This is going to be a big theme for me in the near future… … the Web’s infinite niches make for richer possibilities for identity construction—it creates, as it were, a bubble in personal identity. We thereby need a platform where our social production—in this case, of our own identity—can be consumed, where the value [...]
economics
Halfway through his review of Free: The Future of a Radical Price, it became totally clear to me. I mean, I always knew it but I didn’t appreciate the full implications until now. Malcolm Gladwell is essentially an entertainer. He writes to be read and enjoyed rather than to challenge and educate. He turns ideas into [...]
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 [...]
Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness (which everyone doesn’t have to read but you definitely do need to know) blogs for nytimes.com: Money matters and today most of us have less of it, so no one will be surprised by new survey results from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index showing that Americans are smiling less and worrying [...]
Douglas Rushkoff is one of those writers I imagine my own work resembling. We have a lot of the same ideas and sentiments: fairly critical of business and marketing but not in a simple anti-capitalist way. Get Back in the Box has a fairly central place in my bibliography. His documentaries for PBS Frontline, The [...]
Thanks to Twitter I was able to catch some of an interesting conversation on Rogers 13 with LOLA organizer Andrew Francis. He suggested that the fact London Ontario is not where it should be… should be seen as an opportunity (I’m going from memory here so forgive me if my interpretation is a little skewed). [...]
I first saw Tom Brokaw talking about this historical moment as “a reset” when he was talking about the AIG bonuses on Meet the Press a month or so ago (I just happened to tune-in for the first time in ages). Then today when I saw his op-ed in the New York Times start with [...]
For the Wall Street Journal yesterday Peggy Noonan mentioned a Michigan family that, “under financial pressure, decided to give up credit cards, satellite television, high-tech toys and restaurant dining, to live on a 40-acre farm and become more self-sufficient.” The story originally ran in USA Today: The paper weirdly headlined them “economic survivalists,” which perhaps [...]
Boston’s case illustrates the difficulty you’d have establishing a new startup hub this late in the game. If you wanted to create a startup hub by reproducing the way existing ones happened, the way to do it would be to establish a first-rate research university in a place so nice that rich people wanted to live there. [...]
