Online shared intelligence

Sorry, I got targeted for spam by some moron, and in the process of deleting the 200 or so junk comments y deleted all previous VALID comments. At some point I’ll recover them from backup, but I am very busy right now.

My apologies

All fantasies of ethical behavior die a slow death in these hyper-commercialized days. The process is familiar, you like a hungry startup because you are hungry for empathy, the hungry startup likes you because… it’s hungry for your attention. You love each other, admire each other, and everything works until the hungry startup makes it. Then, class conflict replaces romance.

Google’s “do no evil” was just a stretcher, a smart tactic to make us think the other way while the company helped the Chinese government censor its people (and probably helping ours censor us as well). But let’s admit it, the romance is gone; Google crossed “to the other side” long ago.

Lately, however, something is starting to happen more and more frequently, which would suggest that the corruption of principle is getting deeper and deeper into the architecture of this money-making machine: search SPAM. Check the search below: can anybody suggest that the Google engine does NOT know the difference between this SPAM result (offering cheap cash) and the technical results I was expecting from an OBVIOUSLY technical search? How many people would you expect to Google for specifications on a software integration and come out saying “Hey, that was cool, getting cheap cash was exactly was I needed for my integration needs!”?

Do you know of any innovative search provider that is still hungry enough to love me? If so, let me know… And if you see Google around, please ask them to come pick up their things or I’ll throw them out of the window  :)

Most users of enterprise social networking / collaboration complain about the chasm between common desktop documents and on-line content; let’s face it, most Rich Text Editors (RTE’s) used by Enterprise Collaboration products are anything but “Rich”, and people who learned everything they know about computers through Office don’t get along with Textile either. As a result, RTE’s and/or Textile irritate the heck out of most users.

From what I hear, most collaboration vendors are trying to tackle this problem, some by making the desktop edition even more proprietary (guess who), others by trying to improve RTE’s. Well, there is another vendor, one that doesn’t have a collaboration platform of its own, whose product (Evernote) is quite relevant to this issue…

Memory lane on enterprise collaboration: many years went by, buzz-words getting old and refreshed, problems have not changed much: a hierarchical corporate culture of control and power

GTD (Short for David Allen’s book title Getting Things Done), is not only a book, it’s also a hugely adopted personal productivity methodology, a cult phenomenon, a tag in del.icio.us with 58,000+ entries, a favorite posting subject for bloggers (how original of me), and the subject of multiple software and online solutions, both open source and proprietary.

But GTD is also a naked emperor of sorts: chronicles of failed adoptions are pretty much as common (or more) as discussions of GTD itself. Typical postings about it go as follows:

So, another day went by, and I am still trying to recover from the mess I described in my last post, about upgrading to Apple OS X Leopard (or was it Leper?) 10.5.2. I have by now gone through the typical curve Stress vs. Time, that goes from suspended disbelief (I am sure this is something minor) to the oh shit moment, to increasing exasperation caudes by the idiocy of brands and the power of the large corporations (that component seems to always be there), to gradual understanding of the causes of the problem, and finally to the sweet and sour process of fixing the mess, with increasing confidence, and (I never did, and I will never do it again) some level of realization of the personal responsibility in the disaster.

 So, I am fixing the problem. Not out of the water yet, but a few things I have learned:

Let me state very clearly that it is not my intention to pick up a zeallot fight. I am NOT a hacker, I am not an expert, just your regular user who has found a couple applications he/she depends on, and uses them regularly. I expect thousands of such users to be in the same situation as I am now, and thus I decided to share my experiences.

I use a quad-processor Mac G5, 2.5 Gb memory, Quadro 4500 Video Card driving two Cinema 30 inch monitors. The machine has 750 Gb internal disk, plus 4 Tb of external disks. Not a low end system, not one that can “barely run” the OS. Further, with OS X 10.4 the machine was a screamer, running Aperture with thousand of pictures of 20 Mb each, and at the same time flying through three or four other simultaneous heavy-load programs like Photoshop.

So, one day Safari breaks.

Patterns on use of Nokia N810: how the N810’s particular convergence of memory size, connectivity, processing speed, storage and UI bandwidth gets very close to ideal for me

I am using the Nokia N810 more and more, and finding myself increasingly charmed by the device, its community, and Nokia itself. I find that uncommon (I am increasingly disenchanted with technologies, and hold very little respect for its ability to do any good), but at the same time somehow enjoyable. Well beyond the point at which I hit the hype curve’s down-slide with other gadgets, I keep finding more reasons to like it. That is strange…