Mario Is All Grown Up: How Gaming is Gaining Societal Influence

I must admit, I’m not much of a gamer. Even the word conjures images of nerdy teenagers sitting in front of their computer shooting aliens with a joystick. I’m not trying to offend all you gamers out there, in fact that’s the opposite of the point of this post. While I was [...]

Wikipedia: Knowledge as a Social Tool

This week, I finished reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody.  In his book, Shirky examines group efforts, and how the internet has given them great power to “organize without organization.”  Online groups are limitless in their number of members and categories.  You can find a group for almost anything on the internet.  How about people [...]

Google: The [Good] Database of Intentions

Since it’s official inception in 1997, Google has continued to move more towards “the perfect search,” as John Battelle puts it in his book “The Search.”  While the definition of a perfect search has evolved as much as the index of Web pages it pulls from, Google has managed to “de-computerize” the search engine, making [...]

Will the Economy Shorten the Long Tail?

In his book, “The Long Tail,” Chris Anderson argues that our culture and economy is shifting away from a focus on a small number of mainstream “hits,” and moving towards a large number of niche products that lengthen the tail of the demand curve.  One needs to only examine Amazon.com to see how the digital [...]

Blogs: The Evolution of Conversations

This is my first official blog entry. While I like to think of myself as moderately tech-savvy, I must admit blogging is a world that I haven’t ventured into yet. That being said, I thought it appropriate to comment on what NOT to do when blogging, as discussed in detail in Naked Conversations. [...]