Read The Craftsman by Richard Sennett — one of my favourite thinkers. This book gets right to the heart of things. From the publisher’s description: Defining craftsmanship far more broadly than “skilled manual labor,” Richard Sennett maintains that the computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen engage in a craftsman’s work. Craftsmanship [...]
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Nonfiction: What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis It’s focused on media but the message is essential for anyone who’s work or life relies on the use of information. Chances are that means you…. It could be called a “new economy” book but it isn’t about the future. It’s about the economy we have now. The [...]
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Ok I just had my first hard-core experience in Wave. Things got pretty nuts when three of us found ourselves updating at the same time. It was sort of a “breaking-in” session for all three of us and it didn’t take long to accelerate… Turns out it is not easy to read what two people [...]
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Props to TechAlliance and BIOTECanada for booking Adam Bly to speak at the launch of National Biotechnology Week. I’m very grateful to have attended; I came away rejuvenated with energy and ideas… Bly made the case we need to reorient “our collective ideology, our collective imagination,” towards science — towards “Big Science.” Some of his remarks [...]
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Mark Bauerlein complained at WSJ.com that “Gen-Y Johnny Can’t Read Nonverbal Cues.” It has something to do with all the time they spend, according to Nielson Mobile, sending and receiving an individual average of maybe 1,742 or 2,272 mobile text messages per month. And what’s supposed to be bad about that? Bauerlein’s concern is that “much of [...]
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I was going to do this Thursday night but I got sidetracked. Dan Brown at the The London Free Press took up my challenge (which was “both 100% ironic and 100% sincere at the same time”) to “take a few hours or a few months to figure out what really matters” and compose it into [...]
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The news sure spread fast. It interrupted broadcasts and seemed to consume Twitter — as much as it can be consumed by any single event. Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices reported, according to his metric, that 15% of all posts on the service mentioned Michael Jackson. By comparison, he never saw Iran or Swine Flu [...]
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I’m absolutely enthralled by this, both emotionally and intellectually. My passion is driving me to reason that we’re in the midst of one of history’s great moments. Historians a century from now will yearn to imagine what it was like to actually experience these changes (I mean the large-scale shifts). Let’s not squander this. We’ll [...]
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All of the articles on this (e.g. at TechCrunch and O’Reilly) seem to have giant, static screenshots that don’t convey the essence of Google Wave. This is something you have to see in action to appreciate. Not everyone will want to watch the 80 minute demo, but keep it in mind for a rainy day. The nut of the idea is [...]
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Richard Florida responds to my last post by referencing a 1948 essay by Anatole Broyard, “A Portrait of the Hipster,” via this article: Broyard was less enthusiastic about these supposed new rebels, and saw the attempts to escape from the restraints of society through narcotics, jazz, and general disaffiliation, as merely ways to a new conformity. [...]
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I’m glad I got more to keep the hipster topic going because it’s way more fun than anything else I blog about. Richard Florida points to a familiar article about “blipsters” — “black hipsters.” Which is funny, now that I think of it, because the original hipsters were known as [correction: I meant, later known as] “white [...]
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