Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

City Brights: Howard Rheingold : Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it)

To oversimplify, I think successful use of Twitter means knowing how to tune the network of people you follow, and how to feed the network of people who follow you.

Sidekick debacle: The cloud is a lie | TechBlog | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle

I’ll be blunt: I don’t trust cloud computing. I don’t care how big the vendor is or how reputable its service has been in the past. Systems and people fail. I’ll do my best not to be in the way when they do.

Twitter is tomorrow’s email… technology adoption in organisations « BASIC CRAFT

In 2004 – in Lithuania, of all places – Professor Stephen Coleman introduced me to a four-phase model for understanding how new technologies are adopted and influenced by organisations.

Don’t know if he came up with it directly but finding it beautifully simple and functional, I’ve used it countless times since to make sense of how technology use is developing in organisations I have worked for or with.

Unboxed – I.B.M Tries to Help Cities Work Smarter – NYTimes.com

“The mistake people make is to think that collecting the data is the endgame,” said Michael R. Bloomberg, the mayor of New York. The real payoff, he said, takes another step. “We actually use the data,” he noted.

Joho the Blog » [berkman] Viktor Mayer-Schönberger on the virtue of forgetting

For millennia, forgetting was easy, and remembering was hard, says Viktor. So, we’ve come up with ways to pass on our memories. The oral tradition. Painting. Writing. “But these tools have not altered the fundamental fact that for us humans, forgetting is easy, and remembering is time-consuming and expensive.” The book and the photo also haven’t altered this fact. What is long past fades in our mind. We depreciate what is no longer relevant. But because forgetting is biological, we never had to develop explicit strategies to forget. Now we’ve moved from biologically forgetting to permanent remembering.
This has happened because storage is cheap in the digital world. And we’ve gotten much better at retrieving information. And we have global access. Remembering has become the default.