Got a tour of a showcase data center at IBM’s RTP lab the other day with some architect coursemates, many of whom were hardware/infrastructure specialists, saw this mainframe processor with actual copper tubing inside. So cool.
From the CFEDC website, my brief overview of and appreciation for a Geoffrey “Crossing the Chasm” Moore report on enterprise and “systems of engagement”:
An open secret about the Cape Fear area is how many techies here work not at small boutique IT shops or local businesses but at employers like Cisco, IBM, SAS, Yahoo, HP.
These large organizations are all grappling with the incredible changes being wrought by the web–by new collaborative technologies, new media habits, social networking. My own employer–one of these listed here–has published some “social computing guidelines” to help organize our thinking around our sometimes very public roles as technologists and our sometimes very private data–company plans and product information, business practices, that sort of thing.
But the problem is much larger than how and what to tweet about technology. These organizations are finding that business, like everything else that has anything to do with technology, is being done in a whole new way, and that enterprise competencies and processes are not adapted to this new way at all. In fact they’re realizing that if processes and expertise inside the enterprise are not changed, quickly and dramatically, then the enterprise will be left behind the curve of history….
(Report itself is here.)
This was published in a slightly different form in the Star News last week:
My son is in a rap class with a few other five-to-nine year olds. They meet at the Myrtle Grove library once a week to write lyrics around a particular theme, such as vegetables, to perform their raps on a microphone, maybe do a little dancing. Their teacher is goofball genius Scooter Hayes, AKA Melvil Dewey the rapping librarian. Maybe you’ve heard of him. You’re kids have. They love him and sing his songs. Scooter visits school libraries all over Wilmington and raps infectiously about the Dewey Decimal system, library cards, bookmobiles. Continue reading
On Monday morning, the Obama administration launched a new community focused on consumer data at Data.gov. While there was no new data to be found among the 507 datasets listed there, it was the first time that smart disclosure has an official home in federal government.
Just published a piece on our own Cape Fear Roller Girls in Men Ink magazine (online):
You’ll think I’m exaggerating if I say that the Cape Fear Roller Girls are my all-time favorite spectator sport, but that’s not a particularly high bar, since I’m not a sports fan. The Roller Girl events at the Schwartz Center downtown are literally spectacles. It takes a while to figure out what’s going on in the ring, but your tattooed, beer-drinking bleacher-mates will eagerly fill you in on the rules, jabbing at your program, at the confusing numbers on the scoreboard, at the helmeted ladies whizzing around the track and crashing into one another. The crowd is friendly and various, antic; the action is tense and real.
I was preparing to write up another piece about Instapaper and the nice reading experience it affords, how you can send articles to it as you browse, see them beautifully laid out as pages, the way you can collect those pages into an ebook for your reading device. But then I just thought, Fuck it. You don’t need to know about that; you’ve already got some reading and curating system that works well enough for you. With all kinds of features for collecting the right “content”. Continue reading
Not long ago, “hyperlocal” was the buzzword of the day in the digital media business, and a number of major media entities — including the New York Times and AOL — either acquired or started their own efforts in that direction. Now one of the pioneers of that movement has been abruptly shut down: NBC announced on Thursday that it has closed the doors on EveryBlock, the hyperlocal startup it inherited when it took full control of MSNBC last year, and the site has gone dark. Continue reading
Which of the online booksellers will make the next move in the evolution of the book business and let me upload, store, and synchronize my reading “stuff” on their servers [without having sold it to me]?
One of the features I’ve ended up liking most about e-reading is the ability to read on many different devices—to use my tablet for a few pages when I’m on there anyway, to read with my Kobo Mini on the couch, even to catch up on a page or two with the Kobo app on my phone while I’m waiting in line somewhere. Continue reading
Barnes & Noble plans to close about twenty retail stores a year over the next ten years, the company’s retail CEO Marshall Klipper told the Wall Street Journal. Continue reading
This book Open Government, which publisher O’Reilly released to memorialize hacker Aaron Swartz, is just a fantastic smorgasbord of writing about government and participation and technology, some of it dated or auxiliary but all top notch and thought-provoking. Particularly, so far, Beth Noveck’s chapter on deliberative versus collaborative government. Hope to write more reading notes as I go.
But right off the bat I was struck by what a great bibliography the book assembles, and so I wrote a little script (xml.etree.ElementTree) to scrape all the web references out of the ebook for looking into later. Those references are published below in quickie fashion, were extracted from the EPUB version I’m in the middle of now.
Continue reading