Two books and a story. Samarkand, by Amin Maalouf is about Iran and Omar Khayy·m and his Rub·iy·t. At a deeper level is about different dreams for the islamic world from the poet to the fanatic. Clancy’s The Teeth of the Tiger is why I will never read another Clancy novel. Warmed over characters that are the children of previous heros are just part of the problem. The premise of a secret organization privy to all the secrets of the CIA and FBI is unbelievable. The good guys are even less believable. Clancy sets up the good gudys by having others talk us how smart they are. One big backslapping circle of characters without humility. I find it hard to believe this was a best-seller – it isn’t even good enough for airport reading. Easily the worse book I’ve read in a decade.
Alas Clancy is what people will read to orient themselves to the islamic world instead of Maalouf.
Continue reading One good and one bad book
Roell: Distributed KM
Distributed KM – Improving Knowledge Workers’ Productivity and Organisational Knowledge Sharing with Weblog-based Personal Publishing,by Martin Roell, is the a paper he presented to BlogTalk 2.0 in Vienna in July 2004. He starts with a point that can’t be made too often, knowledge is human, it is not an attribute of information systems or a fancy version of information. More importantly, knowledge is not a collection of objects, it is an aptitude or capability in humans to re-create on appropriate demand.
Roell then swerves off to talk about “knowledge workers”, a horrid phrase that should be banned. The paper redeems itself by turning at the end to blogs and how researchers can use them as open filing cabinets. I like the idea of “knowledge journals” – it suggests that knowledge has a narrative rather than being a system of fact-jects. Whether research blogs ever lead to collaborative projects or not, they capture fragments of the path, which in the humanities is all we have.
A9 and Privacy
In A9.com search engine – The consequences on your privacy, Fred reflects on the security and privacy implications of A9. Do we want Amazon tracking our habits even if it means they can help us? Note: the blog essay has now disappeared.
Managing E-Mail
From Vika via Humanist, Managing Incoming E-mail: What Every User Needs to Know is a report by Mark Hurst that gets you thinking about how to deal with the experience of e-mail overload. It ultimately places responsibility with us, the users, not with management to create a solution.
Canada High-Speed
Globetechnology has a story on “The world’s most connected place” by Dave Ebner from Sept. 16, 2004. Canada is the second most connected country in terms of percentage of households with high-speed Internet connections after South Korea. And, massive on-line gaming is one reason Koreans are getting high-speed. (Apparently Korea is also dense and urban, which makes it easier to wire.)
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text-e
text-e was an online symposium that is interesting both as an online event and in terms of content. The site is tri-lingual (French, English and Italian) and brought a number of speakers, like Umberto Eco, around the subject of “impact of the Web on reading, writing and the diffusion of knowledge” in 2001.
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A9 and why you would use it
Company > Why use A9.com?” href=”http://a9.com/-/company/whatsCool.jsp”>A9.com > Company > Why use A9.com? A9, which combines google and Amazon (and other things) into a unified search environment, is now out of beta. You can get an account with a diary, history, and links. Could this be better than plain old google?
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Carnivore
Carnivore is an art network surveillance tool that can be built on. They provide the CarnivorePE application that watches a network and passes the data stream to clients you make for art purposes. Check out the example projects.
Berry: Bare Code: Net Art and the Free Software Movement
Bare Code: Net Art and the Free Software Movement by Josephine Berry, is an essay on the NetArt Commons: Slash Site about net art projects and the free software movement. It is part of OPEN SOURCE ART HACK, which I think is a NetArt Commons topic (but I am still figuring out the site) and an exhibit at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.
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boohbah Flash for kids
Boohbah Zone is a neat little Flash site for what I assume is a kids TV show. Sent to me by Judith.