December 2010
3 tags
S.E.C. Scrutinizing Stock Trading in Facebook and... →
Looks like trading in these high-flying ‘private’ companies is going to be curtailed.
Dec 30th
4 tags
Part-Time Career?
The Netherlands has transitioned very quickly to a worl culture where many people — professionals included — work 4 day weeks. Is this likely to happen in the US and other advanced economies? Katrin Bennhold, Working (Part-Time) in the 21st Century For reasons that blend tradition and modernity, three in four working Dutch women work part time. Female-dominated sectors like health...
Dec 30th
5 notes
4 tags
Part-Time Career?
The Netherlands has transitioned very quickly to a worl culture where many people — professionals included — work 4 day weeks. Is this likely to happen in the US and other advanced economies? Katrin Bennhold, Working (Part-Time) in the 21st Century For reasons that blend tradition and modernity, three in four working Dutch women work part time. Female-dominated sectors like health...
Dec 30th
2 tags
The evanescence of Twitter debates - Felix Salmon →
Observation about Twitter’s role in the recent Wired/Greenwald fooforaw: At some point, I hope that Twitter will roll out easily navigable and searchable archives of all public Twitter streams. But for the time being, Twitter is a stubbornly evanescent medium, for all its increasing importance.
Dec 30th
2 tags
The evanescence of Twitter debates - Felix Salmon →
Observation about Twitter’s role in the recent Wired/Greenwald fooforaw: At some point, I hope that Twitter will roll out easily navigable and searchable archives of all public Twitter streams. But for the time being, Twitter is a stubbornly evanescent medium, for all its increasing importance.
Dec 30th
7 tags
He's Got A Gregarious Physiology
I have long maintained that the Dunbar Number — we supposedly can only maintain a small number of close relationships, and only remain connected to 150 people in total — isn’t a constant: it’s a variable. I have been on the look out for research that supports this premise, and something new has come to light. Lisa Feldman Barrett, working with a team at Mass General Hospital in Boston, has new...
Dec 29th
6 notes
7 tags
“It’s when West switches the conversation from infrastructure to people that he...”
– - Jonah Lehrer, A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation (via underpaidgenius)
Dec 29th
1 note
5 tags
“After buying data on more than 23,000 publicly traded companies, Bettencourt and...”
– - Jonah Lehrer, A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation Consider this idea: the most successful companies of the future will be those that operate more like cities. ‘More of a village than an army’, as I wrote in Defining Social Business: Metaphorically, a social business will...
Dec 29th
2 tags
Dec 29th
5 notes
1 tag
“All great discoveries are made by people whose feelings run ahead of their...”
–  Charles Parkhurst
Dec 29th
5 notes
3 tags
S.E.C. Scrutinizing Stock Trading in Facebook and... →
Looks like trading in these high-flying ‘private’ companies is going to be curtailed.
Dec 28th
3 tags
“Govindarajan, the Dartmouth professor, presents companies with what he calls the...”
–  David Segal, In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm
Dec 27th
1 note
2 tags
“Govindarajan, the Dartmouth professor, presents companies with what he calls the...”
–  David Segal, In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm
Dec 27th
“We’re in the abstract-expressionist era of management.”
–  Dev Patnaik,  cited by David Segal, In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm
Dec 27th
14 notes
2 tags
“In any system as complex as the economy of a developed country, the...”
–  Peter Drucker
Dec 26th
2 notes
2 tags
“What are the characteristics of the Net? First of all, the Net is a place where...”
– Franco Berardi (Bifo), Technology and Knowledge in a Universe of Indetermination, 1998
Dec 26th
12 notes
4 tags
Working Toward Life Balance
An interesting twist on the work/life balance meme caught my eye: Mitch Joel, The Myth Of Work Life Balance Don’t do it. There is no such thing as work/life balance. By even saying there is such balance, you’re making an internal agreement that work is not a part of a healthy life, and I just don’t buy it. Like you, I put a good chunk of my waking hours against the work I do....
Dec 25th
4 tags
Working Toward Life Balance
An interesting twist on the work/life balance meme caught my eye: Mitch Joel, The Myth Of Work Life Balance Don’t do it. There is no such thing as work/life balance. By even saying there is such balance, you’re making an internal agreement that work is not a part of a healthy life, and I just don’t buy it. Like you, I put a good chunk of my waking hours against the work I do....
Dec 25th
G.O.P. to Open House to Electronic Devices -... →
I hadn’t realized that it was against congressional rules to use electronic devices on the floor of the House. As usual, 10 years behind the rest of the world.
Dec 25th
3 tags
The New Who Thing - Khoi Vinh →
My biggest complaint, by far, has bothered me for some time but has taken me only until recently to put my finger on. Tumblr discourages identity. Or, to be more specific, it promotes shallow identity. Moreso than other blogging systems like WordPress or ExpressionEngine, Tumblr blogs frequently offer only scant few details about their authors. I can’t recall how many Tumblr sites I’ve visited...
Dec 24th
4 notes
3 tags
The New Who Thing - Khoi Vinh →
My biggest complaint, by far, has bothered me for some time but has taken me only until recently to put my finger on. Tumblr discourages identity. Or, to be more specific, it promotes shallow identity. Moreso than other blogging systems like WordPress or ExpressionEngine, Tumblr blogs frequently offer only scant few details about their authors. I can’t recall how many Tumblr sites I’ve visited...
Dec 24th
2 tags
Word Of The Moment: Social Loafing  →
In the social psychology of groups, social loafing is the phenomenon of people making less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a group than when they work alone. This is seen as one of the main reasons groups are sometimes less productive than the combined performance of their members working as individuals.
Dec 24th
1 note
2 tags
Word Of The Moment: Social Loafing  →
In the social psychology of groups, social loafing is the phenomenon of people making less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a group than when they work alone. This is seen as one of the main reasons groups are sometimes less productive than the combined performance of their members working as individuals.
Dec 24th
6 tags
The Many Faces of You - Claire Cain Miller →
Facebook has received its share of criticism as it prods people to make more information on the site public. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, has said Facebook reflects social norms, which are rapidly changing as people become more comfortable sharing more information with more people. But attitudes toward sharing have not necessarily changed. Instead, people are...
Dec 24th
5 notes
6 tags
The Many Faces of You - Claire Cain Miller →
Facebook has received its share of criticism as it prods people to make more information on the site public. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, has said Facebook reflects social norms, which are rapidly changing as people become more comfortable sharing more information with more people. But attitudes toward sharing have not necessarily changed. Instead, people are...
Dec 24th
2 tags
“Our premise is that first-person shooters are fundamentally strategic in nature,...”
– - Matt Seeney, as cited by Keith Stuart, Can first-person shooter skills really be taught? Like most cognitive skills, training will dramatically improve performance, based on mental plasticity: over time, more neurons are dedicated to tasks we perform frequently. Why not first-person shooter...
Dec 24th
1 note
2 tags
“Our premise is that first-person shooters are fundamentally strategic in nature,...”
– - Matt Seeney, as cited by Keith Stuart, Can first-person shooter skills really be taught? Like most cognitive skills, training will dramatically improve performance, based on mental plasticity: over time, more neurons are dedicated to tasks we perform frequently. Why not first-person shooter...
Dec 24th
2 tags
“Researchers at Columbia Business School and the University of Maryland analyzed...”
–  Hanna Rosin, The End of Men
Dec 24th
2 notes
3 tags
“A white-collar economy values raw intellectual horsepower, which men and women...”
–  Hanna Rosin,  The End of Men
Dec 24th
2 tags
Wall St. Computers Read and Trade on the News -... →
Bloomberg monitors news articles and Twitter feeds and alerts its customers if a lot of people are suddenly sending Twitter messages about, say, I.B.M. Lexalytics, a text analysis company in Amherst, Mass., that works with Thomson Reuters, says it has developed algorithms that make sense out of Twitter messages. That includes emoticons like the happy-face :) and the not-so-happy :. ...
Dec 23rd
7 notes
“Amazon made its books available on lots of devices and did really well as a...”
– - Farhad Manjoo, The year in gadgets: the iPhone, iPad, Kindle, Netflix, and OnLive (via fredericguarino)
Dec 23rd
Bed or Bits? Nearly Half of All Americans Would... →
courtenaybird: Would you happily lose your pillow before the cloud? You’re not alone. According to a new survey, nearly 50% of Americans would give up their bed before their TV and computer. (via fastcompany)
Dec 23rd
“Then there is Julian Assange, who is a pure-dye underground computer hacker....”
–  Bruce Sterling, The Blast Shack
Dec 23rd
20 notes
2 tags
bijan sabet: Your Tumblr reach is likely bigger... →
bijan: Many folks on Tumblr add Google Analytics to their page. That way they can get some useful data from Google about who is coming to your site. I do this as well. And the data is quite interesting. But it really doesn’t tell the whole story. A huge (understatement) part of the traffic &…
Dec 23rd
215 notes
1 tag
“Run like hell from anyone calling themselves a “creative.” Design is a...”
– - Mike Monteiro, Giving Better Design Feedback Anything called ‘creative’ isn’t.
Dec 23rd
4 tags
The Death Of Email: What Does Dead Mean, Exactly?
[reblogged from Enterprise 2.0 blog, originally published 16 October 2009.] There has been a great deal of discussion about email recently. I think the proximate cause is the arrival of Google Wave, which is being heralded like the coronation of royalty. (I will leave a review of Wave to another venue, since the introductory video from Google is 85 minutes.) But the rise of tools like Twitter...
Dec 21st
1 tag
Dec 21st
10 notes
2 tags
“Mr. Katz, the Rutgers professor, said texting and social networks better...”
– - Matt Richtel, E-Mail Use Falls as Young Chat and Text There is still an opportunity for hybrid private/public replacement for email that integrates with text. Gmail hasn’t cracked that nut yet.
Dec 21st
5 notes
Anonymous asked: Your excellent piece on Anonymous Cash perfectly fits the theme of my two-year blog, The Monetary Future (http://themonetaryfuture.blogspot.com). Would we have your permission to reprint with full attribution and link.

Best regards, Jon
matonis@yahoo.com
Dec 20th
Anonymous asked: Your excellent piece on Anonymous Cash perfectly fits the theme of my two-year blog, The Monetary Future (http://themonetaryfuture.blogspot.com). Would we have your permission to reprint with full attribution and link.

Best regards, Jon
matonis@yahoo.com
Dec 19th
7 tags
Anonymous Cash = Freedom
Since terrorists and drug lords take advantage of anonymity of cash, Jonathan Lipow argues for a transition from cash to smart cards or other digital solutions: Jonathan Lipow, Turn In Your Bin Ladens From a technical point of view, such an initiative is entirely feasible. The trick is to lower the cost of making transactions to the point where even the smallest payments can be executed...
Dec 18th
8 notes
1 tag
Is Yahoo Shutting Down Del.icio.us? [Update: Yes] →
As if we needed more proof that Yahoo is giving up on being a software services company, they are apparently going to shut down Delicious, Altavista, and MyBlogLog. Apparently, this wasn’t supposed to be public information: Yahoo Product Manager Blake Irving has threatened to fire whomever leaked the slide.
Dec 17th
1 note
7 tags
Why Everything Shouldn't Be A Game
Margaret Robinson, of Hide&Seek, the game designers, on why everything shouldn’t be ‘gamified’: Margaret Robinson, Can’t play, won’t play Games offer fail conditions as well as win conditions. They are able to deliver the high levels of emotional engagement they’re famed for because they’re also adept at delivering the lows of loss, humiliation and frustration. The...
Dec 17th
8 notes
Anonymous asked: Hello
My name is Barbara. I am a student of a Master of Science degree in Computer Science (http://www.m-iti.org/mei ) in the University of Madeira, PORTUGAL. I am doing a research about how a particular social web, Dopplr (www.dopplr.com ) influences the travelling choices of its users.
I am randomly selecting Dopplr users and request them to help me out by answering to my short...
Dec 15th
1 note
Anonymous asked: search your article from May 2003, "Are you ready for social software" - could not find it. Could you help me ?
Thank you, Thomas
Dec 15th
11 tags
Are You Ready For Social Software?
[Originally published in Darwin, January 2005. I am reprinting because of a request from a reader that led me to search for this piece. Thank goodness someone reprinted in its entirety, because Darwin content has been offline for several years.] Years ago, a logic professor beat it into my bony head that Sherlock Holmes had it all wrong when he consistently claimed to use deduction in solving...
Dec 15th
22 notes
Anonymous asked: search your article from May 2003, "Are you ready for social software" - could not find it. Could you help me ?
Thank you, Thomas
Dec 15th
2 tags
On The Road With Cr-48: The Chrome Notebook Is... →
Sounds horrible, especially since the Mac Book Air is so wonderful.
Dec 13th
1 note
2 tags
Internet and Income
The best predictor of Internet use is income; all other factors are irrelevant: The Better-Off Online - Pew Research Center Some 95% of Americans who live in households earning $75,000 or more a year use the internet at least occasionally, compared with 70% of those living in households earning less than $75,000. Even among those who use the internet, the well-off are more likely than those...
Dec 13th
2 notes
Anonymous asked: Hello
My name is Barbara. I am a student of a Master of Science degree in Computer Science (http://www.m-iti.org/mei ) in the University of Madeira, PORTUGAL. I am doing a research about how a particular social web, Dopplr (www.dopplr.com ) influences the travelling choices of its users.
I am randomly selecting Dopplr users and request them to help me out by answering to my short...
Dec 8th