Search Results for: provisional

This is one of my more provisional posts; in it I bare my thoughts somewhat more vulnerably than I am normally wont to do, because it is about an important subject. I’ve been thinking about it for some time now, which means it is a long post. It’s rambling and woolly because it is provisional. [...]

I like thinking about things. Savouring them as I roll them around my head, tasting them, mulling over them. Ruminating. Masticating. I like thinking about things in themes. What do I mean? Let’s take an example. A recent Harvard Business Review article asked if we should Invest in the Long Tail. Apparently, research had shown [...]

There was a strange story making the rounds a few years ago: apparently someone had thought up the idea of etching images of house flies on public urinals; boys being boys and men being men, they “took aim”. And suddenly “spillage” was reduced by lots and lots. You can see the story here. When I [...]

I’m sure there are better ways to decompose social networks, but in my simple mind, there are only a small number of fundamental components: directories and address books (you need to find the person or group you’re looking for) profiles and CVs and suchlike (there has to be some way of describing the person or [...]

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 [...]

This is a very provisional post; even as I write it, I have this sense of having to tread barefoot very gingerly across a landscape strewn with broken glass. Not sure why. But sometimes that’s what blogging’s for. To expose what you’re thinking to other people so that you can learn from their comments, an [...]

I guess quite a few of you will already have read Abraham Flexner’s essay “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge“. Flexner was the founding Director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and originally wrote the essay as a memo for thr General Education Board; he later used it as the basis for an address [...]

Yup, it’s time for another Very Provisional Post. There’s something I don’t get about IT and ROI. Something fundamental. And that thing is: How can we possibly use the tools of a very old paradigm to solve the problems of a very new paradigm? I guess this is something I’ve been musing about for fifteen [...]

While reading Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside Of Down, [thanks! Kaliya] I was intrigued by his consideration of opensource in a chapter titled Catagenesis, which he defines as “the creative renewal of our technologies, institutions and societies in the aftermath of breakdown”. I quote sporadically from the chapter: Scientists have found that complex systems that are [...]

One has to be careful with the word “agile”. If you were an accountant, how would you feel if someone described you as agile? Other than in the pure physical sense, I guess. I digress. I’ve experienced a lot of pushback whenever I’ve seen agile techniques being used, perhaps even more pushback than I’ve seen [...]

Looks like a few people like NewtailBlog; as Dave points out, people have tried it before, with varying levels of success. Not everyone likes it, or maybe Sid was making some other point. That’s a prerogative that every one of us must have. Stephen’s comment, following up on Sid’s, mentions the “rehearsal” attraction of blogging. [...]

Nic Brisbourne set this particular snowball rolling along, with his comments on one of my recent posts. I’d been talking about a future where increased commoditisation led to there being only one real sustainable differentiator, the customer experience. One of the things Nic said struck a chord with me. A discordant and jangly one. [And [...]

I’ve just come back from an intriguing experiment, having watched an unfinished version of David Mackenzie’s Hallam Foe, in the company of a small and relatively random bunch of bloggers. Everybody knew someone else there, and we all knew Hugh, who, in all probability, pretty much constructed the experiment and convinced David to do it. [...]

A few days ago I wrote a post about how I found Gyorgy Faludy‘s Learn By Heart This Poem Of Mine. I’d been looking for the poem for a very long time, without knowing author, title or first line. Yet it happened. Because of the blogosphere. Now I want to be able to do something [...]

Here’s a story by Mark Frauenfelder showing how he found a set of books he was looking for via his blog. Once again it is a case of the conversational richness that a blog community represents, how natural-language amorphous requests and queries resolve themselves beautifully “given enough eyeballs”. Of course I appreciate the skill, talent [...]

I feel at ease. For once I am not confused. At least I am less confused than I was earlier. You remember the sequence of posts I wrote about opensource and gatekeepers? [Those new to the conversation can find them here, here, here, here and here, in chronological order. Alternatively you can enter "gatekeeper" into [...]

While many of us may understand the distinction between Because Of and With companies, there are still many unanswered questions as to the right business models to use for Because Of companies. As with most of opensource (and some will say it should be all of opensource, and I tend to concur), Because Of companies [...]

In a recent post titled On Control, I wrote about what happened to LIFE Magazine in 1972; in it I referred to a number of quotes from something called Dirck Halstead’s Platypus Papers. As an aside, I asked if anyone knew where I could find my favourite LIFE photograph, one that has eluded me for [...]

Dennis Howlett commented on a recent post of mine, On Control, where I was musing over Big’s relationship to Control Failure, and arguing that we needed a Better But Not That Big approach. One of the things Dennis said was “Big often means complex. So how do you propose to solve the complexity issues?” That [...]