This is my latest contribution to Beyond by the Weatherhead School.
Re-imagining Our Cities With Digital Innovation
Herbert A. Simon, the late management scientist and Nobel Laureate, argued that we are living in an “artificial” world, one that is shaped by man-made artifacts. Throughout human history, we have mobilized our collective power with increasingly powerful tools to transform the natural world to advance our civilization.
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As I am rushing to write a blog column for the school, I realized that I only posted one blog post last year. I will need more regular care and feeding of this site. Life is too much!
After a long long silence, I decided that it is time to start posting my blog again. Originally I wanted to set up a new site. At the end, however, I decided to keep the site, but just change the name. Over the next few days, I will start posting stories about Urban Apps & Maps 2013 Summer BITs program.
I realized that I still have the title of “in an iPod world” as the title of my blog. I started this title in 2002 when I first started a course at Case with the same title. A lot have changed since then. The iPod world has moved to iPhone world and then iPad world. Now Steve Jobs is gone and I am not sure if we will have yet another frame-breaking i-product that is worthy of the name of a blog. Back then, iPod was a revolution. I still remember the day when I first saw the physical iPod in Tokyo. I had never seen anything like that before. It was just a thing of beauty. Although iPhone has had much greater overall influence on the way I live, I think iPod was the one that inspired me more. It showed me for the first time that digital technology can change our everyday life, above and beyond mere computing. It was the first machine that I can truly love.
Anyway, sadly, it is a time for me to change the title of my blog. The system that I use (Typepad) does not make it easy to change the title of a blog once it is created. So, I will have to archive my current blog and create a new one. When my radio show program went out, the link to my web site was not properly working and I decided that I must update my on-line presence. But today, I realized that what I need is a completely new blog. I will try to think about the design over the next few weeks and hope to start the new blog in the new year. In the mean time, if you have any suggestions for the title of the new blog, please let me know.
I am testing an iPhone-based blogging client iBlogger by the same people who wrote Ecto, a Mac blogging client that I have been using for many years.
One of the problems I have is that it is not that easy to link other sites and pages into my posting. But if you have something to post on-the-go, it might be a good platform.
Mobile Blogging from here.This is the image of word clouds based on my blogs since its conception. It was done through http://wordle.net/.
Washington Post has an interesting story about Japanese blogging. It is worth watching this video. One thing stuck in my mind. “While Americans often blog to stand out, Japanese blog to fit in.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mmedia/player/wpniplayer_viral_300.swf?vid=111407-17v_title
Well, I made some changes on the design of the site. It is not perfect, but I will live with it for now.
My old blog site at yoo.temple.edu has been down for some time as it became a magnet for the spammers who are looking for a place to post their “comments”. Although I could have spent hours to reconfigure the server to prevent this from happening, I did not have time or will to do it. So, a simple solution was to turn the server off. As I was thinking about other ways to blog, it seems to me that it might be a good idea to get my own domain name and host my site outside of the university’s network. After poking here and there, I decided to start my new blog here at TypePad. Once it is settled, I will get my own domain name.
So, here it is. My very first blog here. As I did when I was very active with my own blog back at Case, I will try to write at least once a day. I will also introduce myself and my work through this new site as well.
