“We’re victims of crime, and nobody gives a damn. That’s a nice feeling — your business is being pounded into dust by criminals, and people say, `Live with it.'” I have a lot of respect for
Barry.
criminal activity
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Category Archives: General
Strong Mueseum
Once you get past the amazingly commerical front end of the Strong Museum in Rochester New York they have some extremely delightful exhibits. Fun interactive exhibits about the toys and commerce of fifties for example. Surprisingly nice uses of computers.
But keep going! The museum does something that all museums ought to do. The vast majority of it’s collection is on display in densely packed rooms of cases. The lady who collected this stuff had fantastic taste. A passon for beautiful objects. Objects that people actually use. An interest in how stuff is made. How it was used.
I love a mueseum that floods me with ideas, I’m peeved when mueseums think they must entertain me – like a TV show.
One thing that impressed me about the Strong was how many objects were collected or displayed together to illustrated a unique way to put an object together. For example the doll collection had lots of of dolls displayed where you could see how they were made.
I really hope they can get the whole collection on the web. With very high quality pictures. A tiny portion – maybe a thousand items – are on the web now. Consider, just this one object. A fruit bowl the picture is way too small but read the description and then click thru to the larger picture. See what I mean about her sense of humor?
I loved hundreds objects in this museum. Very few are on the web at this point. For example there was a collection of inkwells. It is fun
when an object used for a simple everyday job evolves into a new
art form. For example she had a small collection of ink wells. There were a
few that look like the head of a crying baby. You would draw the ink for your rants from the lower lip of the crying babe.
it is easy
If you haven’t noticed, something is happening. Things are comming together. Listen! while you read, then watch. Skip the intermediaries? “Spontaneous Integration“? Indeed!
.03%
The word community get’s tossed around a lot these days,
particularly when it comes to the Internet. For example consider
these page counts for various queries at google.
"online community" -- 1.4 million pages "my online community" -- 521 pages "their online community" -- 986 pages
Millions of people are talking about it, but very few (521)
actually will publicly declare that they are members of one. 521 is
.03% of 1.4 million! In fact people are almost twice as likely (986)
to ascribe membership in a community to somebody else.
Amazon will offer to sell you 15 books about online communities.
Only one or two of these are a narrative account (a case study) of an
actual online community.
Something is wrong here. There is something strangely wrong when
there is more material about constructing an online community than there is
about the actual experiences of people inside of them. It is as if
the entanglement a participant has:
- the stories he tells of the community,
- the community rituals he engages in,
- his sense of moral obligation to the community,
- his self identification with the community,
- his skills at identifying other members
are less important than the acts that outsiders might take to engineer that entanglement.
BlogApp, Movabletype, mod_perl
Humm… movabletype’s mt-xmlrpc.cgi and mod_perl’s good buddy apreq don’t play well together. For example you might find this in your server’s error log.
... [libapreq] unknown content-type: `text/xml'
What to do?
If you disable mod_perl for mt-xmlrpc.cgi then, happy day, you can post from BlogApp. For example you might make a script like:
#!/bin/sh exec .../mt-xmlrpc.cgi $*
Of course you can only suffer from this problem if your clever enought to have installed mod_perl. Mod_perl is, by the way, God’s gift to performance.
Stablity vs. Innovation
Brad deLong draws our attention to an article in Business Week about MSN and AOL trying to capture a chunk of the highspeed home ISP market. The article misses the point; this competition is about who will control the bandwidth market. Sure! It’s also about who will control the top of the power-law heap in the customer eye-ball market – but are these two really different. This is about big time innovation & disruption.
Continue reading
Firms & Networks
I’m reading “The Architecture of Markets: An Economic Sociology of Twenty-First-Century Capitalist Societies” by Neil Fligstein.
I’m a fan of what might be called the “network theory of firms” – e.g. that a firm can be usefully modeled as a node in a network of linkages to other entities in the economy. The theory gets interesting when you begin to classify the kinds of links and their attributes.
Fligstein provides a nice enumeration of some of the attributes of these linkages.
“Networks usually are a stand-in for other sociological variables such as resource dependence, power, often ownership, information, trust, or status.”
This is a wonderful book. If books were meals then Barabasi’s book Links would be a salad and this book would be beef stew.
The sentence actually reads: “Networks usually are a stand-in for other sociological variables such as resource dependend (Burt 1983), power, often ownership (Mizruchi, Stearns, and Brewster 1988, Lincoln, Gerlach, and Takahashi, 1992; Palmer et al. 1995), information (Davis and Stout 1992), trust (Uzzi 1996), or status (Podolony 1993).” but…
The Million Book Digital Library Project
A million books, that’s about what a good university has in it’s libraries. How about getting that on line? What would it take? Copyright lawyers, money, a hundred scanners distributed around India and China, air freight books from assorted world libraries, five years, clever software.
Read more: Project Overview…