By David Weinberger  Edward Burman recently sent me a very interesting email in response to my article about the 50th anniversary of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. So I bought his 2003 book Shift!: The Unfolding Internet – Hype, Hope and History (hint: If you buy it from Amazon, che... May. 15, 2012 07:00 AM EDT Reads: 694 |
By David Weinberger Some wonderfully interesting stuff from Stephen Wolfram today. Here’s his Reddit IAMA. A post about what’s become of a New Kind of Science in the past ten years. And a part two, about reactions to NKS. And here’s a post from a couple of months ago that I missed that is, well, amazing. ... May. 14, 2012 10:17 PM EDT |
By David Weinberger I am the lucky fellow who got to have dinner with James Bridle last night. I am a big fan of his brilliance and humor. And of James himself, of course. I ran into him at the NEXT conference I was at in Berlin. His in fact was the only session I managed to get [...] May. 10, 2012 02:36 PM EDT |
By David Weinberger The DSM — the psychiatric tome that lists diagnosable (and thus billable) disorders — is being overhauled. Famously, in an earlier edition, homosexuality stopped being counted as a disease. I have some hopes that some illnesses of the Internet will be formally recognized: Internet Conc... May. 8, 2012 09:19 AM EDT |
By David Weinberger MetaFilter popped up a three-year-old post from Derek Sivers about how streeet addresses work in Japan. The system does a background-foreground duck-rabbit Gestalt flip on Western addressing schemes. I’d already heard about it — book-larnin’ because I’ve never been to Japan — but the p... May. 7, 2012 08:03 AM EDT Reads: 177 |
By David Weinberger NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people. Matt Oswald drew Me ... May. 4, 2012 04:26 PM EDT Reads: 346 |
By David Weinberger I’ve come in late to Ethan Zuckerman’s panel on worldwide memes. I heard the fabulous Brazilian discussion from my spot in the back of the room. Now I have seat and anasqtiesh, a Syrian blogger, is talking about the importance o memes in Syria’s repressive environment. For example, as ... May. 4, 2012 03:07 PM EDT |
By David Weinberger For me, “impacted” refers to an unpleasant dental condition, and cannot be used as a verb. So, given my grammatical self-righteousness on this point, I was chastened to read a column written by William Safire sometime in 1989-1991 (in his anthology In Love with Norma Loquendi) criticiz... May. 3, 2012 08:11 AM EDT |
By David Weinberger Carl Zimmer has a fascinating article in the NYTimes, which is worth 1/10th of your NYT allotment. (Thank you for ironically illustrating the problem with trying to maintain knowledge as a scarce resource, NYT!) Carl reports on what may be a growing phenomenon (or perhaps, as the artic... Apr. 29, 2012 01:09 PM EDT |
By David Weinberger An indie movie launching in September is holding a contest to find four songs for four scenes that need musical backing. The movie is We Made This Movie from Rob Burnett and Jon Beckerman (creators of the TV show Ed; Rob is the Late Night with David Letterman producer). Because of the ... Apr. 29, 2012 10:44 AM EDT |
By David Weinberger I’m at the DPLA Plenary meeting, heading toward the first public presentation — a status report — on the prototype DPLA platform we’ve been building at Berkman and the Library Innovation Lab. So, tons of intellectual stimulation, as well as a fair bit of stress. The platform we’ve been... Apr. 27, 2012 02:28 PM EDT |
By David Weinberger They say the way to succeed as a blogger is to use shocking headlines. Now you have mine. And it’s true. This morning at the Seattle airport, I had a very pleasant experience going through Securty, and no, I am not referring to an especially loving pat-down. Because I am a Special Pers... Apr. 25, 2012 02:00 PM EDT |
By David Weinberger (Here’s a version of the text of a submission I just made to BoingBong through their “Submitterator”) Harvard University has today put into the public domain (CC0) full bibliographic information about virtually all the 12M works in its 73 libraries. This is (I believe) the largest and ... Apr. 24, 2012 10:28 AM EDT |
By David Weinberger The Chronicle of Higher Ed asked me to write a perspective on Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions since this is the 50th year since it was published. It’s now posted. Apr. 23, 2012 10:25 AM EDT |
By David Weinberger Outer Space from Sander van den Berg on Vimeo. Apr. 22, 2012 11:24 AM EDT |
By David Weinberger A British game show that I never heard offers a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. As the host explains at the beginning, if both contestants agree to split the pot, they split it. If one chooses to split and the other to steal, the stealer gets the whole thing. If they both choose to ... Apr. 21, 2012 09:44 AM EDT |
By David Weinberger Neelie Kroes is becoming one of the open Internet’s most influential supporters. Kroes is Vice President of the European Commission and is responsible for its “digital agenda.” At the Forum d’Avignon I was at (see here and here) she was just about the only person in a positon of power ... Apr. 20, 2012 09:35 PM EDT Reads: 186 |
By David Weinberger Secret Service scandal eclipses Obama trip That’s the headline in USAToday. It’s typical of the news coverage of the Secret Service scandal before the President arrived in Colombia. Let me fix that for you: Media’s decision to focus on the Secret Service scandal eclipses Obama trip The... Apr. 16, 2012 09:41 AM EDT |
By David Weinberger On April 1, rebels overran Timbuktu, so, according to a Reuters article, librarians, scholars, and citizens in this important site of Islamic learning are hiding away thousands of irreplaceable manuscripts. “Estimates for the total number of historic documents in the city, some of them... Apr. 15, 2012 09:45 AM EDT |
By David Weinberger Valdis Krebs has posted a map of books that Amazon says people who bought 2b2k also bought, and then the web of books that are one degree away from those books. It’s interesting to parse as you try to discern what the shared interests are. And I’m surprised that Amazon hasn’t picked up... Apr. 14, 2012 03:03 PM EDT Reads: 118 |
By David Weinberger Musician and Berkman Fellow Erin McKeown has written a wonderful post expressing her ambivalence about copyright. Her heart and her brain are on the side of copyreasonableness, and thus she reacts strongly against the insane copyright totalitarianism that has come to be taken as obviou... Apr. 14, 2012 10:22 AM EDT Reads: 125 |
By David Weinberger Highlighted results from a new Pew Internet poll (taken directly from their pr email): One in five American adults does not use the internet. Senior citizens, those who prefer to take our interviews in Spanish rather than English, adults with less than a high school education, and thos... Apr. 13, 2012 11:36 AM EDT Reads: 150 |
By David Weinberger Brian Millar has a brief article in FastCompany about his company’s strategy of consulting “extreme customers” to get insight into existing products and ideas for new ones. He writes, “You can learn a lot about mobile phones by talking to a power user. You can learn even more by talkin... Apr. 13, 2012 09:12 AM EDT |
By David Weinberger My friend Nathaniel James has a kickstarter-like project going in order to fund a 90-day tour gathering stories and information about “New Giving.” (Yes, this is a self-reflective New Giving project.) He’s got five days left to reach the tipping point so that the project actually gets ... Apr. 12, 2012 04:11 PM EDT |
By David Weinberger From a New Yorker article (April 9, 2012) by Adam Gopnick on Camus: Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostely not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing…Not “Say this!” but “S... Apr. 11, 2012 08:25 AM EDT |
By David Weinberger The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — AKA “The Agency Elizabeth Warren Was Born to Lead” — has announced that its software will be open source, with rare exceptions for security, although “… we believe that, in general, hiding source code does not make the software safer”. The CFP... Apr. 10, 2012 12:35 PM EDT Reads: 291 |
By David Weinberger Apr. 6, 2012 01:25 PM EDT Reads: 311 |
By David Weinberger Forum d’Avignon is an annual get-together in France to talk about culture, by which most of the attendees (and especially President Sarkozy who came to give a speech) mean how they can squash the Internet and retain their stranglehold on culture. A little harsh? Maybe, but not entirely... Apr. 4, 2012 10:42 AM EDT Reads: 127 |
By David Weinberger Why? Does the Times have research that shows that when someone is denied access to her eleventh NYT article, she’s going to cave in and buy a subscription for $195/year? Because my informal market research — I sat myself in an airless room, asked myself some questions, and rewarded mys... Apr. 2, 2012 11:22 AM EDT |
By David Weinberger Howard Weaver’s Write Hard, Die Free is a two-fisted memoir of how The Anchorage Daily News — a newspaper he helped found and then edited — went on to win two Pulitzer prizes and defeat the established major daily, which was, according to Howard, an oil industry mouthpiece. It’s an ent... Apr. 1, 2012 01:04 PM EDT Reads: 114 |
By David Weinberger Reddit’s Timeline lets you see reddits from the past and future. This is crowd-sourced humor, and whole bunches of it are pretty damn funny. Of course, some, not so much. Many of the posts are in jokes about Reddit — e.g., in the ’30s, someone posted “Ron Paul born – Great Depression t... Apr. 1, 2012 11:18 AM EDT |
By David Weinberger Ars Technica has a post about Wikidata, a proposed new project from the folks that brought you Wikipedia. From the project’s introductory page: Many Wikipedia articles contain facts and connections to other articles that are not easily understood by a computer, like the population of a... Mar. 31, 2012 11:50 AM EDT |
By David Weinberger I’ve got a post at the Harvard Business Review site about what I’m calling (not too seriously) The Gettysburg Principles. The point is that you can keep your customers buying from you if your business is of your customers, by your customers, and for your customers. “Of” means that your... Mar. 28, 2012 02:25 PM EDT |
By David Weinberger Or maybe it’s a dictionary. Or an encyclopedia. In any case, The Mind is a Metaphor you can look up metaphors by keyword and facet the results by date, genre, nationality, gender, etc. (Note that these are facets of the speaker, not of the metaphor.) Mar. 28, 2012 08:08 AM EDT |
By David Weinberger In a paper Natasha Waterson and Mike Saunders describe how Kew Botanical Gardens in England are adopting mobile technology to help visitors become “delightfully lost.” From the abstract: In October 2010, Kew Gardens commissioned an in-depth study of visitors’ motivations and informatio... Mar. 26, 2012 09:23 AM EDT Reads: 111 |
By David Weinberger I spent too much time yesterday debugging a table in the Wikipedia markup language (on a different Wikimedia wiki). This would have come in handy: Mar. 25, 2012 10:00 AM EDT Reads: 111 |
By David Weinberger My friend Evelyn Walsh’s short story “Birthday Girl” is the Story of the Week at Narrative Magazine. It’s a carefully observed little tale of norms and ethics embodied in a sleep-deprived suburban mom’s desire to do the right thing by everyone. From my point of view, it’s about how dif... Mar. 24, 2012 10:09 AM EDT Reads: 124 |
By David Weinberger VisiCalc was the first killer app. It became the reason people bought a personal computer. You can read a paper presented in 1979 by one of its creators, Bob Frankston, in which he explains what it does and why it’s better than learning BASIC. Yes, VisiCalc’s competitor was a programmi... Mar. 23, 2012 07:02 AM EDT |
By David Weinberger In fact, Harold’s post is so long that I’m only half way through it, but I have to leave for a plane. In it he explains in some detail the history and ramifications of… well, here’s a taste from near the beginning: …Verizon graciously offered to buy out Cox’s AWS spectrum so that Cox c... Mar. 22, 2012 12:49 PM EDT |
By David Weinberger In the straight-up match between paper and Web, the Encyclopedia Britannica lost. This was as close to a sure thing as we get outside of the realm of macro physics and Meryl Streep movies. The EB couldn’t cover enough: 65,000 topics compared to the almost 4M in the English version of W... Mar. 20, 2012 10:31 AM EDT Reads: 101 |
David is the author of JOHO the blog (www.hyperorg.com/blogger). He is an independent marketing consultant and a frequent speaker at various conferences. "All I can promise is that I will be honest with you and never write something I don't believe in because someone is paying me as part of a relationship you don't know about. Put differently: All I'll hide are the irrelevancies."
