a blog about information
Building Society for the 21st Century* Economic models that succeed tend to take advantage of the abundances as well as the shortages that characterise a particular economic era. Traditionally, the primary factors of production used to be land, labour and capital; much of this was in “institutional” rather than individual hands, and as a result, … Continue reading “Kernel”
Thank you everyone for your comments on my previous post on this subject. I’m working through them and learning from them. In the meantime, I’d like to extend the conversation on just one theme within the comments: Motivation. I think it’s at the heart of the nature-versus-nurture debate. Imagine going into Google and trying to … Continue reading “More about nurture versus nature”
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 … Continue reading “More on Control and Complexity and Big”
Cory Doctorow pointed me (thanks, Cory) at this recent article from the FT: A closed mind about an open world. In it, James Boyle makes some very interesting points, I can only recommend you read it. Here’s a sample quote from the article: Studying intellectual property and the internet has convinced me that we have … Continue reading “The openness aversion”
Clarence Fisher provided the kernel for this particular post, telling me about Bookmooch. And it made me think. About books and the web. [An aside. When Amazon entered the Fortune 500 whom did they replace? AT&T…..) First we had Amazon, a way of discovering and acquiring new books. For a while we also had ZShops … Continue reading “Learning from books”