Morning is Wiser Than Evening

by Venkat on August 30, 2010

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If I had to summarize my life philosophy in one phrase, I would pick the Russian proverb, morning is wiser than evening. The phrase appears in many Russian folk-tales. I used to read these avidly as a kid. The world of Ivan the youngest of three sons, Vasilisa the beautiful and my favorite, Baba Yaga the witch, who rode around on a stove, is a sad and pensive one, but one you yearn to visit. Morals are careless afterthoughts. Russian folktales  are primarily impressionistic little gems that create a mood more than they tell a story. If you read the stories, you get a sense of where Chekov got his more grown-up inspirations. Chekov is, to me, the quintessentially Russian writer. I’ve read some Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but neither captures what I imagine the Russian landscape to be like, the way Chekov does.

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Interested in Guest Posting on Ribbonfarm?

by Venkat on August 25, 2010

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This is a call for guest posts. Interested? Read on. The open-mic stage is officially open.

Over the three years that this blog has been in existence, I’ve rarely had people guest posting. Just 4 guest posts by my count. You can view the map of the  Guest Post trail here, and start browsing here.  It’s a rather eclectic bunch: George Gibson did a review of Predictably Irrational, Marigo Raftapoulos talked about video gaming in business, Dorian Taylor talked about his own take on the lean startup movement and Michael Michalko posted about how geniuses think.

I figured it’s time to get the guest posting thing a little more organized.

This is quite a demanding audience to write for.  But if you are up for the challenge of performing for a very tough-to-please and scarily knowledgeable crowd  (but one that is very generous with praise when it is pleased), and have something stimulating to offer, I am open to contributions.

You get noticed by a significant and high-quality audience (currently around 2300 regular RSS subscribers and about 17,000 – 20,000 visits a month), and if you can impress this lot, given the caliber of comments, you’ll get some high quality readers for your own blog and/or personal connections.  And I mean high quality. I am routinely surprised to find that some high-level exec or well-known entrepreneur, writer or professor has read something on this blog (personal high point: William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and cyberpunk pioneer, tweeting my Container Shipping post; can’t find the damn tweet now; should have bookmarked it. I doubt he’s a regular though). Scares me a bit, I admit, and I basically try not to let it worry me.

Rule #1: No purely commercial stuff or blatant self-promotion.

Rule #2: Your contribution has to be “Ribbonfarmesque.” If you don’t know what that means, spend some time reading stuff on the site.

Interested? Just cut-and-paste your contribution into this contact form. Or if you prefer, use the form to send me a proposal and if if I accept it, you can email me the thing as an attachment.

And please forward this to others who might be interested.

Venkat

p.s. In case regular readers are wondering why I am soliciting guest posts now, two reasons. First, I’ve got a VERY busy few months coming up and second, after years of wondering whether this blog has a distinct identity separate from my own writing voice, I’ve finally concluded it does. There is definitely a “Ribbonfarmesque” way of seeing the world and thinking/writing about it that many others share (the term was actually coined by a reader to describe somebody else’s work, so I am not trying to slap my brand on others’ styles!).

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The Greasy, Fix-It ‘Web of Intent’ Vision

by Venkat 08.17.2010

Twitter It!The Web of Intent is a term that’s starting to get tossed around a lot, and I’ve gone from being wary about it to believing strongly in it. I was introduced to the term by Nova Spivack of Lucid Ventures about a year ago and was initially skeptical. Could Web ADD be reversed? Can [...]

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Cultural Learnings of Blogosphere for Make Benefit Glorious Blog of Ribbonfarm.

by Venkat 08.15.2010

Twitter It!I found a couple of good blogosphere conversations that took me far off my usual reading routes this week. It started with an article about whether language influences culture, Lost in Translation.  Here’s the sort of insight the new research offers: Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing [...]

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How to Take a Walk

by Venkat 08.09.2010

Twitter It!It was cool and mildly breezy around 8 PM today. So I went for a walk, and I noticed something. Though I passed a couple of hundred people, nobody else was taking a walk. There were people returning from work, people going places with purpose-laden bags, people running, people going to the store, people [...]

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Down with Innovation, Up with Imitation!

by Venkat 08.03.2010

Twitter It!Perhaps it is professional burnout, but lately I’ve been getting extremely tired of all the stupid things people say about innovation. Especially stupid positive things. A great deal of the stupidity in the conversation about innovation is driven by the desperate urge to be original for the sake of being original. There is a [...]

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Wanted: A Book Cover Designer for “Tempo”

by Venkat 07.28.2010

Twitter It!I am at that dangerous stage with my first book project, Tempo, where I am going around telling people the manuscript is “95% done,” but with the last 5% threatening to take 50% of the time by the time the it is actually done. But still, with cautious optimism, I can report that I [...]

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A Big Little Idea Called Legibility

by Venkat 07.26.2010

Twitter It!James C. Scott’s fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, examines how, across dozens of domains, ranging from agriculture and forestry, to urban planning and census-taking, a very predictable failure pattern keeps recurring.  The pictures below, from the book (used with permission from [...]

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The Right Question, Review of Shallows, Insight vs. Mind-Candy

by Venkat 07.22.2010

Twitter It!I have three off-ribbonfarm posts this week that should interest you guys. Is the Internet Making us Smart or Stupid? A guest post on VentureBeat, my review of Nick Carr’s The Shallows (a book-length build on his Atlantic piece, “Is Google Making us Stupid.” The Dangerous Art of the Right Question On the Trailmeme [...]

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The Happy Company

by Venkat 07.20.2010

Twitter It!I rarely read biographies or autobiographies of individuals or groups. This is because I rarely find accounts of success or failure by the people involved, or hired hagiographers, very believable. I usually wait for somebody to tell the story more critically, within a broader context, such as the history of a sector. But I [...]

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