I’ll admit to a certain vanity with Facebook: I’ve been trying to build an audience for my blog, using a Facebook page to import blog entries and inviting just about everyone who’s a friend to follow the page. Facebook very nicely provides “insights” (analytics) on interactions with the page – number of comments, ratings, [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Technology category.
Free (Technology) Agents
Had breakfast with a friend this morning who commented on the state of the economy in and around our neighborhood by saying that “there are many free agents available.” He wasn’t talking about the Yankees, Mets, Devils, Rangers, Knicks, Nets, or any other sports franchise that funnels ticket revenue into the hands of free [...]
Reshaping Services Industries
I’m participating in a technology roundtable for one of the services industries this week; it’s a closed-door session with some pretty heated discussion. The economy is definitely hurting this segment and one of the recurrent themes is that personal (low volume) customers are going to be the growth engine, not business (high volume) [...]
Wil Wheaton on Life Without DRM
Wil Weaton, known to some as Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation, has gained more publicity in the last decade as a writer giving voice to geek culture. His latest work is available as an audiobook available only directly from Wheaton’s website, not Amazon’s Audible service.
Read Wheaton’s comments [...]
Facebook and the Wrong Definition of Productivity
I’m convinced that “productivity” is a dumb word. It presumes some magic metric for how people create value in the workplace, and that metric is usually, inexorably tied to a clocking problem. Work faster, work harder, work more hours – and my favorite – waste fewer hours! I hear Tock’s admonishments ringing [...]
Newt Gingrich, Light Bulbs and Market Disruption
I was digging through old paper files this weekend and found a note I had scribbled on a hotel phone message notepad that read simply “Newt Gingrich and candles.” Truth be told, I was doing a periodic office purge and happened to find a manilla folder of clippings, notes and sketches [...]
Intractability and Incomprehensibility
I attended the (sometimes semi) annual Princeton University Computer Science department affiliates seminar this week, and got to hear a variety of short talks on topics ranging from data management in computational biology to how students infer trust in search results. Professor Andrew Appel opened the day with some statistics about the department, including a [...]
Evernote
Despite having half a dozen computing devices within reach at any time (Eric Schmidt was right in 1995 when he said “In the future your body will have 5 IP addresses; where you put them is your business”), I’m still a stickler for sticky notes, notebooks, scribbled thoughts on the back of tear-off calendar pages, [...]
Deconstructing My Cell Phone
I suffer from information sprawl in a bad way. Partly this is due to loving paper notes, partly due to the proliferation of devices in tow, partly due to just not having the incentive to consolidate and clean up. My address book is a virtual data center in miniature: a little bit of [...]
Getting the “H” Out Of Yahoo
The hullabaloo, hoopla, hearsay and hand-wringing over the Microsoft-Yahoo deal has me more than mildly amused, and not just because it would fill the H-stanza in King Crimson’s (entirely appropriate) Elephant Talk. Somehow, Google thinks that the deal will damage the internet in some way that having opaque code that colors [...]
