Text Sushi by Alf Rehn

I haven’t kept this blog up in the way I should have. I really should do something about that.

Right now, I’m leaving for the Caribbean for a vacation, but come 2007, I shall try to improve both this blog and my website more generally.

Back after January 12th…

I’ve decided it’s time to proclaim a series of things as officially dead. Most on this deadlist will not surprise you in any way, if you follow this kind of thing, and if you’ve never heard of these things, you’re so behind it ain’t even funny no more. OK, the following things are so not going to make it in 2007:

• Second Life — face it, it’s over.
• MySpace — unless you’re Kevin Federline, you’ve moved on
• Viral videos — yes, we’re bored of them already
• Proclaiming T-shirts as a new form of media — bespoke suits are the new media
• Being excited about blogs — there’s this wonderful new thing called “email” you should try…
• Thinking that economics is cool — we’ve all read Freakonomics now
• Brands — let’s pretend we never had this discussion

Listening to: I Surrender, Dear (Take 1) from the album “Monk Alone (Disc 1)” by Thelonious Monk

I love this: Adventures with the Venture Communist. The Chinese economy is an object of my fascination, and this blog post is far more enlightening than the sloppy BusinessWeek articles one comes across.

So I run across a series of odd statistics. According to the US Census bureau, approx. 25% of the world population now consists on Asian children and teens. That’s a lot of people. In fact, that’s world-changing amounts of people. Also, turns out that they are behaving just like we expect teens to act, only much, much more so. Thai teens spend three hours on the phone daily. 50% of Singapore’s teens blog actively. Chinese teens are growing up thinking that online gaming is a) a natural right, b) the normal way to socialize. It’ll be a wild ride when these kids grow up…