Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Does My Tweet Look Fat?
As the velocity of communication approaches realtime, language compresses.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
The Eternal Conference Call
What goes around comes around, if always a little faster.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
The New York Real Times
Twitterification continues. Not only are other social networking sites, such as Facebook, scrambling to pour their members’ energy into the realtime stream, but more traditional publishers are also adopting the Twitter model to firehose their content.
Monday, March 9, 2009
The Coming of the Megacomputer
Here’s an incredible, and telling, data point. In a talk yesterday, reports the Financial Times’ Richard Waters, the head of Microsoft Research, Rick Rashid, said that about 20 percent of all the server computers being sold in the world “are now being bought by a small handful of internet companies,” including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Amazon.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Zuckerberg’s Second Law
There’s something about the crisp autumn air that brings out the philosopher in Mark Zuckerberg. At this week’s Web 2.0 Summit, the Facebook founder mused, according to Saul Hansell of the New York Times, “I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and [the] next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.”
Monday, October 27, 2008
What Tim O’Reilly Gets Wrong About the Cloud
Technology publisher and Web 2.0 impresario Tim O’Reilly wrote a thought-provoking post today about the dynamics of the nascent cloud computing business. He makes some important and valid points, but his analysis is also flawed, and the flaws of his argument are as revealing as its strengths.
Monday, June 30, 2008
I Google, Therefore I Am Losing the Ability to Think
“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” was the provocative title of a recent article in the U.S. journal The Atlantic. Its author was Nicholas Carr, a prominent blogger and one of the Internet’s more distinguished contrarians.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Google Is Giving Us Pond-Skater Minds
Here’s something I didn’t know: Friedrich Nietzsche used a typewriter. Many of those terse aphorisms and impenetrable reveries were banged out on an 1882 Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. And a friend of his at the time noticed a change in the German philosopher’s style as soon as he moved from longhand to type.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Understanding Amazon Web Services
There are two ways to look at Amazon.com: as a retailer, and as a software company that runs a retailing application. Both are accurate, and in combination they explain why Amazon, rather than a traditional computer company, has become the most successful early mover in supplying computing as a utility service. For Amazon, running a [...]
Monday, March 3, 2008
Rumor: Microsoft Set for Vast Data-Center Push
I’ve received a few more hints about the big cloud-computing initiative Microsoft may be about to announce, perhaps during the company’s Mix08 conference in Las Vegas this coming week. One of the cornerstones of the strategy, I’ve heard, will be an aggressive acceleration of the company’s investment in its data-center network. The construction program will be “totally over the top,” said a person briefed on the plan.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Social Networking Goes to War
Call it Gruntbook. As part of its long-term effort to pioneer “network-centric warfare,” the U.S. military has rolled out a social-networking system for soldiers in Iraq. Called the Tactical Ground Reporting System, or TIGR, the system was developed by DARPA, the same Defense Department agency that spearheaded the creation of the Internet 40 years ago.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Crowd Control at eBay
If over the last decade you’ve read any of the many books and articles promoting the Net as a means for forming self-regulating, super-democratic communities, you have no doubt come across glowing descriptions of eBay’s feedback system. By providing buyers and sellers with a simple means for rating one another, eBay has been able, we’ve been told, to avoid lots of rules and regulations and other top-down controls. The community, built on trust and fellow-feeling, essentially managed itself. Tom Friedman, in his book “The World Is Flat,” voiced the common opinion when he called eBay a “self-governing nation-state.” Nice story. Too bad it didn’t work out.
Friday, February 1, 2008
Looking at a See-Through World
As GPS transceivers become common accessories in cars, the benefits have been manifold. Millions of us have been relieved of the nuisance of getting lost or, even worse, the shame of having to ask a passerby for directions. But, as with all popular technologies, those dashboard maps are having some unintended consequences. In many cases, the shortest route between two points turns out to run through once-quiet neighborhoods and formerly out-of-the-way hamlets.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Cloudwar
The Internet arms race has begun. On Jan. 8, the Washington Post reports, George Bush signed a far-reaching executive order expanding the power of federal law enforcement and spy agencies to combat Internet attacks on government computer systems using both defensive and offensive measures.
Friday, January 18, 2008
A Little Too Much aaS
It started with SaaS, which was OK. Kind of sassy, in fact. At least it had symmetry. But the IT business, in its endless pursuit of the new buzzphrase, has to work every verbal angle to death. So we couldn’t stop with software-as-a-service. We had to have IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) and, thanks at least in part to yours truly, HaaS (hardware-as-a-service) and MaaS (media-as-a-service or malware-as-a-service, depending on whom you believe) and DMaaS (data-mining-as-a-service) and OSaaS (operating-system-as-a-service) and VaaS (virtualization-as-a-service) and PaaS (platform-as-a-service) and FaaS (finance-as-a-service, or frameworks-as-a-service) and AaaS (architecture-as-a-service) and … etc. (Google this stuff if you don’t believe me.)
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