What is Good Writing?

July 2, 2009

A funny thing happened in the course of my last post: I committed the same error I was complaining about: putting readability before rigor. 
In an earlier version (this is where the problems began, perhaps: fussing over it too much) I had a lengthy excerpt from Seth Godin’s excellent post. In the process of making my post more readable [...]

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Beyond the ‘Free’ Debate with Malcolm Gladwell

July 1, 2009

Halfway through his review of Free: The Future of a Radical Price, it became totally clear to me. I mean, I always knew it but I didn’t appreciate the full implications until now: Malcolm Gladwell is an entertainer.
He writes to be read and enjoyed rather than to challenge and educate. He turns ideas into fashions, baubles [...]

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Make Institutions and Leaders More Fallible

June 29, 2009

Read this on O’Reilly Radar: Andy Oram getting to the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC:
I hooked my friends through the idea of an irreversible political shift. Not a regulatory regime that could be dismantled like the agencies responsible for civil rights, or a mandate that could be defunded like federal housing initiatives–no, in this case [...]

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Essential Update

June 29, 2009

First off, if you’re reading this via the Open Conceptual Essays RSS feed then you’ll want to add http://feeds.feedburner.com/BrianFrank to your subscriptions. For the past 9 months, after I merged 2 blogs together in September, I’ve been syndicating content from the same blog (brianfrank.ca) into the two different FeedBurner URLs.
Now I’m diverging again. The feed for [...]

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Our Creative Roots

June 23, 2009

A recent paper published in Science argues that our big brains aren’t what ultimately caused early human cultural development. In fact, it took maybe 100,000 years (give or take tens of thousands) for the human brain to find its mojo.
What was the secret?
Sure enough, when the critical population density was reached or there was a [...]

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Creating via Hybrid Groups

June 22, 2009

In the last post I wrote that I’d like to see a high-profile, London-based innovation centre or initiative. Then I started thinking about how TechAlliance and the Stiller Centre (and what else am I missing?) sort of fit that bill — but not quite. Some elements are missing but I couldn’t quite figure out what.
Then [...]

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It starts with you

June 18, 2009

The strange stunt pulled by some of London’s city councillors this week — calling for an economic summit while everyone else was already talking about the flurry of economic conferences in the area (e.g. Canada 3.0 and SWREC) — is a good opportunity to bring this LdnBeta initiative into a better light.
Paul Berton says “our ability to [...]

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Introduction via the Essentials

June 8, 2009

Courtesy of Mike Kujawski, here’s a list of books for anyone who needs an introduction to “all the incredible human collaboration occurring right now on a global scale”:

Wikinomics - Don Tapscott
Grown Up Digital - Don Tapscott
Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky
Groundswell - Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff
Tribes - Seth Godin
Naked Conversations - Shel Israel & Robert Scoble
The Long Tail - Chris Anderson
The [...]

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Growing the Conversation

June 8, 2009

You’ll remember last week I made a call for recommendations of blogs to include in a blogroll here. The idea was to start developing sort of a core set of common references so we’re all be ’starting on the same page’ in our conversations.
You’ll see there’s now a Blogger-style blogroll on the far right that automatically [...]

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Developing Open Cities

June 1, 2009

To succeed in the 21st century, cities will have to simultaneously thrive in a global economy, adapt to climate change, integrate a tsunami of rural and/or foreign migrants, as well as deal with innumerable other challenges and opportunities. These issues go far beyond the capacity and scope of almost any government – not to mention [...]

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