You should spend some time reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ reports from Europe (a harrowing pre-departure, and a first report). His writing is excellent. I felt a lot like him, in race- and class-specific ways, when I went to Paris as a student in college. But I didn’t have a way to express myself with eloquence about it.
John Gruber talks about a difference between Google and Apple’s approaches to selling hardware: Google Glass absolutely is generating buzz, but it’s not “the sort of buzz usually reserved for Apple products”. Glass has nerds excited; Apple products get the general public excited, and often annoy nerds by being iterative improvements that press the “familiar …
A friend asked my opinion about Clotaire Rapaille, whose firm Archetype Discoveries Worldwide promises to “discover the hidden cultural forces that pre-organize the way people behave toward a product, service or concept.” In particular, my friend asked to what extent would I guess this is the work of a charlatan or a guru. You can …
I started reading Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms, and I am struck in the first chapters how much I want to be on board with the revolution-as-seen-from-1980. You can read a bit more about Mindstorms here, and it figures prominently in both the Lego’s Mindstorms robotic toy, but also this amazing essay on learning to code. But …
I was just perusing my pinboard bookmarks from this past year, thought I would pass along the kinds of things that crossed the transom over 2012. I know, listcicles are a little late, and sooo December, but still. Enjoy, and I’m happy to have some conversation about some or all of these things, publicly or …
These two posts (this one and that one) arrived simultaneously in my news reader today. Ok, so if you are getting paid by Seth Godin or his publisher, or website host provider, or whomever, to provide authentic synergy, or thought leadership, or influencer powerjuice, could you at least provide a bit more differentiation. I mean, …
We have an ongoing joke in our household about products, marketing, websites, ideas, that purport to be their user’s fantasies, but are actually a brand or product manager’s fantasy. For instance, in an otherwise wonderful application that I use all the time and do in fact love, the new 1password for iPhone has a ‘demo …
I love stories about how industries/organizations/people react to big changes in their worlds, but have you ever read an article and come away with a suspicion that people don’t really know anything? I know, I know, political punditry (and any article that starts, ‘What Obama needs to do is..’). Anyhow, I somehow felt this nagging …
I think about Witold Rybczynski’s book One Good Turn (which is a history of the screwdriver and the screw) more than is healthy for a person. Discussing his possible candidates for ‘tool of the millenium,’ Rybcyynski contemplates the power saw: “Does one of my carpenter’s tools qualify as the millennium’s best? I discount power tools. …
In the Great Transformation and Trade and Market in the Early Empires, Karl Polanyi proposed a typology of exchange: reciprocal, redistributive, and market (as a clear summary among other things, you should read Barber’s “Absolutization of the Market.” It’s quite useful). Reciprocal exchange is gift exchange, and the act of exchange itself brings people into …