The rumblings over Facebook banning Robert Scoble have opened up all sorts of conversations about who owns or controls your data – see also: Data as currency. One issue that has been highlighted is how easy it is for people to scrape enough information about you to form an identity. Scoble was running an automated [...]
In the headlines on Techmeme is a blog post predicting a dot com crash in 2008. I’m not so convinced. The conditions are not the same as in 2000. Back then, ridiculously large sums of money were being bet on crazy ideas with a business model as well covered as a thong-wearing butt (it’s Friday [...]
During the past 24 hours, there has been a flurry of discussion about Facebook banning Robert Scoble. Robert was running an automated script to scrape his ‘friends’ contact information (5,000 of them) out of Facebook. The script was being tested on behalf of Plaxo, an online address book that can automatically update contact details. I [...]
In his book ‘The Living Company’, the author Arie de Geus points out that the average life span for a multi-national company (Fortune 500 or its equivalent) is between 40 and 50 years. For companies in general, it’s a massive 12.5 years. In comparison, the average for human beings is 75 years, suggesting we do [...]
“Strange things happen when a gift economy and a market economy collide” (Peter Lyman, Political Scientist, as quoted in The Social Life of Information, published 2002) There’s been a great debate over Jason Calacanis’s offer to pay Digg’s top contributors if they defect over to Netscape to build a similar service in return for payment. [...]
