Archive for September, 2006

Dead Words Walking

Friday, September 29th, 2006

Did a presentation yesterday at the Shift conference on the use of language as technology/tool for change [PDF]. The last page is the participants suggestions of words we should say goodbye to and words they’d like to see appear/be used more widely. Shift is a great initiative, more momentum to the power of conferences with lot’s of perspective of human social use of technology and to conferences organized by passionate individuals not for profit or to make a living, but to create platforms for conversations.

Blogger dinner thursday with Kevin Jones

Friday, September 15th, 2006

Kevin Jones from Good Capital and xigi is in Copenhagen next thursday the 21th of September. So if you’re into talking about investment that serves good purposes, microfinance, social enterprises, social entrepreneurship - wednesday is your evening since we’ll have an open blogger dinner at 8pm @ The Laundromat Cafe, Elmegade 15, Copenhagen N. (If you all ready will have had dinner with your loved ones don’t feel obliged to have to eat - just come anyway). Add a comment here if you’re coming…

A simple case of user innovation

Friday, September 15th, 2006

“And the only interesting thing that happened was, Juan Trippe was walked into this plywood mockup of the cockpit, and he didn’t care about that, but he turned around and looked at the space behind the cockpit, and I’ll never forget it, because he turned to his chief engineer, John Borger and said, “What is this space going to be used for?” And Borger made a hell of a mistake, he said, “This could be a good crew rest area.” And Juan Trippe just said, “This will be reserved for passengers!” And that’s what turned the upper deck into a very profitable part of the airplane.”
From the “father” of the 747 jet

Hypocrisy quote of the year

Wednesday, September 13th, 2006

“Ya see users like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Flickr because they are contributing to true, free, democratic social platforms devoid of monetary motivations.”
Kevin Rose, co-founder, Digg

The organization that was just a bit confused about whom it really was

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006

Al-Noor Ramji, Chief Executive Officer BT EXact and Group CIO, “At the end of the day, we (BT) are a telco… and by that I mean, we are fundamentally an infrastructure company”.
Five minutes later on the same panel:
Neil Rogers, Managing Director 21CN, BT says, “We are fundamentally a services company”
as reported by Malcolm Matson.
(Not that there’s anything wrong in being a bit confused about who you are - i’m that all the time - just not something that’s currently accepted in the corporate non-human world).

Who Writes Wikipedia? (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought)

Tuesday, September 5th, 2006

Who Writes Wikipedia? (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought). Essential read from Aaron Swartz about who really writes Wikipedia - contradicting the analysis Jimbo Wales has presented many places including at reboot.
Perhaps Wikipedia really is the hive mind when it comes to core creation, allthough when it comes to “formatting” it’s a small community. At least a very important discussion to have about the essential icon of a new era that Wikipedia has become.
Coincidently i wanted to vote for Aaron for the Wikimedia foundation board but got this message.
“Sorry, you are not qualified to vote in this election here on the English Wikipedia. You need to have made 400 edits here before 00:00, 1 August 2006; you have made 5″.
Nails Aaron’s argument pretty strong since i’ve contributed to at least 50 wikipedia articles anonomously - which isn’t valued - but getting to 400 edits is pretty simple. It seems Wikipedia could have a major governance issue here - since it’s the “formatters” that are going the be running the place - not the contributors.

Out of context observation: The Frame Rate of Cities

Friday, September 1st, 2006

In the coming urban city of screens the essential zoning regulation entity is gonna be “the frame rate” - as in the average number of frames per second/minute/hour allowed on the screens on that particular part of the city. A new quantifyer of the vividness of cities could be the overall average frame rate of the screens in the city. What frame rate do you wanna live in?