Faneuil Media

The contrarian in me surfaced last week when I read Rich Gordon’s advice to, “Build a network, not a destination.”
Rich is absolutely right, but the current network-building mania among news sites reminds me of the late-90s portal-building mania.
“Portal” is that all-encompassing term used to describe news sites’ efforts to build out verticals and create functions […]

Malcolm Gladwell’s article in last week’s New Yorker, Open Secrets, is well worth the read.
The piece is build on a distinction between puzzles and mysteries:
Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, […]

When I took my first look at the data for our Massachusetts campaign finance maps this fall, I nearly jumped out of my seat.
According to the Massachusetts Office of Campaign & Political Finance, my mother had given more than the legal limit to Deval Patrick. It turned out that there had been a credit-card foul-up, […]

If you spend time thinking about investments in online classifieds and content, this piece by Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAffee is worth reading.McAffee coined the term Enterprise 2.0 a few months ago. In this piece he contrasts evaluation of traditional corporate investments (e.g., widget assembly lines) to less-tangible technology investments (e.g., wikis). I think […]