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.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Paul Is Dead
The release next month of The Beatles™: Rock Band™ is shaping up to be the cultural event of the year, if not the millennium to date.
Monday, June 29, 2009
The Sour Wikipedian
Forget altruism. Misanthropy and egotism are the fuel of online social production. That’s the conclusion suggested by a new study of the character traits of the contributors to Wikipedia.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
For whom the Google tolls
It’s amazing that, before Google came along, any of us was able to survive beyond childhood.
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, April 13, 2009
Google in the Middle
Three truths: 1. Google is a middleman made of software. It’s a very, very large middleman made of software.
Friday, April 10, 2009
The Stream
“Controlling the stream” is not just one of the major life-challenges facing elderly gentlemen; it is the center of industrial competition on the realtime social network that we once termed “Web 2.0.”
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
A New Chapter in the Theory of Messages
One of the goals of the software coder is parsimoniousness. Because every line, even every character, of code places a demand on the computer processor, the pruning of instructions to their essence makes for faster, more efficient programs and an optimized system.
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.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
The Avatar of My Father
The Singularity–the prophesied moment when artificial intelligence leaps ahead of human intelligence, rendering man both obsolete and immortal–has been jokingly called “the rapture of the geeks.” But to Ray Kurzweil, the most famous of the Singularitarians, it’s no joke.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
A Prescription for Smart Pills
In response to the flood of prescription brain stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall on college campuses, a group of academics from Stanford, Harvard, Cambridge, Penn, and other schools say the time has come to allow such drugs to be prescribed to healthy people for “cognitive enhancement.”
Friday, December 5, 2008
The Trailer Park Is the Computer
Microsoft is about to take trailer park computing, or, as The Register has dubbed it, white trash computing, to its logical and necessary conclusion. The company’s next generation of utility data centers will take the form of–you guessed it–trailer parks: sprawling, roofless parking lots in which all the components–server clusters, power units, security systems–will be prefabricated offsite, packed into containers or other types of “modules,” trucked in, and plopped down on the ground as needed.
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.”
Thursday, November 6, 2008
The New Economics of Computing
Are we missing the point about cloud computing? That question has been rattling around in my mind for the last few days, as the chatter about the role of the cloud in business IT has intensified. The discussion to date has largely had a retrospective cast, focusing on the costs and benefits of shifting existing IT functions and operations from in-house data centers into the cloud.
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