Having all the means available to be connected on a permanent basis seems so natural for us today. No one really is interested in the gory details of the infrastructure world (the infraworld indeed) of the machines, network and all these different technical assets that makes our many different electronic lives possible.

Mark Richards Core Memory project is a tribute to this infra world. Some kind of still life to the unsung heroes of the information age : the electronic machines and devices. (Thanks again SignalVsNoise for the link !).

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Yet another Bullshit 2.0 presentation (via Bertrand Duperrin).

I used to be kinda okay with this sort of Armanoesque material. But I just can’t anymore : I just find this type of presentations disgusting.

Here is the pitch : there is this emergence of Enterprise 2.0 tools that transform the way we work in the company. These are natural tools for the digital natives but not so natural for the baby boomers. The generation in between (it doesn’t say but I would think 35 - 45) are the knowledge workers 2.0 (blimey !) who can link the two generations together. Innovation … blah blah … collaborative work … blah blah … bullshit … blah blah

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Bitching + Moaning

Unexpected post by Hugh McLeod on Gaping Void about the Parisian literary microcosm. Hugh talks about a female friend of his, a Parisian, who wrote a novel and cant succeed in having it published. Hugh wonders why she refuses to publish that book on a blog. Let’s try to answer his questions from a french perspective.

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Phineas X Jones posted an article on Signal Vs Noise on his art work for a folk rocker CD cover, his first ever. Phineas goes through every steps of the realisation, from the main idea to the twicky bit of photoshop. It is quite interesting to see how the idea blossom and how internet drastically speeds up the process.

But the truth is : the result is disappointing (and I wont show it here). Too complicated and technical, too many different colors and items. We just dont see what the real point is.

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It’s that time again : when, running out of ideas and/or time, Heavy Mental multi-twitters.

On the (pretty geeky) menu : high scalability, graduating Vs startuping, Web 2.0 Noise, OS/360 Tar Pit and a rock solid business model there for the taking : God Bless HTTP !

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Great post by Roger Von Oech on Creative Think today : Embrace failure.

Errors serve a useful purpose: they tell us when to change direction. When things go smoothly, we generally don’t think about them. To a great extent, this is because we function according to the principle of negative feedback.

Scott Berkun made a very interesting essay on a pretty tangential issue : admitting mistakes. Read the rest of this entry »

A quick post on enjoyable ideas to browse through. It may be pretty recent content, maybe quite old but it is this week’s and highly hypertextual in any case.

On the menu : Egonomics, Situational Relevance of social networks, preparing keynotes with Steve Jobs and Portfolio Management explained. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll do a more comprehensive review of that book when I am finished with it. I’ve just started it thanks to danah boyd advices.

The objective of this book is in the subtitle : propose some explanations as to why today’s young americans are more confident, assertive, entitled and more miserable than ever before.

I always am extremely excited whenever I bumped into a book sheding some new light on society, offering a new perspective on urban sociology. Especially when this theory is supported by tons of data and when it remains readable even if you’re not a PHD in philosophy. Jean Twenge’s book is one of those :

The boomers practically invented youth rebellion in the 1960s. By the 1970s the rebellion was mainstream and the defiance of authority an accepted social value.

Obviously, it’s fair to say that the scope of this book can be extended to young people in the western world even if the massive data gathered by Twenge only applies to USA.

Individualism : the child of the boomers

I always hear people in France whinging (we’re profesionnal whinger, sadly) about individualism in our societies, pointing the finger on hysterical consumerism. As a principle, I just dont buy blindly into simplistic and politically oriented types of explanations.

This book, for instance, comes with this other assumption whereby individualism is a direct consequence of being raised by baby boomers, the people that mainstreamed rebellion who incidentally grew their children with these values of being truth to themselves, their belief and what they want to be. Interesting.

Watch this space : I’ll get back to it later !

Technorati: Jean-Twenge Generation-Me

Hey, looks like I was a bit early on this blog day thing.

So for those who initially missed it (i’ve counted a few) here is Heavy Mental’s blog day post, then.

Technorati: BlogDay2007

Code will tear us apart

There is this Alternative rock scene that blossomed back in the late 70s/early 80s on the ashes of the punk music. This encompassed bands like XTC, Wire, The Cure or Joy Division in the UK and Husker Dü or R.E.M in the US.

They basically had the energy and the DIY approach of the punk bands but as opposed to the latter they have a much more realistic view of the business, were not so self destructive (except maybe Joy Division Ian Curtis).

They had a proper plan : offering an alternative to mainstream (hence the name) pop music, driven by their vision of what it should be : quality pop song with an attitude, with an independent (hence Indie in the UK) artistic approach, ignoring business driven advices from major record companies marketing executives.

Viewing this Jason Fried (co-founder of web2.0 start-up extraordinaire 37Signals) video, I thought of the many similarities of their business approach in the software industry with that very musical vogue. Thinking about it, this analogy also gives some hints on 37Signals success … Read the rest of this entry »

Mack Collier from the viralgarden did something similar a while back : kick-off a meme to promote unsung bloggers.

So here is the deal : list and describe about 10 out of your blogroll, do a quick description and pingback the one that referenced your blog. Please no Seth Godin, Loic Le Meur or Stairway to Heaven here. I dont think they need any reference.

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‘right : writing a blog is cool. But there are some rumours around that writing a blog that some people end up reading is kinda cooler.

So tired with having an average of 8 views per blog post I’ve decided to roll up my sleeves and dig into the subject. Believe it or not a few people decided to study the issue before me. Honest.

So here I come, SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

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(Click to play the soundtrack of my summer and, incidentally, of this post. The band is Asobi Seksu a NYC Shoegaze quartet and the song is Thursday. I dont have any suitable and meaningful visual resources for this post so I’ve decided to put some promotion material of this band that I really like instead.)

Classes and networks

I’ve blogged about this Danah Boyd essay already.

It looks like this has caused a lot of misinterpretation and angry posts to which Danah has decided to respond.

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The cold cold heart of the Web 2.0

Brilliant column by William Davies in The Register.

Illustration : Keith Haring
Source : http://www.orgsites.com/

A very interesting article on the Social Network applications trend to rationalise everything in our social life. It tends to show that while we expand the use of the internet from our profesionnal life to the social parts of it, we also expand professional habits such as efficiency concerns.

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Boys and girls, I’ve just came back from arguably one of the most beautiful place in the whole world : Moorea. Which means the yellow Lizard in mao’hi (or is it ma’ohi ?) language.

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