Well, I had a demo of Facebook, and it’s a very nice web application. [Previously: Attention Metastream. Today: Fred Wilson on the changes (good comments thread).] (I have removed names from this screenshot.) It’s hard to get a sense of it from the picture, but I can tell that if I were a college student […]
September 7, 2006
Symbolic Interaction
Last night a friend called via cell phone from Michigan between sets at a concert. Cell phones suck. The microphones pick up a lot of background noise, there are frequently echos on one side or the other, there are subtle time delays that make it hard to tell when someone has stopped speaking, and the […]
September 6, 2006
Commodity Fetishism
Thanks to Tom Matrullo I am now aware of the term commodity fetishism: In Marxist theory, commodity fetishism is a state of social relations, said to arise in complex capitalist market systems, in which social relationships are defined by the values that are placed on commodities. The term is introduced in the opening chapter of […]
September 5, 2006
Attention Metastream
I don’t yet have access to Facebook, but this TechCrunch review notes the key element in successful web applications: Facebook clearly gets the idea of an attention metastream, where page views aren’t the currency that matters but rather how effectively the service allows users to communicate. Facebook users will now have a much easier way […]
September 5, 2006
WoW Update
In June 2005, I wrote about World of Warcraft (WoW): Conservatively, there was a one-time revenue stream of just under $100 million dollars, and an on-going monthly revenue of just under $26 million (just under $312 million annually). They are opening the game up in China soon, where there are 500,000 players in the open […]
August 31, 2006
Olbermann on Rumsfeld
Every once in a while, it’s worth noting that the majority of people continue to disagree with the Bush/Cheney administration and their approach to the so-called War on Terror, even if we don’t talk about it much. Thank you, Keith Olbermann, for this searing critique. Transcript and video via the link.
August 25, 2006
Democratic Strategy
The smartest thing the US Democrats could do for the next two years is split the Republican Party down the middle between the church-focused social conservatives and the less-government economic conservatives. Karl Rove (has his middle name always been “Christian?”) and Grover Norquist have been masterful at holding these two unrelated groups together in one […]
August 24, 2006
TMI: Kundalini
Sanatan Society: Kundalini Yoga: The roused Kundalini energy moves upwards in the central nadi, the Sushumna, passing through each of the lower chakras to reach the seventh, the Sahasrara Chakra. This process is known in Kundalini Yoga as the piercing of the chakras and represents the merging of the female with the male. Kundalaini Teacher: […]
August 23, 2006
Is Fear Always a Negative?
Kat asked, in a comment, “Is fear always a negative thing?” I briefly reflected, and here’s where I am now: I think of fear as a continuum between “an alert edge” and “paralyzed with fear.” What we generalize as “fear” starts at alertness, because at that point you can no longer be fully “open”—you are […]
August 22, 2006
Is Psychoanalysis Elitist?
Was digging around the unblogged writing archives, and found this half-formed thought from July 22, 2003. A comment has been raised that psychoanalysis is the most narcissistic and elitist of pursuits. I’m beginning to wonder if “elitist” is like “affirmative action” – defined on the fly to suit and argument or perspective. Sure, rich people […]
August 4, 2006
Creating and Destroying Mutual Understanding
Daniel O’Connor has a brilliant post over at Catalaxis called The Political Economics of Stephen Colbert. In simplest terms, when we communicate we tend to at least implicitly, if not explicitly, raise a set of three distinct validity claims regarding what is true, what is right, and what is sincere. When either one of us […]
August 2, 2006
The Stages of Giving
A very nice summary over at GiftHub of the stages of giving The stages are given in the businesslike language of money and accounting, but they seem to also articulate a kind of personal journey to self-mastery, wisdom and serenity. Phil is a philanthropy advisor for a major financial services company, and a great guy […]
August 1, 2006
A Cooperative Solution
An excellent 3,300 word article in Strategy + Business on the cooperative advantage. A very good read. Cooperatives are often assumed to be merely local affiliations of small and midsized companies, and therefore limited in scope and reach. But their deep roots in their countries of origin — as well as their surprising pervasiveness and […]
July 25, 2006
It’s Not That Men Are Dumber
Sassy Pants is in fine form this morning: It’s not that men are dumber, they just choose to use their brain less if there is a female around. There are two reasons for this. The first is that their brain tends to be a little lower in their body when a woman is around. Second, […]
July 24, 2006
On Sweeping
On my lunchtime errand walk the phrase, “Swept me off my feet” popped into mind. I decided that it’s a lot easier to sweep someone off their feet once you know them—who they are, what they like, how they’re motivated. Via amplification and inversion, the feeling of being swept off your feet prior to really […]
July 17, 2006
E-Prime
From The Sourcebook of Magic, pg 351ff: Alfred Korzybski (1933/1994) warned that the “is” of identity and the “is” of predication present two dangerous linguistic and semantic constructions that map false-to-fact conclusions. The first has to do with identity—how we identify a thing or what we identify with. The second has to do with attribution—how […]
July 13, 2006
AI@50
Meg Houston Maker is doing some fantastic live blogging of the Dartmouth AI@50 conference. This gathering celebrates, explores, and, to an extent, reprises the original Dartmouth Summer Research Project in artificial intelligence of 1956, which proceeded “on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in […]
July 11, 2006
Examples of Categories
Art: Leonard Cohen and Sonny Rollins on live TV. (Thanks Jon.) Commerce: Do Patents Encourage or Stifle Innovation? Culture: On media elitism and the “derivative” myth Technology: On playing with my Holux GPS unit… Cool: Velcro Being Pulled Apart
July 9, 2006
We Must Disenthrall Ourselves
There’s a good interview with Al Gore in the July 13 issue of Rolling Stone. Some quotes: I believe there is a hunger in the country to be part of a larger vision that changes the way we relate to the environment and the economy. Right now we are borrowing huge amounts of money from […]