General

Privileged Information

Monday, October 23rd, 2006

A thought-provoking review appeared in the October 13 2006 issue of the Times Literary Supplement:

Privileged information has been leaking into the public domain since the Reformation. During the 1530s, in England, records that for centuries been restricted legal and religious texts were transformed into historical documents… [T]hey were picked up by… the antiquarian, who [...]

A Great Idea to Save the World

Monday, October 23rd, 2006

How many world-shaking ideas have you had in stop-and-go traffic, meditating on those Pennsylvania license plates URLs that seem to change every year? I’ve had 53 — but I can’t remember any of them.
Enter DictaBrain.
DictaBrain gets World-Shaking Idea #54 out of your head and onto your blog (or your book, or your [...]

Wall Street Journal Exposes Names@Work

Monday, September 11th, 2006

The Wall Street Journal today, in a long article about book publishing on the Web, completely blew Names@Work’s cover as the producer of “Pulse.” There’s a long expose, in which we are accused of doing “innovative marketing.” Take that, Red Baron!

Rusinga Island, Kenya

Thursday, June 15th, 2006

Fisherman at sunset, Lake Victoria
Just back from two weeks in Kenya. It was sort of a vacation. Probably better than a vacation, though I had to tromp around in the hot sun with 25 lbs of photographic glass on my back. I managed to get myself attached to a paleontological expedition as [...]

Design Hell

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

Dealing with some designers is hell. I’m talking about designers who think they know what a good design is and blather on about their superior knowledge. They don’t know what good design is. There’s no way they could. They might have a better idea of what might work, but it’s just [...]

Where did you want to go yesterday?

Sunday, May 14th, 2006

I found neat little neat little app by yet another bright guy Google hired (George Steinbrenner, you got nothin’ for stars) that lets you show where you’ve visited in the world. Here’s mine:

create your own visited countries map
It looks a little pitiful. I’ll have to visit Russia and India to get the surface [...]

Birth of the Uncool

Saturday, April 29th, 2006

Personally I find those Bluetooth earpieces one of the least attractive pieces of technology ever invented — unless you want to look as if you’ve never had sex.
So I started thinking about past identifiers of male social cluelessness, and passing by the much-maligned pocket protector I hit upon slide rules. My father [...]

Long fat Zipf Paredo power tail curve

Sunday, March 5th, 2006

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s distinctly different take on the Long Tail.

Welcome James M. Woods!

Wednesday, February 15th, 2006

James M. Woods joins Names@Work as its Chief Operating Officer. Read the press release to see what it really means.

What does this mean?

Thursday, February 9th, 2006

We’ve just published a glossary of Internet marketing terms, and a WordPress plugin automatically links keywords that appear on our site to the glossary. Let us know what you think!