Marvellous, touching, sad short story from Jonathan Safran Foer, about how families communicate.

"Words in other languages are like icebergs: The basic meaning is visible above the surface, but we can only guess at the shape of the vast chambers of meaning below. And every language has particularly hard-to-translate terms, such as the Portuguese saudade, or "the feeling of missing someone or something that is gone," or the Japanese ichigo-ichie, meaning "the practice of treasuring each moment and trying to make it perfect."" Lovely little article on the untranslatable.

"I suppose this goes to show that, from an anthropological point of view, the truly interesting part of any human encounter is its beginning. I can instantly identify friends and colleagues from the rhythm of their knock at the door, or the slight pause before they identify themselves on the phone - those tiny gestural and auditory signatures, both idiosyncratic and culturally produced, that make us human." Greetings and openings, principally, to do with telephones.

"Seems to me people help people go through stuff, life and things. Technology and infrastructures are not the only tool we have and social interactions count more in my opinion. When technology fails, you’ll still have to ask for directions whether you like it or not :) and whether you think your laptop is user-friendly or not is absolutely not related to your gender."

"In business, words are like fashion. You try a word on because important people around you are saying it and getting results, but you may not actually know what it means." Rands helps you discover what the words actually mean. As usual, he is right.

"Clatter is a wireless IM Lens instant messaging system built on to a soft contact lens. Clatter differs from other, commercial lens services by being open source and "riding" other services to create free cross-platform access." From Warren Ellis' Doktor Sleepless.

"In the 14 months since [TeamFortress 2] shipped, the PC version of the game has seen 63 updates – “that’s the frequency you want to be providing updates to your customers,” [Newell] adds. “You want to say, ‘We’ll get back to you every week. The degree to which you can engage your customer base in creating value for your other players” is key, says Newell. “When people say interesting or intelligent things about your product, it will translate directly into incremental revenue for the content provider.”" Great write-up from Chris Remo of Gabe Newell's DICE talk.

"One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs (yes he knew about them) was that "you got messages rather than conversations." That's about as an accurate summation of our times as any." A wonderful quotation in the midst of this dense, fascinating article.

"CRM training encompasses a wide range of knowledge, skills and attitudes including communications, situational awareness, problem solving, decision making, and teamwork; together with all the attendant sub-disciplines which each of these areas entails. CRM can be defined as a management system which makes optimum use of all available resources - equipment, procedures and people - to promote safety and enhance the efficiency of flight operations."

"Changing the Game (order via Amazon or B&N) is a fast-paced tour of the many ways in which games, already an influential part of millions of people’s lives, have become a profoundly important part of the business world. From connecting with customers, to attracting and training employees, to developing new products and spurring innovation, games have introduced a new level of fun and engagement to the workplace.

Changing the Game introduces you to the ways in which games are being used to enhance productivity at Microsoft, increase profits at Burger King, and raise employee loyalty at Sun Microsystems, among other remarkable examples. It is proof that work not only can be fun--it should be." I shall have to check this out.

"As the population of the system grows, everyone's personal horizons begin to shrink. With enough people, eventually you're talking to the people right in your neighborhood. To get a message to someone across the country, you might lie about your location, or ask that it be passed on, Milgram-style." Filtering by proximity in a restrictive - but potentially more useful - manner. Interesting.

"You might argue that an iPhone without connectivity is, well, an iPod, but its not. To state the (obviously overlooked) obvious - it is a phone without connectivity and that over time the ease and evolving practice of disconnecting fundamentally changes our assumptions of what we can expect from a phone, which in turn alters our expectations about the connectivity of other people." Jan Chipchase on pause buttons and understandings of what "social" means. Excellent.

"The value lies in the network of people and how they illuminate the things I don’t know." Rands hits the nail on the head. It's about who you know, and how you make use of them. Just like real-world friends. Hint: Scoble is using it wrong.

"One-Sheeters are quick and easy marketing tools for information architects. They're like mini brochures to advertise IA deliverables and promote the IA practice in your company."

"Osmo Wiio is a Finnish researcher of human communication. His laws of communication are the human communications equivalent of Murphy’s Laws"

"With FamSpam, your family has one email address everyone can use to send messages, reply to conversations, or share photos." An interesting approach to a fairly common problem - wonder how successful it'll be.

Exhaust data is, I think, a clear case of "phatic communication." This is communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of emotional and social content. [It] doesn't get much said, but it has social effects so powerful, it gets lots done

Communication is inescapable, irreversible, complicated, and contextual. Nice summation of many of the issues around communicating with other people. Reminds me how little I'm going to miss transatlantic teleconferencing.

Pneumatic messaging tubes. Awesome.

The quality of a representation that makes it easy to handle, discuss, reshape, pass on: this is how semiotcratic it is.

"the strength of social contact between people cannot be measured by frequency or intensity; a better measure is the number of communication channels used by people" - I like Chris' ideas, but need to think a bit harder on them.

Guilty of half of these (at points). They usually didn't matter - but I'll be some more in mind for the future.

"'Urban Legend' doesn't refer to the message content; it refers to the transmission protocol." Bookmarked not for the agile stuff, but for this quotation.