Evolution or Revolution?
4 November 2009 Tim asks what the difference is ‘between peaceful evolution and continuous revolution. Is CD a revolutionary argument that peaceful evolution does not exist?’ I suspect that what he...
View ArticleThe end of email?
8 November 2009 This may be a bit rich coming from me, but perhaps expressions like ‘winners and losers’ and ‘creative destruction’ have reinforced a crudely gladiatorial view of the complex patterns...
View ArticleThe free lunch
15 November 2009 The sharpest comments I’ve seen on Rupert Murdoch’s latest pronouncement were from Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing and John Gapper in the Financial Times. (In an interview, which is...
View ArticleIn defence of heretics
4 December 2009 Cormac McCarthy announced this week that he is auctioning the Olivetti he has been using since 1963. Why do some people cling stubbornly to a technology that everyone else thinks is...
View ArticleHow evil is Google?
20 January 2010 Google’s announcement that it is no longer prepared to cooperate with the Chinese authorities in ‘filtering’ search results and may pull out of the country altogether is proof positive...
View ArticleThe Network Effect
February 11, 2010 The Economist recently published a special report on social networking, which attributed Facebook’s extraordinary growth to ‘the network effect’. This is more or less true but the...
View ArticleWinners and prizes
21 February 2010 I discussed last week how different combinations of network effects and positive feedback loops have enabled a few winners to take something close to all the prizes in some markets....
View ArticleHitler, History and feedback loops
17 August 2010 Part of my long summer break was spent writing a new talk, Winner Takes All , and thinking further about the role feedback loops and network effects played in the rapid rises of...
View ArticleMore runaway trains
21 August 2010 (Part 2 of post of 17 August) The French Revolution was another striking example of history moving like a runaway train. The monarchy had been in dire financial and moral straits for...
View ArticleApple v Google, not quite a death match
18 January 2011 Robert Lane Greene has written a sparkling account in Intelligent Life of the growing rivalry between Google and Apple. For years Steve Jobs was an inspiration to Larry Page and Sergey...
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