Seems like ‘New Media Month.’ BusinessWeek has a cover feature on social media. Scientific American reports that blogging is good for you. The New York Review of Books has a good article on digital storage and communications affecting libraries, research, and books. (Good historical perspective, pointing out that “Information has never been stable.”) I liked [...]
May 2008
Found myself caught up in business/management ideas again this weekend — as I do every couple of months. This time was sparked by my stumbling onto Harvard Business Publishing blogs, a great site I wish I’d known about sooner. I remember being in that vicinity a couple of years ago, looking for HBR content online [...]
A decent grasp of economics (beyond ‘Econ101′) has always been just beyond my reach. I keep trying to approach it from different angles (through the various paradigmatic economists, like Friedman, Keynes, Smith, etc.) but I’ve never been able to get ‘into’ it. Part of my problem is a lack of mathematics (but part of that [...]
Intrigued by The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. The book’s cover features a warning label (or alternate subtitle): “Do Not Trust Anyone Under 30.” (My recent 30th birthday must have been a relief to all my advertisers and sponsors — now you can trust me.) I’m intrigued [...]
Here’s one of those essays I love because they save me the trouble of writing it myself: What Have We Learned, If Anything? in the NY Review of Books, by Tony Judt. Actually it doesn’t save me anything; a lot of points in it need to be made over and over and over again until [...]
Good article by Malcolm Gladwell about an interesting company, Intellectual Ventures, founded by a former head of research at Microsoft and some other brilliant people. In a nutshell, the company generates inventions and patents; their main innovation is the process of invention itself — trying to “engineer” the insight the leads to great inventions. It’s [...]
Started writing a scathing post about the two most popular ‘news’ stories in Canada today: the stupid timbit thing and the stupid biker chick thing. I started complaining about ‘dumbing down,’ speculating about the role of social media, making snide remarks that the role of ‘serious media,’ but then I realized that these near-meaningless stories [...]
Made a rare public sortie a few hours ago for a meetup of London bloggers, podcasters, and developers; a good opportunity to connect and soak up the conversation of people who are way ahead of me. It also gave me a good excuse to work a little harder on organizing and presenting my web presence. [...]
Really recommend this article in Scientific American by M. Mitchell Waldrop (author of Complexity, one of my favourite books), about Science 2.0 (a term I think is silly) and the “open access” approach to publishing (i.e. social/online/dynamic/wiki-style) being adopted by a new generation of scientists; see MIT’s OpenWetWare project as an example. I want to [...]
Brianfrank.ca continues to change on a weekly basis (as I learn one little thing per week about web design, such as ‘the use of colour’). I’m also not satisfied with the style of my blog posts; I still believe the longer form can work (see, for example, this great demonstration for the New York Times [...]
