“And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old...

It’s been a year since I started this blog The Parallax View and from time to time I get asked if the reference is to Pakula or to Žižek. The answer is a dialectical strain of both. I’ve read too much Jameson to go for any debased attempt to read the totality that is the conspiracy. It’s...

I like this video as it combines animation, origami and commodity fetishism. Money begets money in a magical union. See Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America for some of the fantastic forms this takes – money mating with money in the tills to make more money. This is a...

A lot of waffle today on the wires and especially on Twitter about Adobe acquiring Omniture. But I wonder who will acquire Adobe? This is the Battle of the Cloud. And these are the 3 contenders: 1) Microsoft – ‘we own the software and the operating system’ 2) Cisco – ‘we own the...

Resisting all puns and correlations between cargo cults and our own somewhat moribund British attitude to production I was struck by Oliver Marks’ piece on Enterprise 2.0 and those fetishistic religions: Strategic Thinking before Operational Actions: The Enterprise 2.0 Tool Cargo Cult Problem. Oliver...

One way to beat the jams and avoid buying a luvvly Bianchi road...

Two interesting mirror discussions on the future of the intranet from the IBF’s Intranet Life blog and over at LinkedIn in the Melcrum group section. Both about the future of the intranet. Melcrum as whether social media will kill the intranet. The IBF about will the Intranet destroy the .com. All in...

There’s a good many of my compilation of social media case studies that point to using Twitter to successfully market goods or service. Few have thought of ways that Twitter itself might make money. Premium usage, advertising, pay per user, are the usual solutions proffered. Now as Erick Shonfeld...

Looks like the 1st full-blown folk devil 2.0 is shaping up in the form of China’s ‘50 cent Army’ (The Guardian) or ‘50 cent Party’ (BBC); because as Datamation proclaims the Chinese will wreck Web 2.0. What’s happening here is that the president and apparatchiks of the...

Noteworthy contrasts both sides of the pond re freedom and privacy. In America, Venture Beat reports on the New York Times and an API that opens up data from Congress which, allows developers to access data about which congresspeople represent which districts, and how they voted on specific issues. This is...