Books
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Real reading
Garrison Keillor on books: I happen to love the sensual experience of walking into a bookstore and examining the wares, picking up books, smelling them, admiring the covers, reading the first page or two. In 15 minutes, I can always find at least five books that really deeply interest me. I can’t do that online.… Continue reading
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Bring on The Live Web
I first heard about the “World Live Web” when my son Allen dropped the phrase casually in conversation, back in 2003. His case was simple: the Web we had then was underdeveloped and inadequate. Specifically, it was static. Yes, it changed over time, but not in a real-time way. For example, we could search in… Continue reading
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Geography forever
When I was walking to school in the second grade, I found myself behind a group of older kids, arguing about what subjects they hated most. The consensus was geography. At the time I didn’t know what geography was, but I became determined to find out. When I did, two things happened. First, I realized… Continue reading
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Research assignments
I’m looking for two things here. First is the percentage of advertising devoted to “branding.” I’ve read 90% somewhere, but I need more than hearsay or partial recall. In fact, I’m in the market for any hard numbers on the subject of advertising. This is for a book I’m writing, and my sources need to… Continue reading
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The World Live Library
My great uncle Jack Dwyer worked in the shipping and steamship business through the first half of the last century. He also took a lot of pictures, including my favorite family photo of all time. (I’m the kid with the beer.) I was going through a bunch of these on Flickr yesterday, when I noticed… Continue reading
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A new path
Sitting in the Harvard Law Library, where John Palfrey is about to give what I sense will be a landmark lecture, on the occasion of his chair appointment as Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. So I’m taking notes here. [Later… John’s own notes — the abstract for his talk… Continue reading
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Where did “Chinese Wall” come from?
The meaning of the term “Chinese wall” is clear. It’s a virtual partition meant to keep potentially conflicted interests apart: a private partition meant to keep interests apart, even if what’s happening on both sides is obvious to the other. What’s not clear, at least to me, is where the term came from. Wikipedia’s Chinese wall… Continue reading
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Beyond caveat emptor
First, three posts by JP Rangaswami: Does the Web make experts dumb? Does the Web make esperts dumb, Part 2: who is the teacher? Does the Web make experts dumb, Part 3: the issues His bottom line in the last of those: “… people are saying the web dumbs us down. This is wrong. The… Continue reading
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For your soul’s bibliography
I’ve been so heads-down working on a book, and prepping for this this week’s workshop, that I haven’t blogged anything in a while. Normally blogging is a steam valve for my work, but tweeting does more of that now. (Which is too bad, because tweets are snow on the water. Or at least it seems… Continue reading