About

Ribbonfarm.com is a blog about seeing things with different eyes (that’s the “refactored perception” bit), written by me,  Venkatesh Rao. The topics range from philosophy, art and sociology to business, innovation and technology. I post about once a week, and pieces are usually at least a thousand words long. I started writing the blog on July 4th, 2007 (significance somewhat intended). I am also working on a book on the interplay of timing and decision-making, tentatively titled Tempo. I live in Arlington, VA, with my wife and two cats. All the views expressed on this site are mine alone and do not reflect the views of my employer (Xerox).

Press

Ribbonfarm has been featured on Slashdot, Kottke.org and  the New York Times. I have guest-blogged on Mashable, Silicon Angle and other tech-sector blogs.

The Elevator Pitch/411

I work at the Xerox Innovation Group, where I manage trailmeme.com, and am involved in a couple of other Web technology projects to do with content management and online marketplace technologies. Before I came to Xerox, I was a postdoc at Cornell, working on Air Force sponsored research on command and control. Between 1997-2003, I was at the University of Michigan, working on my PhD, which was on aircraft and spacecraft formation dynamics. I took a year off from graduate school, in 2000-2001, to work at a pioneering online community, Sulekha.com.

About the name…

The name ribbonfarm refers to the ribbon farms of 18th century Detroit — strips of lands 2-3 miles long, each with 2-300 yards along the Detroit river waterfront — that the then governor invented to resolve water disputes. I thought it was a great metaphor for a blog trying to get its thin slice of attention from the great river of eyeballs that is the Web. Here is a picture (courtesy, Detroit Public Library) of an 1818 map of Detroit that shows the ribbon farms.

About the tag-line

By experiments in refactored perceptions I mean changing how I see the world by trying to rewire the software in my head through writing. My little geek joke.