April 2011
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IIW: Investors Invitational Workshop
We’re doing something different at next week’s IIW: inviting investors. So here’s a pitch that should resonate with investors — especially in Silicon Valley, where IIW happens (appropriately, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View)… Here’s a chance to check in on development work on a huge new disruptive market play: empowering customers as… Continue reading
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Overlooking Detroit
Got my first good clear look at Detroit and Windsor from altitude on a recent trip back from somewhere. Here’s a series of shots. What impressed me most, amidst all that flat snow-dusted spread of city streets, a patch of grids on the flatland of Michigan and Ontario, flanking the Detroit River and its islands, was… Continue reading
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Royal pains
The Royal Wedding isn’t my cup of tedium, but olde blog buddies Eric and Dawn Olsen will be covering the show for The Morton Report, so I urge you to follow it there. I’ll do my best as well. Not speaking of which, I am old enough to remember the last Royal Wedding, which happened… Continue reading
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Making the basket (ball) case
As a (literally) old basketball player, I have always hated dealing with net-less hoops. Full satisfaction for a shot well made requires a net. But nets do wear out. Schools and cities fail to replace them. So I sometimes take matters into my own hands, and replace nets personally. This is also what Maria Molteni does, but… Continue reading
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Let’s move tweeting off Twitter
Blogging, emailing and messaging aren’t owned by anybody. Tweeting is owned by Twitter. That’s a problem. In all fairness, this probably wasn’t the plan when Twitter’s founders started the service. But that’s where they (and we) are now. Twitter has become de facto infrastructure, and that’s bad, because Twitter is failing. Getting 20,500,000 Google Image… Continue reading
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Overlooking Chicago
I know Chicago well — from the air. I’ve flown in and out of O’Hare countless times, always enjoying the view from my window seat. I’ve also flown over Chicago a lot, en routes from cities east and west. And I’ve shot a lot of pictures, which I usually used to put up on Flickr;… Continue reading
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Twitter failings
The first time I went to Twitter this morning, I got this: Before that, the computer had been asleep all night. I still haven’t tweeted anything this morning. There must be some meaning behind the message, but the message itself says nothing useful. When I’ve seen this before, I thought perhaps Twitter in my browser… Continue reading
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World Wide Catacombs
What started as plain old Web search has now been marginalized as “organic”. That’s because the plain old Web — the one Tim Berners-Lee created as a way to hyperlink documents — has become commercialized to such an extent that the about the only “organic” result reliably rising to first-page status is Wikipedia. Let’s say… Continue reading
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Dorothy Parker quote question
So I’d like to find authoritative sources for two Dorothy Parker quotes. Here’s the first: “I prefer the company of younger men. Their stories are shorter.” No idea where I got that one. It’s too right not to be real, but I can’t a source yet. (That’s a job I’m giving ya’ll.) The second quote… Continue reading
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World wide puddle
Nicholas Carr is ahead of his time again. The Big Switch nailed computing as a utility, long before “the cloud” came to mean pretty much the same thing. His latest book, The Shallows, explored the changes in our lives and minds caused by moving too much of both online — again before others began noticing how… Continue reading
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A strange Twitter double-fail
This makes no sense. If you can’t read the above, it says “Sorry! You’ve hit your hourly usage limit. Try again soon.” That’s above a message that says “This user does not exist.” The user in question is @DickHardt, who does exist, as you can see. Twitter has frozen me out, so I can’t check shit, but… Continue reading