Roundup: Jan 17 - March 20

March 21, 2008

Since mid-January, we’ve had 16 new new articles. There were 4 articles relating to books, 4 relating to technology,  4 relating to business and economics, and 4 on thinking and philosophy. Here is a grouped list of each of the 16 new posts. But first, some interesting quick highlights.

• Most Popular Article: Ambient Presence and Virtual Social Capital
• Most Commented Article: Trollope, Fitzgerald and Holmes for the Generalist’s Soul (5)
• Least Popular Article (no correlation to quality!): How the Internet is Really Evolving

And now for the 16:

On Books

• The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr : a review of a pretty important new book, the first popular treatment of the idea that technology is going wholesale into a utility model
• Book Review and Summary: Strategic Intuition: a look at a nice complement to Gladwell’s Blink.
• The Broken Brain Books: a meta-review of recent literature that applies cognitive science ideas in novel ways to produce a new generation of self-improvement and popular science books
• How to Pick Business and Self-Improvement Books: since ribbonfarm carries so many book reviews, a meta-look at the process is in order.

On Technology

• On Japan as a Robot-Loving Nation: one of the shorter posts on ribbonfarm, with some interesting ideas in the comments.
• Ambient Presence and Virtual Social Capital: continuing the series of articles on virtual geography, the 50-foot rule and related stuff.
• How the Internet is Really Evolving: an examination of the language we use to describe the evolution of the Internet, and the underlying mental models and metaphors.
• Mousetrap 2.0: A Comicbook: the first serious Ribbonfarm stab at studying business and innovation through the graphic novel form.

On Economics and Business

• Bargaining with your Right Brain: an attempt at an unorthodox look at bargaining as collaborative-adversarial storytelling.
• Entrepreneurship, Intrapreneurship, and Cross-preneurship: an exploration of *preneurial behaviors that cross domains.
• The Varieties of Innovation Experience: when you have no clue how to build a conceptual model of a domain — in this case the personalities of researchers — start with an arbitrary taxonomy. Hey, there were other stabs at the periodic table before Mendeleev came along with the definitive one!
• Creative Destruction: Portrait of an Idea: we take a look at the concepts and history of the notion of creative destruction, from ancient times to Schumpeter.

On Philosophy

• Trollope, Fitzgerald and Holmes for the Generalist’s Soul: or perhaps we should call it “Chicken soup for the Renaissance Man’s (Person’s?) Soul.”
• The UnAha! Experience: some reflections on mathematical counter-examples and how gut insticts and Aha! certainties can be wrong.
• The Blue Tunnel: the second Ribbonfarm experiment in the graphic novel form, this time more like a picture-book story in the Dr. Seuss “Oh the places you will go” vein.
• A Map of Communication: Yet another visual-heavy post, this time around a whimsical (okay, half-serious) map of an imagined continent of communication.

If you really want to back-track, here is a link to the last roundup, which was a year-end roundup and covered everything published in 2007.

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