Posts have been coming irregularly for the past month, and here’s an explanation. I’ve had some significant (but good) upheaval workwise and have been searching for the rhythm (and subject matter) to keep blogging. Don’t worry. I’ve been collecting ideas and continuing to read. I’ve been on the road a lot, which is conducive to reading. I’ve also been thinking about what to focus on, or whether to focus on anything at all.
Anyway… stay tuned. I’ll be back shortly.
This 10-minute TED presentation from Tom Wujec demonstrates the astrolabe (an instrument used hundreds of years ago to tell time at night) and in doing so discusses what’s lost amidst technological advances. Wujec points out that simply knowing how to tell the time at night required one to deeply understand the geography of the night sky.
I’ve encountered something similar recently. For the last couple of months, I’ve been accompanying my son to school – both on rollerblades and on bike. That brief ride (about a mile) has acquainted me with the various elevation changes on the way (completely unnoticeable to an auto driver), and obstacles of various sorts that come from the mid-Atlantic autumn. Such as fallen acorns and leaf piles spilling onto the road.
So – technology is great. And from time to time, it’s good to re-engage with the world around us, too.
Related post:
Low tech and on the ground
There are no standards for creating business email addresses, and so the formats chosen reveal a lot about the company behind them. Here’s an overview:
Corporate Titans (or wannabes): jennifer.mann@titancorporation.com. This format is serious, sober, and says, “Don’t mess with us – we have thousands of employees.” (An extreme example is Accenture’s format: Jennifer.n.mann@accenture.com.)
Friendly SMB’s: jennifer@philsflorist.com. Everyone’s on a first name basis with them.
Sole Proprietors: westshorecpa@gmail.com. The lack of your own domain name is a dead giveaway – technology is not a big part of your strategy.
Nostalgics: MANNJ72@firstnationalbank.com. The seven-character name comes from old IBM-mainframe-style user ids, which were limited in length. This format says: we loved the world before servers.
Do email address formats affect the way you view companies? Which model do you prefer?
Two interesting stories today about publicly taking others’ work without credit.
1. Best-selling author Chris Anderson acknowledged that sections of his new book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” were copied without attribution from Wikipedia. Waldo Jacquith, an observant reviewer from the Virginia Quarterly Review, discovered the identical passages. The New York Times ArtsBeat blog wrote:
[Anderson in a phone interview] said he originally wrote the sections using the material from Wikipedia in quotations, and had hoped to cite them using footnotes. But while Mr. Anderson wanted to provide a URL address in the notes, he said the publisher wanted to add a time stamp as well. Mr. Anderson objected, on the grounds that Wikipedia pages change constantly as users update them. “It felt archaic and clumsy,” he said. Such notes, he said, “would be months out of date.”
Read the Virginia Quarterly Review analysis, look at the comparisons, and see if you agree with Anderson’s explanation.
2. TED took down a video in which Chris Hughes demonstrated a technology called “augmented reality” using Flash video after many commenters protested that the demo was based on two software projects that Hughes didn’t mention (a commenter noted that “Chris conveniently forgets to mention the projects which are about 95% of the work, but does remember his own name twice”).
Here’s Hughes’ explanation of the situation.
A Shop Talk “word cloud” courtesy of the very cool application Wordle. (Hat tip to the TED blog.)
As I scan Google Analytics to see how people use this blog, I find some of the same posts being read again and again, despite being months or years old. Here are the posts with the most “legs.”
1. On Gary Hamel’s “The Future of Management.” People are interested in the book, and search for information about it, nearly every day.
2. Jellyfish. It’s the picture. Honest.
3. Top 5 Business Books of the Year. I think Shenhar and Dvir liked being on the list.
4. A brief history of wheeled luggage. For some strange reason, the topic of suitcases with wheels continues to fascinate us.
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