August Jackson's Page

Cross Post: Strategic Secrecy and Excellence

I am going to be a lazy blogger today and cross-post a forum discussion topic that I posted in the Competitive Intelligence community on Ning that explores the concept of Apple’s strategic secrecy.  My hypothesis is that Apple and other companies earn the privilege to be strategically secret (note: not completely opaque) by delivering customer [...]

Revenge of the Nerds

John Hodgman is one of my favorite nerd comedians.  I really enjoyed his exploration of the nerd aesthetic (uncertain, questioning) versus jock aesthetic (certainty, confidence) and ribbing of Barack Obama to determine whether or not he is truly the first nerd president of the modern age.  Hodgman reminds us that some have even gone so [...]

I love My MiFi!

In an effort to establish professionalism, I do try to not pimp my employer’s products or services.  I’m an unabashed user of a product on a competitor’s network (iPhone) and try to make it clear that the content here represents my own opinions and not those of my employer.  So I hope that you will [...]

Forbes gets Amazon – Sprint Relationship Wrong?

Back in January 2007 I wrote a blog entry trying to explain the basics of network neutrality one more time.  This was in response to a Forbes column by Peter Huber that claimed Content Delivery Networks such as those from Akami, were violations of network neutrality.  On the contrary, I argued, CDNs were examples of well-designed [...]

Screencasts of RSS Workflows

In preparation for my presentation on RSS at the SLA 2009 conference I created a set of screencasts of simple RSS workflows.  These workflows are very simple and straightforward. This is the most simple workflow for finding RSS feeds for standard sources such as on-line publications and blogs: Next I demonstrate the simplicity of creating a custom [...]