Note: This is something I had embedded in a few very long presentations from last year, and I’m realizing it would probably be useful (to me if nobody else) to elaborate on it as its own topic. Here’s the first part.

There’s a lot of writing and thinking happening around the best approaches to designing […]

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Kevin Kelly’s article Bottom Up is Not Enough is making the rounds, and rightly so. Here’s a snippet:
Here’s how I sum it up: The bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further than even seems possible. It keeps surprising us in this regard. Given enough time, dumb things can be smarter than […]

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As networked social applications mature, they’re evolving more nuanced ways of constructing and maintaining an identity. Two of the major factors in online identity are How you present yourself, and Who you know.
How you present yourself: “Flourishing”
Flourishing is how we ornament ourselves and display ourselves to others. Think of peacocks flourishing their tail-feathers. […]

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I can’t believe I’ve been “blogging” for over seven years. How the hell did that happen?
Actually, I think it was longer — if I remember correctly, my first blog was on some service whose name I simply cannot remember now, until I ran across Blogger in 2000. Then I switched to there, using […]

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Fascinating post in Danger Room about a new War College research paper explains that insurgencies aren’t even a species of conventional warfare, but very different. Definitely check out the post, but here’s an interesting tidbit:
…the dynamics of contemporary insurgency are more like a violent and competitive market than war in the traditional sense where […]

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Austin Govella puts a question to me in his post here: Does Comcast have the DNA to compete in a 2.0 world? at Thinking and Making
Context of the post: Austin is wondering about this story from WSJ, “Cable Giant Comcast Tries to Channel Web TV” — specifically Jeremy Allaire’s comments doubting Comcast’s ability to […]

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I’m a huge fan of Jonathan Lethem. And I hadn’t gotten round to reading all of his essay in Harper’s until just lately. Here’s a slice. And yes, the writing is this sharp and elegant all the way through:
“The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism” by Jonathan Lethem (Harper’s Magazine)
For substantially all ideas are secondhand, […]

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I managed to finish my presentation for this year’s IA Summit, and present it in under 50 minutes. Huzzah!
As promised, I’m posting the whole thing with notes here on the blog. If you want the PDF of the presentation (16MB), go here: http://www.inkblurt.com/media/hinton_summit07.pdf

And if you want to see the “blog post of record” about the […]

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I was delighted to see Antonella posting something again: Of the kindness of strangers (in NYC) | AntonellaPavese.com
She starts with the observation that New Yorkers aren’t rude at all, in her experience (she just started working at Google in Manhattan a couple of months ago). That, in fact, they seem to function very well together: […]

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Excellent video interview with Wenger.
Interview with Etienne Wenger on Communities of Practice — Knowledge Lab
Etienne Wenger is one of the founding fathers of Social Learning Theory and the concept of “Practiced Communities”. People are learning together – every individual deals and engage in many different communities of practice. Here people negotiate and define what […]

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I haven’t made my way through this yet, but Boyd’s the go-to-person for social network thinking these days:
Friends, friendsters, and top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites
Friending is deeply affected by both social processes and technological affordances. I will argue that the established Friending norms evolved out of a need to resolve […]

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There are references everywhere — I saw it on the news while I was travelling — but here’s an article at USA Today
IPSWICH, England — Tear down the traffic lights, remove the road markings and sell off the signs: Less is definitely more when it comes to traffic management, some European engineers believe.
They say drivers […]

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