3ones

I had the opportunity to talk Monday with Danny Wong, one of the co-founders of the startup Blank Label which allows customers to create custom men's dress shirts. Users can pick fabrics, collar styles, cuff styles, size and fit options, as well as embroider custom monograms. The company is the brainchild of Wong's partner, Fan Bi, who developed the idea during an exchange program between the Boston area's Babson College (a school we've mentioned before for it's entrepreneurship programs) and his school in ...

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An honest tale speeds best being plainly told.

(This is the final post in a series called
"Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between.")

After viewing the various facets of that gem that we call identity in
rotation, it is time for us to polish and view them in one piece.
This series has explored what identity means in an online medium, the
most salient aspect of which is the digitization of information.
Consider what the word digitization denotes: the
fragmentation of a whole i...

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In the course of doing research for some recent testimony before Congress on the National Archives and Records Administration, I was struck by several facts about how our first National Archivist, Robert D.W. Connor, met some seemingly insurmountable challenges when he took office in the mid-1930s.

The biggest challenge was the deluge of paperwork, a situation not very different from what our national institutions face today. Instead of simply moaning the impossibility of swallowing all the records Con...

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1. How to Run a Meeting Like Google (BusinessWeek) -- the temptation is to mock things like "even five minute meetings must have an agenda", but my sympathy with Marissa Mayer is high. The more I try to cram into a work day, the more I have to be able to justify every part of it. If you can't tell me why you want to see me for five minutes, then I probably have better things to be doing. There may be false culls (missing something important because the "process' is too high) but I bet these are far outweig...

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So may a thousand actions, once afoot,
End in one purpose, and be all well borne
Without defeat.

(This is the seventh post in a series called
"Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between.")

Despite all the variations played on the theme of personal identities
in the previous sections, remember that identity is a group construct,
not an individual one. If we never took part in groups, our personal
identities would scarcely matter.

We're all members of certain groups without ou...

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1. GTFS Data Exchange -- site for sharing the files that Google Transit collects from public transit agencies. This lets third party developers write apps that don't involve Google.
2. Tenureometer -- if you are what you measure, let's build good measures. This is one for higher education, designed to measure scholars' impact on their fields by counting how much they have contributed to the literature and how frequently those articles have been cited.
3. The Known Universe -- rendered according to the best data ...

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Haply you shall not see me more; or if, a mangled shadow.

(This post is the sixth in a series called
"Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between.")

One reason Sherry Turkle saw the Internet through the prism of
invented identity--or, perhaps, found the aspects of Internet life
that corroborated her own interests as a psychologist with a fondness
for postmodernism--was her choice to seek out initial contacts from
serious players of 1970s multi-user dungeons. These environments wer...

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Recently, I wrote a post about Government 2.0 predictions for 2010-12, and one of them was that government would "always be on-the-record."

By that I meant that the combination of (1) the proliferation of tech-savvy citizens with mobile camera/video devices, (2) the prevalence of wi-fi or other Web connections, (3) the massive number of people using social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, and (4) the great interest that people have right now in a number of controversial issues like our current...

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Which is the natural man,
and which the spirit? who deciphers them?

(This post is the fifth in a series called
"Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between.")

What we've seen so far in this series would be enough to shake
anyone's sense of identity. We've found that the technology of the
Internet itself fudges identity (but does not totally succeed in
hiding it), that companies use fragmented and partial information to
categorize you, and that your actual identity is perhaps les...

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The

Peer to Patent
project has already earned its place in history. It was explicitly
cited as inspiration for the open government initiative in the Obama
administration, which recently released a comprehensive directive
(available as a
PDF)
covering federal agencies. The founder of the project, law professor
Beth Noveck, began implementation of the directive as Deputy CTO in
the US government. But I've been wondering, along with many other
people, where Peer to Patent itself is going.

It's encouraging...

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1. Jonathan Zittrain on "Minds for Sale" -- video of a presentation he gave at the Computer History Museum about crowdsourcing. In the words of one attendee, Zittrain focuses on the potential alienation and opportunities for abuse that can arise with the growth of distributed online production. He also contemplates the thin line that separates exploitation from volunteering in the context of online communities and collaboration. Video embedded below.
2. Anatomy of a Bad Search Result -- Physicists tell us that...

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Thy self thou gav'st, thy own worth then not knowing

(This post is the fourth in a series called "Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between.")

Voracious data foraging leads advertisers along two paths. One of
their aims is to differentiate you from other people. If vendors know
what condiments you put in your lunch or what material you like your
boots made from, they can pinpoint their ads and promotions more
precisely at you. That's why they love it when you volunteer that
inf...

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1. Trading Shares in Milliseconds (Technology Review) -- With the rise of automation, the bulk of U.S. stock trading has moved from the once-crowded floor of Manhattan's New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to silent server farms run by exchanges and broker-dealers across the country: the proportion of all trades that the NYSE handles has shrunk from 80 percent in 2005 to 40 percent today. Trading is now essentially a virtual art, and its practitioners put such a premium on speed that NASDAQ has considered issuing ...

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I've been a fan of Jackson Fish Market's work since before they existed. My first Radar post about them talked about founder Hillel Cooperman's personal food site, Tasting Menu, which was and is amazingly detailed and hunger-inspiring. Jackson Fish has the same, or higher, quality of work -- software craftsmanship that makes each of their sites immediately identifiable and distinct, graphically full and compelling.

I'm totally gaga, though, over their new site, A Story Before Bed. This might be one of t...

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What men daily do, not knowing what they do!

(This post is the third in a series called "Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between.")

Previous posts in this series explored the various identifies
that track you in real life. Now we can look at the traits that
constitute your identity online. A little case study may show how
fluid these are.

One day I drove from the Boston area a hundred miles west and logged
into the wireless network provided by an Amherst coffee shop in
Wes...

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But he that writes of you, if he can tell
that you are you, so dignifies his story.

(This post is the second in a series called "Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between.")

Long before the Internet, much of our private lives were available to
those who took an interest, and not just if we were a celebrity chased
by paparazzi or a lifelong resident of a small village. Investigators
with many good reasons for ferreting out such knowledge--non-profit
organizations, college devel...

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Reading this morning's New York Times story, Mobile Phones Become Essential Tools for Holiday Shopping, I was reminded again of the fundamental shortsightedness of so many of our economic decisions, that flaw in human nature that makes us seize on temporary advantage without thinking of the long-term consequences.

The article focuses on the use of applications like ShopSavvy and RedLaser to do comparison price checking while in the store. On the surface, these are great tools for consumers (and there are ...

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1. In Character -- a journal that addresses a different virtue each quarter. I've been thinking of practical philosophy a lot, lately, as we see ever-more-dodgy behaviour. (via bengebre on Delicious)
2. Lessons from Parallelizing Matrix Multiplication -- a reminder why low-level knowledge of your platform matters, and why motivating examples should be carefully chosen.
3. MathJax -- MathJax is an open source, Ajax-based math display solution designed with a goal of consolidating advances in many web technologies i...

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