September 2009 Newsletter

Here is September's selection of links shared via Google Reader, Delicious and Twitter. Organised into the usual suspects of Systems and their bits and pieces: People, Information and Technology. No obvious theme this month but the gap between government and all other aspects of life (business, social etc.) seem to be getting a growing amount of attention. Enjoy!

Systems

• The accelerating expansion of knowledge - anything that can be replicated will have a price that will tend toward zero
• Social Business - don't run away from the title, a good read on the changes coming
• The Internet vs The Financial System - is it another VHS vs Betamax debate?
• The World Wide Web isn't World Wide Neutral - ongoing challenges of globalisation not reaching politics
• Open data and shared platforms can revolutionise goverment - but will it?
• What happened to the UK's online public services? Good question...
• Connected schools, the generation gap and distraction - exploring homo interneticus
• Social Networking Use Triples from only a year ago - why advertisers are taking notice
• Let's Kill the CPM - why catching eyeballs is the wrong approach for the web
• The Platform vs the Eyeballs - Seth Godin weighs in on CPM too
• Marketing lessons from Second Life to Web 2.0 - blog post
• Classical economic nostalgia - the correct and incorrect price in a market
• A novel insight into investment terms and game plans for start-ups - how Twitter and Facebook got their money
• Blueprint for a better world - big ideas from the New Scientist magazine

People

• Five reasons to show yourself - and if you don't, what if your competitors did? Who would a new customer pick?
• Another problem with productivity - we've reinvented work without changing expectations or creating new measures
• Lessons learned whilst playing games - why cheating won't make you happy
• Are you climbing the wrong hill? - great post and comments about ambition
• Self-employed workers work longer hours and are the happiest - about that ambition...
• The dark side of political discourse on the Internet - because it is easy to filter online reading, extreme views tend to dominate the discussion
• Jeff Bezos' four-point performance plan - lessons learned at Amazon
• The incredible shrinking boomer economy - "when 70 million people start spending less... it won't be pretty"
• Con artists exploit social web sites - scams involving Twitter and Google on the increase
• How Alan Turing finally received an apology - unlikely to have happened pre-Internet

Information

• Charting emotions - with data everywhere, we need new ways to display it
• Building Rome in less than a day - using 150,000 photos from Flickr
• The New Literacy - technology isn't killing our ability to write, it's reviving it
• What visualisation tools should you use? - Flowing Data has some suggestions
• UK public spending by department - talking of visualisations...
• Metadata vs data - why treating them as separate entities creates technological challenges

Technology

• Why social networks need to be decentralised - RSS never blocks you or goes down
• A computing future from Microsoft - large and cheap displays
• TechCrunch interview with Steve Ballmer - products, competition and the road ahead. In 3 parts (link is to the third) and not without its controversies, naturally :-)
• The People's Republic of Google - peer review dominates
• 5 things we learned from the Gmail outage - what happened when Gmail went offline
• The bar for success in the IT industry is too low - free is only worth it once you're profitable
• Back to school with Google Docs - benefit of not being tied in to n-year product versions = timely feature releases

And a couple of finally's... First, found via Euan Semple: A great example of how to change behaviour (ignore the video title, seems the poster didn't quite understand what was happening)

And to finish with a chuckle - Is this the funniest 404 error message ever? Found via Steve Clayton:

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