Archive for October, 2004
This is the Table of Contents that I wish Blogware would build for me automagically. I may just build the whole thing but for now this is a test: Table of Contents Sunday, October 31, 2004: The Social Customer Manifesto and an example (updated) The Technology Buyer’s Manifesto Enblogment: Kerry for President Saturday October 30, [...]
First came the Cluetrain Manifesto (the end of business as usual). And then the Hughtrain (the end of marketing as we knew it.) Then the Social Customer Manifesto (social software + angry customers = angry but social customers who talk to each other and hate your company together.) So I figure it’s time to bring [...]
Christopher Carfi from Cerado Inc., writing for the Always On Network posted an article titled The Social Customer Manifesto, which is good and is worth a read. He prefaces it with: “Social media, including blogs, wikis, and social networks, are fundamentally changing what it means to be a ‘customer.’ Customers are pissed off. And they’re [...]
I’m doing my part to join the enblogment exercise started by Larry Lessig. Everybody should link back (trackback) to their candidate of choice. The trackbacks will be analyzed against the election results to see if there is any correlation at all. Here is my vote for Kerry.
The transcript from Al-Jazeera is here. Some interesting comments. In short, OBL blames American/Israeli bombing of Lebanon for being the root cause of his revenge. Another interesting point is that he says four years have passed and the roots of the problem (Israeli/Palestinian relations) still have not changed. He makes no comment on Saudi Arabia [...]
I was going to send this to my friend Roland at Streamlinewebco, but thought that it might make for an interesting post for other readers who also use Blogware or other Blog applications. Here are a couple of suggestions for improving Blogware in the next revision: batch-tagging of categories: Quite often I will write a [...]
Here they are: The Economist: The Incompetent or the Incoherent? Lawrence Lessig: Enblogment: For KerryThe New Yorker: The Choice is Kerry John Perry Barlow: How to Overthow the Government Mark Morford: Get Out and Vote and Scream
Well, it’s a tough Senatorial race in Kentucky so they’re pulling out all the stops and playing the gay card. One of Senator Jim Bunnings supporters, State Senate president David Williams, tried to sway voters away from Senate hopeful Dan Mongiardo by deriding him as a “limp wrist”. Not to be outdone, State Senator Elizabeth [...]
My nephew Matt sent me a link to this Wired article on rat neurons being used to control a flight simulator. In essence, they have plugged the feedback and the control systems into the neurons and have found that eventually the neurons learn how to “fly” the virtual plane. Now, I have heard of using [...]
Thanks to Scott Rosenberg at Salon for the links to this amazing set of articles at the New York Times covering Bush’s catastrophic failures in Iraq on the military front as well as on the legal front. I took the three long military articles from the New York Times and converted them to a PDF [...]
We all struggled along with WordPerfect’s perfectly horrible code-based word-processing in the ^iearly^i days. Remember those evil codes? Then thankfully we got WYSIWYG editing and the world was good. In the early days of music on the computer, we had horrible interfaces that were very disconnected from the process. Now of course, we have GarageBand [...]
Andrew Zolli (again) points out a fantastic project known as the Eastgate building in Harare, Zimbabwe that was modelled on the termite mound (see biomimicry) and that resulted in 10% lower up front capital costs, lower ongoing running costs, and 20% lower rents for its inhabitants compared with the building next door built with a [...]
I love stories like this one at the Christian Science Monitor about Chris Anderson, a New Zealand scientist using crops to clean up contaminated mines. (Thanks Z+Partners for the link.) In one fell swoop, he has come up with a process to improve the environment (both by having plants around and by having the plants [...]
This is an extremely long post on Massive Change, the multi-media exhibition that is intended to be the starting point for a global discussion on the role of design in creating our world. Here is a bit from their website that gives you a sense of the goals of the project.
NOTE: Deadline is approaching on October 31st for presenting to the Angel Forum on November 22, 2004. See “Angel Forum” notes below. October 25, 2004: Investor Ready 101 Seminar From their website: Open to anyone, this seminar (not a workshop) will help emerging entrepreneurs seeking seed and expansion equity to understand the motivations and expectations [...]
Cool mapping site. You can do the following: • look up a person to see what they’re connected to • look up a company / organization to see who they’re connected to • find the connection between two companies (it will draw you a map of the connecting humans.) This is COOL. I still want [...]
“The vast majority of people are computer-generated. Some are very complicated and consume a whole Pentium by themselves. Some are so simple, you can run a few hundred on a computer.” - Bob Lucas, division Director, California’s Information Sciences Institute, talking about the game he helped port to Linux called “Urban Resolve” that is being [...]
Fred Wilson over at the A VC blog originally noted sometime back in September that Philadelphia had launched an initiative to provide wireless internet access across their entire city. Now he has written about San Francisco undertaking a similar venture. I think that this is something that Vancouver, Canada should absolutely launch. Having wireless internet [...]
I found that in some anonymous poster’s signature and couldn’t resist posting it.
CBS News has an interesting article that documents the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe and the International Federation of Robotics: QUOTE “…said that 607,000 automated domestic helpers were in use at the end of 2003, two-thirds of them purchased that year. Most of them — 570,000 — were robot lawnmowers. Sales of vacuum cleaning robots [...]
Here is some very interesting research from the National Institute for Health on the two different decision making processes being observed in the brain using functional MRI. It appears that when faced with a decision between a short-term emotional reward and longer-term logical reward, two different parts of the brain are involved. This brings to [...]
It’s not the specifics of this article that are interesting, but more the fact that I’m constantly humbled by natures complexity and intricacy, much of which is invisible to us. When researchers learn these tiny little tidbits, they always make me smile because I think there must be a googoljillion other processes just like it [...]
I thought housing prices here in Vancouver were crazy but a fellow in New York city just bought a taxi license for $360,000 USD. That would be about $470,000 CDN. That would buy a townhouse here in downtown – albeit a small one. Or at least a 1-2 bedroom condo. Of course there is no [...]
Declan McCullagh, chief political correspondent for CNET News, covers the next degree of heat in the boiling frog pot otherwise known as the American government’s plan to track every American citizen’s communications, travel, finances, relationships, and lives from cradle to grave. This time, One section of the new proposed legislation: “…anticipates storing the ‘lifetime travel [...]
Portland Indymedia (pdximc) has a long and interesting post on the ecological costs of shifting from fossil fuels to biodiesel in particular that is very interesting. In short, it states that we use 1 billion gallons of fossil fuel per day and that we only generate 1.5 billion gallons of vegetable oil per year. He [...]
I have followed John Perry Barlow’s writings for many years, starting with the formation of the EFF. He has a great blog posting called Exit Strategies about a discussion he recently had with a highly experienced mercenary with significant experience in many global conflicts. It’s worth a read. In short, the fellow in question said [...]
Wired talks about the demand outstripping supply for both diesel vehicles and hybrid vehicles in the U.S. and how that will likely lead to diesel/hybrid vehicles. The problem is that diesel is still fossil-fuel based, stinky, sooty, and toxic. VW has also publicly declared that they are reversing their stand on hybrid cars and will [...]
William Gibson is blogging again. Sort of. His blog has no ability to directly respond to comments. Also, there are no permalinks to each posting. And even the archive is listed in date order as opposed to reverse date order. In short, it is a home-built blog app that defies most current blogging conventions. However, [...]
I love Ray Kurzweil. Here is a short but interesting interview from CIO magazine where Kurzweil predicts things that will sound outlandish to most people: • outsourcing is a good thing and in the bigger picture not an issue because it’s not a zero-sum game – he gives a 200 year view of these similar [...]
Backstory for a conversation that has started: In September, 2004, I posted an article that asked, what happens to your iPod when you can put a 40GB hard drive into your phone? Does that kill the iPod? Or can Apple then finally combine an iPod into a phone by co-branding with the phone manufacturers? Then [...]
