"Frictionless sharing has the same drawback as “effortless poetry”: its final products are often intolerable. It’s one thing to find an interesting article and choose to share it with friends. It’s quite another to inundate your friends with everything that passes through your browser or your app, hoping that they will pick something interesting along the way."

"Let’s rate our technologies for how much they help us as primates, rather than how they can put us further into this dream of being powerful gods who stalk around on a planet that doesn’t really matter to us."

Emergent technology is the most powerful single driver of change in the world, and it has been forever. Technology trumps politics. Technology trumps religion. It just does. And that’s why we are where we are now. It seems so self-evident to me that I can never go to that Technology: threat or menace? position. Okay, well, if we don’t do this, what are we going to do? This is not only what we do, it’s literally who we are as a species. We’ve become something other than what our ancestors were.

"My plan for this project is to make my way down and back up Essex Road in Islington from number one to number 400-odd visiting every business along the way."

"In Mad Men we watch a group of people who live in a prosperous society that offers happiness and order like never before in history and yet are full of anxiety and unease. They feel there is something more, something beyond. And they feel stuck. I think we are fascinated because we have a lurking feeling that we are living in a very similar time. A time that, despite all the great forces of history whirling around in the world outside, somehow feels stuck."

"So which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture? Which companies are "in the software business" in this respect? As Yahoo discovered, the area covered by this rule is bigger than most people realize. The answer is: any company that needs to have good software."

"In the cozy confines of personal life, we rarely used the power of numbers. The techniques of analysis that had proved so effective were left behind at the office at the end of the day and picked up again the next morning. The imposition, on oneself or one’s family, of a regime of objective record keeping seemed ridiculous. A journal was respectable. A spreadsheet was creepy. And yet, almost imperceptibly, numbers are infiltrating the last redoubts of the personal. Sleep, exercise, sex, food, mood, location, alertness, productivity, even spiritual well-being are being tracked and measured, shared and displayed."

"My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times. How could I disagree? It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art."

"This helps me understand what happened to blogging when the prospects of financial reward crept in. It changed everything. And, presumably, unless people read and understand this, it's going to happen again when new creative tools are invented."

"I remain convinced that _in principle_, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form."

This is brilliant. But argh, Farmville. "The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness."

"Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change."

"Those frustrated with Twitter are frustrated because they have a belief that a story needs a beginning, middle, and end. And that it should have all of those parts before it’s presented to them. What the hell am I supposed to learn from a tweet? The point of Twitter isn’t knowledge or understanding, it’s merely connective information tissue. It’s small bits of information carefully selected by those you’ve chosen to follow and its value isn’t in what they send, it’s how it fits into the story in your head."

"There is a similar craftman’s spirit (“shokunin kishitsu” or “shokunin katagi”) in Europe. Yet in Europe I can see it coming alive only from a certain level of sophistication. –In Japan, even ordinary jobs such as cleaning and cooking are filled with this craftman’s spirit. It is is common sense in Japan."

"Covers technological, scientific, and cultural trends that are changing - and will change - human beings in fundamental ways."

"There is a cancer in the collective American soul — a mercy deficit that has in recent years grown as alarmingly as the budget deficit. Nor is it as simple as a left/right thing: no political party has a monopoly on merciless behaviour. Rather, a creeping draconian absolutism has cast its penumbra across the entire arena of public discourse, tainting every debate, poisoning and hardening attitudes across the board."

"Full-body animal pajama with hoods or hats styled after animals are also called Kigurumi, but do not have the same "costume" connotation as the full-body suits. They are worn non-commercially and are another form of Japanese street fashion. People who choose to wear kigurumi in public are often referred to as "kigurumin", and the consumer-level costumes they tend to wear are known as "disguise pajama"."

"I tend to see _why more as an artist. He used a wide variety of mediums for his exploration: Written word, drawings, code, and even music."

"The procession of technological discoveries is inevitable. When the conditions are right — when the necessary web of supporting technology needed for every invention is established — then the next adjacent technological step will emerge as if on cue. If inventor X does not produce it, inventor Y will."

So what is the organisation's end goal? Bowdler puts it simply: "To engage people with science who would not otherwise choose to immerse themselves in the subject."

"When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it."

It's funny because it's true.

a term used in the history of architecture, design, and archaeology. It refers to a derivative object which retains ornamental design cues to structure that was necessary in the original. Skeuomorphs may be deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar, such as copper cladding on zinc pennies or computer printed postage with circular town name and cancellation lines."

Another brilliant talk from Matt Webb.

"Kiddie Records Weekly began in 2005 as a one year project devoted to the golden age of children's records. This period spanned from the mid forties through the early fifties and produced a wealth of all-time classics. Many of these recordings were extravagant Hollywood productions on major record labels and featured big time celebrities and composers. Over the years, these forgotten treasures slipped off the radar and it became our mission to give them a new lease on life by sharing them with today's generation of online listeners."

"If the UX architect at AA.com is actually pretty good, then why does the site suck so much?"

"This website contains over 650 posters from the National Theatre Archive. Beautiful photographic quality prints are available in a range of sizes and prices, supplied ready for framing and delivered to your door."

"Remix your favourite song into a bangin' hard dance anthem." Supported by the University of Sussex?

"Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal."

"Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history."

"An example of cognitive bias in which "people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it". They therefore suffer an illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average."

"Wired, [Albert Read] suggests, may not really be a tech magazine at all. "It's a magazine about innovation and the future, and should not be narrowly confined to technology in people's minds," he says. "You read Wired if you see yourself as a forward thinker or an early adopter." I'm looking forward to seeing how this turns out.

"Art bollocks has become institutionalised, normalised and is now practically the default way of writing about art and culture for seasoned journalists and a-level students alike. Like Orwell’s Newspeak, art bollocks is variously used in a knowing way, as an in-joke, a private language, a posture, or maybe out of fear – to maintain some questionable status among equally questionable peers."

"It turns out that Best Buy has embraced the use of social media to empower it’s employees and reaped massive productivity gains as a result."

Ex-Jockey Slut types in new online music magazine venture.

I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.

"The old digital agency model is not helpful today. Instead, the industry can learn a lot from social start-ups (like Vimeo - who I am in love with, or SoundCloud) and work as fast as possible, being entrepreneurial, pragmatic, and nimble [...] People in traditional agencies - ‘old new media’ and our cousins in advertising - say they find all of the above quite challenging - which is weird because these agencies are stuffed with really smart people."

"Time is the most perishable good in the world, and it is not replenishable. You can’t earn an extra hour to use on a busy day. Nonetheless, we usually have a vague feeling that there is plenty of time — somewhere in the future — so we waste it now and carelessly steal time from our families, friends or ourselves when we come up short at the end of a workday and need to stay an extra hour."

Designers Republic goes under. "I’ve never liked that agency model - it’s not where creativity lies. DR accidentally ended up there in order to service bigger clients. I’m not being ungrateful to the people who ran the business side at DR – it wasn’t their fault. I’m glad we did it - it took getting there to make me realise that it wasn’t where I wanted to be."

"Take a springtime stroll through the streets of Belbury. This provincial English town, created by CS Lewis in his allegorical novel That Hideous Strength, is also the imaginary home of the electronic eccentrics Belbury Poly. There are Tudor buildings next to modernist municipalities; spots of Arcadian reverie and pleasant public gardens with fountains and statues of nymphs; and, on the outskirts, green fields, unexplained crop circles, haunted woodlands and ancient stone monoliths dedicated to pagan deities. Listen to Belbury Poly’s most recent album, The Owl’s Map, and you’ll find all of this invoked by some of the most delightful electronica to arise in Britain since Aphex Twin, the Black Dog and Global Communication in the early 1990s."

"Neal Stephenson delivered a talk entitled The Fork: Science Fiction versus Mundane Culture at Gresham College. Four professors discuss the origins of science fiction, its overlap with other genres and its developments over more than a century."

"To mark the 70th anniversary of the [Orwell] diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written."

"The busyness economy works on face time, incremental improvement, strategic long-term planning, return on investment, and hierarchical control. The burst economy, enabled by the Web, works on innovation, flat knowledge networks, and discontinuous product

Looks like Zappos is doing things right.

"Interesting2007 was a conference that happened on the 15th June at the Conway Hall, London. This site isn't so much an archive of the event as a collation of the traces and remains it's left scattered over the internet."

"Steal This Wiki is a collaborative update of Abbie Hoffman's seminal work, "Steal This Book"."

"An outpost for curious divergent thinkers who appreciate new ideas from a wide mix of sources. Completely random and updated regularly, inspiration drawn from - and relevant to - the larger creative world."

"Ten things Google has found to be true". Classic vision.

"Science groups for young professionals who don’t wear white coats, like the year-old Secret Science Club at Union Hall, are cropping up in bars and bookstores all over the country." Great idea!

"This Flickr support thread is a must-read if you’re interested in online communities, and in particular, how they change as they grow."

"When we first started dabbling in Second Life we quickly realized that something interesting Penguin could do would be to bring William Gibson into this strange new place, a place he seemed to have predicted and described years ago..."

"When you see your client's pubic bone, something has changed."

"Baby - a vast parisitic cultural organism feeding off the love expounded in pop songs."

"The way Google organises knowledge raises fears that in the process understanding will be crushed. Tony Curzon Price identifies a problem and points to a solution."

"People ask me, "How can I get our employees to be passionate about the company?" Wrong question. Passion for our employer, manager, current job? Irrelevant. Passion for our profession and the kind of work we do? Crucial."

"When it comes to creating a successful international website, language isn’t everything. Many other factors come into play, all of which require knowledge about your target market."

They're the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat "movie-literate."

"inds the best ethical, Fair Trade and environmentally friendly products and services available and brings them together in one easy-to-access place."

Go see!

"Self-Described 'Nerds' Put Their Own Stamp on Famed Electronics Retail District"

"Tom Stoppard [...] will be back in the West End this autumn. He’s written a new English-language version of a hit French play by Gerald Sibleyras called Le Vent de Peupliers, which will receive its UK premiere at the West End’s Wyndham’s Theatre on

"The old adage used to be "you are what you eat.'' But with the advent of digital music and the popularity of gadgets like the iPod, now it's "you are what's on your playlist.''"

"Whats on your ipid play list? You are what's on your playlist Experts say digital music library reflects listener's personality"

"The four-storey, steel-framed cultural centre now houses the Vortex jazz club, removed here from Stoke Newington, as well as a cafe, shop, gallery and artists' studios."

Japan travel guide, information on Japan and Japanese culture.