As usual, I love the pointers over at Many-to-Many. In particular this week, Clay Shirky pointed to this great article over at Slate by Duncan Watts on the shortcomings of centralized intelligence. Duncan Watts runs the Small World Project, which seeks to test the “six degrees of separation” hypothesis. He’s written a book about it, […]
Category: thoughts
Changing my mind
So picking up the threads of my post about harshness, I realized that one of the possible sources of people not wanting negative feedback is that people never want to admit they’re wrong. In fact, they don’t even want to admit they don’t know (thanks to my father for pointing that out). They want to […]
Instant Community and Values
In a slight departure from my rants about organizations and responsibility and harshness, I’m going to go off on a digression here for this post, one brought on by a thought I had while writing up my experience at Greg Maddux’s 300 wins. I was wondering why I cared. I mean, this multimillionaire did his […]
Different Management Structures
So I’ve been thinking a bit since my last post, about how to tie those visions of taking responsibility for oneself to management structures. What would a management structure that followed those principles look like? I don’t really have any answers yet (nobody does, I suspect), but here’s some ideas. Let’s start with what’s out […]
Taking responsibility
This post is going to be a little bit disjointed. I apologize from the start. I have several themes running through my head, and I know they all tie together, but I may not be able to express the connection coherently. But I’ve been mulling it over for a few days now, and it’s not […]
Harshness
One of the things that always surprises me is how gentle other people are around each other, and how fragile some people’s self-image is. There have been a couple occasions over the past few months where I asked for somebody’s opinion, and they prefaced their comments with “I know this is going to sound really […]
Social networks and rejection
I wanted to follow up on my recent post with more thoughts about social networks. I was thinking about the networks I’m part of, and how they interact, and realized that a component that is often missing from social software is the requirement for rejection. Nobody ever turns down a friend request in Orkut. But […]
Esther Dyson on LinkedIn
After reading danah boyd’s post about autistic social software a couple weeks ago, it was interesting to read this CNET commentary by Esther Dyson on LinkedIn, discussing several of the same issues. Since Dyson is one of the high-powered elite of the computer world, she is looking for a tool to help her manage her […]
Television ads
The American Museum of the Moving Image has put together a repository of campaign commercials, dating back to 1952. The commercials of most interest to me, of course, were the current commercials being run by Bush and Kerry. Since I live in California, which both parties are ignoring, I yet to see a single campaign […]
"Autistic Social Software" talk by danah boyd
One of the few blogs I try to keep up with is the Many-to-Many blog at Corante, because the work they’re doing involving studying community fascinates me. One of the posters there is danah boyd, who posted an interesting talk that she gave at a conference, noting that social software has many of the same […]
