A tech conference appears to have marked yet another shift in the use of social tools to wrest control and flatten the playing field. Dan Fost of Fortune calls it Conference 2.0 but I prefer the term (which Dan also uses): The Unconference Movement. (I prefer it because anything with 2.0 in it implies money; … Read more
The AP picture that accompanies this OPEC story says it all: Journalists still don’t seem to have switched from cassette recorders to digital, even though prices have dropped amazingly in the past five years and features risen impressively. (I’ve just bought an Olympus DS-20 for a quarter of the price I paid for a DM-1 … Read more
I love the Internet Movie Database but have been somewhat irritated by the need to register to read comments. I didn’t do it for a while but finally did today. Turns out they don’t just want your email address; they need a gender and a year of birth. I know it’s churlish of me, but … Read more
Reading at the moment Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who mentions the trick German experimental physicist Heinz Maier-Leibnitz used to do in boring conferences to entertain himself and to measure the lengths of his trains of thought — microflows, in Csikszentmihalyi’s words. The passage is conveyed in full here: Professor Heinz Maier-Leibnitz, a German experimental physicist, … Read more
Online fraud and other forms of Internet crime is a business, openly sold over the Internet. British-based Internet security company Netcraft says they’re receiving spam advertising dozens of “fraud hosting” websites that offer services and gather together those interested in such pursuits. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, most are Russian. But not all. Carderportal.com resolves to … Read more