here’s an excerpt: There’s something for all of us to learn in all this. For some time now, I’ve been [...]

When I look at the digital implementations of social networks of today, they appear to have a core made up of five things: a directory or address book the ability to group people in the directory support for different modes of communication between people the ability to schedule meetings between the people a way of [...]

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 [...]

My thanks to those of you who commented, tweeted or wrote to me about my post on the customer perspective yesterday. Some of the questions raised were such that I felt a follow-up post was of value, so here goes. I’ve tried to structure it as a small number of points that clarify and simplify [...]