Search Results for: facebook

Beginnings: congregations and stories As long as humankind has existed, humankind has congregated. And whenever humankind has congregated, humans have used the opportunity to follow their passions and dreams, to tell the world their stories, to connect with others to make their dreams reality. Sometimes those dreams went against the grain of the society they [...]

A whole generation of people grew up in the belief that using the C-word in public was just not done. So they avoided doing so. A good thing. At the same time, unrelated to the original C-word, they’ve managed to obscure and obfuscate a number of other C-words. Not a good thing. This post is [...]

There has been a lot of debate as a result of recent announcements about Goldman Sachs investing $450m in Facebook at a valuation of $50bn, and planning to raise another $1.5bn at the same valuation, apparently by attracting wealthy private investors into a special purpose vehicle at high speed. Much of the debate is about [...]

[Note: this is a follow-up to my post a few days introducing the theme of un-nationalness.] Krosno Odrzanskie, Poland. Dakar, Senegal. Greenwich, London. Uzice, Serbia. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Cardiff, Wales. Praia, Cape Verde. Edinburgh, Scotland. Derry, Northern Ireland. Blaegoevgrad, Bulgaria. Guadalajara, Mexico. These are the birthplaces of the 11 who took the field in [...]

There I was, quietly reading last week’s Economist, and I came across this article on UK telephone calling habits, drawing from MIT’s Senseable City Lab research on the subject. Its core finding? Calling habits tend to reflect cultural/political boundaries. While I’d been aware of the study, I hadn’t seen this particular representation of the data. [...]

There’s been a lot of commotion on the web about a particular video going viral a few days ago. When I heard about it, my instinct was to do nothing; after all, there was a NSFW warning emblazoned right across it. So I forgot all about it. Then an old friend of mine, Philippa Davis, [...]

My thanks to Tochis for the wonderful photograph above. A full twenty-six years after the eponymous year of Orwell’s dystopian novel, we are only just getting used to the idea of Big Brother watching us. For many of us, this sense of being watched seems to have been built around physical constructs, around the usage [...]

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 [...]