Ideas
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Open Cardspace opportunity
Just learned from Craig Burton that Microsoft has killed off Windows Cardspace. Here’s the report from Mary Jo Foley. Here’s the Twitter search. Plenty of pointage to follow there. Here are Mike Jones’ reflections on the matter. I don’t have time to get my thoughts together on this right now, but here’s my brief take… Continue reading
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Learnings from the Browser Wars
The question on Quora goes, What lessons can be learned from the first browser war between Microsoft and Netscape? I covered that war when it broke out, more than fifteen years ago. No magazine was interested in my writing then. Blogging was several years off in the future. All we had were websites, and that… Continue reading
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What if Flickr fails?
[2 February update… A new case has come up, of accidental deletion. More details here and here. The company has also updated its community guidelines. It’s still not clear why the company does not save deleted accounts. My provisional assuption is that the reason is legal rather than technical. But I’d love to hear somebody from… Continue reading
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Make Your Own Zombies
Tim Hwang, (aka Broseph Stalin, aka @TimHwang) father of ROFLCon, mother of The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences (in which I hold a chair, mostly for other people), commissioner of The U.S. Bureau of Fabulous Bitches, god of The Web Ecology Project (aka @WebEcology), former Berkman Center researcher and partner in the firm… Continue reading
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A toast to common genius
Although I appreciate being called “smart” (as Hugh MacCleod kindly does here), that adjective has always troubled me, no matter what, or to whom, it’s applied. Two reasons: 1) because I believe smartness is a far more common quality than our bell-curving institutions would have us believe; and 2) because the label too often serves… Continue reading
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What does cognitive science say about privacy and the Net?
Here’s what one dictionary says: World English Dictionary privacy (ˈpraɪvəsɪ, ˈprɪvəsɪ) — n 1. the condition of being private or withdrawn; seclusion 2. the condition of being secret; secrecy 3. philosophy the condition of being necessarily restricted to a single person Collins English Dictionary – Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition 2009 © William Collins Sons… Continue reading
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Balk Friday
Yesterday’s paper came late. Guess it was too heavy. The thing weighed about four pounds, most of which was advertising for sales today, Black Friday, the first day of the Christmas Shopping season. Buy Now and Save! Celebrate the birth of the Savior by spending big, in herds. We were at a house with TV… Continue reading
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IQ and Caste
Smart people SLEEP LATE yells the headline of this opinion piece in the Winnipeg Free Press. It begins, Sleep is a fundamental component of animal biology. New evidence confirms that, in humans, its timing reflects intelligence. People with higher IQs (intelligence quotients) tend to be more active nocturnally, going to bed later, whereas those with… Continue reading
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Bread and Circuits
I lost my Sprint data thing and my smartphone is getting dumber by the second. (In fact, I’m on my way to trade it in.) So the only way I can get online from the road right now is by stopping at a Panera Bread, which has slow but free wi-fi. The kid is with… Continue reading
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Thank what?!? for sharing
If you want to know what data you’re sharing — without (thus far) knowing about it — on Facebook, ISharedWhat.com is the way. You run it as a simulator and what’s what. It was developed by Joe Andrieu, a stalwart contributor of wisdom and code to the VRM community, and has been covered by Read… Continue reading
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Networds
Live blogging Barbara van Schewick’s talk at Maxwell Dworkin here at Harvard. (That’s the building from which Mark Zuckerberg’s movie character stumbles through the snow in his jammies. Filmed elsewhere, by the way.) All the text is what Barbara says, or as close as I can make it. My remarks are in parentheses. The talk… Continue reading
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e-commerce makes me tired
So my friend Joe tells me to check out a book called Where Good Ideas Come From. I look it up on Google and click on the top result, an Amazon one for Steven Johnson’s book by that title. That goes to an Amazon page for the book, with links and pitches to various other… Continue reading
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Food for re-thought
The summary paragraph of a great column by Tom Friedman: A dysfunctional political system is one that knows the right answers but can’t even discuss them rationally, let alone act on them, and one that devotes vastly more attention to cable TV preachers than to recommendations by its best scientists and engineers. Here’s a link… Continue reading
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I was overheard to have said…
Nice interview with Dan Levy of Sparksheet: From Part I: What opportunities does the widespread adoption of mobile smartphones present for VRM? This is the limitless sweet spot for VRM. Humans are mobile animals. We were not built only to sit at desks and type on machines, or even to drive cars. We were built to walk… Continue reading
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Would you move to Chatanooga for Internet speed?
So EPB, the Chatanooga power (and now high speed Internet) utility, is now offering Internet speeds up up to 1Gbps over fiber optic connections to homes. (A U.S. record, far as I know.) If you ignore EPB “triple play” offerings of TV and telephony alongside Internet connectivity and just go for the Internet connection, your… Continue reading
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Cookies for Kiddies
Back on July 31 I posted The Data Bubble in response to the first of The Wall Street Journal‘s landmark What They Know series of articles and Web postings on the topic of unwelcome (and, to their targets, mostly unknown) user tracking. A couple days ago I began to get concerned about how much time… Continue reading
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Sighs of the times
Several pieces worth noting. From back in February, The Smarter You Are, the Less You Click, in ReadWriteWeb. It begins, If the latest numbers from online ad network Chitika are anything to go by, then we may well be on our way to the world of Idiocracy. According to the study, which compared click through rates to… Continue reading
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Turning the Tracking Tables
The Wall Street Journal‘s @WhatTheyKnow tweet stream is still going strong, but we haven’t seen anything new in the series since Google Agonizes on Privacy as Ad World Vaults Ahead, on August 10. That was “fifth in a series” that had many more than five items in it. Dunno whassup with that, but my favorite… Continue reading
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A Cluetrain talk turns 10
Ten years ago this month, I gave the opening keynote for the International Retail Conference of the Gottlieb Duttweiler Instutut, in Lucerne, Switzerland. The venue was the amazing Culture and Congress Centre, which had opened just two years earlier. Designed by the architect Jean Nouvel and esteemed for its acoustics, it was the most flattering… Continue reading
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CRM+VRM 2010 Follow-up
It’s been a week since VRM+CRM 2010, and there have been many conversations on private channels (emails, face-to-face, phone-to-phone, face-to-faces), all “processing,” as they say. Meanwhile we also have some very interesting postings to chew on. (Note: This is cross-posted here.) First, Bill Wendell‘s RealEstateCafe wiki has a nice outline of sessions at the workshop. Better than… Continue reading