Everyone knows that we’re living in a time of unprecedented access to information, right? Personally, I’m always a bit skeptical of these grand narratives. To see why, watch this short video showing the social networks of correspondence among 18th Century scientists: It’s great research that illustrates some important points: When we talk about ‘social networks’ […]
I first started thinking about using twitter during a very loosely organised but wildly interesting talk from Phil Long (@RadHertz) nearly two years ago now. In the course of a one hour talk that wasn’t called ‘Cool Stuff I’m Excited About’ but should have been, Phil told us about TED talks – showing us the […]
The problem with measuring innovation is that you can’t measure innovation. This makes it a difficult thing to manage. Now obviously, organisations figure out ways to measure how innovative they are – but they usually doing it by finding metrics that approximate some part of the innovation process. The fact that our metrics are all […]
Is google making us stupid? No. We keep hearing the argument that relying on technology makes us less smart somehow. Plato was probably the first person to make this argument. His target? Writing – his argument was: So, too, with written words: you might think they spoke as though they made sense, but if you […]
In a strange confluence of events, yesterday I: wrote a post about filtering and connecting when you’re a small enterprise; then Clay Shirky wrote about almost exactly the same subject in a post on algorithmic authority; then I ended up talking about the same topic with Paul Moynagh from the innovation consulting group Tough Problem. […]
Seth Godin’s post today demonstrates one of the key benefits of being a lumper instead of a splitter – you can learn by analogy. Sure, the industries change, the goods/service ratio changes, regulation changes, names change. Doesn’t matter. It’s all the same. People are people, and basic needs and wants don’t vary so much. Put […]
In a nice piece in the latest newsletter from edge.org, Annalena McAfee talks about the impacts of digital technologies on modern life (check out the whole piece – it’s quite good). Her first interesting contention is that she feels that younger people are more polite, and more engaged with adults than kids were when she […]