Five Most Interesting Finds This Week

So, I've been on vacation this week - just hanging out in London - which means that I've been doing a fair bit of media grazing ...

Here are the best things I've come across.

1. IDEO's Human-Centered Design Toolkit. Very user-friendly set of resources and basic structure for attacking interesting problems (has a development slant, but can be adapted).

2. Daniel Pink's 'Drive' - Animated. Daniel Pink's excellent book on what really motivates people condensed into a phenomenally illustrated interactive presentation (thanks Dan Rowe for the link).

3. Cyber-Con - Book Reviews in LRB. So, remember my last blog post on the moral ambiguity of technology? Here's exhibits A, B, and C for the dark side. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom is on my Christmas list! Warning - it's long.

4. Lower-Class People Better at Reading Others. Another one in a long line of quirky behavioural psychology studies ... but certainly thought-provoking. Quick read.

And, finally ...

5. All of The Lights by Kanye West. Hands down my favourite track of the year, off of the best reviewed album of the year.

Talk Soon,

Dane

Generic European Update

Remember when I started that blog a few weeks ago, and then didn't write anything? Yeah ...

I've actually had an interesting 'seed' of a post sitting in drafts for the past three weeks on the nature of information, but it turns out that a) interesting ideas are easy, interesting articles are hard, and b) I'm relatively lazy.

So, instead - a more pedestrian update on life in the UK.

Darkness. We're still a month out from the shortest day of the year, but it's pitch-black by 4PM. It's also -3 today. On the flip side, apparently the crocuses come out by February. At least two people have told me this, and I guess it's supposed to be uplifting, but not entirely sure why?

Television. It's terrible here - unless you like Top Gear and Friends, in which case you have 48 hours worth of programming to choose from every single day. On the other hand, the selection of On Demand stuff is amazing.

Mail. Mail (or 'post') is really important. I just opened a new "international" bank account, an event which triggered 12 discreet pieces of mail over the span of 3 days (1 which I had to send to the bank - 11 of which came to me). If you don't have mail with your address on it, you are for all intents and purposes a homeless person.

Restaurants. So many good restaurants it's criminal. You could - hypothetically, of course - eat out every week-end for months without travelling more than 500M from our house, even if your wife really wishes that you would try some new places. In theory, anyways.

Ashes. The big cricket match (game? test?) with Australia started yesterday. I think it finishes sometime next month, but in general I have no idea how to interpret anything that's going on. We're in the 80th 'over' right now, from what I understand.

P.S. The pic is from Italy ... the location where we hosted a pricing workshop. Not a bad place to go to work.

Dane

Sunday Night Thoughts on Tech

I spend a lot of time thinking about technology. Mostly, it's at a pretty superficial level that involves thinking up use cases to justify buying new gadgets ("this could be really helpful if I need to simultaneously listen to a podcast and read a book while flying!"), but occasionally I stumble into more fertile ground.

This forms the basis for my first 'Sunday Night Thoughts' post where I'm going to throw a few bits and pieces of thinking out there, along with some interesting things I've read.

So, my Sunday Night Thoughts -

1. Technology is the single most powerful force in the world today - I just don't see any way to dispute this any more. You're either on this boat, of you've missed it. Media (news scrapers, citizen journalism, proliferation of information), politics (campaign finance, wikileaks, so-called 'twitter revolutions' - more on that later), warfare (drones), manufacturing (automation), marketing ('earned' media, channel proliferation), human interaction and networks (LinkedIn, Facebook) ... you can go on and on.

If you're reading this, nodding your head, and saying 'tell me something I don't know' - then, great. But, honestly, I am continually shocked at the extent to which this would be a radical assertion within the more traditional business sectors in which I find myself on a regular basis. I think this is a big blind spot for a lot of people.

2. I'm deeply ambiguous about whether it's a force for good - Unlike a lot of technologists (Clay Shirky, Kevin Kelly, Daniel Pink, etc.) I just don't buy the idea that we're entering a new age where technology will bring us together, liberate the oppressed, and free our 'Cognitive Surplus.'

This is all based on the idea that technology creates a platform through which like-minded people can find each other. This can be good, but it can also be tremendously bad. Google's Eric Schmidt spoke about this issue a few weeks back - http://j.mp/bOLr3W - short, and to the point.

Clay Shirky - author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus, is a very famous technologist and I actually find a lot of what he says very interesting. But I definitely identify with this critique of a lot of the over-optimistic hyberbole that surrounds technology - http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/future-guy_513321.html

That's it for Sunday - talk soon.

In Trento

I've been on a project in Trento, Italy for several weeks now. Now that we are close to wrapping up, a few thoughts on Northern Italy.

1) I'm not entirely sure how everyone isn't massively obese here. So much prosciutto, pasta, and bread. Seriously, it's like an olive oil commercial.

2) I have officially flown into or out of the airports in Florence, Pisa, Milan, Venice, Treviso, and Verona. Consistency is key ... you can get the 'V.I.P.' panini everywhere and it's always good.

3) GPS units are in incredibly short supply here. Bring your own or prepare for hilarious hi-jinks! (read: 500GBP mobile phone bills from using Google Maps)

4) There are no irons in the hotels here. Seriously, none. I'm staring at a built-in pants press right now, but somehow asking for an iron gets you a blank stare.

5) Driving through the town square is typically

fine - just don't park there. Finding the impound lot is a bitch, and an Italian police station is exactly as disorganized as you think it is.

6) This is absolutely beautiful country. You should probably bring your wife to Sirmione, on Lake Garda, like I did. To make up for your anniversary trip spent in the Holiday Inn by the train station in Paris, hypothetically.