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….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 [...]

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 [...]

[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 [...]

A couple of days ago, I was home chatting to my son. The topic of conversation moved to recent events in North Korea; we touched briefly on a cartoon depicting satirical “last words” associated with the passing of Kim Jong-Il (“I told you I was Il” …. apologies to Spike Milligan). I remarked that I’d seen [...]

I love the web, and all the things it lets me do. Take the Ricky-Tick Club in Windsor. Ever since I moved to Windsor in 1988, I’ve been hearing about the place. It started off as an R&B/folk club in a small upstairs room at the Star and Garter Inn, shown below, which appears to [...]

I happened to look at the tabs I’d got open over the past few days, stuff I was gently drifting through, stuff I intend to complete reading/experiencing later. And I realised they were sufficiently eclectic to be worth sharing, in case some of you hadn’t come across them or were interested anyway. So here goes: [...]

[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. —Former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, [...]

[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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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”. [...]

Origins of “social objects” Nearly four years ago, Jyri Engestrom introduced us to the concept of social objects, and Hugh Macleod built on that theme, and what they said really resonated with me. As a result, I’ve been writing about social objects for a while, as you can see here from three years ago here, [...]

Beginnings: congregations and stories As long as humankind has existed, humankind has congregated. And whenever humankind has congregated, humans have used the opportunity to follow their passions and dreams, to tell the world their stories, to connect with others to make their dreams reality. Sometimes those dreams went against the grain of the society they [...]

A whole generation of people grew up in the belief that using the C-word in public was just not done. So they avoided doing so. A good thing. At the same time, unrelated to the original C-word, they’ve managed to obscure and obfuscate a number of other C-words. Not a good thing. This post is [...]

There has been a lot of debate as a result of recent announcements about Goldman Sachs investing $450m in Facebook at a valuation of $50bn, and planning to raise another $1.5bn at the same valuation, apparently by attracting wealthy private investors into a special purpose vehicle at high speed. Much of the debate is about [...]

[Note: this is a follow-up to my post a few days introducing the theme of un-nationalness.] Krosno Odrzanskie, Poland. Dakar, Senegal. Greenwich, London. Uzice, Serbia. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Cardiff, Wales. Praia, Cape Verde. Edinburgh, Scotland. Derry, Northern Ireland. Blaegoevgrad, Bulgaria. Guadalajara, Mexico. These are the birthplaces of the 11 who took the field in [...]

There I was, quietly reading last week’s Economist, and I came across this article on UK telephone calling habits, drawing from MIT’s Senseable City Lab research on the subject. Its core finding? Calling habits tend to reflect cultural/political boundaries. While I’d been aware of the study, I hadn’t seen this particular representation of the data. [...]

There’s been a lot of commotion on the web about a particular video going viral a few days ago. When I heard about it, my instinct was to do nothing; after all, there was a NSFW warning emblazoned right across it. So I forgot all about it. Then an old friend of mine, Philippa Davis, [...]

My thanks to Tochis for the wonderful photograph above. A full twenty-six years after the eponymous year of Orwell’s dystopian novel, we are only just getting used to the idea of Big Brother watching us. For many of us, this sense of being watched seems to have been built around physical constructs, around the usage [...]