I think it’s dead, Jim: When large companies kill small ones
I can think of many reasons a large company might buy a smaller one, only to kill them. For example: Perhaps it was a smaller competitor causing the larger comp...
Category: The Narrative
Spam robot cut-up fiction
In one of my meanders through the web this weekend, I was reading about Jack Kerouac, which led to William S Burroughs, which led to Burroughs’ cut-up tec...
Ebola exposes chinks in our techno-optimistic armor
If you’re a bio-nerd like me, you’ve known about Ebola for a very long time. You knew it was trouble from the get-go and wondered how it would unfol...
Cow, goat, sheep, alpaca, camel, or buffalo? Which milk do you like?
I thoroughly enjoy making yogurt. But, of course, most yogurt is made of cow’s milk. I was able to find some goat and sheep milk yogurts in my local store...
Changes in Aetna’s online offerings: what the impact?
I find Aetna to be a leader in using online tools to increase member engagement in their health (with the interest to lower costs, of course). One interesting o...
Posting mobile photos like it’s 2005
I haven’t looked at my Lifeblog archive in a long time. Without the software, it’s just a deep tree of folders holding all sorts of media over many ...
What to do with so many layers of technological sediment?
Much to my wife’s frustration, I have a habit of holding on to old tech. So what’s in my basement? Computers A 1987 Mac II (16-bit 68020 chip!) with...
TV: Morsels vs Streams
For a long time I’ve been thinking about the morselization of the web – the break down of the mogul-minded content consumption of the early media wo...
Frak. The car stopped.
I grew up in Brasil, so it was normal to be driving up in the hills of Rio and have a dog jump out and chase our car. Being teens, we’d just stop the car ...
Oral culture: Snapchat, deleting streams, and, now, Banter
I have two teens and it has been fascinating to see how they approach the permanence of text and images. The digitization of the world has challenged how we kee...