I was IM-ing a friend of mine a few days ago, and was telling her that I wasn’t sure I wanted to remain a programmer, commenting that I wasn’t really a geek at heart. She replied “you’ll always be a geek though. you can be a pundit geek”, which got us into a brief discussion […]
Category: thoughts
Presence in IM
danah boyd just put up a post about different styles of using IM (instant messaging), contrasting those who use it in an always-on way versus those who turn it on only to talk. It’s an interesting reflection on the social cues that people lose when moving to an online world, and how it takes time […]
What makes a game successful
Just a quick comment on this New York Times article about World of Warcraft. “It’s the difference between an immersive experience and a mechanical diversion,” Mr. Metzen said. “You might spend hundreds of hours playing a game like this, and why would you keep coming back? Is it just for the next magic helmet? Is […]
Experimentation Matters, by Stefan Thomke
Amazon link I’m not sure where I originally heard about this book, but given my preference for rapid prototyping in my work, I thought it would be interesting. Thomke is a Harvard Business School professor who’s spent the last ten years studying how experimentation is integrated into and leveraged by organizations. This book is his […]
Followup to Trust, but Verify
I wanted to pursue a couple things I mentioned in my last post. I speculated that customer enthusiasm might be a sufficient factor in making decisions in my P.S. to that post. But I was thinking about it this morning and realized that there are some great counterexamples to that. Apple has a nearly cult-like […]
Trust, but Verify
After hearing me talk about how much I enjoyed Gary Klein’s Sources of Power, a friend of mine forwarded me this Harvard Business Review article, titled Don’t Trust Your Gut, by Eric Bonabeau. Bonabeau takes on the recent books promoting the use of intuition in business, calling out Gary Klein specifically, and attempts to make […]
The Internet as a Global Brain
This is a pretty minor observation, but while reading Gonzo Marketing on BART this morning, my brain cross-pollinated some of Christopher Locke’s ideas on micromarkets with the ideas of Global Brain, and realized that the World Wide Web maps very well to Howard Bloom’s conception of a Global Brain. Let’s review the elements that Bloom […]
Gonzo Marketing, by Christopher Locke
Amazon link Subtitled “Winning through Worst Practices”, this book caught my eye when poking around the clearance section of a bookstore. Plus it referred to “gonzo” marketing, and since I’m a huge fan of Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo journalism, I picked it up. Christopher Locke was one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, which […]
Attention management system
In light of my interest in social software, I’m finally opening up a new category in my blog for it, to separate it out from the people rants. Of course, this first post isn’t actually about social software, except for possibly a bit at the very end. Part of what I’m struggling with right now […]
In Search of Stupidity, by Merrill R. Chapman
Amazon link I picked this book up after reading the interesting foreword that Joel Spolsky wrote for it. Chapman’s insight was that several of the companies lauded for having a great corporate culture in the famous business book In Search of Excellence had fallen off the face of the planet within a few years. From […]
