The Nexus of 2024

Author: jon

  • Howard Rheingold’s new video blog

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    Howard Rheingold (author of The Virtual Community) has a new vlog up.  The first video does a great job in setting today’s high-bandwidth, visually immersive world in the context of online community, social networking, and activism over the late 20 years. From his intro post on Smartmobs: It all started when I started thinking about…

  • Wikia’s open-source “social search” alpha is up

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    Wikia‘s an open-source search engine that uses community feedback to improve search results, an approach referred to as ‘social search’, and they released their alpha version today. I briefly discuss the social networking aspects of this and my initial experiences on the Tales from the Net blog and linked out to some initial reviews and…

  • “Unstuck”

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    I picked up this short paperback (by Keith Yamahsita and Sandra Spataro) because I was intrigued with its design; it turned out to be very interesting in general. Unstuck is billed as “a tool for yourself, your team, and your world”, and while most of the examples come from the corporate space, it’s just as…

  • Four out of four ain’t bad: Sony BMG to throw in towel on DRM

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    Catherine Holahan reports in BusinessWeek.com that In a move that would mark the end of a digital music era, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is finalizing plans to sell songs without the copyright protection software that has long restricted the use of music downloaded from the Internet, BusinessWeek.com has learned. Sony BMG, a joint venture of…

  • “A very special Ad Astra holiday”

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    Sometimes I described the Ad Astra (Analysis and Development of Awesome STRAtegies) work at Microsoft as a sitcom on network TV — most explicitly when we had a “wrap party” at the May Mashup. In this worldview, the Ad Astra narrative is something along the lines of … Building on the small audience success of…

  • Announcing …

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    Tales from the Net. Stay tuned!

  • Resolutions

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    A poem by my brother. A few years ago, when I launched my web site achangeiscoming.net on new years day, I asked him for permission to post it to start things off on a good note. It worked well then … why change a winning recipe? RESOLUTIONS by Gregory K. Pincus Every year on New…

  • Notes from underground, 2007/2008

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    As TantraSF says: Remember the days before the underground split into many different scenes and moved into nightclubs? Remember when you could hear trance, breaks, techno and downtempo in a big warehouse with an old school vibe? Remember back in the good old days? We do too, so this year Tantra is teaming up with…

  • Thinking of you (New Year’s Eve)

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    Thinking of you Thoughts emerging from dreams, In my mind as I wake: Full of warmth and desire, Bliss beginning the day.   Thoughts weaving together, Through the whole afternoon: Sun, chocolate, your smile, Love … and feeling alive.   Thoughts of art and beauty, In my mind late at night: Memories, Fantasies, Dreams and…

  • THREAT LEVEL’s year in review

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    The group blog THREAT LEVEL is one of my favorite things about wired, and Kevin Poulsen’s year-end roundup is a great example of why: It was a year of soul searching at THREAT LEVEL, every day a fresh challenge to our fundamental beliefs and convictions: Alberto Gonzales made us pine for John Ashcroft; Google made…

  • Microsoft 2008: Where are the opportunities?

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    Yeah, I don’t work there any more, and I’m practicing saying “they” instead of “we”, but I still think that Microsoft’s situation is extremely interesting from a strategy perspective. So as a companion to Mini’s What’s going well?, MSFTextrememakeover’s Will this dog ever hunt again, Joe Wilcox’s Definitive, unsolicited advice, Slashdot’s Microsoft’s biggest threat, and…

  • CNet’s “social networking year in review”

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    Other than the title, which doesn’t do it for me, Caroline McCarthy’s Social networking gets its geek on is an excellent short roundup of the activity in 2007 in the social networking space, with great links both in the story and the “2007 highlights” sidebar. One thing that popped out at me: legal and political…

  • What’s up with me

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    The two months since I left Microsoft have been low-key recharge-and-relax time: catching up on sleep, visiting my mom, reconnecting with friends, doing some writing (blogging, poetry, the fictional The anomaly and the goddesses), and hanging out with Deborah. It’s been great. My friends consistently tell me how relaxed I look and sound (my Facebook…

  • On Mini: “Microsoft’s 2008 – What’s Going Well?”

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    Who da’ Punk’s got a new post up on MiniMSFT with a great, and somewhat out-of-character, topic.  Most of the commenters thus far appear to have missed the request “I’d like to know what you honestly think is going well, too”, but it’s early days yet.  The areas Mini lists as going well in his/her/their…

  • The green fairy

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    With a cover story in by Paul Clarke in Imbibe magazine (not available online, alas) following Jacob Sullum’s The Green Fairy gets a Green Card in reason online last month, it’s absinthe-mania! The legal issues are complex and relate to the levels of thujone, the ingredient that may or may not be psychoactive. To me…

  • More (negative) attention to Facebook’s privacy practices

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    With a two-part series on TPM Cafe’s Table for One, an article in the Mercury News on Christmas Day, and the recent settlement of a suit on text messaging, Facebook continues to become a focus for discussion of privacy issues. To some extent this is a consequence of their size and success: they’re a high-profile…

  • Egypt to copyright pyramids, sphinx

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    Sometimes truth is just as strange as fiction. I’m working on a sequel to my story Eris and the anomaly which kicks off with the law firm of the Gods of Olympus sending me a takedown notice, claiming copyright on both the image of a golden apple and the term “kallisti”. I was pretty pleased…

  • “The official channel of the British Monarchy”

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    Queen Elizabeth’s annual Christmas broadcast, along with about 20 other clips, are up on YouTube as the inital offerings of The Royal Channel.  George V started the tradition with a radio broadcast in 1932, and the queen took it to television in her 1957 broadcast, hoping that the new medium would give a more personal…

  • This just in: Dalai Lama “not a call girl”

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    … at least according to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who was responding to Chinese criticism for meeting the Dalai Lama in his office as opposed to a hotel. Just thought you’d want to know.

  • Notes from underground: Geo Solstice tonight!

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    Heading out soon to Geomagnetic.tv’s Geo Solstice 2007 at the Gingerbread House in SF tonight. Geomagnetic’s Dr. Spook, who did the pscychedelic Ad Astra visuals and rotating globe, is on at midnight; string art by Andres! The psytrance, dark psytrance, and darkwave scenes are feast-or-famine in SF: sometimes there’s a ton of good stuff going…