Category: technology
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The Rise of the Brainstorm Bots
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I was listening to The Life Scientific this morning, where the guest was Michael Wooldridge, professor of computing science at the University of Oxford, talking about AI and sentient robots. It’s a good listen; the part that stood out to me most was this… “One of the unexpected applications of this technology is brainstorming. So traditionally,…
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What is six-fingered text?
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This afternoon, I idly sketched out ‘there’s no such thing as six-fingered text’. Some of my work of late has taken a sudden AI twist. I mean, whose hasn’t… in the discursive, theoretical stage at least. Lots of people talking about it, nobody really doing it. And with good reason, perhaps. As conversations unfold, you realise just…
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WeWork… never worked
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This started as an aside on LinkedIn, but in the comments more stories started turning up, so capturing here for posterity. ——- WeWork has filed for bankrupt (FT). Quite some going for a company Ince valued at $47 billion. An unbelievable valuation. I have been grimly fascinated by the business for years, ever since I…
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Resurrecting web marginalia
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I’ve just spent a few minutes with Stephen Anderson‘s reflections on the Mighty Mind community experiment on Circle (which, as a platform… kinda sucks). Stephen wondered if the thing he actually wanted didn’t quite exist, and in amongst ideas threw out the term… wait for it… Webrings. The description from Wikipedia, if that doesn’t mean…
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Mystery Thumbs and Feature Debt
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On video calls recently, I’ve been confused by a mystery thumb reaction which appears above my head at the mere glance of a thumb, like in the picture here. Was it a Zoom thing? Or an Opal Camera thing? Whenever it happened, I’d spend five minutes poking at various bits of software trying to work…
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How I Created LEGO Serious Play
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…wait, what, that’s not true, how can you even go about claiming that? Of course I didn’t create LEGO Serious Play. But ChatGPT claims I did… It’s just so damn eager to please sometimes, it’ll say anything. Not that I’m sitting all day asking LLMs who I am (now there’s an identity crisis waiting to…
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How to use the Community Power Compass
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A practical walk through on how to use the Community Power Compass to evaluate and analyse communities in spaces like Web3.
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Introducing the Community Power Compass
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The background context for a beta version of a tool for investigating and evaluating different types of community, particularly those in the Web3 space.
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A bar without walls
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Spotted in a barber shop last week. I won’t name names, as I’m not entirely sure how legal it would be… During last summer, they opened up within strict COVID guidelines, as did the pub nearby. As with most pubs, the pub implemented a technology-powered table service system – just order where you are, and…
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Zenko Mapping, Inception and Pace Layers #WIAD2021
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I was honoured to give a talk on Zenko Mapping as part of this year’s virtual Word Information Architecture Day. Thanks to Mike and Mari for the invitation, and help in planning. As per the last talk I gave, I made a film to do it, using some of the previous ideas I’d used in…
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Finding intimacy in the infinity of Clubhouse
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Clubhouse is, as they say, a thing right now. A self-styled drop-in audio app, it’s moving from beyond just the darling of the dilettante set of Valley media hobbyists, spiralling outwards past the long lines of social media specialists, and into that hot new space of brand opportunity. There is a deliberate queasiness to that…
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Think of information as light, not liquid.
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In the recent Zenko Mapping video, I talked briefly about a new idea, a lens through which to see the world; we should focus on thinking of information as light, not liquid. It’s the fundamental philosophy at the heart of this year’s TENETS project, and will no doubt form the basis of Smithery’s work moving…