The first month of operation turned out to be pretty exciting. Ribbonfarm.com went from zero to 17 articles at a brisk average pace of just over an article every two days. The business, economics, philosophy and thinking themes saw the most development, which sort of surprised me, since I’d assumed I’d be able to develop the science and technology themes the fastest. Here is an article-by-article overview of the action, with highlights of the comments section, and for those of you prefer listening to reading, my first ever experiment with podcasting. The podcast provides an overview commentary of the first month’s activity on the site, and also has a sneak preview of upcoming action. It’s going to take me a while to learn this game, so you can have some fun sniggering at my umms, aahs and run on sentences in the meantime.
July 2007 Roundup (22 minutes, 20 MB)
Do let me know if you have problems accessing the podcast, or if you have suggestions for making that better, since this is a very new and still uncomfortable medium for me. I’ll figure out how to optimize the size of the thing soon, so apologies for the 20 MB size.
Overview
A total of 17 posts got out the door in July, in the following themes. This is one possible exhaustive-and-mutually-exclusive listing of articles that I hope suits a lot of people. But your interests might mean you are best off cherry-picking a piece or two from each thematic cluster rather than following the contours of my breakdown.
In the Business/Economics categories, there were 7 articles:
- Book Review: Wikinomics provides a critical summary of the first navigation guide for the virtualized world
- Book Review: Competing on Analytics takes a detailed look at the new book that preaches statistics-as-competitive-advantage
- The 15 Laws of Meeting Power has some Machiavellian advice on how to influence groups and earns me the label of sociopath from a reader
- A retrospective look at Clayton Christenson’s Innovator’s Dilemma in Disruptive vs. Radical Innovations
- A two part series on the notion of a silo: The Silo Reconsidered and Silos and the Art of Empirical Theology
- The House of Tata and Indian Innovation takes a look at the emerging Indian multinational from my hometown, Jamshedpur
Next, in the broad theme of philosophy and thinking, there were 6 articles:
- Concepts and Prototypes examines how we deal with abstract concepts, such as ‘triangle’ through prototypical instances
- How to Define Concepts continues the thread by providing some introspection on how we actually arrive at definitions of slippery ideas, by reflecting on the process of defining concavity in geometric figures
- Harry Potter and the Concept of Magic sneaks in some metaphysical analysis by piggybacking on the Harry Potter series
- The Third Dimension is Not Simple is a meditation on the nature of three dimensional thought and action
- Framing the Consciousness Debates kicks off a major Ribbonfarm theme: the mystery of consciousness
- Breadth-Depth Metaphors and Beyond looks at the metaphors we use to organize human knowledge
In Science and Technology, there were 2 pieces
- Book Reviews: The Trouble with Physics and Not Even Wrong took a look at 2 recent books that criticize superstring theory and its dominance of physics (this was the most popular article of the month)
- Visualizing the 2d World with Cartograms provides an introduction to a neat visualization technique for geospatial data
Finally, two pieces in the culture section continue the Harry Potter thread that started in Philosophy
- Harry Potter and the Leaky Genre examines the reasons behind the success of the series
- Harry Potter and the Cuaron Slam looks at the reasons behind the literary and cinematic merits of the third part of the series, in terms of a robotics metaphor
Would you like this review and roundup to be more or less frequent? Do you enjoy listening more than reading? Would you like to see audio version of some of my articles? Post comments and let me know.
About Venkatesh Rao
