What happens when a company hires an individual or a firm to represent them on social media? Ultimately the guru “selling” social media as a business virtue — direct responsiveness to your customers! — actually becomes the “middleman” between the corporate institution and the public consumer population. In other words: if the power of social […]

Google’s official blog post outlining the new Google, plus Search Your World service explains some of the benefits of integrating crowd-sourced, social-inputs to your search queries: Say you’re looking for a vacation destination. You can of course search the web, but what if you want to learn from the experiences your friends have had on […]

The problem is we cannot see what we cannot see. We cannot unbundle our neurons. We cannot unstreamline our neural pathways. We cannot un-habituate ourselves to our own habits all by ourselves. We need calculated disruption—what some people would call, on an attentional level, distraction—before we can begin deep learning of our most basic patterns, […]

This is a brief post with a sizable announcement: I have started a podcast! The program is comprised of various presentations I have delivered, interviews which I have either conducted or participated in, and other tidbits of auditory curiosity. Like this blog as a whole, it is notoriously difficult to nail down a specific theme, […]

Feel like thinking big? Here are three lectures that address some extremely important questions and issues. I encourage you set aside some time to avail yourself to this learning. There is some immensely valuable perspective and insight here: Why Cities Grow, Corporations Die, and Life Gets Faster by theoretical physicist Geoffrey West.1 Civilization Far From […]

What kind of healthcare ‘system’ do we want? I’ve gotten into some trouble in Silicon Valley for saying that the patient in the bed has almost become an icon the real patient who is in the computer. I’ve actually coined a term for that entity in the computer, I call it the iPatient. The iPatient is […]

Perhaps the most succinct way to appropriate all this “New Economy” talk is to simply say this: You can’t sit around and wait for someone to build you a factory to work at anymore.1 The days of going out to “get a job” are fading away, while the time to “make a job” stretches out […]

I recently heard an intriguing lecture by columnist and author Thomas Friedman. He began by highlighting the rapid speed at which communication technology has revolutionized the economic landscape in just the past six years: When I wrote The World is Flat [2004], Facebook didn’t exist, twitter was a sound, the cloud was in the sky, 4G […]

I have comments disabled on this site for the same reasons that many other writers have shut them down as well: they tend to become spammy soapboxes, they require time for moderation, they interrupt the textual flow of the site, blah, blah, blah. And yet this leads to something of an ironic contradiction: a common […]

The most effective delusion is the one which holds you captive to the illusion of your own freedom. For if your freedom depends on a certain belief, ideology, device or lifestyle — if you can’t truly be free without it — then are you not actually a prisoner to it?