After we had our Building43 launch party I wanted to explore more why small groups of people are so much better for actually learning something. By the way, Michael Sean Wright put together a neat little video of our launch party. He’s the one who produces Peter Himmelman’s awesome show on Tuesday nights. Anyway, we’ve found that if you are throwing a party, somewhere around 200 people is the right number (or fewer). I’ve been to quite a few TechCrunch parties with 800 or so, and they just aren’t as satisfying. This holds true for weddings, too. I’ve been…
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Robert Scoble
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Really Secret Scoble
2 Jul 2009 | 2:50 am -
How @loumongello turned vacation at Disney World into riches
2 Jul 2009 | 1:33 amI love hearing stories about how people turned their passions into a career. Lou Mongello used to be a lawyer, but he kept going back to a childhood memory: his family kept taking the family to Walt Disney World in Orlando. He turned taking his own family there into a hobby and later quit his job as a lawyer and now has a media company that publishes books, CDs, magazines, and does a weekly radio show, er, podcast, about Walt Disney World. Very popular stuff and he is hitting a monetizable audience: traveling families who will spend lots of money. Some things I learned in my interview with… -
Calling my mob: #realtimecrunchup is next week @techcrunch
2 Jul 2009 | 12:44 amSteve Gillmor has been hard at work putting together an interesting day for those of us who are interested in the real time web. The speakers lineup includes founders and executives from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, FriendFeed, TweetDeck, Meebo, WordPress, Seesmic, Virgin America, Tweetmeme, Qik, and more. But that’s not what will make this interesting. In between all the interesting panels about APIs and search and Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Mike Arrington and I will pit our mobs against each other. Or, more realistically, have a discussion about what he sees as a… -
Bing Tweets! *
1 Jul 2009 | 4:07 pmTechCrunch and others are saying that Microsoft’s Bing search engine is adding Tweets soon. Microsoft has finally figured out the strategy to compete with Google. Cut Google where they are weak. Keep cutting. Bing! This strategy is winning. Google is losing market share and hasn’t yet figured out how to respond. Hint to Google: your UI is stale. Your search results are, while getting faster (FriendFeed and Twitter posts are now getting into Google within a few minutes) still not real time and you haven’t shown any real time leadership. But where’s Yahoo? Carol? Hello? -
What was Scoble doing on an aircraft carrier? @flynavy knows
1 Jul 2009 | 2:57 pmIt’s been just about a month now since I stepped off of the USS Nimitz. Well, was flown off, more accurately. I took a month off to let is sink in just what I was there for. It is SO easy to hype up such a trip right after you get back. And I did over on Twitter and FriendFeed. But I wanted to do a blog post about what I remember of the trip. Not a long one. Enough words have been written by others to occupy your reading time for hours. More on that later. But just a short one. Here it is: young people rock. I remember standing by myself watching pilot after pilot flying aircraft onto a…
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Dave Winer
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There's a missing product
1 Jul 2009 | 2:28 amThere's a missing product in the social networking space. I'm going to try to describe it, but I think it may be hard. But I'm willing to give it a go. A little over a week ago I got an email from a very good friend in Europe asking if it was true that I was going to Reboot. I replied with an email saying it was. And I thought to myself, I thought by posting that fact to Twitter four or five times that I would have informed him of this. It is not his fault. There's a missing product. Yesterday, I was trying to figure out what to do with the four hours downtime between flights in CPH, so I… -
While you were asleep, from Copenhagen
1 Jul 2009 | 1:31 amAnother in a continuing series of overnight dispatches from your faithful European correspondent, me! This time I'm coming to you from the SAS business class lounge at CPH, a real treat. Often on my European travels I end up exiting through Amsterdam or London with time to kill at Schipol or Heathrow, and they are completely chaotic toon-town messes. In comparison, the pace at CPH is leisurely and the Danish of course are great designers, so the place is super-comfortable and pleasing to the eye. While you, in the US, were asleep -- I left Berlin, and created some memories in a set of photos… -
What of Woodstein in the Rebooted World
30 Jun 2009 | 6:16 amEvery time I write about Sources Go Direct, like clockwork, someone asks how will we get Woodward & Bernstein reporting without great reporters sniffing around for stories that bring down Presidents. Never mind that it only happened once and hasn't happened since. Only Richard Nixon has been forced from office by the press (or anyone) and it turns out that had W&B not been sleuthing, the NYT had the story too, but they blew it. So it's possible that without W&B, Nixon would have remained in office. However it's hard to imagine that he could have been worse than Bush II, who the press of today… -
While you were sleeping, from Berlin
30 Jun 2009 | 12:11 amIt's 9:11AM as I write this, and back home in California, it's just after midnight. I've done this so many times, but it still seems something of a miracle. How a day can be starting and another day be ending, all at the same time. Glad to see Scoble blogging again. I predict a return to blogging as people discover the power of being able to finish a thought, and to link to another site without going through an intermediary. Once again people will discover the power of Small Pieces, Loosely Joined. Chris Anderson is right, of course -- and uses a device to bait the press to object. Good way… -
Your Berlin correspondent
29 Jun 2009 | 1:33 amI always get a cold at about this point in a Europe trip. The jetlag must weaken me, and all the walking and sweating and temperature changes, and so forth -- I get sick. And I always do the same thing, go right through it. I'll have time to get over it when I get home. Right now I'm spending my first full day in Berlin. So far I like it. Two news items caught my eye this morning. One a controversy in the press over whether the President had the right to call on a Huffington reporter second in his last press conference, when it seemed as if the President had an idea what kind of question he…
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Guy Kawasaki
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How to Achieve Revenue
1 Jul 2009 | 10:59 amThe harsh reality of the startup scene today is that revenue is the best, and maybe only, form of funding. While many conferences focus on gaining the attention of investors, we’ve put one together that focuses on generating revenue. It’s called Revenue Bootcamp. It’s on Friday, July 10th, at the Microsoft Mountain View, California campus. Click here to learn more about it and to register. The topics include increasing traffic, selling advertising, and utilizing other revenue streams. There is also a keynote and booksigning with Chris Anderson, the author of Free: The Future… -
Reality Check Now Available in French
28 Jun 2009 | 7:39 pmVient de paraître en français: La réalité de l'entrepreneuriat Le guide irrévérencieux pour dépasser, devancer, distancer vos concurrents de Guy Kawasaki Publié en français par les Editions Diateino, avec l'aimable autorisation de Portfolio, Penguin Group. 26 euros. Ce livre, traduit par Marylène Delbourg Delphis, fait suite à L’art de se lancer, le bestseller de Guy Kawasaki traduit en 10 langues, paru en 2006 aux Editions Diateino. La réalité de l’entrepreneuriat, comme L’art de se lancer, est un livre de chevet pour tout entrepreneur, où qu’il vive. Ce livre vous… -
Sites Used at San Diego Venture Group Speech
25 Jun 2009 | 11:19 pmThese are the sites and applications that I used in today’s San Diego Venture Group speech about using social media as a marketing tool. Making Connections LinkedIn LinkedIn: Find References LinkedIn: Companies LinkedIn: Answers: Home LinkedIn: Jobs Home Jigsaw Spokeo Social Networking Facebook | Alltop Twitter / Home Twitter Corporate Examples JetBlue Dell Outlet Virgin America Amazondeals CirqueLasVegas Comcastcares Kogibbq Twitter Search Examples Monitor: guykawasaki OR alltop Monitor: comcast OR Directv Monitor: Starbucks VIA Search.twitter.com/ Camaro Camaro within 100 miles… -
How Mayo Clinic Uses Social Media
23 Jun 2009 | 4:57 pmOver at the American Express Open Forum I posted an interview with Lee Aase. He manages syndication and social media for Mayo Clinic. In this interview he explains the history of Mayo Clinic’s use of social media and how effective this effort has been. If you’re considering social media for your organization, it’s a worthwhile read. Click here to read it. -
How to Use Alltop to Add Content to Your Website, Blog, and Feed Reader
21 Jun 2009 | 10:43 amWe’ve enabled people to access and repurpose the website and blog feeds that we’ve curated at Alltop: Widget. Create a widget of any Alltop site by going here. Then you can deploy these widgets in your blogs. These widgets display the five most popular stories from the respective topic. This is a great way to add fresh content to your website or blog with very little work. To see a list of “all the topics” that may be relevant, go here. RSS feed. Grab the RSS feed of any Alltop topic by clicking on the RSS symbol in your browser’s navigation area. Then you can…
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Kara Swisher
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Yahoo Product Head and CTO Ari Balogh Speaks!
2 Jul 2009 | 2:05 pmIn BoomTown’s bold quest to annoyingly stick a Flip digital video camera in the face of every Yahoo senior exec, this week I worked the last nerve of its CTO and EVP of Products, Aristotle “Ari” Balogh. Actually, the 45-year-old Balogh is a very calm and pleasant man, especially considering the huge responsibility that has been foisted on him by CEO Carol Bartz to rejigger how Yahoo (YHOO) makes its products and services and deploy its technology in a more efficient, centralized and most of all, innovative manner. It is actually a process that was started under the previous… -
NBC Universal President and CEO Jeff Zucker: The Full D7 Interview
2 Jul 2009 | 12:37 pmJeff Zucker runs one of the world’s leading media and entertainment content companies, which is also being caught in the throes of a major shift, due to the impact of the Internet over the last decade. In this onstage interview with me at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, Zucker talks about the state of the television business; the changing advertising market; the impact of Hulu, an online premium video joint venture the GE (GE) unit NBC launched with News Corp. (NWS); and precisely what he meant when he said that the Web was turning “analog dollars into digital… -
Microsoft Adds Some Twitter Real-Time Data to Bing (And Stalks BoomTown in the Process)
1 Jul 2009 | 3:06 pmMicrosoft just announced in a blog post that it was “integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres.” Microsoft (MSFT) said it is not indexing all of Twitter in its new Bing search service–not yet, that is–nor has it made any kind of exclusive deal with Twitter to add this real-time feed. Recent tweets will be prominently displayed near the top of the search page, but could also be spread throughout the results. The feature is now rolling out, so might not be able to be… -
Tim Armstrong’s 100-Day Vision Quest Nearing End: Party in Dulles! (And Then What?)
1 Jul 2009 | 6:28 amBack on April 7, Tim Armstrong sent a memo to the long-battered troops of AOL about a 100-day vision quest the new CEO and chairman was going on to find out “how to bring back the magic of AOL.” It is now Day 86, and Armstrong is closing in on the end of a Where’s-Waldo commitment that he made then to visit all of the far-flung offices of the Time Warner (TWX) online unit globally. More importantly, as it is almost over, Armstrong also has to make good on another promise he made in that memo he sent to the staff on his first day: “The culmination of the 100-day process… -
Yahoo’s Extreme Makeover Confirmed With the Hiring of a New Global Marketing Exec
1 Jul 2009 | 3:20 amLast week, BoomTown posted a detailed piece on Yahoo’s plans for a massive rebranding and marketing push, which included the hiring of outside consultant Penny Baldwin (pictured here), who was a former top exec at Young & Rubicam. And, yesterday, Baldwin became an official Yahoo exec, as SVP of global integrated marketing and brand management. Baldwin, said Yahoo (YHOO), “will lead the company’s global brand efforts, and is responsible for developing and executing Yahoo!’s brand marketing approach including brand management, corporate messaging, integrated…
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Seth Godin
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The purpose of a book cover
2 Jul 2009 | 3:11 am(and I think it works for lots of products)Is the purpose of the cover to sell books, to accurately describe what's in the book, or to tee up the reader so the book has maximum impact?The third.It's the third because if the book has maximum impact, then word of mouth is created, and word of mouth is what sells your product, not the cover.Tactically, the cover sells the back cover, the back cover sells the flap and by then you've sold the book. If those steps end up selling a book that the purchaser doesn't like, game over. So you have to be consistent all the way through and end up creating a… -
The risk/reward confusion
1 Jul 2009 | 3:13 amIt's easy to to adopt the policy of avoiding risk at all costs, that whenever possible, the products you launch or the engagements you have should be flawless and without downside.Here's the problem: in most endeavors, a small increase in risk can double the reward. It's the second doubling of reward that brings serious risk with it. But the first leap is relatively painless.In the chart above, notice that going from point A to point B brings almost no incremental risk. It might feel scary, but rationally, it's not. Doubling reward again from B to C, though, brings significant incremental… -
Malcolm is wrong
30 Jun 2009 | 1:37 pmI've never written those three words before, but he's never disagreed with Chris Anderson before, so there you go.Free is the name of Chris's new book, and it's going to be wildly misunderstood and widely argued about.The first argument that makes no sense is, "should we want free to be the future?" Who cares if we want it? It is. The second argument that makes no sense is, "how will this new business model support the world as we know it today?" Who cares if it does? It is. It's happening. The world will change around it, because the world has no choice. I'm sorry if that's inconvenient, but… -
There's always room for Jello
30 Jun 2009 | 2:41 amThis is one of the great cultural touchstone slogans of our era. A culture where there's so much to eat we need to try to find a food that we can eat even if we're stuffed.Often, we'll decide that something is full, stuffed, untouchable but then some Jello shows up, and suddenly there's room.Think about your schedule... is there room for an emergency, an SEC investigation, a server crash? If you took a day off because of the flu, is your business going to go bankrupt? Probably not.So, if there's time for an emergency (Jello), why isn't there time for brilliance, generosity or learning? -
How to be a packager
29 Jun 2009 | 3:05 amFor fifteen years, I was a book packager. It has nothing to do with packaging and a bit more to do with books, but it's a great gig and there are useful lessons, because there are dozens of industries just waiting for you to do something like this. Let me explain:A book packager is like a movie producer, but for books. You invent an idea, find the content and the authors, find the publisher and manage the process. Book packagers make almanacs, illustrated books, series books for kids and the goofy one-off books you find at the cash register. I did everything from a line of almanacs to a book…
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Jason Kottke
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Salary vs performance in baseball
2 Jul 2009 | 12:57 pmBen Fry just updated his interactive salary vs performance graph that compares the payrolls of major league teams to their records. Look at those overachieving Rays and Marlins! And those underachieving Indians, Mets, and Cubs! Tags: baseball Ben Fry infoviz sports -
Feet up on cushion
29 Jun 2009 | 8:26 pmThings will be significantly slower than usual around here this week...I am on vacation. Aside from some sporadic updates, I'll see you next week. Tags: kottke.org -
New Yorker iPhone site
29 Jun 2009 | 7:22 pmThe New Yorker has an iPhone-specific site up. (thx, @level39) Tags: iPhone The New Yorker -
Megachurches and corporations are alike
26 Jun 2009 | 5:19 pmFrom Joseph Clarke in Triple Canopy, a comparison of the histories of the American megachurch and corporation. Lakewood and America's twelve hundred other megachurches -- congregations that draw between two thousand and fifty thousand people per weekend -- are not simply vast machines for passive spectatorship. Sunday services are convergences of worshipers who spend their weeknights at prayer groups, Bible studies, ministries, and missionary training sessions. Successful megachurches are like well-run companies, with intricate corporate structures devised to keep each member personally… -
Netflix Prize won?
26 Jun 2009 | 4:43 pmIt looks as though the Netflix Prize might have been won through a combined effort of the top two teams. (thx, bergmayer) Update: All teams have 30 days to better the current high score before the winner is declared. But, someone has won the Prize. (thx, all) Tags: Netflix Netflix Prize
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Valdez Klein/Sparrow
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UCLA Can’t Seem to do Right by Burn Victim or Her Family
30 Jun 2009 | 8:03 pmDuring my time at Pomona College, I was privileged to know two beautiful, brilliant sisters. The eldest, Naveen, was in my class, while her younger sister Sheri studied abroad and graduated with Andy’s little sister Susan. Both women were kind, funny and scarily intelligent - a credit to their family, the college, and to one another. Their potential was limitless - both women had the character and talents to be of great benefit to the human race. Now, only one of them will get that chance. Sheri Sangji died earlier this year after a horrific and entirely preventable laboratory accident… -
Where the Wild Birds Land on Your Hand
29 Jun 2009 | 10:42 pmI went on an awesome backpacking expedition with a few close friends this week. Sometimes, in this technology-saturated world we live in, it’s awesome to get off the grid. As we crossed into the Alpine Lakes wilderness and found our way to Talapus Lake, we saw a pair of camp robbers, the cute little bluejay like birds that are brazen enough to make a living stealing food from camp sites. They were so comfortable with people that with a little coaxing, and a little food, they landed right on our hands: We named the two Icarus & Daedalus, since one was much more cautious than the… -
Jackson Death “Without a Doubt” Poses Threat to Democracy in Iran
26 Jun 2009 | 2:13 pmLooks like I’m not the only person who believes that the Ayatollah and his butt buddy Ahmadinejad are happier than pigs in you-know-what over Michael Jackson’s death: The Jackson story, paired with Farrah Fawcett’s death and Sanford’s own scandal, “without a doubt” poses a danger in Iran, according to Michael Rubin, an American Enterprise Institute scholar and former Bush administration official. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Rubin said the issue was already a hot topic among his colleagues in the Middle East. “To put it this way, the gods are not in… -
Michael Jackson as Symbol of Freedom
25 Jun 2009 | 11:15 pmAndrew Sullivan’s Live Tweeting the Revolution series is incredible. He consistently pulls images and updates from Iran’s front lines to the fore. This tweet he recapped stuck out at me today: R.I.P Micheal Jackson, many in Iran loved you and grew up with your songs, despite all the Regime’s confinements and propaganda It’s very true that Western music has played a role in raising the generation that is now working to collapse an unjust system in Iran. A reminder that we are all connected in more ways than initially meet the eye. -
Top Stories on CNN Say it All
25 Jun 2009 | 10:58 pmTop Stories on CNN at 10:40 p.m. PST on July 25, 2009: 50% Michael Jackson 20% Mark Sanford 10% Jon & Kate 10% Air France Crash 10% Farrah Fawcett To recap: 70% Show Business, 20% political sex scandal, 10% plane crash Compare that with the 10 posts on Andrew Sullivan’s top 10 at the time. (I’ve outlined the topic where not obvious.) E-mail of the day (Topic: Iran) Thinking about Michael II Thinking about Michael Blue Suits And The Seventies The Ways Of Rove (Topic: Politicization of DOJ under Bush) The Retaliator (Topic: Hawks vs. Doves) “Like Butcher,” Ctd…
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The Altimeter by Charlene Li
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Redesign and logo for Altimeter Group
22 Jun 2009 | 5:54 pmIt's with great excitement that I'm beta launching a redesigned web site at www.altimetergroup.net today. I welcome your feedback before I port the main altimetergroup.com site over to the new design on Friday. The site was designed by Horn Group, a digital communications agency (disclosure: Horn Group is a client and they were paid for their work on the site). The goal of the site is to provide more information about Altimeter, the services being offered, and also be a home for The Altimeter blog. My favorite gee-whiz feature -- the rotating tag cloud sphere on the home page. A big shout out… -
Would you invite 16 bloggers to spend 24 hours with your company? The Navy did.
14 Jun 2009 | 5:18 pm(I previously wrote an intro and link post about the bloggers who went on the USS Nimitz.) When the Navy issued the invitation for 16 bloggers to spend a day on the USS Nimitz, I thought there had to be string attached, or that the Navy wanted to use us bloggers as propaganda spreaders. But hey, I'm used to people pitching me and trusted myself to be able to figure out the real story behind the Navy "story". But surprisingly, there were no pre-conditions, no restrictions on access other than to safeguard our well-being. The schedule was packed with organized tours to different parts of the… -
Nimitz Blogger Embark: Intro Links
14 Jun 2009 | 4:05 pmAt the end of May, I joined 15 other bloggers for a trip on the aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz which was about 80 miles off the coast of San Diego. Which meant that we had to fly on and off the carrier. And yes, it was a pretty amazing to experience to get caught by a wire and catapulted off the carrier. But my longest lasting memories will be of the amazing people I met. I will be writing a few additional posts with more details, but below is a quick overview as well as links to the content from the other bloggers. The trip was initiated by Guy Kawasaki, who last fall made a similar trip… -
Microsoft Bing's focus on decisions is smart -- but not a Google killer
29 May 2009 | 12:42 amApologies for the long title, but I wanted to get one thing across before diving into my review of Microsoft's new search engine Bing. (The site was announced on Thursday at the All Things Digital conference and will be available June 3rd. I was given a pre-launch briefing and have had access to a preview site.) Bing is not a Google killer. But that isn't necessarily a bad thing, and in fact, I think Microsoft is taking a pretty darn smart move by focusing on being a "decision engine". Here's why. Bing's goal is to improve the search experience, and it does that well overall in an incremental… -
Where I'll be in May and June
11 May 2009 | 3:43 pmI'll be speaking/traveling to the following events and cities in the next few months. Hope to catch some of you in person. You can find a full list of my future engagements on my Calendar page. May 12, 2009: Women Who Tech TeleSummit, "Breaking Through the Digital Ceiling". This is a particularly passionate topic for me. This is an online event and this single panel is a bargain at $10!! The entire TeleSummit will be available as a podcast if you can't make it. Other panelists are Lynne D. Johnson, Fast Company, Susan Mernit, Consultant, Connie Reece, Every Dot Connects and Social Media Club.
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John Gruber
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Modes, Quasi-Modes, and the iPhone
2 Jul 2009 | 1:10 pmLukas Mathis has been writing some of the most insightful essays on UI design I’ve read in ages. He has a great piece today on modes and “quasi-modes”: Quasimodes require the user to do several things at the same time, such as holding down the Shift key while typing. Modes, on the other hand, allow users to do things sequentially — hit Caps Lock, type, hit Caps Lock again. Sequential actions, especially if guided well, are often easier to execute than parallel actions. And he argues (correctly, I say) that the iPhone’s new modal interface for selecting text is… -
XHTML 2 Is Dead, Long Live HTML 5
2 Jul 2009 | 12:10 pmThe W3C’s XHTML 2 effort is (thankfully) now officially dead, not just effectively dead. This is good news for HTML 5, as there’s no longer any dispute over which standard is the future of HTML. ★ -
Getting Pretty Lonely
2 Jul 2009 | 11:38 amSmart essay from Daniel Jalkut on how the GPL discourages participation from many (if not most) developers. ★ -
Apple Retail Stores Can Now Replace Broken iPhone Screens
2 Jul 2009 | 10:40 amSpeaking of fixing cracked iPhone screens, Jim Dalrymple reports: The Loop has confirmed that if your iPhone has a broken screen and you take it to an Apple retail relocation, they have the capability to fix it on the spot. The machine, which is located out of customer view in the back of the store, reportedly separates the iPhone from the screen, allowing a new one to be installed. Of course, your screen doesn’t have to be completely smashed to need some sort of replacement done. Some users have reported dust particles on the inside of the screen as well. ★ -
How to Replace a Cracked iPhone 3G Screen
2 Jul 2009 | 9:20 amStep-by-step instructions, with photos, from Jeff Carlson. ★
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Michael Arrington
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Sam Sethi: The Lawsuit
30 Jun 2009 | 5:21 pmMany of you know all about Sam Sethi, the former TechCrunch writer who left after a disagreement and then went on to create BlogNation. Two days ago Sethi filed a lawsuit against us for libel and other issues. As we always do, we’re posting the litigation threats and will continue to fight the litigation publicly. See our previous posts involving YouTube, Marvel, Rivals, Mediascrape EarthComber and Richard Figueroa. I don’t need to go into much additional background here. My post from late 2007 gives the complete history of this guy and what he has done. Our response letter,… -
ETA Bombs Spanish Newspaper
10 Jun 2008 | 3:30 amThe ETA may or may not have a legitimate goal in demanding Basque independence, but bombing a building full of journalists is no way to win karma points or influence people. -
Sarah Lacy Book Tour - I’m In
7 Jun 2008 | 2:35 pmSarah Lacy, the author of the book “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good,” is thinking of doing a book tour. Start things off here in Atherton, Sarah. I’ll do the first one at my house. See my interview with Sarah on the new book here. -
We Don’t Do Reprints
19 Mar 2008 | 12:10 pm -
I’m going with what Mathew Said
8 Mar 2008 | 12:47 pmI already picked one blog fight today. So on the other issue, I’m going with what Mathew Ingram said.
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John C. Dvorak
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The Search Economy and the Tower of Babel
30 Jun 2009 | 2:54 pmThere is nothing on the search horizon that cansolve the developing problem of page overload. -
HDMI: Who Needs This Aggravation?
30 Jun 2009 | 2:54 pmEvery time I think about getting some new hot flat-panel TV, I read about yet another variation in the connectivity game. -
Net Lament: Fragility, Censorship, and Ruination
30 Jun 2009 | 8:09 amAs it turns out, it was the death of a pop singer that really tested the Web's fortitude. -
FTC Is Ready to Pounce on Dishonest Bloggers
22 Jun 2009 | 2:41 pmDoesn't the Federal Trade Commission have anything better to do than exposing conflicts of interest on blogs and Twitter? -
The Perfect Mobile Phone Is (Nearly) Here
15 Jun 2009 | 1:20 pmThe iPhone may have begun the smartphone's transition into a full-fledged computer, but lots needs to change before we get there. Here's my wish list.
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David Armano
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50 Successful Open Source Projects That Are Changing Medicine [del.icio.us]
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When Ambient Intimacy Hits Home
29 Jun 2009 | 9:47 amIf someone had told me that Megan Porter had been killed in a terrible car accident, I'm not sure that things would have connected for me. But as I got the news that it was @megapixel (her Twitter name), I knew immediately. Even brief exchanges like the one above about weather or a common favorite cocktail, (we both like dirty martinis) is memorable via Twitter's system of real time dynamic signals. Ambient Intimacy is a fascinating sociological phenomenon and in this case can be quite sad. I didn't know Megan, but felt like I knew something about @megapixel. Anyway, my thoughts go out to her… -
Debunking The Myths of Social Media
29 Jun 2009 | 9:22 amMoving forward I will be contributing to the Harvard Business Review when time permits. My first contribution is up, you can view the entire article here. Below in an excerpt:"There are a few considerations every organization needs to consider when developing their blueprints for their own unique social media design. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution, there are few things you can plan for as you review the many options before you. Here are three to consider:Seeding. As you plan your approach for designing your social system, take into account that you'll have to invest to grow your… -
Is The Hub And Spoke Model Adaptable?
26 Jun 2009 | 9:31 amWe've been doing a bit of thinking on how organizations can re-design themselves as social systems which produce emergent outcomes—that is, results which move business forward and tend to emerge in an organic fashion. Twitter's growth due to end user innovation, an open API, and other drivers are an example of this. When I first wrote about Twitter in Businessweek back in 2007—I called it an "ecosystem"—that's because it is. It's a living, breathing organization with thousands of nodes in place which facilitate real time dynamic signals. In my new role, I was recently able to take a… -
#e2conf Tuesday - a set on Flickr [del.icio.us]
Photos from the Dachis Group Tweetup in Boston
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Jeremiah Owyang
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Facebook’s Awkward Adolescence
2 Jul 2009 | 6:21 amFacebook is undergoing pubescenct changes in the next few years –from a private pre-teen to a public facing member of society –that’s what I told USA Today. Facebook initially made it’s promise to be a private community, but realizes it must now be more public to compete with the open web. Expect more awkwardness for the social network and it’s users’ over the coming years. What are the indicators that Facebook wants to grow up and be public? Previous settings allow members to allow their profile page to be public and therefore findable by search engines. -
As Brands Continue to ‘Pollinate’ the Social Web, Expect Corporate Websites to Aggregate
1 Jul 2009 | 3:44 amBrands are pollinating the social web with easy-to-share features like Sharethis. As conversations splinter across the web, brands must prepare to aggregate those same conversations on their corporate website. As a result, the trusted conversations will centralize back on product pages. [Trusted conversations have fragmented to the social web --shifting the balance of power to communities] Social Pollination: Brands Currently Spreading to Communities Why: Brands are trying to let their corporate and social content spread to many different communities in Facebook, Twitter, Email and others. -
Is Blogging Evolving Into Life Streams?
26 Jun 2009 | 6:45 amTop Bloggers Spend Less Time Blogging I’ve noticed a gradual change in what we know as blogs when Scoble and Shel wrote the book on Naked Conversations. Both of them are now focused on micromedia: Shel has an upcoming book on Twitterville, and Scoble spends more time promoting Friendfeed than his own blog. Secondly, I just learned that Edelman’s top blogger Steve Rubel has retired his traditional blog, and it’s now a life stream, which aggregates content from any source. Of course, I don’t need to mention that many of the top 100 blogs all look like mainstream media,… -
Report: Companies Should Organize For Social Media in a “Hub and Spoke” model
25 Jun 2009 | 2:51 pmI often get asked by brands: “How should we organize our company for social media?” or “Which roles do we need”, or “Which department is in charge”. So for our latest report (clients can access all the details) answers just that, it has data and graphs about spending, brand maturity in the social space, which department ‘owns’ the program, and how companies are organizing. Companies organize in three distinct models For this post, let’s focus in on how companies are organizing. There are three basic models that I’ve observed and… -
Where Your Facebook Pictures and Friends are Featured, “Prototype Experience” Provides A Social, Contextual Video Trailer
22 Jun 2009 | 8:31 amRemember early Jib Jab cartoons where you’d manually upload your own photo and that of your friends? Now, it’s much easier with just a few clicks to Facebook Connect. Last week, I had dinner with Chris Pan (linkedin, twitter), Head of Brand Solutions at Facebook, who pointed me to a new social interactive marketing advertisement for a video game called “Prototype”. Upon accessing the site, Prototype Experience, (try it for yourself) you’ll be prompted to login with your Facebook account. After a rather lengthy loading period (it’s worth it, hang tight)…
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Amy Wohl's Opinions
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Searching for the Right Search Engine
19 Jun 2009 | 7:23 amThe woods seem to be full of new search engines. The last time this happened, we tried them all, fooled around with them for a bit, and then quickly chose one -- it was just too much trouble to use different search engines for different purposes. Who remembers AltaVista, DogPile, or Northern Light?I wonder if it's a coincidence that search engines seem to come in bunches,or whether it's the lure of economic riches that pulls them into the market simultaneously?In any case, we have several, quite different ones, that have all gotten my attention in the past few… -
Maybe Bloggers Need Labels?
10 Jun 2009 | 8:22 amRecently, I participated in a series of articles and emails over the topic of whether bloggers report the news in a less responsible way than traditional news organizations. I did this in response to a post to Dave Farber's Interesting People list (favorite reading of mine) by my friend and colleague Jonathan Spira of Basex. Jonathan was responding to an article in the New York TImes which implied that bloggers can be reckless in their pursuit of new things, often presenting rumors as news. I have a problem with this. As I noted in my comments (which you will find… -
What's in a Name?
27 May 2009 | 10:15 amIt's always hard for a company to know what to do when one of its products becomes a lot better known than the company itself. The possibilities for confusion are endless. No one recognizes the company name, but everyone who needs to knows the product. This happened to WordStar (known as MicroPro) and WordPerfect (Satellite Systems International) in their turns, forcing the product names to eventually become the company identity.Now the success of Zoho, with more than a million users, has convinced its parent company AdventNet, to change its name to ZOHO Corporation,… -
Searching for the Right Answer
19 May 2009 | 5:58 amI have been avidly following the run up to the announcement of the Wolfram Alpha search engine. This is a new search engine which is designed to be much more powerful than Google because it includes both curated data and a vast and growing library of mathematical algorithims (brought to you by Mathematica, from whence it comes). It also has a high degree of language understanding, particularly within subjects and something called "computational aesthetics" which means it presents the resuts as a custom page of clearly presented… -
The Sun will Shine on Oracle
20 Apr 2009 | 2:26 pmSo the deal has been done and it's Oracle, not IBM that will be buying Sun (which has needed to bought for some time). This is a much tidier deal, not from a financial point of view -- Oracle paid only 10 cents a share more($9.50 for a total of $7.4 billion or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt) than IBM ultimately was willing to offer -- but there are likely to be few if any legal impediments to the Sun/Oracle arrangements. An IBM/Sun would have owned 42% of the server market, a concentration that might have attracted the SEC (and no one knows yet how this…
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Christine Lu
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Wow. I’m Going To TEDGlobal!
30 Jun 2009 | 12:11 amMy day started out a mess with a really crappy email …but amazing what a difference a nice email can make in your inbox. I applied last week to attend TEDGlobal and got accepted! I’m thankful for the opportunity to have co-organized the recent TEDxShanghai event as I’m sure that had everything to do with it. I also wrote the equivelant of a novel in answering some of the questions on the application and listed a special someone as my reference that might have helped. I’d like to think it did. Really proud to be representing TEDxShanghai at this event in July and… -
Creative Commons – A Shared Culture
24 Jun 2009 | 3:19 am“what does it mean to be human if we don’t have a sharing culture?” *photo in thumbnail: giuli-o / flickr / creative commons -
Sometimes Happy Pictures Make Me Cry
20 Jun 2009 | 6:26 pmGoing through my Flickr photos from last year and came across this awesome shot of me and my little sister from her wedding. Isn’t she beautiful? We look happy huh? You would never know that I used to beat her up and steal her candy. Not recently. More like when we were little. As you can see, we’re over that phase. One person is missing from this photo though. My older sister Susie. It sucks. She lost a 2 year battle with depression and took her own life in 2004 – a month after her own wedding. These are the conflicted feelings one goes through when they lose a sister to… -
Geeks On A Plane Hawaii
20 Jun 2009 | 5:35 am…a preview of things to come. :) -
Katana-ya Ramen in San Francisco
19 Jun 2009 | 4:44 amphoto: christinelu.china / Flickr / Creative Commons Every single time I’m in San Francisco — which lately is every other week — I have to stop by Katana-ya. If Chris is in town at the same time I am, we usually eat here for dinner. Otherwise, you’ll catch me here during lunch by myself at the sushi bar tweeting about how awesome the food is. photo: christinelu.china / Flickr / Creative Commons Warning, if you go for dinner be prepared to wait. This place is one of those secret noodle shops that everyone knows about. Part of the reason why it’s packed is because…
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Scott Adams (AKA Dilbert)
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Good Samaritan
30 Jun 2009 | 1:00 amLast night we went to watch the new Transformers movie on the big iMax screen. As we got out of the car in the theater parking lot, in a rush to get good seats, a young man approached and asked if we had jumper cables. Luckily I did not have jumper cables, because if I did, I knew we would be late for the movie. I did my best to make a face that said, "I sure wish I could help," while being secretly gleeful that this was officially not my problem. I wondered if the young man thought I was lying about not having jumper cables. My fake sincerity face looks like a mime with an… -
Shopping is Broken
29 Jun 2009 | 1:00 amLet's say you have a problem or a need or a want, and you're sure there is product somewhere in the marketplace that would help. You Google, and a handful of web sites pop up that offer promising solutions. But obviously you don't believe anything you read from vendors, so you check for online reviews. Then you wonder if the favorable reviews are planted by the vendor, and the bad reviews are planted by his competitors. Can you trust reviews from anonymous strangers?You ask your coworkers and friends if they have ever used the product that you're interested in, and no one has. -
Your Bank Hates You
26 Jun 2009 | 1:00 amI pay my bills online. The interface for the bill paying system is a tragedy, as you might expect from a bank. But it's not entirely accidental. Banks inconvenience their customers for a reason.For example, I would like the option of automatically debiting my checking account every month to pay off my credit card balance just before it is due. The system could easily send me a courtesy e-mail warning me the transfer was about to happen, in case I changed my mind. And if I didn't have enough money in my checking account, it could warn me by e-mail and abort the transfer. This system… -
Things I Don't Know How to Do
25 Jun 2009 | 1:00 amI can figure out how to do most things, no matter how complicated, if I put my mind to them. There's no shortage of challenges. There's my home computer, and my work computer, my cell phone, various entertainment electronics, a minivan bristling with options, kid toys, and so on. I spend half of my day figuring out why my technology isn't acting the way I think it should. And then there is the complexity of general living, including my various business ventures, and lately the overwhelming complexity of building a house. My desk is normally a blizzard of paperwork ranging from… -
Prediction Wrong
23 Jun 2009 | 1:00 amLast week I predicted in this blog that the Iranian leadership would look into allegations of vote rigging, announce that problems had been found, and a new election would be held.Wrong. But interestingly, the Guardian Council announced that there were indeed irregularities in 50 of 170 districts, including cases where there were more votes than people. I will accept partial credit for that part of my prediction, and I think most people were surprised that the Iranian leadership admitted that much of a problem. That was very undictatorish. But the Guardian Council concluded that the problems…
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Doc Searls
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Beyond celebrity obsession
27 Jun 2009 | 6:05 amGreat minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people. — Eleanor Roosevelt Somebody I wish to discuss an idea here. It’s an idea about celebrity, and it follows an event that has become a black hole in nearly all media: the death of Michael Jackson. According to Don Norman, a black hole topic is one that is essentially undiscussable: “Drop the subject into the middle of a room and it sucks everybody into a useless place from which no light can escape.” Michael Jackson was more than a celebrity. He was a first-rank contributor to pop music and… -
Life in Cox tech support hell
26 Jun 2009 | 10:15 pmMajor props to Cox for cranking up my speeds to 18Mb/s downstream and 4Mb/s upstream. That totally rocks. I’m getting that speed now. Here’s what Cox’s local diagnostic tool says: TCP/Web100 Network Diagnostic Tool v5.4.12 click START to begin Connected to: speedtest.sbcox.net – Using IPv4 address Checking for Middleboxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Done checking for firewalls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Done running 10s outbound test (client-to-server [C2S]) . . . . . 3.79Mb/s running 10s inbound test (server-to-client [S2C]) . . . . . . -
Living Ends
25 Jun 2009 | 3:51 pmThis twitter post, from @KNX1070 four minutes ago, says Michael Jackson is dead. Google News‘ latest, from Fox, says he’s being rushed to the hospital. Here’s the latest Google search, as of 3:42pm Pacific: A snapshot in time, already changed. (FWIW, the KNX item came up the first time I searched, but not this time. The System That Isn’t, isn’t perfect.) The Twitter results up top are courtesy of a Greasemonkey script. It is here that we see manifest the split between the Live Web and the Static Web. I’ve been writing and talking about this split since my… -
Tech hell, cont’d
24 Jun 2009 | 7:08 pmThe idea was to take some down time in Santa Barbara and get work done in my own nice office, with my nice comfortable chair, surrounded by space and time, with soft sea breezes blowing through. Instead it’s been tech crash city since I got here last Thursday. (Except for getting out to the Live Oak Festival. That rocked. Also, trees, dirt and great music tend not to crash.) First a system upgrade hosed a beloved old mail program. So far I can’t get the archives to migrate anywhere. I can still get email addressed to my searls.com and Gmail accounts, but not to… -
This latency is caused by ____ ?
21 Jun 2009 | 5:31 pmStarting a few days ago, nothing outside my house on the Net has been closer than about 300 miliseconds. Even UCSB.edu, which I can see from here, is usually no more than 30 ms away on a ping test. Here’s the latest: PING ucsb.edu (128.111.24.40): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 128.111.24.40: icmp_seq=0 ttl=52 time=357.023 ms 64 bytes from 128.111.24.40: icmp_seq=1 ttl=52 time=369.475 ms 64 bytes from 128.111.24.40: icmp_seq=2 ttl=52 time=389.372 ms 64 bytes from 128.111.24.40: icmp_seq=3 ttl=52 time=414.025 ms 64 bytes from 128.111.24.40: icmp_seq=4 ttl=52 time=428.384 ms 64…
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Fred Wilson
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Hacker News and the NoSQL Movement
2 Jul 2009 | 3:44 amI love Hacker News (aka news.ycombinator.com). I read it at least once a day and it sends this blog more traffic than anything other than Google and Twitter. This is the refer log for AVC for the past month.But like every great web service out there, it's the community at Hacker News that makes it so great.This morning I read a Computer World article about the "NoSQL" movement. It was interesting to me because we have an investment in this market sector, an open source cloud based document store called MongoDB (which is mentioned in the computer world story).There are three comments at… -
A Shorter Post Than I Planned
1 Jul 2009 | 4:21 amI just spent a half hour composing a longish thoughtful post on the art of saying no in the venture capital business. It was inspired by Brad Feld's post on the same topic a few days ago. However, when I hit save, Typepad forced me to re-login and after I did that, my post was gone. So I can't get back that half hour today and that post is gone for good. Maybe I'll try to do it again another day.But in the interim, please do go read Brad's post. I agree with what he has to say about saying no. It's a big part of the VC business and doing it right is critically important.And while you are at… -
Trendrr - The Freemium Web Charting Service
30 Jun 2009 | 11:11 amLet's say you want to track how something you are working on is doing. You can look at it's web traffic on comScore, Compete, Quantcast, Alexa, etc. You can check out how it is doing on Google Trends. But if you want to do something a bit more sophisticated, you might want to try Trendrr.Trendrr is a free service (for a limited amount of data tracking) that let's you track keywords across multiple data sets. Here's a screen shot of the basic service which shows how it works. The cool thing about Trendrr is the charts that others build are shared in the service. It's a social charting system. -
What VCs Are Worrying About
30 Jun 2009 | 3:55 amA survey of VCs by Polachi Inc. has been making the rounds of the internet the past couple days. I was asked to participate in this survey but did not (not for any reason in particular).I looked over the results (click on that link above to see them) and this slide caught my attention: Surprise, VCs are not worried about deal flow and the management teams they work with, are a bit worried about their portfolio, and are a lot worried about exits.We've talked about this issue endlessly here on this blog and elsewhere. The problem with the VC industry is that there is too much money in it, too… -
The Conversational Marketing Summit Interview
28 Jun 2009 | 9:47 amA few weeks ago, my friend John Battelle invited me to open the Conversational Marketing Summit with an interview. I've known John for over a decade and we backed him as CEO of The Industry Standard back in the Flatiron days. It was a fun interview and as you can see, we coordinated our outfits the night before (that's a joke). The video is about 35 mins long but I've provided a transcription below the video. These transcriptions are being provided by the Simulscribe API. I'm hoping to add some cool technology I saw last week soon which will make the transcription hyperlink to the exact spot…
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John Battelle
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The Year's Half Over. So How Are My Predictions Tracking?
1 Jul 2009 | 11:40 pmI like to do this exercise from time to time - asking how my predictions for the year are holding up given six months have passed since I posted them. Well, let's see, shall we? 1. We'll see an end to the recession, taken literally, by Q4 09. I think most folks agree this will happen. I'm not saying it has, just that the consensus is we're on the way there. 2. The online media space will be hit hard by the economic downturn in the first half, but by year's end, will have chalked up moderate gains over last year in terms of gross spend. Jury's out, hard to call this one, but my own… -
Bing Starts to Get Real (Time)
1 Jul 2009 | 10:29 pmI've been complaining that nearly no search engines surface real time data (for now, that's Twitter, but Facebook is coming soon enough, and there will be tons more). In fact, I complained to Microsoft about this well before the launch of Bing, and then complained some more when Twitter results were not surfaced in initial beta versions of the service. Man, I'm grumpy lately, eh? Well, that's changing. Sort of. From a Bing blog post today: There has been much discussion of real-time search and the premium on immediacy of data that has been created primarily by Twitter. We’ve been watching… -
Juxtaposition Fun
30 Jun 2009 | 8:07 pmSeen in my feedreader just now. I dunno, it just struck me, Google can't do a helluva lot to help you, Newspaper Industry. -
It May Be Free, But It's Sure As Hell Underwritten
30 Jun 2009 | 7:57 pmThere's quite a wonderful authorial kerfuffle happening between Chris Anderson, whose recent book "Free" has been the target both of plagiarism charges (from Wikipedia, of all places, oh the wonderful irony, one might think Chris actually planted the whole damn thing...) and Malcolm Gladwell, who never met a clever anecdote he couldn't convert into a well turned (and dammingly entertaining) book of his own. I won't go into the whole thing, because, honestly, I just don't have the, er, free time. However, I do find it noteworthy that Chris's much-linked to riposte to Malcolm's… -
And a NYT Profile of Aardvark..
29 Jun 2009 | 8:56 am..which I've been talking about for some time...from the piece: Having humans, not software, supply the advice is important. Max Ventilla, who formerly was at Google and is now Aardvark’s chief executive, said, “Often the most useful answers don’t answer the original question. Example: ‘You don’t want to go to the Caribbean now — it’s the rainy season — you want to go to Hawaii.’ ” ONCE you try Aardvark’s service, you can’t look at Yahoo Answers, the current leader in questions-and-answers, without feeling pity for its now-manifest limitations.
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37signals
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QUOTE: 'Rock Star' is perhaps the most abused phrase
2 Jul 2009 | 2:02 pm‘Rock Star’ is perhaps the most abused phrase in the history of job listings. Nobody should be looking for a “rock star” accountant, HR recruiter or janitor. Whomever is posting these jobs is grossly misinformed as to the nature of rock stardom. Or accounting. Or both. —AvoidThisJob.com on the differences between a Rock Star and a Planet Funk Store Manager -
Product Blog update: New Basecamp features, Highrise/Harvest integration, etc.
2 Jul 2009 | 8:18 amSome recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog: Basecamp New File Uploading features in Basecamp We’re excited to announce a batch of improvements to File Uploads in Basecamp. Now it’s easier to attach multiple files at once, we’ve improved our progress bar to show you as each file is uploaded, and you can click thumbnails to zoom image attachments without leaving the current page. These new features make it faster and easier to attach, review and discuss files in Basecamp. Here’s a demo video to show you all the improvements. New Basecamp feature: The Daily Digest… -
Oldie But Goodie: Sketching with a Sharpie
1 Jul 2009 | 7:16 amI’ve always preferred sketching UIs with an as-thick-as-I-can-find Sharpie over a thin ballpoint pen or finely sharpened pencil. Ballpoints and fine tips just don’t fill the page like a Sharpie does. Fine tips invite you to draw while Sharpies invite you to just to get your concepts out into big bold shapes and lines. When you sketch with a thin tip you tend to draw at a higher resolution and worry a bit too much about making things look good. Sharpies encourage you to ignore details early on. If you sketch, try a thick Sharpie next time. You may find you’re better able to… -
Design Decisions: Results from the Basecamp account screen redesign
30 Jun 2009 | 9:54 amJust about two weeks ago we launched the a redesign of the account chart in Basecamp. This is where people can upgrade or downgrade their accounts. The goal was to increase overall upgrade conversions and encourage people who are on Basic plans or lower to upgrade to the Plus plan (our lowest priced full-feature plan). Results I’m glad to report our design hunches appear to have paid off. We’re only about two weeks in, so we don’t have a ton of data yet, but we can compare the 14 days since the upgrade with the 90 days prior to the upgrade. Average upgrades/day: up 13%… -
Working at 37signals
30 Jun 2009 | 8:54 amIt’s been several weeks since I was hired here at 37signals so I thought it might be interesting to share some of my experiences so far. Ready, set, go! One of the best things has been how quickly I’ve been able to jump in and start contributing. The very first project I worked on was a refresh of the Account screen in Basecamp. What started as an exercise quickly escalated to a new design that we wanted to actually put into the app. So it wasn’t long before I moved from Photoshop right into the app code to integrate the new design. This required me to build on my limited…
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Chris Brogan
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Glynne Soaps- Beer-Flavored Soap and Online Presence
2 Jul 2009 | 3:41 amThat soap in the picture came from Glynne Soaps, who evidently knew that I stunk. This one was a soap made partially from the biproduct of beer, and yet, it was very clean and wonderful. They also gave me a bar of Bug Off soap, which supposedly keeps the bugs away. (I didn’t really test it well, but it smelled nice, and I wasn’t bothered too badly by bugs, given all things.) But you know this site, and I’m not going to review soaps. What I am going to point out is their web presence. Glynne Soaps has built a @glynnesoaps Twitter account with many thousands of followers. They… -
I Believe Mark Cuban is Right
1 Jul 2009 | 5:44 pmThe whole “Free” debate is alive and well, thanks to Chris Anderson. Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell have weighed in, and right behind them, Mark Cuban put out this piece. I want to skip down to the part where my head started nodding like a bobble-head: Newspapers are also catching flack for saying they dont want their content openly distributed. On this point, they are correct again. They should have complete control over where it is distributed. They should have the ability to choose where it is offered for free. Not only should they have this control, taking back this control… -
The Value of Wonder
1 Jul 2009 | 3:30 amSometimes, just sometimes, we should step back from what we’re doing (marketing, writing, selling, customer service, whatever!) and think about wonder. And by wonder, let’s think about those moments when we see or experience something that makes us breathe in deeply, and then causes us to pause and just be there. In life, there are moments like this when we think about our child’s first steps, or that surprise party your wife threw you that truly and utterly surprised you. Maybe it comes when you travel. Now, look at what you do in a given day. Not much of it is inherently… -
Strategic Blogging and Some Tactics to Nail It
30 Jun 2009 | 3:30 amOnce you get past the “should my company be blogging” hurdle and into the “okay, so now what?” part of the race, the next question you might find yourself facing is, “What should I be doing to marry my blogging to my business goals?” If you’re in charge of making blogs deliver a business value to your organization, here’s some thoughts to consider. (Note: this is a business-minded post. You can use blogs however you like.) A Strategy is the Path You Choose to Take Before we dive in, just realize this: strategy is a word that’s rarely used… -
19 Presence Management Chores You COULD Do Every Day
29 Jun 2009 | 12:20 amIf you’re looking to establish your online presence, and build relationships, it’s not the kind of project where you show up, build your profiles, friend a few people, and call it good. It’s a lot like tending the farm. Here are seven particular “chores” you could do every day that should prove beneficial to your online interests. Twitter Find seven things worth retweeting in your general feed and share. Reply to at least five things with full responses (not just “thanks”). Point out a few people that you admire. It shows your mindset, too. Follow…
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iJustine / Justine Ezarik
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iJustine reality show
2 Jul 2009 | 7:44 amIf I had a reality show.. it would probably be nothing or everything like this. It’s the internet — everyone can have their own reality show at anytime!! -
Crabbing and a canoe
29 Jun 2009 | 1:05 pmWe’re having fun here on vacation.. I’m much better at Sims fishing than real fishing -
Ask iJ #14
28 Jun 2009 | 8:45 amLeave me lots of questions!! Yay! -
Verizon mifi
27 Jun 2009 | 5:54 amI recently bought the Verizon MiFi to test out because of my recent dislike for Sprint. I’m currently using them as an EVDO solution. For the past 6 months the USB on the device has been faulty and if I move my computer while it’s plugged.. the connection drops. I’ve went into several stores to see if they’d give me another one, and they always try to send me to another store claiming they don’t have any techs available to look at my card and tell me if something is wrong with it. Well.. I’m not a tech but when something doesn’t work that’s a… -
Apps for your new iPhone 3GS
25 Jun 2009 | 9:04 amWhen they announced the “S” in the new iPhone 3GS was for SPEED, they weren’t kidding! This little guy is definitely a huge step up from the last gen. Granted, the 3.0 software is a huge part of that.. you can definitely tell how much faster it is when playing games and even taking videos (which I do quite often and post on my otherijustine youtube channel)! Sims 3 - $9.99 The first game I downloaded was the new Sims 3 game. It was a bit pricey, but these types of games for me will get a lot of usage on airplanes and traveling. The game is pretty fun and just like any other…
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Joel on Software
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The eternal optimism of the Clear mind
23 Jun 2009 | 8:32 pmClear just closed down. Here’s how it worked while it was in business. You paid $200 for a one-year membership. You underwent a big, complicated background check to prove that you were extra-super-trustworthy. In exchange, in a few big airports, you got to skip to the front of the TSA line for screening. Now, you didn’t skip the screening itself. You still went through the X-ray machine and had to remove your shoes, belt, pocket contents, laptops, and plastic quart ziplock bag of toiletries. You just got to cut to the front of the line. A few people signed up. In certain airports, it was,… -
Platform vendors
10 Jun 2009 | 12:45 pmDave Winer (in 2007): “Sometimes developers choose a niche that’s either directly in the path of the vendor, or even worse, on the roadmap of the vendor. In those cases, they don’t really deserve our sympathy.” iSmashPhone: 15 Apps Rendered Obsolete By The New iPhone 3GS When independent software developers create utilities, add-ons, or applications that fill a hole in their platform vendor’s offering, they like to think that they’re doing the vendor a huge favor. Oh, look, the iPhone doesn’t have cut and paste, they say. Business opportunity! They might imagine that this… -
A visit to Microsoft and Google
10 Jun 2009 | 10:56 amFrom my latest Inc. column: “Giant corporations such as Google and Microsoft are like cities full of relatively anonymous people: You don't actually expect to see anyone you know as you walk around. Going to lunch on either campus is like going to the cafeteria at a huge university. The other 2,000 students seem nice, but you don't know most of them well enough to sit with them. Meanwhile, a typical lunchtime at my company is like Thanksgiving dinner: There's a big meal you get to share with a bunch of people you know and like.” Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that… -
Conferences in New York
10 Jun 2009 | 9:50 amAndrew emailed to ask why we don’t have a StackOverflow DevDays day in New York City. That’s a fair question! There’s a big software development community here. There are two reasons New York is low on my list. The first is cost. Hotels, venues, and catering are prohibitively expensive in New York. At a medium-class hotel, say, the Marriott on the East Side, giving everybody one coffee break with coffee, tea, soft drinks, and nothing to eat costs $23 per person [PDF]. It’s simply impossible to do a $99 one-day event in New York. The other reason is attendance. I don’t know why,… -
StackOverflow DevDays: Five New Cities
9 Jun 2009 | 9:30 amWhoa. Less than a month ago, we announced first Stack Overflow DevDays and opened registration to 300 people in each of five cities. Well, that sold out pretty quickly. Ryan Carson, who is taking care of all the conference logistics, was pretty sure we’d be able to book larger event spaces, so we allowed even more people to register... we’ve got 2388 people booked worldwide so far, including over 800 in London, but it’s clear that with just five events we weren’t going to be able to accomodate all the people who want to spend a day meeting online Stack Overflow friends in real life…
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Dooce
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Dudes, seriously
2 Jul 2009 | 11:46 amI know I am going to get a slew of hand-slapping email over this because here I am condoning something so incredibly bad for the environment, but trust me when I say that this could very well CHANGE YOUR LIFE. My mother gave this to me as gift for the nursery, a Munchkin Warm Glow Wipe Warmer that heats up baby wipes and makes it so that the baby doesn't go yelping off the changing table because suddenly you're shoving an ice cold cloth between her butt cheeks. I want one of these for both of our bathrooms so that when I go to wipe my butt I have the luxury of a warm wipe. But since you have… -
Jon and Heather plus two and getting our asses kicked
2 Jul 2009 | 11:30 amHow does something so small and helpless bring the entire world around her to a screeching halt? I know I was guilty of once thinking that a newborn couldn't be that much work, right? You just go about your business when they're taking a nap, duh. EXCEPT WHEN THEY NAP ONLY WHEN PHYSICALLY ATTACHED TO YOUR BODY. And that's when you have to retrain your body to do basic tasks with either one arm or one hand, and then balance this or that on one hip, and then it's OH MY HELL WOULD YOU HOLD THIS KID SO I CAN BRUSH MY HAIR FOR GOD'S SAKE. If this were some sort of athletic event the score would be… -
Familiar territory
30 Jun 2009 | 8:49 amYesterday morning after a bit of a blurry night, one that resembled the many blurry nights before it where the newest member of the family periodically yelled orders and shot butterscotch poo four feet up and out the back of her diaper — wait, have I mentioned yet that Marlo doesn't cry? I'm serious. She doesn't string together a chorus of wailing like many other babies her age, but, and this is a HUGE but, a Kardashian-sized but that makes everyone in the room stop and stare and wonder HOW IN THE WORLD that thing fits through a door, the kid can yell. And I mean, YELL. Like, the referee… -
You had to know this was coming
29 Jun 2009 | 4:08 pmBecause he sure did. by dooce in Daily Chuck© Armstrong Media, LLC. All rights reserved. Originally published by Heather B. Armstrong for dooce.com as You had to know this was coming. This post cannot be republished without express written permission. -
Behold...
29 Jun 2009 | 2:40 pm... The Dimple. I have already conducted several experiments to see what sorts of things she can store in there, like grains of rice and maybe beans. Later in life it should come in handy when she needs a place to hold a quarter and suddenly she needs money for a parking meter. by dooce in Daily Photo© Armstrong Media, LLC. All rights reserved. Originally published by Heather B. Armstrong for dooce.com as Behold.... This post cannot be republished without express written permission.
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Matt Cutts
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30 day challenge begins: biking to work
1 Jul 2009 | 8:28 amThe overwhelming winner in my 30 day poll was “Bike to work” so that’s what I’m doing during the month of July. In the third week of July I’ll be out in Boston to speak at SIGIR, but any time I’m heading into the Googleplex during July, I’m planning to bike there. Is there something good for yourself that you’ve been meaning to do? Why not try it for 30 days this month? The month will end whether you try something new or not, so why not tackle something new? -
Funny spam email, June 2009
30 Jun 2009 | 7:57 pmI enjoy posting some of the funny emails that I get. This one made me laugh: You don’t need to %SI3_rnd10 rod’s %SI3_rnd11 and %SI3_rnd12 %SI3_rnd13’ jokes! This is a %SI3_rnd14 for %SI3_rnd15 your %SI3_rnd16! It will %SI3_rnd17 in seconds after she %SI3_rnd18 and %SI3_rnd19 as good as if it was a %SI3_rnd20 rod! No more jokes – you will always get %SI3_rnd21 and moans! The huge pack costs less than 30 %SI3_rnd22! %SI3_rnd23 can be a %SI3_rnd24! No one will know about your %SI3_rnd25! %SI3_rnd26 now and save more than $10 regardless of your order’s size! I think it’s spam… -
Natural links are better than non-natural
24 Jun 2009 | 11:25 amI got a spam email that I thought about blogging about, but decided not to. Then they spammed me *again*. Sheesh. So here goes. If you get an email with a subject like “Affordable Link Building Outsourcing,” think twice. Any email that starts out Make your links appear Natural Link Building is one of the most significant aspect of the off page optimization process and is a major determinant… is starting off on the wrong foot. The objective is not to “make your links appear natural”, the objective is that your links are natural. Another rule of thumb for me… -
30 days
22 Jun 2009 | 8:43 pm30 days is enough time to build a habit. Last month, I started trying to walk 10,000 steps a day for 30 days. I didn’t walk 10K steps every day, but I did keep at it until I’d walked over 10K steps for at least 30 days. In the process, I discovered that walking to the grocery store can be a relaxing way to unwind and get some exercise. I’m just now wrapping up an effort to not watch any television for 30 days. I started on May 22nd (right after all the season finales finished). I learned that other than a few times at night, I don’t really miss the television--and I… -
My review of the iPhone 3GS
21 Jun 2009 | 9:22 pmDisclaimer: This post is entirely my personal opinion. I also own an HTC T-Mobile G1, which runs Google’s Android operating system. I picked up the new iPhone 3G S this Friday and I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts: The Good: - The iPhone 3GS is considerably faster than the iPhone 3G. Especially in the browser, you’ll notice pages render faster. JavaScript-heavy pages (such as the mobile web version of Gmail) execute much more smoothly. The iPhone 3GS feels less like an underpowered mobile phone and more like a powerful pocket computer that can keep up with its owner. -…
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Bob Sutton
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Sexism and Female Playwrights
24 Jun 2009 | 10:00 amToday's New York Times describes a fascinating trio of studies -- by a clearly brilliant undergraduate named Emily Glassberg Sands (her research is a lot better than most doctoral dissertations) -- that reveals some sexism against female playwrights. Check out the article Rethinking Gender Bias in the Theater. The first study shows that the main reason that fewer plays written by women are produced is because they write fewer plays than men. The third study shows that plays that do get produced that are written by women make more money than those written by men -- on average, they… -
New York Times, I Hate People, Censorship, and Headphones as Protective Devices
21 Jun 2009 | 11:32 amThis morning's Sunday New York Times has a well-researched piece by Phyllis Korkki in her Career Couch column called "I Find You Annoying, But I Can Cope." It starts out with a quote from Jonathan Littman about the implications of the ideas in I Hate People for dealing people who bug you at work (see their post), and travels through a lot different methods for coping with the problem from several other researchers and the like. I was quoted in the article several times, emphasizing some of my favorite themes from The No Asshole Rule including the virtues of learning… -
The HateMobile
21 Jun 2009 | 10:31 amThe authors of I Hate People, Jonathan and Marc, customized their rental car so it was a rolling advertisement for their book. A brilliant move I think, although perhaps a bit dangerous in New York City. Check out their post, which also describes the excitement they generated handing out promotional swag in Times Square. These guys are getting piles of attention in the main stream media, CNN,Wall Street Journal, and New York Times. So I have to hand it to them because they are doing the guerrilla marketing thing too. -
The No Asshole Rule at Shakespeare Miami
17 Jun 2009 | 11:44 amI still get perhaps 20 emails a week from people about the challenges and triumphs of dealing with workplace assholes. I try to respond to each, but don’t print most of them because I know that readers of this blog aren’t interested in reading about all assholes all the time, and I would be bored to tears too if that was all I ever wrote about. But every now and then I get a note that is just wonderful and feel compelled to share it. Today, I got one of my favorite notes ever, from Colleen Stovall, who is the Producing Artistic Director at Shakespeare Miami – which… -
Great Review for "I Hate People" In Today's Wall Street Journal
17 Jun 2009 | 9:31 amAt breakfast this morning, my wife pointed out that I Hate People (which I endorsed and is a book I love) got a long and very positive review in today's Wall Street Journal. The reviewer did a bit of nit-picking, but he clearly is a big fan of the book. Predicting which books will be best-sellers and which will not is impossible, but my first reaction to reading this book, which persists, is that if any book in the current market deserves to be one, this is it, because business books that are both fun and useful are as rare as hen's teeth. Check out the review…
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AE on the Verge
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Three decades ago? Yikes.
1 Jul 2009 | 7:29 pmSomething happened today that made me feel old: the Sony Walkman turned 30. I think I can mark time by what technology I was using ..... my Smith Corona typewriter with the correctable cartridge, FORTRAN (IF THEN GO TO) and the Walkman in college ... Wang with Lotus 1-2-3 and my very first so-called "portable" Mac (a carrying case does not mean easy to carry) in the early eighties at NAR ... the exciting moments of explaining how to put thermal paper in a dumb terminal for electronic communication in the mid-eighties (yes, I was your first online MLS instructor) ... and on and on ... and on. -
9 Thoughts after 2 Months on Twitter
28 Jun 2009 | 6:27 pm9 more thoughts after 2 months on Twitter (in no particular order) ...1. Maintaining 2 identities: There's difference of opinion about whether it's good or bad to have two separate identities on Twitter - and the challenge of doing that. My opinion is that if it's an "organization" using Twitter but a staff person has personal opinion on other topics - it's not the same. Now that news media, legislators, the Governor, Members of Congress, business groups may follow (or just watch) an association on Twitter, the organization's "name" should likely be mindful of that. It is, however, difficult… -
Why not pick what many people like?
25 Jun 2009 | 8:24 pmI'm not sure if this is stating the obvious - but is a reason certain foods are typically available and selected because there are a lot of people who like them?At a recent conference an attendee handed out single-packs of Reese's peanut butter cups - with a sticker with his Twitter name. I've also received weird candy in the past that maybe other attendees may find they really like ... or they'd ignore it, or dislike it. Recently I checked into a hotel after midnight after traveling for many hours. Awaiting me in my room was a note from the manager - and a chalkboard with a display of mole… -
Annoying: Cancelled vs. Canceled
22 Jun 2009 | 8:51 pmI'm deeply into my career and still don't have certainty about if the correct spelling is "cancelled" or "canceled". I could link to all the conflicting info, but won't. Today I cancelled a meeting. And spell check rejected it. Checked numerous sources as I've done numerous times and kept as cancelled (not canceled) because it looks wrong the other way.Spell check on this blog program didn't flag either spelling. Maybe they're both right? -
5 (Bad) Twitter Lessons
21 Jun 2009 | 1:04 pmThis online story has some classic examples of Twitter gone bad, compliments of singer Usher's soon-to-be ex-wife Tameka. And since I don't personally know Usher and never followed either of them on Twitter - I can't even tell you if the reported story is remotely true - but think the lessons apply to all Twitter users regardless of the circumstances.1. Watch out for the Direct Messages. I learned my first week on Twitter how easy it is to accidentally send a direct message (DM) meant for one person out to everyone. Story says Tameka thought she was sending a Direct (private) Message to Star…
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Jason Calacanis
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Wheels up
1 Jul 2009 | 5:44 pm————— Jason@Calacanis.com | Mobile: 310-456-4900 http://www.calacanis.com | http://www.mahalo.com Executive Assistant: admin@calacanis.com -
Final moments in Aspen
1 Jul 2009 | 9:49 am————— Jason@Calacanis.com | Mobile: 310-456-4900 http://www.calacanis.com | http://www.mahalo.com Executive Assistant: admin@calacanis.com -
Eric Schmidt of Google speaking at Aspen Ideas Festival right now talking about economy
30 Jun 2009 | 12:31 pm————— Jason@Calacanis.com | Mobile: 310-456-4900 http://www.calacanis.com | http://www.mahalo.com Executive Assistant: admin@calacanis.com -
Aspen is stunning
29 Jun 2009 | 6:55 pm————— Jason@Calacanis.com | Mobile: 310-456-4900 http://www.calacanis.com | http://www.mahalo.com Executive Assistant: admin@calacanis.com -
Landing in Aspen is really scary and beautiful.
29 Jun 2009 | 5:34 pm[Jc-mahalo Aspen] ————— Jason@Calacanis.com | Mobile: 310-456-4900 http://www.calacanis.com | http://www.mahalo.com Executive Assistant: admin@calacanis.com
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Ze Frank
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Paul Hawken's Commencement Address
30 Jun 2009 | 4:03 pmPaul Hawken's Commencement Address to the Class of 2009 at the University of Portland :: make sure you read the comments as well -
that makes me think of :: black and white
28 Jun 2009 | 12:22 pmnew video on Time.com :: second in a series that might stick around -
Happy Time
22 Jun 2009 | 6:39 pmyou can turn it up :: watch below :: -
HardTimes :: Five People
22 Jun 2009 | 4:24 pmbelow :: -
if you have time and time
20 Jun 2009 | 1:29 pma talk I gave at Webstock which i suppose you could say is dedicated to you :: and "That Makes Me Think Of" :: the first in a series for Time.com
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John Jantsch
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What Really Generates Referrals
2 Jul 2009 | 8:23 amThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing What Really Generates Referrals So much of the literature on the subject of referrals focuses on the proper ways to network, ask for referrals, and create incentive programs for referral sources. While some of these more tactical things do indeed produce referrals for the organizations and salespeople that employ them, they are often little more than window dressing when it comes to the big picture. Building a foundation that automatically generates referral momentum is not done through external actions – like some many things in life, you do it from… -
Yahoo Pipes a Smokin Radar Tool
1 Jul 2009 | 6:13 amThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing Yahoo Pipes a Smokin Radar Tool Yahoo Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. Frankly, it has been around for a couple of years now and while it’s advanced a bit, I don’t think it has ever really caught on in a big way. The interface is a little funky and takes some getting use to, but once you do, it’s a pretty cool tool. Pipes can do some very complex things, but what I think it does better than most other options is allow you to aggregate, sort and filter many RSS feeds… -
Local as Differentiator
30 Jun 2009 | 8:17 amThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing Local as Differentiator Several years ago, Hilary Brown decided to open a burger joint in Lawrence, KS. She readily admits that folks around town questioned whether the world, or for that matter Lawrence, needed another place to get a hamburger. After all, this is a college and fast food is plentiful. Brown tells that to her doubters she enthusiastically replied, “what I’m creating is the next generation of burger joints.” Local Burger, as her restaurant is called, takes into consideration where food comes from as well as the… -
Making Video an Everyday Marketing Activity
29 Jun 2009 | 5:17 amThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing Making Video an Everyday Marketing Activity Capturing and adding video to your marketing and social media mix has become a necessary and increasingly expected part of creating your overall marketing message. With each passing day this task just seems to get easier. Camera prices have fallen while quality has risen, editing software is free and simple to use, and video hosting and streaming from sites like YouTube provide most of the heavy lifting when it comes to putting those videos online. Recently, I added a Flip Ultra HD camera to my portfolio of… -
Weekend Favs for June Twenty-Seven
27 Jun 2009 | 5:39 amThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing Weekend Favs for June Twenty-Seven I’ve added a weekend post routine that I hope you enjoy. Each weekend I write a post that features 3-4 things I read during the week that I found interesting. Generally speaking it won’t involve much analysis and may range widely in topic. (Flickr image included here is also fav image of the week) Enjoy! Good stuff I ran across this week 100 Social Sites for Every Aspect of your Life - this should keep you busy for a few hours 74 Examples of single web page design - draw inspiration from these simple designs Tips…
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Chris Anderson
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Dear Malcolm: Why so threatened?
29 Jun 2009 | 3:31 pmIt’s now clear that the bane of my next year will be questions about the future of the newspaper industry from journalists. I don’t blame them—newspapers are indeed one of the industries most affected by Free (although that’s just one manifestation of their larger problem: having lost their monopoly on consumer attention). And neither I nor anybody else has any good answers, other than the newspaper business is probably going to shrink but not go away, and that the business model will have to change. But since journalist Malcolm Gladwell has somewhat parochially decided to make the… -
Corrections in the digital editions of Free
24 Jun 2009 | 10:36 amAs some of you may have seen, VQR rightly spotted that I failed to cite Wikipedia in some passages in Free. This is entirely my own screwup, and will be corrected in the ebook and digital forms before publication (and in the notes, which will be posted online at the same time the hardcover is released), but I did want to explain a bit more how it happened and what we’re doing about it. First, as readers of my writings know, I’m a supporter of using Wikipedia as a source (not the only one, of course, and checking the original source material whenever possible). I disagree with those who… -
Waste is Good. FREE excerpt in Wired
22 Jun 2009 | 10:33 pmWe published an excerpt from the book in Wired this month. Here’s how it starts: “In 1969, the Neiman Marcus catalog offered the first home PC, a stylish stand-up model called the Honeywell Kitchen Computer, priced at $10,600. The picture shows an aproned housewife caressing the machine, with this tag line: "If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute." That image should be on every cubicle in Silicon Valley; it's a testament both to what technologists get right and what they get badly wrong. To their credit, they understood that Moore's law would bring… -
My Free speech from last weeks Wired Business Conference
22 Jun 2009 | 1:50 pmI cover competing with free, free gaming models, the newspaper free vs paid debated (actually free vs. freemium) and the antitrust implications of free The slides are below, with apologies for the messed up typeface. It didn’t look that way on the day: Other speeches from the conference are here -
FREE publication is a month away! 150 books to give away now.
16 Jun 2009 | 6:20 amThe hardcovers of FREE: The Future of a Radical Price just came in and they look great. Pub date is July 7th in the US and July 2nd in the UK. We’ll be announcing the many ways in which you can get bits versions of the book (audio, ebook, web) for free around pub date, but in the meantime, it’s time to start giving away some good old atoms! With The Long Tail, we gave away 200 books to the first bloggers who asked for them and promised to review them (the “long tail of book reviewers”). That worked great, but times have changed. So this time, we’re going to go all full-spectrum on…
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Ray Kurzweil (and Ramona)
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Discovery pinpoints new connection between cancer cells, stem cells
2 Jul 2009 | 1:21 amTelomerase, best known for enabling unlimited cell division of stem cells and cancer cells, has a surprising additional role in the expression of genes in an important stem cell regulatory pathway, say researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The unexpected finding may lead to new anticancer therapies and a greater understanding of how adult and embryonic stem cells divide and specialize. (Source: http://www.physorg.com/news165674795.html) -
Sea level rise: It's worse than we thought
2 Jul 2009 | 1:10 amThe continued melting of glaciers and ice caps outside of Greenland and Antarctica will add another 10 to 20 centimeters to sea level by 2100, according to one report. (Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327151.300-sea-level-rise-its-worse-than-we-thought.html?full=true) -
Robot rescue "rat" feels its way through rubble
2 Jul 2009 | 1:03 amA new robot with artificial whiskers could one day be used to locate survivors of natural disasters, or people trapped in burning buildings. (Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17403-robot-rescue-rat-feels-its-way-through-rubble.html) -
Open-Source Data Glove
2 Jul 2009 | 12:49 amAcceleGlove, a low-cost programmable glove that records hand and finger movements, could be used for robotic control and in video games, sports training, or physical rehabilitation. (Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22838/) -
NASA, Japan Release Most Complete Topographic Map Of Earth
1 Jul 2009 | 12:11 amNASA and Japan have released a new digital topographic map of Earth that covers more of our planet than ever before, produced with detailed measurements from NASA's Terra spacecraft. (Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090630162848.htm)
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Chris Messina
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Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 at the height of cynicism
17 Jun 2009 | 11:15 amI shat on Opera yesterday, and I did the same thing to Mozilla a couple years ago, and while I’m not about to go headlong into another tirade on Microsoft, I do have to point out why this contest out of Microsoft Australia is, actually, as stupid as it sounds (contrary to what they’d have you believe). First, my memory isn’t so short as to have forgotten that it was Microsoft and their browser (Internet Explorer 6) that held back the web for so many years. Second, promoting a contest that is based on the very same problem that lead to IE6 stifling innovation on the web is… -
Thoughts on Opera Unite
16 Jun 2009 | 4:52 pmI met today’s news about Opera’s new initiative — called Unite — with a mix of shock and awe. On the one hand, I was sickened by the lack of analysis from the echolalic blogger news corps. It appeared that Opera PR had successfully reached out to all of them, shoved a news release down their throats and waited to give them the go-ahead to regurgitate it on their blogs, using the same screenshots, same content, and differing only in the pithiness of their post titles. Of course, I could have gotten the same depth of analysis from half a dozen tweets. Maybe they long ago wrote… -
Facebook usernames and the battle over your digital identity
9 Jun 2009 | 5:32 pmTechmeme is buzzing with the news that Facebook is finally going to provide custom usernames — and hence web addresses — for its 200 million users. The land grab begins in just over three days at facebook.com/username/. If Dustin Moskovitz were dead, he’d be rolling over in his grave. For those of you who don’t know who Dustin Moskovitz is, he’s one of those infrequently mentioned co-founders of Facebook that prevented Facebook from offering usernames or friendly web addresses (so-called “vanity URLs” in the industry) from the beginning. It was his insistence… -
In defense of microformats
7 Jun 2009 | 8:51 pmI’d never received an Open Letter until Alan Morrison posted one earlier today in response to an interview I gave to Straight.com about microformats and the (lowercase) semantic web. For the sake of completeness, here’s what he wrote: Chris, judging from your interview in Straight.com, you seem like a thoughtful guy. But you don’t seem to understand that the Microformat and Semantic Web folks aren’t that far apart. You cite the prevalence of non-standard HTML to support your contention that we’ll never use ontologies. But in the same article, you say the… -
The Fall of Vidoop
5 Jun 2009 | 4:31 pmWhen I left Flock in 2006, I blogged the occasion, having helped start the company by contributing a vision for what I thought the web needed: a social browser. When I was laid off from Vidoop last month, I didn’t so much as tweet about it. The circumstances were different this time. But because the lack of information coming from the company is disappointing (if not frankly irresponsible) it seemed time that I wrote down my recollection of what went down. Joining Vidoop I joined Vidoop just over a year ago, in May of 2008. To be honest, my initial impressions of the company…
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Pam Slim
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Instant mood lifter: thank someone for a job well done
24 Jun 2009 | 5:55 amI am sitting in the Phoenix airport about to take off for the first leg of my book tour in Silicon Valley, CA and Portland, Oregon. I arrived at 4:30am since my husband dropped me off before work. My flight takes off at 6:15am. The entrance to the departure curb was blocked off for maintenance, and by the time we realized it, I had to crawl over some barriers with my suitcase and drag my book-laden suitcases far down the sidewalk. The police officer stationed at the blocked off entrance gave me an annoyed look. “Someone left you stranded, huh?” he said, as if I had been… -
Overloaded corporate employee w/entrepreneurial dreams needs your advice
16 Jun 2009 | 11:12 amIt has been awhile since I have done an “open source coaching” post. These have been some of my very favorite times on the blog, since the advice from my readers is so specific and supportive. Past posts include: The 23 year old ballplayer trapped in a cube and the follow up post with input from his mom Relationship advice for an aspiring entrepreneur This time around, my gentle reader is, in her words, trapped in a hellish situation and wants to find a way out. Here is the gist, edited for confidentiality. We decided that “Manic Mathilda” was an appropriate… -
Open letter to recent college graduates
12 Jun 2009 | 5:44 pmCongratulations! Making it through four or five years of college requires concentration, stamina and discipline and you should feel very proud of yourself. I am proud of you. I imagine you have been getting looks of pity from friends and relatives since you are graduating in one of the bleakest economic climates since the Great Depression. Here is the good news: there is no need to worry. Living with constraints and challenges is one of the best learning opportunities you will ever get. By succeeding in a tough economy, you will be much better prepared for life than peers who graduate… -
How to know if a work challenge is building or busting your chops
11 Jun 2009 | 1:57 pmThe other day I got a panicked text message from a client. “Help me Pam. I am totally scared. Call me.” Expecting to hear the worst, I called him right back. “What’s going on?” I said. “I just got asked to take on a big project and I am scared out of my mind” he replied. Knowing that he was new in his consulting business and that a big project was exactly what he had been asking for, we worked together to diagnose the scary parts so he could move out of the panic zone and get busy. If you get in a similar quandary, here is how I suggest getting out of… -
Learn fantastic relationship-building skills with me, Keith Ferrazzi and Daniel Pink on 6/11
10 Jun 2009 | 2:44 pmI sometimes have a flair for the dramatic when talking about important business building ideas. I am dead serious about this one: The topic of this call is the secret to the universe, and will radically alter the course of your destiny if you apply it. What I mean by “secret to the universe*” is that when you build strong mentoring relationships with people who are deeply committed to your personal and professional success, you are propelled faster towards the things you want to accomplish in life than any other single thing you do. Keith Ferrazzi, bestselling author of Never…
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Shel Israel
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Restarting SM Global Report
8 Jun 2009 | 8:27 amWhile there is still some work to do on Twitterville, the heavy lifting is over on my part as the publisher's efforts swing into full gear. Interviews about 125 people for the book and nearly 100 of them will be cited, to varying degrees in the book when it comes out Sept. 3. About that number are also acknowledged in the book for having contributed useful ideas or content.It seems the core of my work since 2005, has been to talk with people about how social media is changing their work, culture and life in general. I have now interviewed more than 400 people in 41 countries for my two… -
Cleansing Tiananmen Square
5 Jun 2009 | 8:54 amA few hours before the actual anniversary began, Isaac Mao, one of China's best-known bloggers, tweeted: "Tienanmen Square is the world's most clean Plaza." He wasn't talking street sweepers. He was talking about the near-total erasure from official history of a massacre that occurred in Beijing's largest and best-know square. Twenty years earlier, Chinese people gathered in that square. First it was a handful of students, then more joined in. It went beyond students and everyday people joined in, peasants, workers, professionals even Marxists, people who lived… -
Twitter and that Business Model Thingee
1 Jun 2009 | 11:26 amI had a really good time at TWTRCON yesterday. While some were critical that it was the Twitterville community's testimonial to itself, I found it inspiring to see the rapid emergence of a business community that shares a passion for Twitter. The conference was sold out and the room was about as filled as it could be--unless the round top tables had been removed.My old friend Gina Smith, for ABC tech correspondent and iWoz co-author, did a good job of co-hosting, but she seemed to inject a common theme regarding Twitter and the alleged lack of business model. I found myself disagreeing… -
Ford's endorsement of a national emissions standard
29 May 2009 | 10:13 amLong before I was passionate about social media, I had become passionate about the issue of global warming and emissions. Long before that I was passionate about cars and frustrated at how few of the really cool ones were being built in the US.In fact, long before I team up with Scoble to write Naked Conversation, I researched what would have been a book about the auto industry, environmental non-protection under the Bush administration and the blocking of a California emissions standard approved by voters in 1998 and blocked by Detroit and the EPA in 2002. It was going to be called "Out… -
Send me your favorite tweets
15 May 2009 | 4:58 pmMy editor came up with a great idea for Twitterville. he wants to sprinkle a few chapters with a few sample tweets. The idea is to give readers a sense of the diversity, depth, humor, passion and surprise you find there every day.I'd like you to send me your favorite tweets. The catch is that it should be someone else's--not your own. If we use it, I'll add you to the Acknowledgments. If there is space please use the tag #TVL. I know some entries won't have space, so I'll be pretty vigilant looking.Of course it will score points--but is not mandatory if you send a…
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Jessica Knows
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Best Way to Find Your Blogging Voice? Keep On Blogging
30 Jun 2009 | 11:20 amImage via Wikipedia I get approached a lot for blogging and branding advice. One of the number one questions I get asked: “I feel like my blog is all over the place. How do I get my blog more focused?” First, I’ll say that I can completely see why this is a quandary. Everywhere you look, you’ll find a blogger [...] -
Measuring Reach and Influence: Beyond the Page Views
29 Jun 2009 | 12:19 pmImage by thebadastronomer via Flickr Let’s face it, when it comes to blogger outreach and marketing, PR professionals and business owners alike are always asking bloggers the same question: “What are your page views per month?” This has become the bane of a lot of bloggers’ existence as they try to increase their traffic in order to get [...] -
Bloggers: Use An Email Newsletter to Drive Traffic & Tell a Story
25 Jun 2009 | 12:12 pmImage via Wikipedia A lot of my readers are on my newsletter subscription list. Different from my RSS feed, I only send newsletters when I have some news to share or a special event coming up. In other words, I don’t send a newsletter out on a regular, scheduled basis. I’ve tried different approaches to my email newsletter. [...] -
Alice.com for the Lazy Frugal Shopper: Better than Amazon Subscriptions
23 Jun 2009 | 6:06 amImage via Wikipedia UPDATE! All fifty $10 credits have been given out to readers. Thanks for the great feedback and remember, you still get a $10 credit just for signing up AND a referral fee on friends and family that you introduce to Alice.com as new customers. I want to save money anywhere I can, but a [...] -
The Way We’re Wired…
19 Jun 2009 | 8:28 amImage via Wikipedia As most of you all know, recently my family decided that I would go back to work full-time, return to the corporate world if you will. It was a huge decision for our family to make but it was an easy decision. Why? Because the family roles we have set up right now [...]
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Matt Mullenweg
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Live Web
2 Jul 2009 | 12:08 pmLive Web, Real Time . . . Call It What You Will, It’s Gonna Take A While To Get It. Excellent article by Mary Hodder. -
Velocity and the Bottom Line
2 Jul 2009 | 10:40 amVelocity and the Bottom Line. How performance touches everything on the web, and includes a quote from me about the importance if of speed to the user experience. You can check out my whole presentation, the Moral Philosophy of Performance, on Blip. -
Real-time Systems Knowledge
29 Jun 2009 | 8:24 amScoble: Real-time systems hurting long-term knowledge? -
The Way I Work, annotated
19 Jun 2009 | 5:13 pmI was fortunate enough to be featured in the July issue of Inc. magazine’s “The Way I Work” column. (Page 114, the one with Paul Graham on the cover.) The article is great and the photography very flattering, but it’s a little misleading. All TWIW articles are written in the first person, but not directly authored by the subjects, and we’re not allowed to see them before they’re published. These bizarre rules have some unexpected outcomes, and I’ve taken the liberty of rewriting the article in my own words and with lots of extra links. (You can read the… -
The Capitalist Manifesto
15 Jun 2009 | 10:02 amThe Capitalist Manifesto: Greed Is Good (To a Point). A fair summary view of financial goings-on, with a bit of preaching at the end.
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Mark Cuban
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Free vs Freely Distributed
30 Jun 2009 | 5:21 pmWith the publication of Chris Anderson’s new book Free, the discussion about the role of free, today and in the future has expanded. Articles from Malcom Gladwell in New Yorker, and Seth Godin discuss the various merits and challenges of Free. Is Free inevitable ? Is Free the beginning of the end ? Let me answer the question. First of all, what we are experiencing right now is “Better Than Free”. The videos on Youtube, magazine articles, newspapers reports, anything that used to be analog that now is digital have a perceived value that is based on their legacy… -
2 Quick Hits On Sports Media and The Stock Market
19 Jun 2009 | 8:36 am1. Has anyone noticed that its impossible to trust a single word uttered about coaching changes, the draft, trades and even celebration parties these days ? Bloggers, sports websites and even the print media have gotten so desperate they seem to have come to the conclusion that fabricated stories, passed off as rumors, are a better way to drive traffic and create awareness of a website or blog than actual reporting. Unfortunately, ESPN and local newspapers, radio and TV media have become the patsies of bloggers. If some random blogger reports that “he has heard that a trade of Joe for… -
Success & Motivation – 2009
9 Jun 2009 | 1:44 pmThis is the year of WTF. Yep, What the F&&&. It doesn’t matter what got you to the point of saying it. Maybe you got fired/layed off. Maybe your company went out of business. Maybe you quit because you couldn’t take it any longer. Maybe you are just graduating from school and the prospects of living at home are far worse than cramming in with 12 roommates in a beater house or apartment you call “The Hotel”. Whatever the reason, the question is how do you turn this time into the start of something good ? I’m here to give you your WTF To Do List. 1. -
The Google – Youtube – Conundrum
2 Jun 2009 | 6:51 amYou have a video that you want to post on the web. It may be just for you. It could be for friends. It could be for family. It could be for a company or a political campaign. It could a video that you want seen by as many people as possible. Regardless of your audience expectations, do you have any expectation of paying for that video to be hosted ? Of course you don’t. Neither does anyone else. The reality is that all of us have the expectation of being able to post any and every video on sites like Youtube for free, with no limitation on audience size or location. We have… -
Who Cares What People Write ?
31 May 2009 | 5:46 pmIn this day and age of blogs, aggregation sites, personal recommendation sites, link publishing, twitter and more, its not unusual to get a news alert email, or to wake up and google a person, place or thing and find hundreds of references originated in just the past 24 hours. Does it matter ? Could something be published hundreds, if not thousands of times on the net and be read by no one ? Fewer than 100 people ? Fewer than 100 people that you care about ? The answer is yes. When should you care if something is published on the net about you, your company, or someone you care about ?
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Tom Peters
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May All the Gods Smile Upon Them!
29 Jun 2009 | 10:35 amSee directly above. It is the "control panel" of my new Black & Decker SmartBrew coffeemaker. One switch. Two positions. "On." "Off." I hereby declare that B&D not only wins Tom's User Friendly Grand Award—but retires the cup!! (Some of you snobs will go on & on & on about the limitations of my Dearest Delight. And I will reply with a smirk. In a blind taste test, my coffee will be as good as yours!) Posted by Tom Peters | Comments? -
Speaking of Superb User-friendly Design (and Simplicity) ...
29 Jun 2009 | 10:30 amBelow you'll see ye olde fashion nubby scorecard pencil—directly from Fenway Park. Doesn't get much better than that, either! Posted by Tom Peters | Comments? -
Speaking of Design:How to Spend $50,000
29 Jun 2009 | 10:20 amIf I had $50,000 to spend on the design of a new home—or smallish professional office building, here's how I'd spend it: Home: Interior designer: $25,000. Landscape designer: $15,000. Architect: $10,000. Logic: We live and work and play inside the dwelling (mostly) and outside the dwelling (some to a lot, depending on the climate). The skin that divides in from out, the architect's work, is a third-order concern. Office: Interior designer: $30,000. Landscape designer: $12,000. Architect: $8,000. Logic is pretty much the same, with a little added emphasis on… -
Mary Pennington, Ignaz Semmelweis,And the "Last 98%"
29 Jun 2009 | 10:15 amMary Pennington, IBD tells us (June 22), was known as the "Ice Lady." The Philadelphian saved countless lives via her successful campaigns for sanitary food practices in the early 1900s. Her engaging demeanor was such that she was time and again able to gain the support of both producers and distributors. (A Ph.D. chemist from Penn, remarkable in itself, she became the first woman employed by the USDA.) Reading about Ms Pennington, I was reminded of the virtually opposite story of Ignaz Semmelweis, another pioneer in the field of sanitary conditions. While his work, and that of his peers,… -
Success Tip #176:
29 Jun 2009 | 10:10 amSkip the Trashtalk! Sure you're pissed off that the folks who will be the BENEFICIARIES (!!) of your Magnificent Work "just don't get it." Hint: Calling them the likes of "irresponsible murderers" won't help! Rule: Don't trashtalk prospective users of your programs—even in the most private of private conversations with your most trusted friends and allies!! Posted by Tom Peters | Comments?
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Dave Taylor
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Bad PR Pitch #7132: From Baskin Robbins?
2 Jul 2009 | 11:01 amI dunno if it's just me, but this marketing communications from Paramount PR, the public relations agency for popular ice cream company Baskin-Robbins, sure comes across as presumptuous:Subject: Cool Down this 4th of July with Tasty Treats from Baskin Robbins Hi, I hope you're doing well today! Please post this information on your blog, and let me know if you have any questions. No Fourth of July celebration is complete without ice cream and cake! What better way to add fun and flavor to a July 4th fireworks celebration or backyard BBQ than with a delicious ice cream cake? Starting at just… -
For Sale: The "Firedog" Brand
17 Jun 2009 | 11:09 pmImagine my surprise when I saw the following graphic in the middle of my evening update from TWICE, the consumer electronics industry publication: It's not a terrible ad for industry insiders, but still, a bit of a surprise. Check out where it leads: streambankllc.com/engagements/firedog.html As the site explains: Brand StrengthNumber 2 market positionMulti-service offering under one brandNational footprint with coverage of over 80% of the US populationMarket-leading customer satisfaction scoresGenerated over $272 million of sales in F2008Achieved 28% revenue growth and more than doubled EBT… -
Mainstream media wasn't asleep during the Iranian election!
14 Jun 2009 | 8:37 amI know that it's a popular pastime among the social media cogniscenti to talk about how real-time information sources like Twitter are constantly trumping the so-called mainstream news media's ability to cover stories, but I have to say that the current drumbeat of Twitter vs. CNN on the Iranian elections is a bit too much to bear without some sort of reality check. As you should be aware, the last few days have seen a surprisingly controversial election for the role of President of Iran, with moderate candidate Mirhossein Mousavi believing that he had a substantial lead over President… -
The micro-land rush of Facebook Custom URLs
12 Jun 2009 | 10:06 pmI succumbed, as you can see with this sequence of images: Finally, the seconds count down and ... Whoo hoo! Imagine a digital version of settlers in their wagons rushing across the plains to stake down their prime real estate. Um, kind of. A click on the "Continue" button and: What the hell? Seven seconds have elapsed and someone's already nailed "DaveTaylor" (and "dave" and "taylor" and "dave.taylor") custom URLs? I surmise someone had a name reserved for them, somehow. Ah well, I have another one that I commonly use, "d1taylor", so that's what I try instead: Success! Done. Now you can click… -
Car navigation system with TV tuner, from Mio. WTH??
4 Jun 2009 | 8:31 amI read the following press release this morning with increasing disbelief: (FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -06/03/2009) - When your passengers sleep as you drive, do you feel lonely? Mio, one of the leading makers of PNDs (Portable Navigation Devices), has insightfully launched its first comprehensive range of PNDs with built-in TV tuners - Mio Moov V500 and V700 range at Computex Taipei 2009 today. Featuring 4.7" and 7" widescreens respectively, the two devices are expected to bring a new vision to the world of navigation. I can only assume that the Mio design team doesn't ever actually drive at…
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Valeria Maltoni
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Right Place, Right Time - Free
2 Jul 2009 | 4:00 amOne of the things that you probably learned by hanging out with me here at Conversation Agent is that I tend to bring together a lot of ideas in a short space, show you how those ideas are connected, and why you need to care. But, here's the thing, you care only if I catch you in the right frame of mind, if when you're reading this post you wrestle with the very same thoughts.Attention and contextIn other words, I have your attention - and sometimes I'm even fortunate enough to have your take in the comments - when you're already paying attention to that issue yourself. It's like buying a… -
Social Media Program Lifecycle
1 Jul 2009 | 4:00 amOr as Gianluca Arnesano calls it, the only slide you need to know. I translated the word campaign as program, because I do really believe that it's a cycle with a long tail that probably nearly doesn't wear off or go to zero. This is the work of Italian agency Frozen Frogs born out of the work the agency has been doing with consumer goods companies. It's a brilliant rendition of the dynamics of attention, something Gianluca has been working with for a number of years.In this graphic, which he explains in the PDF offered at the post, he distinguishes between the actions of the company and/or… -
Are *You* Truly Engaged?
30 Jun 2009 | 4:00 amIt was a comment from Zoë and a title of a blog post from Chris Brogan that made me ask the question. Twitter can be tiring and pointless noise, and social media can be a bunch of chores, if the intent does not match the intention. If your involvement is not engagement, then what happens to the outcomes?As Zoë put it so well, when we approach these tools with intention and honesty, they fuel fulfilling outcomes. But when we approach them out of boredom or restlessness, we remain unfulfilled. And so we do and so do companies that are thinking about joining the social media bandwagon. Yes,… -
3 Steps to Mapping the Customer Journey
29 Jun 2009 | 4:00 amI've been reading David Lee King's book Designing the Digital Experience [courtesy of David himself] and I can tell you that many corporate Web masters could learn a thing or two about designing sites from the users' point of view. If you define the digital and customer experience from the point of view of the buyer, not the seller, there are several consideration to make.Even as marketers understand the ideas of customer journey and persona, the hard part is translating that information into truly executing on the customer experience - digital or otherwise - when we're not there. The… -
P&L of New (local) Media
28 Jun 2009 | 4:00 amWhat happens when your local paper goes online only? It loses most of its staff, that's one outcome. I picked up the information from Fred Wilson's blog where a really good discussion around aggregating, curating, and publishing new media is under way. The P&L chart does make a fair argument for staff reductions. Yes, readers did point out that the $5-15 RPM is rather high.The pitch to make such publication possible is from Outside.in, a three-year-old company that has just rolled out a new tool to (supposedly) make pulling extra content created by local bloggers, Twitterers and lots of…
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Brian Williams
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A tyrant's last comments
2 Jul 2009 | 2:50 pmBy Brian Williams, Anchor and managing editor I found this to be the most amazing piece of journalism I ran across today -- believe what you will of Saddam's comments, but if true, it certainly changes the arc of history a bit and clears up some fictions, perhaps. It's well worth a read. Great posts from all our readers last night. I join you in mourning Karl Malden -- what a giant. I was glad to see that most of those who took a "swing" at the issue agreed with me on grunting in tennis -- except for Sam Maier, who committed the ultimate e-mail sin, the incomplete dis! … -
What's that again?
1 Jul 2009 | 12:43 pmBy Brian Williams, Anchor and managing editor We're going to mark the anniversary of the Walkman tonight, and we came across a piece of writing from Hans Fantel in the New York Times, December 20, 1979. Can you imagine reading this passage today, about the effect of a personal stereo? "The listener is sonically isolated and psychologically removed from his surroundings. Schubert on Conrail unquestionably helps in traversing the South Bronx." Where to begin? The gender specificity of "his" surroundings? Conrail? Remember Conrail? You can still see the old logo on… -
Treating patients in need, without the bill
30 Jun 2009 | 3:02 pmBy Kevin Tibbles, NBC News correspondent Tonight's "Making a Difference" report doesn't come with bells and whistles. And, in my opinion, that is what makes it so special. It is a straightforward story about two longtime friends who grew up "without" on the streets of Chicago. "I don't remember a time when I didn't know Charlie," says George Maltezos, a mental health counselor. Maltezos and Dr. Charles Martinez are both in their seventies, both retired and both working harder than ever. That is, in part, because this inseparable pair never forgot what it was like growing up in households that… -
Being able to touch history
30 Jun 2009 | 2:14 pmBy Brian Williams, Anchor and managing editor Last weekend, I attended Mass at the same church in Rhode Island where John F. Kennedy was married. Having read about the family and the event for years, it was a thrill to sit beneath those old timbers, to inhale the atmosphere and see the interior and exterior, largely unchanged since that day when the young couple exited to huge waiting crowds. As a history buff, "tactile" history is what I love best: holding a letter signed by FDR, running your finger over the signature and realizing that's as close as you may get to some of our… -
The best of what's out there
29 Jun 2009 | 2:10 pmBy Brian Williams, Anchor and managing editor Slate magazine over the weekend posted a terrific remembrance of Michael Jackson and another on the death of Kodachrome. There's a dark take on life in New York magazine's blog -- some of the quirks of timing through history where celebrity deaths are concerned. We're also remembering one of my favorites as a veteran talk-show viewer from the '60s and '70s -- Fred Travalena. Otherwise, we hope you can join us for our Monday broadcast -- as we start another week.
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Roger Von Oech
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Video of the Amazing X-Ball®
1 Jul 2009 | 5:48 pmHere's a fun 1-minute video of my newest product: the X-Ball, a set of 30 X-shaped magnetic design pieces (available from Creative Whack Company). The X-Ball is a companion product to the award-winning Ball of Whacks. The X-Ball gets your creative juices flowing! -
Lessons Learned Selling on the iPhone App Store
4 Jun 2009 | 9:47 am[The following interview was conducted by David Armano of Logic + Emotion and originally published in his blog on June 3, 2009.]David Armano: With Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference coming up on June 8-9, it's time to check in with L+E's favorite iPhone App developer, Roger von Oech.Earlier this year, Roger turned his Creative Whack Pack card deck into an iPhone App called the Creative Whack Pack. Roger refers to it as "the App's store's premier creative thinking/innovation tool." I did several posts on it the week it launched in March.So what's… -
Creative Whack Pack 2.0 with Note-Taking Now Available!
31 May 2009 | 11:13 amRelease 2.0 of my Creative Whack Pack iPhone App has just been made available at the iTunes App Store. The big new feature is note-taking creative workshops! This release is FREE for current owners of the App. For more info, go HERE. In my years as a creativity consultant, I've found that when attendees write down their ideas and answers to prompts and questions, their inspiration increases an order of magnitude. A switch goes off in their heads when they're required to commit their thoughts to writing.Thus, note-taking leads to a deeper engagement with this product's creative… -
Fun Test: Switch the Frogs
30 May 2009 | 5:37 pmHave a go at this: Switch the frogs to the opposite side within two minutes. (Supposedly a second grade computer test in China.) Click the picture for link. -
Innovation Tools Creativity Survey
29 May 2009 | 6:06 pmChuck Frey at Innovation Tools is asking for participants in a study surveying their creativity abilities, how their being utilized in the work place, and what the organizational climate for creativity looks like today.Based on answers from early respondents, Chuck thinks the results will be quite interesting.Click HERE for more info and to participate (it only takes 2 minutes). Did I mention there's a prize?
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Ann Coulter
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Obama to Iran: Let Them Eat Ice Cream
24 Jun 2009 | 3:01 pmOn Iran, President Obama is worse than Hamlet. He's Colin Powell, waiting to see who wins before picking a side. Last week, massive protests roiled Iran in response to an apparently fraudulent presidential... -
NYT: Duke Lacrosse Players Killed Meredith Kercher
17 Jun 2009 | 6:17 pmWhether it is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Weather Underground, Central Park rapists, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Jim Jones and the People's Temple, welfare recipients, Palestinian terrorists, murderers, abortionists, strippers or... -
Welcome Back, Carter
10 Jun 2009 | 6:19 pmWell, I'm glad that's over! Now that our silver-tongued president has gone to Cairo to soothe Muslims' hurt feelings, they love us again! Muslims in Pakistan expressed their appreciation for President Barack Obama's... -
49 Million to Five
3 Jun 2009 | 6:48 pmIn the wake of the shooting of late-term abortionist George Tiller, President Barack Obama sent out a welcome message that this nation would not tolerate attacks on pro-lifers or any other Americans because of their... -
I Feel Your Pain. Not Theirs. Yours.
27 May 2009 | 3:24 pmGod save us from liberal "empathy." After President Barack Obama announced his empathetic Supreme Court nominee this week, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, we found out that some people are more deserving of empathy...
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Jeffrey Zeldman
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XHTML WTF
The web's future isn't what the web's past cracked it up to be. 1999: XML is the light and XHTML is the way. 2009: XHTML is dead—kind of. From the W3C news archive for 2 July 2009: XHTML 2 Working Group Expected to Stop Work End of 2009, W3C to Increase Resources ... -
Design management
Clusterfuck, despite its saucy name, does not refer to a pleasurable group activity. Its origins are military, its antecedents bloody. The Urban Dictionary offers ten pages of definitions. Our favorite is a double entendre on "cluster bomb" and the oak leaf or star cluster insignia worn by incompetent military brass ... -
The new old minimalists
The earliest websites were minimal in the extreme, but without the style and flair to make a virtue of their simplicity. 37signals and Kottke pioneered the combination of simplicity with deft design sense. Cardigan made it art. Although it is never popular, never the dominant trend, rarely wins design awards, and ... -
Sour Outlook
It's outrageous that the CSS standard created in 1996 is not properly supported in Outlook 2010. Let's do something about it. Hundreds of millions use Microsoft Internet Explorer to access the web, and Microsoft Outlook to send and receive email. As everyone reading this knows, the good news is that ... -
Beauty and Code
In Issue No. 286 of A List Apart, For People Who Make Websites, Patrick Lynch explains why beauty matters in design, and Mark Birbeck introduces us to RDFa. Introduction to RDFa: Learn how semantic features normally confined to the head of an HTML document can be used to add semantic richness ...
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Marc Canter
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pdf’s of my Textbook and my Manifesto!
2 Jul 2009 | 7:50 amSo I finally found out how to trick Blurb’s BookSmart and get a pdf of my textbook. And here’s the pdf of my manifesto! This is a happy day for me! Now folks can read what I have to say without having to pay $60! And THEN if you love what I have to say - THEN you can buy a copy of the dead tree version (kudos to Cory Doctorow on that strategy!) It’s taken me THIS long to get here. How symbolic that the day I start to move my boxes into storage and REALLY move out - is the day my data moves out of it’s BookJail and into the cloud! These pdf versions have a… -
How to build the Digital City textbook
30 Jun 2009 | 7:47 pmI’ve uploaded the final (draft3) version of the textbook I’ll be using to teach my class at CWRU this fall. It’s course # EECS 396 - which is part of the EE Computer Science dept. at Case Western Reserve University. I’ll be teaching on T-Thurs afternoons - for 15 weeks. I am TOTALLY looking forward to meeting CWRU’s best and brightest! This diagram shows off the many elements of our ’software infrastructure’. They’ll be a Digital City ID system, which will merge SAML and Open Stack standards together - and keep everyone happy. They’ll… -
Tried to post my eBay listing on Facebook, but…..
29 Jun 2009 | 7:42 pmSo I’m selling my 1982 Checker Marathon taxi and I tried to use this feature on ebay to cross-list it in Facebook. However I got………….. -
Strategy for the Plain Dealer
29 Jun 2009 | 10:32 amI noticed a conversation going on - in my Facebook feed about changing the copyright laws to permit newspapers to keep their content ‘exclusive’ for 24 hours. I’m amazed by the sheer audacity of that idea and it turned out that someone I was just introduced to - Connie Schultz - had come out in favor of this idea. So since I’m moving to Cleveland and these are going to become my issues, I thought I’d weigh in on an alternative approach to helping out the Plain Dealer. After all it’s not the copyright laws that are broken, but the newspaper business… -
Goodbye California
28 Jun 2009 | 1:05 pmAfter 21 years the pool is closed, we’re packing our boxes and we’re outa here. Over the years I’ve been privileged to work with a lot of people. Roger Jones - the photographer of this shot - was the first. Roger was an early employee at MacroMind, helped me build MediaBand, Mediabar and our AOL work. I’ve watched Roger (and his wife Susan’s) kids being raised along with mine and he’s one of the guys I’ll miss.
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Donald Trump
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Real Estate Investing: Creative Ways of Selling a Home to a Buyer
2 Jul 2009 | 8:58 amby Tina Merritt Many residential real estate investors have found that in a buyer's market, the buyer's have a buffet to choose from and the sellers are always looking for new and innovative ways to stand out as the better choice in the line. Sometimes, offering creative ways of financing can open the property up to a new consumer or offer attractive financing terms the competition may not be offering. Below are a few examples of these creative financing terms. Rent with the Option to Buy. Commonly known as a Rent-Option, this type of financing usually has the buyer sign a lease… -
Michael Jackson
30 Jun 2009 | 1:38 pmby Donald J. Trump There’s been a lot of coverage on Michael Jackson, and rightly so. He was the most amazing performer I have ever seen, and I have seen most of the greats. I knew him personally as well, as he lived at Trump Tower and stayed at my Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach. He stayed there when he and Lisa Marie Presley were married, and they were obviously a romantic item. They had a great time and we loved having them as guests. Michael Jackson was a shy person which made his gift as a performer even more astonishing. I remember thinking, “This quiet guy is going to bring… -
Wrestling, Ratings and Guerrilla Marketing
29 Jun 2009 | 4:15 pmby Donald J. Trump Guerilla marketing is a term that was coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his book of 1984, Guerilla Marketing. This is a form of advertising and promotions that depends on the unconventional. Imagination is key, and a big budget isn’t always necessary. Entrepreneurs use this technique, and it’s considered to be non-traditional--just what entrepreneurs are known for being. A very good example of this would be the June 22nd WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) event that drew 6.8 million viewers. That’s a 25% increase in viewers from an earlier broadcast in… -
Focus On Business
26 Jun 2009 | 8:21 amby Donald J. Trump The following question was submitted to "Ask Donald Trump" by a Trump University member. What methods do you use to help you focus on the many projects and businesses that you have? In the morning I review the newspapers, national and international, and watch the morning news. I pay attention to anything that might have an effect on my many businesses and make mental notes about that. It gets my mind going for what I need to address that day, and gives insight into developing situations that might also affect my businesses in the future. This provides an immediate focus. -
Donald Trump's Biggest Challenge
23 Jun 2009 | 4:34 pmby Donald J. Trump The following question was submitted to "Ask Donald Trump" by a Trump University member. What was your biggest challenge as one of the top entrepreneur’s in the world? In the early 1990’s I was many millions of dollars in debt, the markets weren’t doing well, and newspapers had reported my demise, that I was finished. But I didn’t believe it for a second. I focused on the solution, not my problems, and refused to give up. I became more successful than I had been before. Related Posts Real Estate Investing and The Global Economic Crisis The…
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Andy Sernovitz
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Newsletter #738: The "Turn a Negative Into a Positive" Issue
2 Jul 2009 | 1:00 pm{Welcome back to the Damn, I Wish I Thought of That Email Newsletter. This is text of the great issue all of our email subscribers just received. Sign yourself up using the handy form on the left.}If you can look at your negatives -- the blemishes, the missteps, and the shortfalls -- as opportunities, you can turn an ugly situation into something everyone loves. Here's a few examples of how to do it: 1> The delays 2> The errors 3> The naysayers 4> Check it out: GraphJam1> The delaysWhen you've got something great,… -
Creepy is wrong
2 Jul 2009 | 6:02 amA lot of people are creeped out by Facebook right now -- because folks are getting friend suggestions that are a little too familiar. Here's what happened to my wife: Facebook suggests she friends 3 of our neighbors. She has never given our address on Facebook or connected to those neighbors in any way. She has never given Facebook access to her contact lists or email accounts. Her assumption: Facebook was secretly scanning her Outlook and identifying people she received email from. Invasive, scary, and infuriating. Mobs of other people are equally angry. Here are a few… -
SocialMedia.org -- the Blog Council is now the Social Media Business Council
30 Jun 2009 | 10:52 amI'm excited to announce that the Social Media Business Council is the new name for the Blog Council. Our new web site is SocialMedia.org. Members chose the new name at our meeting in New York this spring, and we just went live with our new site. (See the press release here.) The Social Media Business Council is a brands-only community that helps large organizations build successful social media programs. Members gain instant access and advice from the heads of social media at the world's largest brands and collaborate in a friendly, productive, and private environment. The Social… -
Sunday Inspiration: Flexibility = Success
28 Jun 2009 | 1:00 pmIt is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change. - Charles Darwin -
The future of shopping: Amazon Remembers
28 Jun 2009 | 6:00 amAmazon Remembers is an astonishing tool. It's buried inside the Amazon iPhone app. You take a picture of something. Hit submit. Amazon figures out what it is. You get a link to the product page on Amazon. I tested it on the most boring product I could find: A bottle of water. Five minutes later: Dear Amazon.com Customer, The Amazon Remembers service has found a product similar to the photo you recently submitted. You may view the result from your mobile device here: Amazon Remembers B000C4EEC4 If you prefer, you may view the result from your web browser. The result has also been posted to…
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Paul Kedrosky
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Readings
2 Jul 2009 | 1:16 pmThere is some good stuff in the current issue of Foreign Policy: Thing again about Asia’s inevitable rise (Source) The end of finance is the end of macho (Source) The 2009 Failed States Index (Source) The collapse of the Baltic states (Source Why birth rates matter (Source) -
Venture Capitalists are Best Kept at a Distance
2 Jul 2009 | 1:05 pmThere is amusing (in an admittedly academic sense) new paper out seemingly showing that venture capitalists obtain a significant portion of their performance by investing in deals outside their local area. That, of course, runs contrary to the usual VC mantra that they only invest in their local area. A cynic (or an entrepreneur) would like say the answer is obvious. Venture capitalists are meddlesome sorts who get in the way of running a company, so startups will do best to the extent that they can keep VCs a few timezones and/or flights away. For some reason the paper’s author don’t… -
Happy Canada Day
1 Jul 2009 | 10:57 amOn a personal note, Happy Canada Day to all my Canadian friends and family. -
Balancing California’s Budget: The Home Game
1 Jul 2009 | 10:54 amThink you can balance California’s budget and save the nation’s largest state from issuing IOUs starting tomorrow? The L.A. Times has up an interactive graphic whereby you can try to balance California’s budget, albeit in broad-brush form. It is worth a look, as it gives a sense of both the immensity of the gap and the commensurate cuts required in the three biggest line items: education, health, and justice. -
U.S. Carbon Emission Declines: Recessions Beat Cap-and-Trade
1 Jul 2009 | 10:35 amGiven the year-over-year economy-induced decline was saw last year in U.S. carbon emissions, maybe we should gun for a longer and deeper recession/depression. It would certainly outpace anything we’re likely to get from cap-and-trade and another such expensive and complex stuff. The following is based on data from a recent Netherlands report: As an aside, by my calculations U.S. carbon emissions declined last year roughly on par with the entire annual emissions of Spain. Maybe we should make that the new unit of measure: We’re going for a Spain in emission reductions.
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Thomas Dolby
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a box of new CDs arrived!
2 Jul 2009 | 11:54 amHallelujah. FedEx just brought me a box of the “Golden Age Of Wireless” and “The Flat Earth” (Collectors Editions). They look great! Very pleased with the way the packages turned out. I’ve spotted a couple of typos already, but hey. That probably means they will start showing up for some of those who ordered them from Amazon etc before the offical release date of July 13th. I celebrated by going for a swim in the North Sea. Which is actually quite warm now. I feel great. Today is our 21st wedding anniversary and we’re going out to dinner. -
RIP MJ… and my $0.02
26 Jun 2009 | 1:22 pmI’m very sorry and deeply shocked to hear of Michael Jackson’s passing. We were the same age, and of course I grew up with his music, and admired from afar as he blossomed into one of the world’s greatest entertainers. Then in 1982 I got to meet him, under quite surreal circumstances. I have told the story a few times. Today, by complete coincidence, I was booked to go into BBC Radio Suffolk for a rare live interview. They were pleased when I told them I not only knew Michael, I’d been to his house in LA and spent the evening with them. Here’s a link to the… -
Nice note from BT
9 Jun 2009 | 3:52 am…. and I don’t mean the phone company. Thomas It’s important to try and explain how I am enjoying this beautiful, beautiful piece of music. The sun is beginning to rise here, I’ve been up a hundred years….my first single comes out today, all around it’s a good day. Really good infact. This just made it much better. Thank you for what you do Thomas, I never really got to say that to you when we toured. You are a big inspiration to me and this is one more reminder why. F***ING AWESOME, just BEAUTIFUL B On Jun 9, 2009, at 4:45 AM, Thomas Dolby wrote: This may… -
out of the mouths….
7 Jun 2009 | 3:08 pmThis is fun. A letter from Ben Brown in Keller, Texas: “My youngest son has taken a special liking to your music as well. His name is Christopher and he just turned six years old last month. While still five years old, a couple of months ago, he wrote what looked like a long letter with some repeated word strings in it. He is a beginning reader/writer, and spells many words phonetically – my wife and I could not figure out what he was trying to say and he wouldn’t tell us. I read it again and again and finally discovered that he had written out the lyrics (primarily the chorus) to… -
Mid-album press
6 Jun 2009 | 1:13 pmOver the last few weeks I’ve been doing a handful of interviews with music publications. While I’m reluctant to take too much time out from the actual recording, and I don’t want to give too much of the game away, I guess it’s important to keep the buzz alive. Plus, I’m still far enough away from actually releasing new music, that there’s little risk I’ll be pulling the trigger too early! Here’s a quite complimentary interview with a web site called The Quietus. Then there’s a review of ‘The Singular Thomas Dolby’ in an…
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Darren Rowse
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Feedburner Add Customizable Subject Lines to Email Subscriptions
2 Jul 2009 | 7:38 amOne month ago I wrote an open letter to Google/Feedburner suggesting that it might be time to add some more features to Feedburner - particularly the ability to customize subject lines of those subscribing to a feed via RSS. It seems that they’ve been hard at work on that very feature. Today I logged into my Feedburner account and noticed this in the ‘Email Branding’ area. Yep - it’s the feature we’ve been waiting for! All you need to do now is add the tag ${latestItemTitle} into the subject line and it looks like you’re set to have new subject lines on… -
Win an Omni Bean Bag Worth $149 in the Next 48 Hours at @ProBloggerDeals
1 Jul 2009 | 11:50 amToday’s ProBlogger Deal is simply - follow @ProBloggerDeals on Twitter and you’ll automatically go into the running to win the ultimate blogger’s chair - the Omni Bean Bag Chair from SumoLounge. You’ve got 48 hours to enter! Valued at $149 USD the Omni Bean Bag Chair comes in a range of 10 great colors, measures 4.5’ X 5.5, is made from rip-proof and easy to clean nylon and is filled with high quality beads which will stay fluffy for ages! Can’t you just picture yourself lazing around with your laptop on your knee in this baby? To win the Omni chair - simply… -
8 First Step SEO Tips for Bloggers
1 Jul 2009 | 7:13 am“What are the first steps to optimizing my blog for searches?” - question submitted by @monedays using the #pbquestions hashtag on Twitter. Much has been written on the topic of search engine optimization for bloggers - but let me give you a few basic first steps: 1. Content is King The quality of the posts you write is the single most important factor when it comes to Search Optimization on a Blog. I suspect others will argue differently but as I look at my own blogs success in the search engines I’d say that this has been the number one factor. Quality content that helps… -
Should I Quit Blogging?
30 Jun 2009 | 7:30 amImage by -nathan “Should I quit my blog and start Lifestreaming, Videocasting, Social Messaging/Networking etc?” There’s been another round of ‘blogging is dead’ posts doing the rounds of late and as a result I’ve had a number of emails hitting my inbox over the last week from bloggers asking if they should stop blogging. Here’s some of the advice I’ve been sharing: Blogging is not dead - it’s evolving. You should be evolving too (read Blogs are Out of Beta, But Bloggers Should always be in Beta) Keep being useful, keep solving problems… -
How to Manage a School/Blog Balance
29 Jun 2009 | 2:55 pmThis post was written by Aditya Mahesh, founder of AMBeat.com, a complete resource for entrepreneurs complete with advice articles, start-up profiles, interviews, news analysis, and more. Common wisdom suggests that academics are always chief in importance. Students, at least those here in the United States, are told time and time again that extra-curricular activities, whether it is a sports team or clubs, always come after academics. Student entrepreneurs and bloggers have a tendency not to follow this rule of thought. Throughout my high school and college experiences, I have always been…
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Walt Mossberg
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Only One Beyoncé: Services Pick Up After Your Music
1 Jul 2009 | 6:08 pmMy digital music collection is over a decade old, and it’s as disorderly as a drawer of mismatched socks. Many songs are missing the correct album titles and cover art—or just show up in Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) iTunes with mysterious names like “Track04.” Over the years I’ve used several programs to import and buy music, resulting in wild inconsistencies in my collection. I’ve got songs by Beyoncé (with accent), Beyonce (without accent), Beyoncé Knowles (with accent) and Beyonce Knowles (without accent). Several companies have developed programs that tap into vast databases of… -
The Swiss Army Knife of Portable Videos
30 Jun 2009 | 3:50 pmEvery once in a while I watch an online video that’s good enough to send to a friend, share on Twitter and Facebook or save its URL so I can watch it again later. The final piece of the puzzle would be moving the video onto a mobile device to have it with me wherever I went. Enter RealPlayer SP beta (realplayer.com), the latest in RealNetworks Inc.’s (RNWK) long line of media players that the company has churned out since 1995. RealPlayer SP—the SP stands for social and portable—is a free download that, once installed, grabs videos from the Web, converts them to the right… -
Upgrading to the iPhone 3G S
25 Jun 2009 | 3:05 pmHere are a few questions I’ve received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability. In your review of the new iPhone 3GS, you said that AT&T had changed its upgrade policy so some buyers of the previous model could get the new-customer price earlier than planned. Can you explain this in more detail? Almost all cellphones in the U.S. are subsidized by the carriers to bring down prices. Typically, existing customers—who have already benefited from a subsidy—can’t upgrade at the lower new-customer price (in this case… -
New Mac Laptops Use Batteries Sealed for Power
24 Jun 2009 | 6:04 pmThe majority of laptop computers come with removable batteries. This approach allows you to pop in a fresh spare when your battery runs out of juice between charges, and to easily replace a battery when its lifespan is over. But there’s a dirty little secret about removable-battery laptops owned by average consumers: Hardly anybody buys extra batteries. Research firm NPD estimates that fewer than 5% of consumers buy a spare. So, a small trend has begun in the industry: More electronic products are being designed with their rechargeable batteries sealed inside. For instance, Dell’s (DELL)… -
Creating ‘Moments’ of Your Life
23 Jun 2009 | 4:30 pmIt’s hard to maintain a monogamous relationship with one photo-sharing Web site. You will sign up with a service and use it as your primary online repository for a while. You may even familiarize friends and family with that service so they expect to see your name associated with it in emails. But before long, other sites with flashier features will entice you to start spending time with them while you continue to maintain your accounts on the old site so you don’t lose your digital memories. Can’t they all just get along in one place? This week, I tested thisMoment.com—a…
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Brian Solis
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Tweet This: Twitter Trademarks Tweets ™
2 Jul 2009 | 11:29 amCredit One of the more interesting, albeit not necessarily press-stopping, stories making the rounds in the blogosphere and Twitterverse currently is sure to make you scratch your head or raise your eyebrow in bewilderment. Twitter officially applied to trademark “Tweet” on April 16, 2009 according to Robin Wauters at TechCrunch. The confusion erupted when developers received the following email (h/t to Andy Beal) In its post, “May the Tweets Be With You,” Twitter explains its position this way, “as the ecosystem grows there is also the possibility that confusing… -
Unveiling the New Influencers
29 Jun 2009 | 6:55 amTraditional influence has followed a systematic top-down process of developing and pushing “controlled” messages to audiences for decades, rooted in one-to-many, faceless broadcast campaigns. Personality wasn’t absent in certain mediums, it was missing from day-to-day communications. For the most part, this pattern seemingly served its purposes, fueling the belief that brands were in control of their messages, from delivery to dissemination, among the demographics to which they were targeted. It scaled very well over the years, until it didn’t… Unbeknown to many companies, a… -
Top Media Outlets
26 Jun 2009 | 3:28 amSource While social and citizen media expand in influence and reach, we can’t ignore or neglect the prominence, credibility, and authority of traditional media – no matter how dearly we’re enamored with shiny new objects. BurrellesLuce recently published its 2009 Top Media List for 2009, which includes newspapers, blogs, consumer magazines and social networks. I’ve included all but social networks below as the rankings are outdated and inaccurate. I’ll publish an updated list shortly. Top 100 U.S. Daily Newspapers Rank, Newspaper, Daily, Sunday: 1 – USA Today,… -
A Pictorial History of Twitter’s Rise to Pop Culture
23 Jun 2009 | 5:21 pmEvery now and then I discover something that is so captivating, that I have to stop what I’m working on to share it with everyone I know. This is one of them. For those veterans who continue to define Twitter’s role in how we communicate, share and learn, those who have recently made its acquaintance, and those just finding their stride, we all linked through common threads and context that pique our curiosity, stimulate our quest for adventure, expand our networks beyond our real world network, and feed our desire for attention. We contribute to the expansion of the… -
Social Media is Rife with Experts but Starved of Authorities
22 Jun 2009 | 6:57 amPerhaps Lewis Carroll was peering into the looking glass when he wrote “Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There.” In it, we were introduced to Tweetle Dum and Tweetle Dee, a curious duo that always shared a fruitful, entertaining, and complementary conversational exchange even though they always agreed to battle each other. Some suggest that the significance of Alice’s encounter with the twins explores how curiosity leads to the unknown and therefore, may not be worthy of pursuit. It’s just not safe right? These encounters either remind us why we’ve created a comfort…
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David Weinberger
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The government is the new Google
2 Jul 2009 | 10:18 ama href=”http://www.buzzmachine.com/”>Jeff Jarvis led a discussion at PDF among 1,000 people about what government could learn from Google, and, more generally, what a bunch of techies would do to make government better. Jeff’s got this rare cross of skills as a writer, teacher, entertainer and provoker. If you haven’t seen him at work, you should grab the next opportunity. And, yes, Jeff is a friend, so I’m biased. But I’m also right. So, here’s a way the government is becoming like Google. Remember how a few years ago, Google was grabbing the best… -
PDF: The takeway
1 Jul 2009 | 5:08 pmPDF was an unusually rich conference. Great folks there and an especially good year to be talking about the effect of the Net on politics and governance. My take-away (although having a single take-away from a conference I just said is rich is rather contradictory, don’t you think?): The Web has won in a bigger way than I’d thought. The people President Obama is appointing to make use of the Web for increased citizen participation and greater democracy (well, at least as access to the Web and the skills required are distributed more evenly) are our best, brightest, and webbiest. -
Bubble bursting photos
1 Jul 2009 | 1:19 pmThese photos of bubbles bursting may be old (or not), but I just stumbled across them, and they’re pretty amazing. [Tags: bubbles ] -
Crowd-sourcing photos
1 Jul 2009 | 1:17 pmSteve Myers at Poynter has a good story about NPR’s crowd-sourcing Dollar Politics project. One element of it was a request for help identifying 200 people who attended a Senate hearing, some percentage of whom were lobbyists. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous media crowdsourcing npr ] -
[pdf09] Has the Net helped journalism?
30 Jun 2009 | 12:12 pmNOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people. Frank Rich: Yes. But someone is going to have figure out how to pay for it. I suspect it will be figured out. There are always these fears during dislocations. Karen Tumulty: It’s a terrifying time for traditional newspapers, but there are models that work. E.g., I watch Marcy Wheeler’s thermometer. Dan Gillmor:…
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Dan Pink
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Money can’t buy you performance
1 Jul 2009 | 7:39 amAs some of you know, I’m finishing up a book about the science of motivation. And each day, it seems, brings more evidence of how we’ve gotten this subject all wrong.The latest example comes from the London School of Economics, where scholars looked at 51 studies on pay-for-performance schemes: “We find that financial incentives may indeed reduce intrinsic motivation and diminish ethical or other reasons for complying with workplace social norms such as fairness. As a consequence, the provision of incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance.”… -
Which animal are you?
28 Jun 2009 | 2:08 pmOne of the great things about a long project, like the book I’m finishing now, is not only the source of satisfaction at the end — but also what you learn about yourself and how you work along the way.What I’m discovering, or perhaps confirming, this time around is what kind of animal I am.To wit . . . Tortoise or hare? I’m a tortoise. Totally. Hedgehog or fox? I lean hedgehog. Night owl or morning lark? I’m more larkish than owlish. Show horse or work horse? Neither. I think I’m a mule (without the infertility problems). Which animals are you? We might… -
Factoid of the day: The 80s are over
23 Jun 2009 | 5:13 pmThe U.S. now has more DVD kiosks than video stores. (Source: Reed Hastings, in the NY Times) -
Idea of the day: Eco-friendly pizza box
19 Jun 2009 | 11:47 amWatch this 45-second video. Then smack yourself on the forehead for not thinking of it first. (HT: Doug Flather) -
Quote of the day: Beware the planners
17 Jun 2009 | 2:32 pm“In all the briefing papers prepared for the famous Clinton Little Rock [economic] summit in late 1992, the word Internet never appeared.”– Daniel Gross, Newsweek(HT: Steve Case)
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Craig Newmark
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A California constitutional convention?
2 Jul 2009 | 7:50 amHey, I've just heard about a group representing California business people known as the Bay Area Council. These guys have just called for a "limited" constitutional convention in California.By "limited", they mean it would be empowered to get into and to propose ballot measures only for matters related to governance, electoral reform and budget reform (so no civil liberties would be on the table, nor would education or health care, for example). From the LA Times: The big constitutional convention question: Who's going to fix California?: RANDOM SELECTION ... might… -
Consumer Reports gives us facts about health care reform
2 Jul 2009 | 4:37 amConsumer Reports has been in the vanguard of health care reform for years, as one of the most trusted and trustworthy organizations in the US.There have been people with profit and political motivations who have been deliberately propagating falsehoods regarding health care reform, but Consumer Reports debunks them. UPDATE: better link here and check out this for more. Health reform will NOT let faceless government bureaucrats come between you and your doctor. Comparing the relative effectiveness of treatments and drugs will NOT lead to rationing. Health reform will take away the good… -
@swoops_the_bird gone?
1 Jul 2009 | 12:12 pmSwoops, a Brewer's Blackbird, is apparently gone, but you can admire the video retrospective at Attack Bird Chronicles.This is not Church Swoops, who recently got my gf.thanks to SFist! -
Kiva/CHF International West Bank microfinance update
1 Jul 2009 | 7:21 amHey, I figure this speaks for itself, via Kiva.org and CHF International.Note all the "Paying back on time" results. Below is the repayment update on your Kiva Portfolio:-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Majed Albarsh in Palestine (Activity: General Store)You Loaned: $375.00Newly Repaid: $15.94Total Repaid So Far: $187.50 (50.00% of your loan)Repayment Status: Paying back on timeView loan profile… -
"Marine Finds Unlikely Reinforcements Online: Nerds"
1 Jul 2009 | 3:16 amAnother sign of the triumph of the nerds. But social networking isn’t just for electoral battles. It’s transforming the way communities organize for the public good. And now, nerds--and I say that with the utmost respect-- are changing the lives of thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Case in point, Rey Leal, an Iraq veteran, found his community online and began his journey home from war: Rey served in Fallujah during some of the heaviest fighting, earning a Bronze Star with valor as a Private First Class, an almost unheard of accomplishment for a Marine of his…
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Andrew Sullivan
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Unemployment At Ten Percent?
2 Jul 2009 | 2:54 pmDaniel Indiviglio says the unemployment numbers are even worse than they first appear. Buttonwood is also pessimistic:[It] is a bit hard to see where the recovery is coming from. American wages are up just 2.7% a year, and it is a lot harder for workers to borrow money to maintain their spending. The boost from lower gasoline prices (seen in the winter) is disappearing and consumers seem to be saving, not spending, their tax breaks. David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff points out that same store sales are down 4.4% year-on-year, a bigger decline than that seen in May. If… -
The Weak Man Argument
2 Jul 2009 | 2:32 pmJulian Sanchez names a pet peeve:With a “weak man,” you don’t actually fabricate a position, but rather pick the weakest of the arguments actually offered up by people on the other side and treat it as the best or only one they have. As Steve notes, this is hardly illegitimate all the time, because sometimes the weaker argument is actually the prevalent one. Maybe the best arguments for Christianity are offered up by Thomas Aquinas or St. Augustine, but I doubt there are very many people who are believers because they read On Christian Doctrine. Probably this will be the case with some… -
Microsoft Tries To Make A Hip Viral Ad
2 Jul 2009 | 2:23 pmAnd falls flat. In vomit. Gross.-- CB -
Kill First, Find Guilt Later
2 Jul 2009 | 2:04 pmNico passes along a great anecdote: Student Leader: In Iran we always use this joke to describe this situation: they say that a group sees a fox that is running away, they ask him, "Why are you running away?" The fox says, "The ruler has ordered that all foxes that have three testicles be killed." They note, "But you have two testicles," and the fox responds, "But first they kill and then they count." This is exactly the situation activists in Iran are facing. Any crisis is an excuse to suppress them; their crimes have been decided beforehand. Much like… -
Waterboarding In Iran, Ctd
2 Jul 2009 | 1:51 pmA reader writes: How is Cheney's torture any more justifiable than Iran's? In each case, the torturer is coercing the confession they want to hear. Is admitting to collaborating with foreign agents to create internal unrest that different than admitting to joining Al-Qaeda and planning attacks against America (whether falsely or truthfully, we can't know)? The main difference I can see is that we can comprehend Cheney's actions as an extremely misguided attempt to protect Americans. That may make his torture more understandable, but it doesn't…
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Jessica Gottlieb
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Will You Be At BlogHer In Chicago?
2 Jul 2009 | 1:49 pmI will. I’ve got to admit, I’m a little intimidated by the size and scope of it. The conference looks interesting, and I’m excited to meet people who have given me windows into their lives. I wouldn’t begin to list them, lest I leave someone off the list. Which brings me to this. I’m going to the Social [...] -
Food
1 Jul 2009 | 12:43 pmRules: Sit your ass down to eat. No, you may not eat anywhere but at a table, with a plate. No, not even if your mom lets you at your house. I make one meal, it’s always good. If the food is better at your house, please eat there. Chew with your mouth shut, I get nauseous watching you. Say please and [...] -
Tech Talk Tuesday: Tween (or OMFG I’m In Over My Head)
30 Jun 2009 | 12:11 pmI spent the day yesterday with my ten year old daughter and her ten year old friend Ann. It was monumentally exhausting. It was a new sort of tired, the tired that comes from your core. The tired that makes you want to weep and sit in a corner. The tired where you simply want to [...] -
Twelve
29 Jun 2009 | 9:06 amTwelve years. Our daughter made us parents and our son made us a family. I’ve lived with my best friend for twelve years. I do, in fact, have it all. -
Friday Confession: I Am Pavlov’s Dog
26 Jun 2009 | 10:05 amI exercise a lot. It’s not for the reasons you might imagine. I play doubles tennis just to have fun and move my body, but I play singles for one reason and one reason only. Eggrolls. I love fried food. I love it so much that I was 198 pounds when I was pregnant with the kids. I [...]
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Richard Branson
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One afternoon in NYC
26 Jun 2009 | 8:54 amOn my trip to NYC to celebrate Virgin Atlantic’s 25th birthday, I had a few media appointments that allowed me to share my thoughts on the Virgin brand and our businesses and announce a bit of exciting rock-n-roll news. Here’s a snapshot of an afternoon in the Big Apple. My first visit was with CNN American Morning’s John Roberts, an award winning anchor and genuinely nice guy, with stunning fashion sensibility (ok, we wore identical outfits). We chatted about the Carbon War Room, Virgin Atlantic, space travel, and music. Here’s his studio: My next appointment was to record a video… -
Virgin Atlantic’s 25th Birthday Celebrations at London Heathrow
24 Jun 2009 | 2:45 amVirgin Atlantic is 25 years old this week and we have recreated the very first flight to New York that departed on 22 June 1984. We departed Heathrow Airport on Tuesday aboard the appropriately named Boeing 747-400 ‘Birthday Girl’. Kate Moss came along to personally wish us a happy birthday and I was joined by onboard by frequent travellers and lots of special guests including Vivienne Westwood, Ian Botham and Kevin Pietersen. Our Flight Service Manager who actually operated the very first Virgin Atlantic flight in 1984 was Chris Morley. Chris has been with Virgin Atlantic for 25 years… -
PitchTV: Ask Gary Vaynerchuk anything
23 Jun 2009 | 1:59 amI’m Gary Vaynerchuk and I’m honoured to be taking part in the Richard Branson blog, so hit me with your questions on entrepreneurship. Just submit your question by adding a comment to this post and l’ll answer some of the best questions on film as part of Richard’s next PitchTV show on Virgin Atlantic. Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion on amazon.com Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion on Facebook -
Business Stripped Bare Audiobook
22 Jun 2009 | 2:27 amRead by Richard himself, Business Stripped Bare is now available as an audiobook. Richard took some time to record the secrets of his success from Necker Island. In this extract you’ll hear Richard’s personal ethos on how a business works, and what to expect from the rest of the biggest book of the year. Extract from Business Stripped Bare Download your copy from itunes or buy from rbooks. Business Stripped Bare Audiobook -
Sign up and save Sydney FBi!
17 Jun 2009 | 10:18 amI’ve been receiving lots of requests from the supporters of Sydney FBi 94.5FM to help save their community radio station which is in financial trouble in this recession. They’ve set a goal to raise one million Australian dollars. I’d like to congratulate FBi radio for running a truly inventive and original ‘Ask Richard Campaign’. I only realised the full weight of their brilliant campaign when a charming, determined and soaking wet young woman, Georgia, swam two and a half miles from a neighbouring island here in the Caribbean to tell me more about FBi’s plight. Naturally I…
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Andrew Baron
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Fred Baron Habitat for Humanity Memorial Home
20 Jun 2009 | 10:40 amFrom Al Ellis via Miriam Hiser - ”Let the construction begin! June 20, 2009 will be a glorious day in Dallas, Texas. On that date, which happens to be Fred’s birthday, we will begin construction of the Fred Baron Habitat for Humanity Memorial Home. While I realize many of our supporters do not live in Dallas, we would like to invite each and every one of you to participate in the first day of contruction on June 20, 2009. The first contruction day involves framing the home and perhaps installing roof trusses. It is always one of the most exciting days for building a Habitat home in… -
ROCKETBOOM INTERNATIONAL TALENT SEARCH
3 Jun 2009 | 2:20 pmAs we set off today on a new search for talent to anchor Rocketboom [see details here] we decided to take the opportunity to push ahead with the growth of our show, by searching for not just one anchor, but two. Now that we have our Los Angeles studio set up, we hope to soon find two stellar people from anywhere in the world, willing to help take Rocketboom to new heights. In 2004, when I was just about ready to launch Rocketboom, there was no such thing as YouTube and so I went to Craigslist to search for talent. There I found Amanda and the show turned out to be great. When Amanda was ready… -
And We're Off!
24 May 2009 | 6:28 amLast night we sent out our first batch of invites and the response has been *great* so far (thanks to Techcrunch for posting about it! - Our First Taste Of Magma) As I noted to those who are using it now, we still have a few weeks of buckeling down to get the site to a state where it’s ready for the public.I hope to spend more time writing about our experiences with the site before and after launch and will kick things off with a note about the domain name, http://mag.maMagma.com turned out to be over $10M so we were were like, nah. Forced to abandon the name or consider other options, we… -
Question to the Internetz on API usage
18 May 2009 | 1:25 pmFor the last couple of weeks with our new Magma site, we have been hitting Digg, Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, and a lot of other sites, with over 30,000 requests per day, each. For every video we track, we go out and see what’s going on on each of these sites and then continue to check back time and time again. At 30,000 requests per website, per day, so far no one has mentioned anything. We’d ready now to ratchet this up to 100k requests per day and foresee the desire for a million requests per day on the near horizon. Does anyone know what is considered typical usage? If no one cares that… -
Lost Views & Tracking Chatter
14 May 2009 | 6:45 amJust when you thought Google blogs and Twitter search would be a good way to measure engagement for your publications, important, prevalent and significant communities are popping up quicker than they are being discovered & tracked by most people. This has been one of the joys of discovery with Magma. There is a lot of action out there that no one is seeing or talking about - the kind of chatter that should be getting people pretty excited. Consider A few examples. TUMBLR My blog here at Dembot used to be a PHP blog that I built myself, then it was a Moveable Type blog, then it was a Word…
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Andrew Grumet's Weblog
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Kids say the darndest things
29 Jun 2009 | 9:52 amBBC: "I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser." -
Jim Lehrer on the fate of journalism
22 Jun 2009 | 12:41 pmThis weekend an interview with Jim Lehrer aired as part of the City Arts & Lectures series on KQED. It was a great hour, well spent every minute. Of particular interest was a few minutes near the end, during the Q&A session. The questioner asked Lehrer what he thought would happen with the newspapers. Lehrer's response doesn't appear to be online so I'll paraphrase (you can listen to the broadcast in the SF bay area again on Tuesday). The gist of it was: a) the newspapers operated on the incorrect assumption that classified-ad revenue would never go away; b) A free society demands journalism… -
TAL podcast at the top of the iTunes charts
27 May 2009 | 10:08 amIt's neat to see the This American Life podcast at the top of the iTunes charts. This is now ancient history but TAL played a big inspirational role in my contributions to podcasting. It's still once of the best programs out there. On a related note, a recent episode of sister program Planet Money tells the story of a shipping executive who, after negotiating the ransom and release of a vessel taken by pirates, forms a relationship with the pirates' negotiator. Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. -
A Newspaperman’s Prayer
13 May 2009 | 9:31 pmThis short piece, attributed to journalist Bob Considine, seems an appropriate admonition to bloggers, who in much greater numbers have the same power and responsibility today: Dear God, may I be fair, Circumstances and dumb luck have placed in my thumby paws a degree of authority which I may not fully comprehend. Let me not profane it. Give me the drive that will make me check and countercheck the facts. Guide me when, lost for want of a rudder or a lead, I stumble through the jungle of speculation. The twenty-six sharp-edged tools we call our alphabet can do what other tools do: build or… -
12 May 2009 | 9:07 pm
12 May 2009 | 9:07 pmDave Winer: "Google this is your wakeup call."
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Betsy Devine
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The amorous singing oxygen atom is baaaack
14 Jun 2009 | 1:30 pmThe oxygen atom, thinking about the scientist Eve Originally uploaded by betsythedevine From today’s NY Times Tierney Lab blog: Dr. Wilczek, an M.I.T. physicist who grew up in Queens, sang a Gilbert and Sullivanish song, centered on the frustrations of an oxygen molecule in love with a human being. The big revelation is that this physicist isn’t a bad a singer. He may have a bit of vibrato, but he’s also got a lot of bravado. And he definitely stayed on key for the entire performance. After a while, he was so engrossed in what he was doing, that he began to move–though, I must… -
To duck or not to duck?
2 Jun 2009 | 8:59 pmThose familiar with this blog may have noticed that ducks tend to float through its pages like a theme, perhaps, I hope, from a dreaming composer and not so much, I hope, like that annoying drum riff that the worst guy in the band loves to play. Sinister ducks, rubber ducks, ducks in and out of water, even (way back in 2003) my first Flash animation Quack-Don’t-Quack. So it is understandable that a clever person who knows me well, such as for instance a Nobel Laureate who is married to me, would think of me as somebody who would like this video making fun of Pat Robertson for comparing… -
My little sister in 1968
29 May 2009 | 4:17 pmMy little sister in 1968 Originally uploaded by betsythedevine My little sister barely 20 years old and looking much younger, proud of her beautiful giant baby, seen here with her then-habitual cigarette. She beat her smoking habit, brought up her baby, made it back to college and through law school, made a busy courageous life for herself, made the lives of so many others so much better, and in a twist on the old-style fairy story, found and loved and married her Prince Charming sometime in her late forties. She died this morning after a long long battle with ovarian cancer. I haven’t… -
Sinister steampunk ducks
26 May 2009 | 12:11 pmYou think you have seen sinister ducks? Bwa ha ha — you haven’t seen sinister ducks until you’ve seen these ducks. -
Reinventing what it means to be human
3 May 2009 | 8:15 amSky treehouse at sunrise Originally uploaded by betsythedevine Let’s be more ambitious than Freud: What do Humans want? I am putting together a college-level course on the ways that Utopia is being multiply re-imagined in digital worlds. Second Life is well-known as a place that sets people free to imagine new faces, bodies, histories, and futures. But Wikipedia is also a second life to many of its participants. If Second Life has multiple sexual genders, including a wide range of Furry and Gorean and scientific data visualization options, Wikipedia too has “genders”; people…
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bijan sabet
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"My answer to that is that Daring Fireball is decidedly not free. It’s simply a question of who gets..."
2 Jul 2009 | 11:56 am“My answer to that is that Daring Fireball is decidedly not free. It’s simply a question of who gets charged. Readers don’t, but sponsors and advertisers do. What makes it work so well (so far) is that this makes everyone happy. I’m earning a nice salary. Readers get to read my writing in exchange for a small portion of their attention which I direct toward ads. And sponsors and advertisers are happy to pay a fair price to reach an audience of good-looking, intelligent readers such as yourself. But there’s nothing free about it.” - Daring Fireball -
Hat tip to Dave Winer
2 Jul 2009 | 10:33 amBack in early 2007, I was itching for a way to automatically tweet links to my photos on Flickr. A few months later, Dave Winer wrote a web service called Flickr-to-Twitter. Dave was nice enough to give me access back then and I wrote about it at the time. And for the past two years, that’s how I’ve been posting flickr links to Twitter for the most part. Since then a number of 3rd party apps have emerged to post photo links on Twitter. Many of them are fantastic. Simple & fast. Earlier this week, Flickr announced that they had officially integrated with Twitter. It provides much of the… -
A note for those that read this blog and use Twitter
2 Jul 2009 | 6:02 amFor the past several months I’ve replaced the MyBlogLog reader roll on the right side of this blog with TwitterRemote. TwitterRemote shows Twitter users that recently visit this blog. The first version of the widget required your Twitter username and password to sign in. The latest version uses Oauth which is a cleaner and secure way to do it. And you just have to sign in once and you are done. And once you sign in here, you won’t have to sign into other blogs or websites that have the TwitterRemote widget either. I’d love it if you could take the time and sign in if you haven’t done… -
saw fred’s post today and did a vanity search of my own my...
2 Jul 2009 | 3:30 amsaw fred’s post today and did a vanity search of my own my tweets getting some “bing-juice” -
Queen Bitch - David Bowie Last night lauren and i watched...
2 Jul 2009 | 3:25 amQueen Bitch - David Bowie Last night lauren and i watched “Run Fat Boy”. I liked it. Sappy but had some funny scenes. Pretty good soundtrack too including this song by David Bowie.
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Brent Simmons: Inessential.com
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The Revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner
15 Jun 2009 | 9:49 amClassic Gil Scott Heron song: The Revolution Will not be Televised. -
The age of hybrid apps
8 Jun 2009 | 4:47 pmI’ve written and talked about hybrid apps before. For instance, in the spring of 2007 I wrote about the end of desktop vs. web apps. When I last wrote about this subject there was no iPhone and no iPhone SDK and no 40,000 apps. And now it seems that hybrid apps are so common, and so expected, that there doesn’t need to be a name for it anymore. They’re just apps. That’s the world I’ve wanted to get to since I started doing this stuff in mid ’90s. And we’re there. Maximum looseness I’ve seen people write silly things like “web data always belongs in a web browser.” Or,… -
Where I am with NetNewsWire
6 Jun 2009 | 7:36 pmPeople ask me what’s up with NetNewsWire — and this week they’ll ask me in person. So I figured I’d better write a post about it. Here’s the scoop: both versions are in extremely active development. I’m currently working on NetNewsWire 3.2 and 4.0 for Mac and NetNewsWire 2.0 for iPhone. I recently set up Twitter accounts for them: NetNewsWire/Mac and NetNewsWire/iPhone. I haven’t posted much yet, but I will. (You can also follow my personal account, but I often post things that have nothing to do with NetNewsWire. And I can’t do support via Twitter via any of the accounts.) I… -
Brent’s WWDC Tips
6 Jun 2009 | 11:55 amThe single most important thing to remember at WWDC: drink plenty of water! You’re not at your usual places, and you’ll forget. Hotel tips When you check in, set up your iPhone charger first thing. If you go out Sunday night (and you should) you don’t want to remember to set it up when you return to your room. It has to be ready. Otherwise you’re screwed Monday. You also should get some supplies for your room: Water! More than you think you need. Pretzels or some kind of snack you like. The biggest danger after dehydration is simply not getting enough food in your stomach. You’ll be… -
Crackhouseisqatsi
3 Jun 2009 | 12:27 pmTime-lapse video of a house getting demolished in my neighborhood. (Down near Market St.)
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John Robb's Weblog
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Ditto
30 Jun 2009 | 10:11 amZombie Economy. If the world's biggest pop star only made $25 million a year in total, something's very, very wrong. Where's the rest of the money? Why can't a resource as scarce as the King of Pop capture more value? The world's top hedge fund "managers" regularly pull in hundreds of millions. That's an order of magnitude difference. No wonder everyone wants to be a banker, investor, or [insert beancounter here]. There's no money left in anything else. That's the big problem behind the zombieconomy. We don't reward people for creating, growing, nurturing, or even remixing assets. We just… -
DING
26 Jun 2009 | 5:57 amMarshall Auerbach sums up 30 years of failure:The current crisis could have been mitigated if increased household consumption had been financed through wage increases and if financial institutions had used their earnings to augment bank capital rather than employee bonuses. The current system has failed because it was built on an incentive system that did just the opposite.Instead, we get debt, investments in casino financial derivatives (the stock marekt, etc.), rapidly falling job/income quality, rising commodity prices, and the inevitable anger. Hilarious:A group of pensioners has… -
Pension Apartheid
25 Jun 2009 | 5:58 amThat's a great term from the UK. It's the difference between generous public sector pensions and the weak/non-existent pensions the rest of us in the business world get (despite the fact that we actually produce the wealth). -
Ditto
24 Jun 2009 | 6:52 amAnimal spirits blog on neo-feudalism. What's sad is that there aren't any meaningful counter-trend efforts underway. Neo-feudalism really does look inevitable. -
The Descent of the UK
24 Jun 2009 | 6:41 amInteresting documentation of the decay underway. Again, another data point on the futility of protest in the modern environment (which will backfire in a violent way).
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Lance Knobel
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No, tell us what you really think: Taibbi on Goldman Sachs
25 Jun 2009 | 12:59 pmFrom Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article on Goldman Sachs (available on Scribd, not the Rolling Stone website): The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. It’s a great read and there are passages I agree with. But I also think the opening I’ve quoted strays awfully close to classic anti-Semitism. I don’t believe in a global Goldman Sachs conspiracy. Rather, it has been very successful at hiring and developing an undue share of… -
The new civil rights movement
19 Jun 2009 | 5:04 pmI spent the last two days closeted in a conference room in Washington, learning about and occasionally talking about systems thinking as it could apply to energy and climate policy. There is a lot to digest from the meeting, but one comment in particular struck home for me and many of the other participants. One of the key issues everyone involved in climate policy grapples with is how to galvanize both the public and policymakers about the urgent need for action. What’s going to change minds? MIT’s John Sterman is one of the world’s leading thinkers on systems dynamics. But… -
The summer of long books
15 Jun 2009 | 8:50 pmNot my library, but I can dream When a few of the people I follow on Twitter started tweeting about #infinitesummer the other week, I was intrigued. The idea is to have a sort of web-based reading group, all reading in a roughly synchronized way David Foster Wallace’s doorstop of a novel, Infinite Jest. It’s “only” just over 1,000 pages, so a relatively leisurely sub-100 pages a week will take you through the book before Labor Day. Why not, I thought. I’m still game, but I violated the rules of Infinite Summer by reading the first 100 or so pages before the start… -
In praise of the modern
9 Jun 2009 | 9:06 pmEvery day brings more wonderful things about having Barack Obama as president. The photo above may seem relatively unimportant, but it’s great to have a president who both looks at modern art and isn’t afraid of a photo opportunity that shows him looking at modern art. I don’t think Kandinsky will swing many votes, but I think the Obamas’ visit to the Centre Pompidou is tacit recognition that going to museums is a hugely popular pasttime in the US. It’s just one that doesn’t get recognized politically ever. Photo from The Official White House… -
Rock star in London
9 Jun 2009 | 3:43 pmTom Streithorst gets a glimpse of economist celebrity culture in London: I decide to go online the second tickets became available. Of course I don’t manage get to my computer until 12 minutes later and by then, all seats to all three nights are gone. Krugman proves to be a tougher ticket than Bruce Springsteen. I guess I’m not the only economics nerd in London. No worries, I think, I’ll get in on a press pass. I inveigle the editor of American Conservative (which for some reason, despite its right-wing name, seems happy to publish my musings on the perfidy of financiers) to request…
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Michael Gartenberg
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gdgt launches
1 Jul 2009 | 11:10 amCongratulations to Peter Rojas and Ryan Block on the launch of gdgt. (disclosure, I’m an investor). What’s gdgt? (which is pronounced either gee-dee-gee-tee, or just “gadget”) From the about page. “gdgt is a new kind of gadget site — a social gadget platform, really, enabling you to connect with the community through your gadgets, and connect with your gadgets through the community. It’s a place for you to engage with your devices and hang out with people who are as passionate about their gadgets as you are” Quite simply it’s social… -
Is that a recording studio in your pocket?
1 Jul 2009 | 8:53 amPretty amazing story of how The 88 recorded “”Love is the Thing” using an app called Four Track directly on an iPhone. The song’s now available in the iTunes store as well. With stories like this, it becomes harder and harder to call these things phones. Even more importantly, it shows how 3rd party applications are going to differentiate and drive the success of mobile platforms going forward. Not everyone needs a recording studio in their pocket, but if you do, it’s good to know there’s an app for that. -
T-Mobile Dash 3G – Hands On
1 Jul 2009 | 7:02 amOne of my favorite smartphones of all time was T-Mobile Dash. Based on Based on HTC’s Excaliber design, at the time, the Dash managed to make the Moto Q feel clunky in contrast. The Dash wasn’t just pocket size, it was shirt pocket size. Even the finish broke new ground with a finish a soft matte texture that gave it a great feeling of carresability. As great as the Dash was, it was aging as a device. Even though many smartphone enthusiasts loved it, there was no support for 3G and even though it remained a solid smartphone choice, it was clearly time for an update and finally HTC… -
Newton Magic
30 Jun 2009 | 6:42 amAs part of my larger efforts to clear out my Office and reduce clutter (which is turning more like shuffling clutter to other parts of the house) I came across a couple of Newton Message Pads from the mid-90s including the fabulous Newton 2100. On a whim, I popped in 4 AA batteries and hit the power switch… Brrrring, she came to life with the familiar Newton trill and even more amazing woke up with all her data intact. Yep; everything. All my calendar entries from 1997, my contacts, every application installed and working just fine and all my scribbled notes. All exactly the way I… -
The intellectual avocado-colored kitchen appliance
30 Jun 2009 | 6:27 amThe biggest competition to Microsoft on the desktop is not Linux or any other product. It’s past Microsoft products and to some degree future ones that are the real threat. XP is what Microsoft needs to worry about with Windows 7, not Mac OS or Linux. Windows 95 finally added a GUI to Windows that was workable. Win2k and XP refined that usability with the stability of the NT kernel. I am still not sure where the overall value of Windows 7 will come into play. I was reminded of a comment in Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, where one of the characters says somrthing along the lines of…
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Naked Jen
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And The World Spins Madly On
30 Jun 2009 | 7:36 pmIt's quite surprising, shocking sometimes, really, the things that will knock you positively sideways when you least expect it. You're going along. You're doing just fine. You're feeling at peace, like perhaps life really is just fine and then you... -
Friday Five
26 Jun 2009 | 7:46 pm1. We have a new member of the family at ChezNaked. Much to the chagrin of Stella (especially Stella) and Buddha, I decided that we needed to rescue a cat. Zelda had found herself in a rather unfortunate situation and... -
Aye, There's The Rub
24 Jun 2009 | 7:22 amI am a woman without medical insurance. Basically, I am a woman who has multiple pre-existing conditions that the health insurance companies of this great country we all call America have decided they would rather not insure. I am not... -
Peeple of zee wurl, relax!
23 Jun 2009 | 7:22 amI've heard from many of you (wow, so many?!) who think that the previous post was my fond farewell. That I'm hanging up my blogging shoes and going for a walk where the climate suits my clothes. While a move... -
That Path Is For Your Steps Alone
22 Jun 2009 | 6:51 amSo, there I was. A patient at Johns Hopkins hospital with two different brain surgeons presenting two very different options to me for the exorcism of Baby Jesus. Dr. Alexander was suggesting that a biopsy was the best course of...
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Rebecca Mackinnon
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Green Dam is breached...Now what?
1 Jul 2009 | 9:28 amAs a number of China hands predicted, the Chinese government has postponed its mandate requiring that all computers sold in China must include the Green Dam -Youth Escort censorware by today. Yesterday after the news broke I told the Financial Times: "There's been this impression in the internet industry that when the Chinese government makes a demand, they have to roll over and play dead. The lesson here is that's not necessarily the case." I'll put it more strongly here: The Green Dam episode proves yet again that when companies respond to critics by saying things… -
Some more Green Dam documents...
27 Jun 2009 | 3:30 pmThis photo, posted last week on Twitpic by a pseudonymous blogger claiming to be based in Hangzhou, shows a document included in the box of a new Sony Vaio computer. (Click to enlarge.) It is titled: "Sony Disclaimer Notice Concerning the Green Dam - Youth Escort" Software." The document makes the following points (my summary, not verbatim translation): Green Dam doesn't support a 64-bit operating system, so PC's with the 64-bit OS don't include this software. The software is provided to users in accordance with government requirements. Sony cannot guarrantee the authenticity, legality, or… -
China's censorship blowback
25 Jun 2009 | 8:15 amI'm not sure what the Chinese government is thinking, or whether certain parts of certain ministries and party apparatus have gotten completely out of control. Until recently, it had seemed to me that the Chinese government was managing its censorship system with surprising success: censoring enough (combined with strategic arrests) to keep people from using the Internet to organize a successful nation-wide political opposition movement; but at the same time allowing enough space for online discourse and citizen-muckraking that people have felt freer and more empowered than… -
Green Dam's makers fail to fix problems
18 Jun 2009 | 5:04 pmLast week, computer scientists at the University of Michigan, The Open Net Initiative, and an independent group of Chinese programmers all found serious security flaws in the government-mandated Green Dam-Youth Escort software. Earlier this week a Chinese official told the China Daily "that all security problems reported by the professors from University of Michigan had been fixed." Well, not really. The Michigan team has found that while some problems are fixed, more serious security problems remain. Here is the summary of their latest update: Following our initial analysis, the… -
Green Damned
16 Jun 2009 | 9:19 amChinese netizens are certainly having fun mocking the government's mandate for PC manufacurers to install the Green Dam-Youth Escort software. Danwei posted some great pictures of cartoon "green dam girls," greated in the style of Japanese porno manga. This one on the left (click to enlarge) is removing the underwear of "Windows XP Girl". Hecaitou has a lot more. The Guardian, Associated Press, and even the China Daily are now quoting an unnamed Chinese official at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology who says that the installation of Green Dam-Youth…
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Rex Hammock
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links for 2009-07-01
1 Jul 2009 | 10:03 pmHammock Builds Social Network for SNAP Conference | FolioMag.com It's great to see Folio: Magazine publishing the kind of story I'm sure its audience can't get enough of — a case study about a recent Hammock project. (Filed under: Shameless linkage to article quoting me.) (tags: magazines hammock publising) -
Nick Bradbury says goodbye to the old Homesite.
1 Jul 2009 | 10:12 amNick Bradbury(credit: Will Pate) My friend, Nick Bradbury, writes about the discontinuation of HomeSite, an HTML editing software he developed before most people ever heard of HTML. He created the software in 1995 and sold it in 1997, so it has been a while since he’s been involved with the product. (After a few sales and corporate consolidations, the software ended up at Adobe.) Nonetheless, the announcement by Adobe provided Nick with the opportunity to reflect on the early days of the software’s development and how he depended greatly on the users of the product to shape it… -
links for 2009-06-30
30 Jun 2009 | 10:04 pmSeth says Malcolm is wrong, Chris is right | Seth Godin In the Free vs. Paid debate, Seth is clearly on the Free side. (tags: magazines) -
Marketing and math quiz: Take the tickets vs. the refund
30 Jun 2009 | 1:19 pmThe company producing Michael Jackson’s concert tour has announced those who have purchased tickets can get a refund or receive “souvenir tickets.” In the old days, before electronic ticket ordering, the tickets would have been issued upon purchase. I assume the “souvenir tickets” are going to be printed up and authenticated in some way to add a measure of validity to any claim they are “limited” and thus, have some value as a collectible. I assume also they’ll be marketed in the same way a collectible dish or “special minted” gold… -
It’s not a job, it’s an adventure
30 Jun 2009 | 8:30 amOne of those intangibles about working on a magazine — an intangalbe that one doesn’t often experience when working primarily on the web — is a sense that something can have a beginning, a middle and an end — and then it starts all over again. But sometimes, those of us who are immersed in producing magazines all the time forget the joy of the process — admittedly, it’s hard to be reflective while you’re actually in the process. But 24HourMagazine.com will give you a jolt of magazine-work adrenaline as it chronicles the efforts of an all volunteer…
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Sylvia Paull
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"Say Everything" Says It All
2 Jul 2009 | 8:58 amAm reading Scott Rosenberg's balanced but exuberant book about the history and impact of blogging, "Say Everything," to be published by Crown July 7. A former theater critic and cofounder of Salon, Rosenberg understands the important of story in telling this history. His book reads like a play, with Act One delineating the players like Evan Williams and Justin Hall who begin to flesh out the plot in the next two acts. Even if you think you know the plot, this book will change your mind about the importance of what has just happened and is happening now. It's full of… -
No Going Back...2 prnt news
23 Jun 2009 | 11:33 amSo after being harangued by the NY Times on phone and by email, I decided to renew my weekday subscription to the paper. Frankly, I needed something to read in the bathroom, and the paper is perfect. (When I lived in France in the early '70s, we used the paper for more than one function in the bathroom, and that was the eminent Le Monde.)Guess what? After over a month of consuming my news online, I could no longer be tempted by the print version. In fact, the paper seemed tawdry and flimsy compared with the clarity and sparkling colors of the medium online. After just a day, I… -
Digital Pack Rat
15 Jun 2009 | 12:47 pmBrewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, which has been undergoing the Sisyphean task of trying to save every page (except porn) ever put up on the World Wide Web, says he missed his chance to save the best archive of music the world has ever heard. That was the chance -- and the archive had the server capacity -- to save every song available on Napster before the music industry took it under. Not that the music moguls might try to excise the songs they copyrighted from the Internet Archive as well -- a feat worthy of the Chinese government's attempts to censor the Internet.I… -
Oilfield Restitution Fund
11 Jun 2009 | 7:16 pmWent to hear a Commonwealth Club-sponsored "debate" between Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope and Chevron CEO David O'Reilly last night in S.F. They both agreed that it's necessary to switch more to sustainable sources of energy, such as natural gas, wind, solar, and even nuclear rather than rely on coal and oil. The critical difference was in the numbers: Pope maintained that by 2050 the U.S. needs to reduce consumption of coil and oil by 90 percent, whereas O'Reilly said that 20 percent was a more realistically achievable goal given the lifespan of cars on the… -
The New Journalist
10 Jun 2009 | 11:06 amMy friend Carleen Hawn, business reporter, Knight Fellow, former associate editor at Forbes and creator of the Midas List, west coast bureau chief at Fast Company, reporter for GigaOm, and freelancer for Financial Week, Business 2.0, and Ode, has just made the switch to new journalism.She is now publisher, editor in chief, and reporter for Healthspottr.com, a publication about innovations in healthcare. After years of being assigned stories, which were then edited in ways that often conflicted with the author's intent, Carleen now has control over what she writes, how it's presented,…
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Hugh MacLeod: Gaping Void
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recession
29 Jun 2009 | 12:30 pm[Backstory: About Hugh. Twitter. Newsletter. Book. Interview One. Interview Two. Limited Edition Prints. Private Commissions. Cube Grenades."EVIL PLANS".] -
the count of three
29 Jun 2009 | 6:26 am[Backstory: About Hugh. Twitter. Newsletter. Book. Interview One. Interview Two. Limited Edition Prints. Private Commissions. Cube Grenades."EVIL PLANS".] -
google vs bing
29 Jun 2009 | 2:38 am[Cartoon inspired by this blog post.][Backstory: About Hugh. Twitter. Newsletter. Book. Interview One. Interview Two. Limited Edition Prints. Private Commissions. Cube Grenades.#evilplans.] -
'how thingamy will revolutionize enterprise software"
29 Jun 2009 | 1:41 am"How Thingamy will revolutionize Enterprise Software." Go here to read more. [N.B. I'm a shareholder in Thingamy.] [Backstory: About Hugh. Newsletter. Book. Interview One. Interview Two. Limited Edition Prints. Private Commissions. Cube Grenades. Hughtrain. #evilplans.] -
more evil plans
27 Jun 2009 | 1:49 pmThough I don't start the Texas road trip for at least another month, I've already started working on the second book, EVIL PLANS. If you click on the link above, you'll see that I'm pretty much writing it the same way I wrote IGNORE EVERYBODY i.e. I'm just cutting and pasting random thoughts, old writings and cartoons together, trying to get it all to fit somehow. Sure, it'll take a while to gel, but hey, there's no rush. Besides, it's quite fun, to push the unfinished idea "out there", and watch it evolve over time. Is it the best way to go about writing a book? Probably not. [Backstory:…
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GerardMcLean
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Confusing bricks with mortar
16 Jun 2009 | 9:58 amI think companies need four basic things with their online presence, 1. Design 2. Host 3. Market 4. Measure Right now, all of this is scattered all over the place. Companies are going to various places and duct-taping their needs together. They don’t know how social media fits into it all and they can’t get their heads around the fact [...] -
Listening is also an important part of using Twitter
11 Jun 2009 | 10:39 amJacqui Cheng wrote a blog post in which she posits: Twitter may be gaining new users at the speed of light, but more than half of those users aren’t actively participating in the service. With no tweets, no followers, and no one to follow, do those users even count? Some brands/companies don’t tweet and don’t follow, but [...] -
The house of cheap is built on a foundation of cards
10 Jun 2009 | 7:57 amI was reading ChrisBrogan.com this morning and one of his readers dropped a reference to a video by Louis CK about the age we live in. I posted it below to save us all a trip to YouTube. (more irony here than you could find in 100 years, but that is another post.) This is a [...] -
Government should be counter-cyclic to the Main Street marketplace
9 Jun 2009 | 7:10 amI was reading this article on Media Post regarding state services suffering because people were not playing the lottery as much and I remembered this blog post from January 2009. It applies still. Enjoy. This post originally appeared on DogWalkBlog.com was listening to NPR on WMUB this morning about the freshman Ohio senators starting their terms and [...] -
Fail if you must, but quit telling us about it
7 Jun 2009 | 4:31 amI’m going to be a contrarian here and say that I long for the good ol’ days when we didn’t see the warts on our celebrities, our presidents weren’t shown in frailty and we didn’t see how sausage was made. Chris Borgan wrote this blog post and every Gen Y, business consultant-wannabe (and some real ones, [...]
