Skip to content


Search Results for: Twitter

The joy of writing about things that don’t matter

….because sometimes they do matter. I’ve been fascinated by what people share, when they share it and how they share it for some time now. And for even longer, I’ve been thinking about why we share what we share. [Those of you who’re interested may want to read some of my earlier posts. Why We [...]

More on know-how and know-why versus know-what

Thanks for all your comments and tweets re my earlier post. Some of you solved the “unGoogleAble” question. Others commented on what they’d been doing with the Prime Numbers in Arithmetical Progression question. And a number of you engaged in conversation with me across a variety of platforms. It helps me think. And learn. For which [...]

Musing gently about filter bubbles and trends

Here’s what’s trending on Twitter right now: And here are the top stories on Google News: Here’s what the BBC News site has at top billing: I tried to even the field. So the twitter trends were set to “Global”, I finally overrode Google’s very irritating attempts to point me towards google.co.uk rather than google.com, [...]

Know-how and know-why versus know-what

A few days ago, I set a cricket question for my twitter followers. To be precise, I set a question for those among my followers who were interested in cricket, interested enough to try and answer the question. The question was simple: Herschelle Gibbs holds the record. Vinod Kambli was the previous holder. What is [...]

More on why I’m excited about 2012

[This is a follow-up to the post I wrote late last night; thank you very much for your comments, Likes, RTs, +1s and Shares. Active and visible feedback is a great motivator, and helps me learn to write about the right things and in the right ways]. Where was I? Oh yes. Why am I [...]

Why I’m excited about 2012

I don’t think I can remember a New Year’s Day when I’ve been more excited about the year to come. Let’s start with the political landscape. You all know about the year we’ve had, the long-standing governments that have tumbled, the despots and terrorists who are no more, the growth in measured nonviolent protest. It’s [...]

More on Facebook’s Timeline

[This post continues from where I left off in the early hours of this morning, here]. I’ve been following the work of W Brian Arthur for over three decades now, starting with his paper on “Samuelson, Population and Intergenerational Transfers” in 1978 or thereabouts, while I was reading Economics at university. During the 1980s, he [...]

Smorgasbord 4: A regular sweep through my open tabs

1. Parasitoid larvae in caterpillars affect the behaviour of moths: Found this as a result of my looking into ecosystem equilibrium. I am fascinated by how pests, parasites and plants live in fragile harmony: there is beauty in that fragility and in that harmony. I also like three-cornered hats and regulatory systems. Parasite hides in [...]

Thinking about streams of information at work

At school and at university, I was reminded by teachers not to allow the knowledge I’d accumulated to constrain unduly my thinking about the future. There was something liberating about the mere process of trying to understand that knowledge could be considered a constraint, a liberation that continued throughout my life, evinced at different times [...]

Steve Jobs

I didn’t know Steve Jobs. Like many others I’d seen Steve on stage a few times; we’ve been in the same small room once, but didn’t actually meet. Until this year, when I was at the iPad 2 launch on 2nd March: Marc Benioff had been invited, and he gave me the opportunity to go [...]

With A Little Help From My Friends

[Note: This is a follow-up to a post I wrote yesterday, which you can find here. Based on the comments, tweets and messages I've received, I felt it was worth adding this little coda. And I wanted an excuse to link to one of Joe Cocker's fabulous versions of the Beatles song.]   There are [...]

Musing gently about the enterprise and gamification

I’ve been wanting to write this post for some months now, ever since I gave a talk on gamification in the enterprise in New York sometime in June. You can see the video of the talk here. Yet I didn’t write it. Because I didn’t particularly want to add to the hype, or for that [...]

More Wond’ring Aloud

…. And it’s only the giving/that makes you/what you are Jethro Tull, Wond’ring Aloud (Ian Anderson). From the album Aqualung [Note: this is a continuation from my post a couple of days ago, linked to here. I began that post with the first line of the song, it is only fitting that I begin this [...]

Wond’ring Aloud

Wond’ring aloud/how we feel/today Jethro Tull, Wond’ring Aloud (Ian Anderson). From the album Aqualung. Photo courtesy Patryk Pigeon From late 2005 on, there was a very interesting discussion about Web 2.0 and SOA. John Hagel, Nicholas Carr, Andrew McAfee and Dion Hinchcliffe were involved, amongst others. To refresh your memory (or to make it easier [...]

Thinking about the Social Enterprise

[Disclaimer: As most of you know, I work for salesforce.com, and have been doing so since October 2010; you will also know that it is not my style to write corporate plugs on this blog, and I'm not going to start with this one. I've written it for two reasons. One, if you're interested in [...]

Thinking about curation in the enterprise

[Esther Dyson, Clay Shirky, Marc Benioff and David Weinberger, people I consider as friends, have said and written things that have influenced this post considerably; the curated conversations between Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere, as recorded in This Is Not The End Of The Book, have also been very influential. Finally, Steven Rosenbaum's excellent Curation [...]

On firehoses and filters: Part 2

Note: This is a follow-up to an earlier post on the subject, written in May this year. You may find it worth the while to read that one first. But if you don’t feel like it, no problem. This post is readable standalone. I love the very concept of publish-subscribe: if you search for the [...]

More sniffing around Twitter, Chatter and pheromones

[Note: This is my third post in a series I've been writing on this topic; the two previous posts immediately precede this one]. What I want to do here is touch on a few subjects that came up in earlier posts, where I didn’t really have the time or space to express what I meant [...]

Thinking more about Twitter, Chatter and knowledge worker pheromones

Introduction This post is a follow-up to one I wrote a few days ago; based on the twitter and mail feedback, and on the comments I’ve received via blog and facebook, it seemed worthwhile to continue discussions on this train of thought. Summary of previous post Let me first summarise where I was trying to [...]

Thinking about Twitter and Chatter: the knowledge worker’s pheromones

Introduction: Background and influences If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, then you’d have come across the name of Clay Spinuzzi. I’ve been following his work for about five years now, and had the privilege of meeting him for breakfast while vacationing in Austin in the summer of 2008. Clay introduced the term [...]

A lazy Sunday playlist

The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night And his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted. So said the Bard via the voice of Lorenzo in [...]

Please buy this book: a book review with a difference

This is a post recommending that you buy a particular book. Now I’ve written many book reviews in the past, recommended that you read many books in the past. So what’s so different about this particular book? What makes it special? Well, first off, I haven’t actually read the book. There’s a good reason for [...]

Cometh the hour

  I’ve been to Japan maybe half a dozen times over the years, so I don’t really know Japan that well; this, despite the fact that I studied Japanese economic history while reading Economics at St Xavier’s College nearly half a century ago. Yet there is much about Japan, its people, its culture, its cuisine, [...]

Social objects in the enterprise: Part 3

Prologue Given the depth and nature of conversations on this subject, I think I’d better let this one run for a while. Many of you have commented in different ways, by writing in, by talking to me, by commenting on this blog, or on Facebook or Twitter, or even by writing blog posts and pointing [...]

Thinking more about social objects in the enterprise

Note: This is a follow-up from yesterday’s post. A quick recap of what I said yesterday. Businesses are morphing from customer-product hierarchies to relationship-capability networks. This is placing intense pressure on enterprise systems bases, which have traditionally kept the Fort Knox-like “systems of record” distinct and separate from the somewhat more promiscuous “systems of engagement”. [...]