The Barnes Family

I came across this (thanks, Stephanie!) this afternoon: it’s a group of people who get together to explore home-made musical instruments, many of them combinations of mechanical and electrical or electronic components. Some of them are played in conventional ways, some make music under computer control, and some combine multiple techniques.  What’s nice about this is [...]

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design—it’s a community and a conference, held in Monterey each year. Their tag line is “ideas worth spreading”, and they publish videos of many of the short (under 20 minute) talks from the conference each year. This one is about music, and shows some work from MIT’s Media Lab that [...]

Music connects us. We celebrate the richness of life through creativity—expression of beauty, pain, our reality. Our task is to create better thoughts and feelings so people can be united. Unity is the result of letting go of the walls we build in our minds. Learning to say “yes!”—first to ourselves; then to each other. I’m looking up at [...]

I wrote a while ago about Web 2.0, and the connections between people that it enables. I still think that’s perhaps the most important social impact of Web 2.0, and the real difference from a user standpoint. But there’s another angle, which is the development side. When I moved beyond static web pages I learned about [...]

I just returned from three interesting days in Tempe, Arizona, at the Frost and Sullivan Sales and Marketing MindXchange. This is a highly interactive event - workshops, facilitated discussions, and a lot of networking. I was somewhat skeptical at first, but it turned out to be a good thing for several reasons: The quality of the [...]

Ray Kurtzweil is not only a respected technologist and innovator, he is also known as something of a futurist. His latest book, The Singularity is Near, argues that technology will radically change our experience of living, and will fix a lot of the things that eventually kill us. There’s a summary of some of the [...]

At www.notesfromtheroad.com (he got the URL before me!) you will find a great site that’s described thus: Notes from the Road is a project in experimental travel writing - it is about subjective travel; the kind of real world of random things and real people. The author is Erik Gauger, and I’m impressed with his photos and [...]

There are lots of definitions, but I think the most useful aspect of Web 2.0 is the way these technologies connect individuals. I saw a statistic the other day suggesting that 60% of online news content is now published by individuals, rather than networks and portals. That’s a huge change. Web 2.0 is based on the realization [...]

I had the chance to attend a panel discussion in London this week - at the Serpentine Gallery, in the inflatable bubble building. The topic was Web 2.0 - the set of techniques upon which this site is based. The meeting was sponsored by Banner - a UK agency that’s part of the WPP group. It was [...]

It’s frustrating that the public don’t seem to have enough information to make a good judgement. I’ve heard about statistically improbable differences between exit polls and the returned vote count, but here is the most detailed and damning discussion of the topic I’ve ever seen - reported in Rolling Stone in June. The article by [...]