confused of calcutta

For years I’ve been watching the way people aggregate and summarise what they do, and how they make such aggregations available to others. In the old days we used to call these chronological aggregations diaries, and we’ve had many famous diarists over the centuries.
Some part of me is deeply enmeshed in an oral tradition: as [...]

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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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That’s the subject of a very powerful set of essays published recently in the Edge World Question Center. I haven’t read all of them yet; I was working through them sequentially when I received an e-mail from Pat Kane of ThePlayEthic, pointing me at the answer given by Kevin Kelly. [Thanks, Pat, and I look [...]

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This post is about Twitter, and yet it’s not. I’m trying to deal with a bigger issue.
First, do take a look at these two posts: Phillie Casablanca’s Ten Commandments and Paul Downey’s Twit or Twerp? Both are excellent; I have the privilege of working with both these guys, and I’m delighted that we have people [...]

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I knew it, someone to come up with a way of making sure that people want their posts to be Flamed!
A couple of days ago, Dave Sifry wrote about a new feature in Technorati called WTF, which stood for Where’s The Fire?

I guess it means many things to many people, but to me it seems [...]

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Have you ever seen Adelson’s Illusion?
The squares marked A and B are the same shade of grey.
I won’t spoil it for you by giving you the proof here. Instead, why don’t you go visit the original site and see for yourself? There are a number of really worthwhile illusions there. I first saw it maybe [...]

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Found these in a completely different context (a discussion group about Prediction Markets); thought that they were wonderful descriptions of the “provisionality” of blogs. See what you think.
Richard Feynman:
In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty [...]

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It’s been an eventful year for me, what with changing jobs in March, changing firms in October, nearly moving house and then not, and finally having a heart attack a few weeks ago.
It’s been an eventful year for me, what with starting this blog in late February, and really feeling part of a small but [...]

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Clustrmaps tells me that I had my 100,000th unique visitor yesterday.
It means very little right now, as an industry we have much to sort out in this respect.
The move away from page impressions to unique users. The period over which that uniqueness is defined. The role of different browsers and aggregators. The impact of [...]

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