I like this column by Nicholas Taleb. I haven’t read his book (The Black Swan) but now I think I might.
I’m more and more convinced that this ineffable activity called “innovation” is merely the story we user after the fact, to help ourselves feel like we understand what happened to bring that innovation about. […]

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Julian Dibbell has a marvelous post about how game realities are symptoms — sort of concentrated, more-obvious outcroppings — of a general shift in economic and cultural reality itself. The game’s the thing …
Online Games, Virtual Economies … Distinction between Play and Production
And I’m arguing, finally, that that relationship is one of convergence; […]

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Joi Ito, back in March, posted from the Game Developers Conference, where he is going to be doing a talk on the topic of “More than MMOs: Let Them Build It. How user-created content has transformed online games into a new web platform.” (Wish I could hear that talk! It’s one of my favorite things-to-obsess-upon, […]

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Via Jay Fienberg, via the IAI discussion list, I hear of this excellent post by professor David Silver about a talk Silver did recently on the Web 2.0 meme.
Silver starts out lauding the amazing, communal experience of blogs and mashups of blogs and RSS feeds and other Web 2.0 goodness, and then gets into […]

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I recently did a presentation at the very excellent DigitalNow conference, in Orlando. It’s a conference for leaders of professional associations, who have a vested interest in virtual community building and keeping their constituents engaged, even in the splintered information-saturated “Web 2.0″ world.
I combined a couple of previous years’ IASummit presentations and added a […]

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I just posted another bit about Second Life a little while ago, and though to myself, “Why are you posting so much about it? You hardly even go there!”
It’s true. I really don’t actually use SL much. I love thinking about it, reading about it, and checking out the occasional amazing build there, but […]

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Google now has spreadsheets and documents (from Writely) combined… and awesome Discussion and Collaboration capabilities baked right in.
Google Docs & Spreadsheets
A combined list of documents and spreadsheets
You can see, create, and share all of your web-based documents and spreadsheets in one place. As your collection grows, you can manage and find them using tags, […]

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SL old-timers are already getting antsy about all this branding happening in-world. But it’s part of the deal, really.
What I’d like to see? Advertising from big brands and corporations supplementing the more or less free activity of others — allowing regular people to be able to have more objects on their land, for example. Watch […]

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The Science Of Desire
The beauty of ethnography, say its proponents, is that it provides a richer understanding of consumers than does traditional research. Yes, companies are still using focus groups, surveys, and demographic data to glean insights into the consumer’s mind. But closely observing people where they live and work, say executives, allows companies to […]

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There’s a lot of buzz about the BBC’s recent announcement:
MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | BBC unveils radical revamp of website
The BBC today unveiled radical plans to rebuild its website around user-generated content, including blogs and home videos, with the aim of creating a public service version of MySpace.com.
I’ve been hearing a lot of talk lately about […]

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Evidently, my proposal to this year’s IA Summit has been accepted. Now comes the tough part of actually having a presentation.
I have plenty of stuff to present on … that’s just the problem. The challenge is getting it all winnowed down into something coherent and useful.
The conference organizers say I need to have […]

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Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing shares a link to the 100 oldest .COM names in the registry, and wonders about the “visionaries” who might’ve realized they needed a “.com” domain in 1985.
But many of those companies likely weren’t thinking about commercial Internet possibilities. They just happened to be involved in the academic, scientific and […]

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