"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." "Like I always say, there's no 'I' in "team". There is a 'me', though, if you jumble it up." We would worry less about what others think of us if we realized how seldom they do. Wisdom - that part of knowledge that isn't only true, but also happens to be helpful. Wisdom speaks softly... Thereafter the volume increases proportionate to the level of ignorance A punctured bicycle On a hillside desolate Will nature make a man of me yet? All designed objects are propaganda for a certain way of life. Sometimes we need to stop analysing the past, stop planning the future, stop figuring out precisely how we feel, stop deciding exactly what we want, and just see what happens. We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person. "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence." --Napoleon Bonaparte The best designed clothes: invite being removed but reward being kept on. It's that you just can't take the effect and make it the cause | Last night, high-profile Google engineer Steve Yegge mistakenly posted a long rant about working at Amazon and Google’s own issues with creating platforms on Google+. Apparently, he only wanted to share it internally with everybody at Google, but mistaken shared it publicly. For the most part, Yegge’s post focusses on the horrors of working at Amazon, a company that is notorious for its political infighting. The most interesting part to me, though, is Yegge’s blunt assessment of what he perceives to be Google’s inability to understand platforms and how this could endanger the company in the long run. Google Engineer: [ continue reading Google Engineer: “Google+ is a Prime Example of Our Complete Failure to Understand Platforms” ] Our Society is: a place to be inspired by possibilities and celebrate achievements a place to share your struggles and engage in honest, open discussion a support network where you can ask for advice, offer help, promote your activities a learning exchange where you tell your story, hear others’ experiences, and find resources Our Society aims to connect people who are genuinely concerned to move power into communities and [ continue reading Our Society ] All of which brings me back to Egypt as the canary in a very large coal mine. It’s hard to overstate just how unexpected a transformation is occurring in Egypt. Death, taxes, and Hosni Mubarak — they were the three great certainties in modern Egyptian life. But just underneath the surface, the tectonic pressure of dumb growth was steadily mounting. Bogus prosperity’s like magma, filling the volcanic chamber of a society: you can bottle it up for only so long before it erupts, and spectacularly. Today, the world’s gaze is fixed on the pyroclastic flow: never-ending demonstrations, protests, people [ continue reading Egypt’s Revolution: Coming to an Economy Near You ] With Tumblr recently experiencing a 24-hour offline stint and a reported single 9 of service reliability, there are plenty of jokes about the microblogging service’s infamous downtime (most I’ve heard have at least a tenuous WikiLeaks connection). Here’s the most Tumblr elaborate satire piece yet: Go to http://wellbebackshortly.com/ and hit refresh. Hit refresh again, and again. Created by Adam Hemphill, the site is a riff on the Tumblr “We’ll Be Back Shortly” page and generates over a hundred hypothetical excuses as to why Tumblr is down so Tumblr doesn’t have to. (Tumblr is currently UP, at the moment.) [ continue reading “Squirrels” And 100 Other Reasons Why Tumblr Is Down ] “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!! #IAmSpartacus #twitterjoketrial “ Social networks, those loose, busy and self-absorbing communities of Facebookers and Twitterers, have always invited analogies from the insect world. If we are to accept the most common of them, then in the past week, Malcolm Gladwell, provocateur-in-chief at the New Yorker magazine, has poked a sharp stick into the online ants’ nest. The twitterers have responded to his provocation by swarming on to blogs and websites to protect their uniting belief: that the future belongs to them. Gladwell is a spirited contrarian. His argument in the New Yorker was an attack on the prevalent idea that online [ continue reading Twitter and Facebook cannot change the real world, says Malcolm Gladwell ] Remember three years ago, when Microsoft paid a quarter-billion dollars for 1.6% of Facebook and the exclusive right to run banner ads across Facebook.com? Tell the truth, how many of you thought that was a killer business decision? I can’t say I did at the time. But as that deal is about to expire in 2011, Facebook’s status as a revenue juggernaut is rarely questioned any more. In fact, I have been mulling over data from both companies, and I’m ready to declare in public my belief that Facebook will be bigger in five years than Google is right [ continue reading How Facebook Can Become Bigger In Five Years Than Google Is Today ] (CLICK HERE FOR MORE »» Anthony McNeill MANL Twitter Dissertation: .) Goodness knows where all this is leading to. The mapping revolution is barely six years old. What will be on offer 10 years hence? Maybe it will be live satellite imaging, so you can see when a car leaves a parking space in the next road, or try to track down Osama bin Laden from your mobile phone. The prospect of anyone in the world being able to make their own contribution to a map – thanks to free access to satellite positioning techniques – is awesome, but so is the downside. Some of the fears emerged at a [ continue reading We no longer go to maps, they come to us ] Further examination of Apple’s new social network reveals more problems. To review from last night’s post: 1. It’s awkward, at least, that it runs in iTunes and not a web browser. There’s no Back button, no way to copy the address of a page and share it outside of iTunes. Also if it were just a website we’d be able to access it from an iPad now, not some time in the future. 2. There’s no way to Like the song you’re listening to. In other words there doesn’t seem to be any integration with the [ continue reading Scripting News: Ping: It’s even worse than it appeared ] I made a graphic that shows how I think information moves through our society today. At the top is the discovery, on its way to becoming common knowledge at the bottom it has to move through several phases. Each phase is an ecological niche that is occupied by a different species. Each creature on the list feeds off of information and uses it for energy to do work. Without information it dies. Take any topic and you can trace its path through the information ecosystem. Global Climate Change, Health Care, Peak Oil, Asbestos concerns, Water on the moon, etc… [ continue reading How information moves in today’s society ] Well this is rich isn’t it? “If the app stops you having one ‘bad’ accident” – what is the sliding-scale and what would be accidental!! SHAME ON YOU TUAW – AND APPLE© FOR ALLOWING IT ON iTunes. Is Text’nDrive Pro worth $19.99? If you avoid even one traffic citation for “texting while driving,” you’d probably come out ahead. If the app keeps you from having a bad accident while you’re distracted by your iPhone, then it’s worth every penny you pay for it, and more. (CLICK HERE FOR MORE »» TUAW review: Email while driving with Text’nDrive Pro [ continue reading be an ARSE and email while driving with Text’nDrive Pro for iPhone (!!! you what?) ] Young people may have one day have to change their names in order to escape their previous online activity, Google boss Eric Schmidt has warned. Mr Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal he feared they did not understand the consequences of having so much personal information about them online. BBC News [ continue reading Google boss Eric Schmidt warns on social use of media ] To move from doing social to being social, an organization must ask itself ‘who drives social bus?’ If the marketing group is just “out there” tweeting away, joining LinkedIN groups and setting up Facebook fan pages without a plan to build a deeper understanding of customer needs, or if the data generated by online social relationships are not being traced throughout the organization’s core operations, then chances are the company is just “doing” social. (CLICK HERE FOR MORE »» The Difference Between Doing Social Vs. Being Social | Social Media Today: .) [ continue reading the difference between doing social vs. being social ] People are boasting on Google’s behalf of their prowess in being able to catch Apple in market share. It is impressive, but not as much as you might think. Apple has never tried to lock-out their competitors, they’ve never designed their product strategies for market share. Jobs said that in a recent interview (I think it was at the D conference). Google has been able to do to Apple in mobile devices what Microsoft did to Apple in PCs, because Apple would rather control their share of the market and have a single target defined by both hardware and software [ continue reading Google vs iPhone and Facebook ] This bus stop advertisement was put up in Hamburg, Germany, and what makes it interesting is the fact that it’s an interactive poster which uses eye tracking camera. When no one looks directly at the poster, it displays a typical scene of domestic issue. And when a passer-by looks at the poster directly, the ‘eye tracking’ camera registers the people looking directly at the poster and the image changes into a photo of the same couple pretending to be happy. [ continue reading The First Poster That Responds To People Looking At It. ] It’s the coolest social networking tool in the world. But is the geo-location app Foursquare a stalker’s dream? Just how easy it is to uncover the intimate details of a complete stranger’s life? But with such power comes responsibility and there are growing concerns that Foursquare is proving to be a “stalker’s dream”. Sure, you might earn yourself a “free” decaf latte when you check in five times at a coffee shop, but at what price to your privacy? Last month, a coding expert called Jesper Andersenmanaged to capture the details of 875,000 check-ins in San Francisco– currently, the [ continue reading How I became a Foursquare cyberstalker ] Is your Council on Twitter? Last time I checked, in March last year, your council probably wasn’t. And now it probably is. A total of twenty London boroughs have taken the plunge and are attempting to interact online with their residents, with varying degrees of success. Some are merely promoting council services, consultations or events. Some tediously regurgitate press releases and chop them off after the first 140 characters. Most only broadcast, while others occasionally respond. And a few are occasionally interesting, or useful, or even both. Here’s a clickable summary of how those 20 councils are doing, [ continue reading Twitterburra ] One year ago, in July 2009, Tumblr was going strong. They had 255 million pageviews that month. By November of last year, that was up to 420 million pageviews. But some new stats which Tumblr is releasing today show an explosion in growth since then. Tumblr is now at 1.5 billion pageviews a month — their Quantcast data confirms this. For the first time, Tumblr is now a top 50 site in the U.S. in terms of traffic as gauged by Quantcast. And only half of Tumblr’s 6.25 million users are in the U.S. Those users are now posting [ continue reading Tumblr Is on fire. now over 6 million users ] Popular stream reader TweetDeck turned two on July 4th, and founder Iain Dodsworth just put up a post giving an update on the company’s progress. Tweetdeck now employs 15 people and recently raised more than $3 million in a series B round, led by betaworks. The company’s product started out as a Twitter client, but now supports multiple streams, including Facebook, Foursquare, Google Buzz, LinkedIn, and Myspace. (CLICK HERE FOR MORE »» TechCrunch TweetDeck Turns Two, Desktop App Passes 15 Million Downloads: .) [ continue reading TweetDeck Turns Two, Desktop App Passes 15 Million Downloads ] The German Data Protection Authority in Hamburg has launched legal action against Facebook, following complaints from people “who had not signed up to Facebook, but whose details had been added to the site by friends.” Facebook is accused of storing the private data of non-members without their permission, to be used for marketing purposes. (CLICK HERE FOR MORE »» Boing Boing Germany goes after Facebook over claimed privacy violations: .) [ continue reading Germany goes after Facebook over claimed privacy violations ] I’d love to see a coastal library set up a permanent book exchange like this. Has it been done? [pic from baddogwhiskas] (CLICK HERE FOR MORE »» Walking Paper Beach IKEA Ad Evokes Library Vibe: .) Every day, thousands of stories are passed around the internet on blogs and via Twitter. A new study by Journalism.org has examined the source of those stories. It turns out, most of them come from old-school media. We may like to share information via Twitter, but the information we share comes from the morning’s newspaper. This is a look at where blogs and Twitter users are getting their stories, and what kind of stories their users are most likely to link to. Source: Journalism.org A collaboration between GOOD and Part & Parcel. (CLICK HERE FOR [ continue reading Transparency: Where the Stuff on the Internet Comes From ] I have found in my brief forty-two years on the planet that everyone has a different spectrum of friendship. Some people I barely know appear to consider me a friend, and that’s typically charming (if perhaps misguided). Other people I have known for many years are still rather formal with me, despite dozens to hundreds of contacts. Pondering Friendship Online: Focus on Intimacy ] | Shirdi Sai Baba: "Before you speak, ask yourself: Is it kind, is it true, is it necessary, does it improve upon the silence?" Well known fact that any kiss where one or other party is in control of heavy machinery doesn't count for quality assessment purposes. There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action. The honest heart that's free frae a' intended fraud or guile. However fortune kick the ba', Has ay some cause to smile. Life consists in replacing one worry with another, and one desire with the next, what the Buddhists call ‘grasping’ or upādāna in Sanskrit "Every saint has a past. Every sinner has a future." "Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die." A wrong decision isn't forever; it can be reversed. The losses from a delayed decision are forever; they can never be retrieved. heavy words thrown lightly And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. Whenever you commend, add your reasons for doing so; it is this which distinguishes the approbation of a man of sense from the flattery of sycophants and admiration of fools “The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.” |