confused of calcutta

We live in interesting times.
Last week, it was reported that the Advertising Standards Authority had decreed that the word “bespoke” could now be used to describe suits that weren’t entirely handmade.
Moustache quivering in indignation, I went over to Wikipedia to see what it said about the word “bespoke”:
Bespoke is usually a British English term for [...]

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I was in conversation with an old colleague, Sean Park, a few days ago; with a little bit of luck, we’ll be able to spend a little time together next week in San Francisco, at Supernova. During the conversation, this post by Chris Skinner came up.
First, a few disclaimers.
One, I am not against cyberlibertarians. I [...]

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I’m a gregarious person: I tend to know a lot of people, and I tend to have the contact cellphone numbers for many of them. Every now and then, as a result, I get a request from Friend A, asking me for the contact numbers for Friend B. What do I do?
The first thing I [...]

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While researching aspects of the lives of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, I was reminded of the works of Richard B Gregg. While I had come across Gregg while reading Economics, I hadn’t appreciated quite how influential he’d been on King, or for that matter just how dedicated he’d been in seeking to [...]

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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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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Who you are is a function of:

what you stand for

what you belong to (both blood as well as thunder)
what you like (and what you dislike)
what you’ve done (and what you’d like to do)

Sure there are many other things. Ways to contact you. The size of [...]

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There continues to be movement in the microformats meets identity space. Doc Searls’s IT Garage recently had a piece on MicroID; comments and conversations took me to Claimid as well; so the space which I always associate with Subterranean Homesick Hardt is beginning to get busier.
As with search and with syndication, we can get as [...]

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Aqualung Ric makes the point that blogging is all about relationships, and that relationships are all about vulnerability.
Doc Searls was talking to me about a conversation he had with George Lakoff; somewhere out of that conversation, they defined blogging as rolling snowballs downhill in comparison with prior forms of multiperson live conversation which sometimes felt [...]

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Anyone who blogs must be prepared to be:

flamed or otherwise criticised
splogged or similarly left with some form of comment spam
ridiculed for actions or omissions

It goes with the territory, and I should not be surprised to face all three within a fortnight of going public. The flames have so far been incidental, largely on other sites [...]

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People have sometimes asked me why I was so interested in Cluetrain when I was meant to be working in technology in an investment bank. So I’m going to do something that people who know me well dread my doing. Let you get inside my head
It’s simple.
0. Without information there are no markets [...]

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