Archive Fever: Writing and thinking with oceans, memory, and attention.

No doubt the ample offerings of video clips and articles commenting on Bill Gates' upcoming last day as a Microsoft employee have folks lamenting enough already...fair enough. However, while the common meditation has been one that asks who'll fill Gates' shoes or how he'll continue to build the Gates Foundation I am excited to think about the context that he's been so influential in creating. For those in technology tribes this may seem obvious, taken for granted even, but the legacy I have found myself coming back to is that of hope and excitement. Certainly such a feeling could be just a geneaological extension of this year's election commentary. But, I don't think it is. I am really excited about what Bill Gates has made possible. I am equally, if not more, excited about what I anticipate he'll do in his future endeavors. Teaching in a humanities cohort I am all too familiar with the critiques of MSFT and Gates, sadly critiques that betray an intellec...

For those of you interested in what seems to be an immanent and very real emergence of mobile ubiquitous computing via handheld devices there is interesting news out this week on three fronts. Google announced that its much anticipated Android OS has been pushed back to a late 2008 release; my bet, expect it late rather than early fourth quarter. I was fired up after reading the recent Wired article on Android and slightly disappointed to hear of the push back. It represents the spirit of the mobile web that speaks to me most. Also, Research In Motion —maker of Blackberry handheld devices— announced earnings Wednesday and (possibly surprisingly) lowered guidance for next quarter and intimated a slower remainder of the year compared to recent analyst expectations. This summer Research In Motion will start selling its first major new BlackBerry model in more than a year—the Bold. Lastly, Apple’s 3G iPhone continues to impress me on features and price (a mere $199) AND by all accounts ...

The New York Times ran an article by Michael Fitzgerald last weekend entitled "Predicting Where You'll Go and What You'll Like" that profiled some interesting new advancements by Sense Networks . The article is a quick read and easily accessible so I won’t summarize in detail, but essentially Sense has made significant strides in data collection and pattern assessment of people’s consumer behavior facilitated by small GPS enabled devices germaine to everday life these days. Given enough data, Sense’s application Macrosense seems to be able to sort through data and establish (what seem to be) accurate probabilities for people’s consumer behaviors. Now, I’m on board with most others who spend time thinking through network science and the non-randomness of patterns and that’s not the trajectory of this post. What I am focused on is that eventually we will see a dominant way of knowing and choosing driven by wholehearted acceptance of these patterns as “real” (read s...