.:justwerks software:.

I saw that Amazon's chief technology officer, Werner Vogels, has picked up on the album-a-year meme over at his blog. It seems to me that a guy who's running a heavy-metal utility computing operation should be a serious headbanger, and Vogels, I'm relieved to say, does not disappoint. Fresh Cream, Live at Leeds, Back in Black, Raising Hell, Appetite for Destruction, Nevermind, Rage Against the Machine: yeah, you bet your ass I'd entrust my mission-critical...

A recent edition of Science featured a worrying paper by University of Chicago sociologist James A. Evans titled Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship. Seeking to learn more about how research is conducted online, Evans scoured a database of 34 million articles from science journals. He discovered a paradox: as journals begin publishing online, making it easier for researchers to find and search their contents, research tends to become more superficial. Evans...

Since the publication of my essay Is Google Making Us Stupid? in The Atlantic, I’ve received several requests for pointers to sources and related readings. I’ve tried to round them up below. The essay builds on my book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, particularly the final chapter, “iGod.” The essential theme of both the essay and the book – that our technologies change us, often in ways we can neither...

Discussions of my Atlantic article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, continue. Edge has been hosting a forum with comments from Danny Hillis, Kevin Kelly, Larry Sanger, George Dyson, Jaron Lanier, and Douglas Rushkoff. This past week the Britannica Blog launched a forum with posts from Clay Shirky, Sven Birkerts, Matthew Battles, and Sanger. I also contributed a reply to Shirky's piece. UPDATE: In today's Sunday Times (of London), Bryan Appleyard contemplates the costs of "chronic...

At Business Week, Sarah Lacy has a good article on the daunting challenges that software-as-a-service companies face as they try to build vibrant, profitable businesses. Some traditional software powerhouses, like SAP, are spending a lot to develop web versions of their applications, but they have little to show for the investments so far. Pursuing two radically different business models simultaneously, they're running a race with their legs tied together. Oracle, for its part, is deliberately...

Over at The Gaping Silence, Phil Edwards picks up the challenge of listing "a favorite album for every year of your life." I'm definitely game for this game, though, like Phil and for precisely the same reason, I'm going to begin the list a few years after the year I was born. There are two restrictions: only one album per year (painful!) and no repeats of artists. Here goes: 1965: The Beatles, Rubber Soul 1966:...