Welcome to the August 2009 Newsletter. As usual, a selection of links gathered during the month, organised into Systems and the dots that create them: People, Information and Technology. By the way, one of the reasons for creating this newsletter is that it expands all the shortened URLs that I’ve used on Twitter during the month. That way, if the URL shortener goes offlinetaking all the shortcuts with it, we can still access the original links. Key themes from the links: Digital social technologies continue to challenge traditional systems and not all changes will have a happy ending. In the tech arena, real-time web is becoming a focus – how to discover meaning amongst billions of micro changes. Enjoy.
Systems
- How big is too big? – NYTimes article discusses Wikipedia’s growing pains
- 6 strategies for overcoming “chicken and egg” problems – how to grow networks
- Close down the schools – increasing evidence of the benefits of online study (but yes, the title is a step too far)
- The Decline and Fall of the British University – damning perspective from a former professor
- 3 focal points of open government – but can it happen?
- It’s a question of creator’s choice – post and comments debating how we make money
- Social media stats – don’t take all as absolute but useful presentation
- Data on social media use – more useful stats
- What we do on the Internet – Joining Dots blog post
- An online market flourishing in China – “Their Amazon and eBay combined…”
- This revolution will not be monetised – …or not for the creators
- How IBM and Yahoo made Microsoft and Google (respectively)
People
- Facebook privacy: a guide – new lessons to learn
- The productivity challenge – step away or toward Twitter?
- See randomness – never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence or ignorance
- Iran’s literary renaissance – amazing story, ’nuff said
- Life lessons: From one Gates to another – Bill Gates Snr and Jnr interview
Information
- Visual map of your online presence – MIT Personas project. What do you look like?
- The placebo effect – disrupting drug trials including established ones
- The importance of colour choice in data visualisation – IBM research
- Wikipedia’s inkblots – normality in Tech and Medicine
- Crowdsourced 3D city – There are more than 2 million photos on Flickr tagged with Rome…
Technology
- Betting on the real-time web – will the money come from analytics?
- Tech Talk in Seattle – Google changing its approach to the real-time web
- SharePoint in plain English – a keep it simple explanation of online collaboration
- Create your own SharePoint theme – blog post on sub-site sharepointsharon.com
- Google testing a new search architecture – ranking changes…
- The insufficiency of Scrum – pointing out the flaws in rapid development methods
- When less is more – the quest to end the gadget features race
- The real difference between Google and Yahoo – not technology but about technology companies…
And finishing with… not a chuckle this time, can’t find one in this month’s archive. Instead, a peak at next-generation technology in the movie industry. Well, not a peak really because you need glasses and a special camera to see the 3D effects 🙂 But here’s the trailer teaser for upcoming movie Avatar, set to be an industry changer (new form of 3D tech):
Anyone remember the awful film where a body crawls out of the TV set and into the living room? Eeek, in 3D… On a side note, it seems YouTube has suffered to the gamers. Every man and his dog titles their crappy video ‘ – official trailer’. It’s ruining the search.
Joining Dots 