September 2010
47 posts
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“Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural...”
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Jonathan Lethem, The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism
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“I don’t want traffic behavior, I want social behavior.”
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Hans Monderman, Why Street Signs Make Traffic More Dangerous
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Like It or Not, Twitter Has Become a News Platform... →
Ingram details recent examples of news breaking on Twitter first, and how news is bottom up now, instead of top down.
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Zygna Isn't Playing Around
Turns out that the exploding game industry isn’t all sunshine and flowers: after all, billions in revenue is at stake and that tends to not bring out the best in people.
It seems that Mark Pincus’ Zygna is a hotbed of idea theft, stealing ideas from competitors, and crushing them with the company’s reach. Just like Elvis Presley knocking off all the old ‘Race Music’ and repackaging it as...
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“9: In your bid to be trusted, don’t take the View From Nowhere; instead, tell...”
– Jay Rosen gives magisterial advice to aspiring journalists, and it’s a great read.
via The Journalists Formerly Known as the Media: My Advice to the Next Generation
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Here Come The Millennials!
Gary Curtis, Chief Technology Strategist of Accenture, condenses recent research the consulting firm has compiled on Millennials’ views of the workplace:
Gary Curtis, Give your workplace a Millennial makeover
The key lessons that CIOs need to learn are:
1. Millennials expect to use the technology and devices of their choice. From mobility devices to reading devices, from the use of...
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Streams In Business: CoHuman Task Priority
I have been heads down on the Streams In Business research project (formerly ‘Microstreams In Business’) and working like a madman to collate information about the growing list of products that I am investigating. The goal of the project is review applications designed to support modern collaboration and coordination of business activities based on the streaming metaphor popularized by...
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Things I'd do if I ran a big VC firm - cdixon's... →
I like the things he would do, which is mostly about acting like a start-up and not like fat cat bankers.
I was especially struck by the all male and overwhelmingly White White White partners at Polaris, Battery, and Venrock. Yipes.
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GoDaddy's X.co -- Yet Another Bit.ly?
Looks like GoDaddy has entered the short URL marketplace by knocking off Bit.ly.
You create an account or login with an existing one and then you can create x.co short URLs, including customized URLs. I created x.co/cdixon linking to his recent ‘Things I’d do if I ran a big VC firm’ post.
They have stats, like Bit.ly, although they don’t make a separation of links from...
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Portugal's New Explorers : Making Waves with Wine... →
A great profile of my pal, A ndre Riberinho, and his company, Adegga:
Adegga Today:
Has more than 100,000+ unique visitors monthly, 250,000 wine listings and over 10,000 wine member tasting notes
Is preparing to release an API to support iPhone and Android mobiles
Has successfully developed the AVIN - what the ISBN is to books, the AVIN is to wine. A technology that works with ...
“The New York Times does not use Web metrics to determine how articles are...”
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Bill Keller
(via soupsoup)
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Nokia bets on new smartphones for recovery -... →
Will this week’s keynote by Nokia’s Kallasvuo demonstrate that Nokia can turn around their dismal performance in smartphones and their truly excreble UX? Is Symbian 3 going to be cool, or more crap?
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Surprise! Twitter Ecosystem Attracting Less...
For a piece coming from an analyst firm with the work ‘insight’ in its name, you’d expect a bit more insight offered and not just numbers.
CB Insights has determined that ‘pure play’ twitter start-ups are getting less funding than formerly:
Pure-Play Twitter Startups Attract 50% Less Venture Capital and Angel Investment Than Last Year » CB Insights
As...
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Ping Coming To iPhone in iOS 4.1
Apple has a long way to go to satisfy all the Ping naysayers out there, but one gap is being fixed immediately:
Ping support in iTunes:
Apple’s newly announced music social network will be making its way to the mobile iTunes, but doesn’t lose a beat. You can follow (stalk), comment, and read up your feed.
In the same piece, Mark Gurman says we will be able to turn off the stupid iPhone...
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The Mushy Middle: Weak Support For Net Neutrality
Craif Aaron, a long-time advocate for net neutrality, bitchslaps the supporters that worry about the debate getting too heated, and upset that other, more vocal supporters are cussing and castigating the opposition.
Craig Aaron, Net Neutrality’s New Enemy: The Mythical Mushy Middle
These sentinels of the sacred center aren’t that concerned about the substance of any given debate,...
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Why Do I Have An iPhone? Er...
via OkCupid
oh, also—iPhone users have more sex.
File this under “icebreakers, MacWorld ‘11”. Finally, statistical proof that iPhone users aren’t just getting fucked by Apple:
The chart pretty much speaks for itself; I’ll just say that the numbers for all three brands are for 30 year-olds, so it’s not a matter of older, more experienced people preferring...
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Addressing The VC Seed Investor Signaling Problem... →
Feld discusses an approach to ‘unwinding’ from an angel investment that counters some of the ‘signaling problem’ involved when seed investors pass on a later round. But he still doesn’t go for it as the best way to seed startups.
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Is 'User Experience' A Real Discipline?
Ryan Carson, the impresario behind The Future Of Web Apps and other web conferences, attacked the premise of ‘User Experience’ being a legitimate job title — or a discipline of its own — and asserted that UX is just a subset of what web designers and developers should be capable of doing:
Ryan Carson, ‘UX Professional’ isn’t a Real Job
A web site or app should be the product of a Web Designer...
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n+1: Internet as Social Movement →
The N+1 editors spend a great deal of time discussing the NY Times in a piece ostensibly about the rise of the web as a social movement, and not that much about the social movement side of things.
“It is too soon to say.”
– Zhou Enlai, when asked about the impact of the French Revolution of 1789
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“It’s not a revolution if no one loses.”
– Clay Shirky
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Where Does Google Begin, And We Leave Off?
The commensualistic relationship between Google and us, the edglings that inhabit the web, leads to all manner of confusion and insights.
William Gibson worries that we are unpaid for the social gestures that we festoon the web with, such as links, that Google’s refinery converts into search engine gold. He goes so far as to say, poetically, that Google is made of us:
Google is made of...
“You’ve found market price when buyers complain but still pay.”
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Paul Graham
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“Rebuilding our base of organizational capital means reinventing our most heavily...”
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Umair Haque
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More Objectivity Mumbo Jumbo At The NY Times
Will the freshman j-school seminar on objectivity never end at The Times? http://nyti.ms/cml0nM
Jeff Jarvis
(via Twitter)
Jarvis cuts off the new Public Editor of the NY Times, Arthur Brisbane, at the knees.
Brisbane is yowling about the decline of objective journalism, citing a large number of annoyed readers who would like the tooth fairy to take control of the swirling opinions that...
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Naysayers Attack Ping
Elmer-DeWitt joins the chorus who wants Apple’s ambitious Ping social music system to grow up fast, noting that one million users have signed up:
Philip Elmer-DeWitt, Can Ping be saved?
[…] many of those people are complaining — loudly and with pretty good reason — about Ping’s shortcomings. Among the more articulate gripers:
TechCrunch’s Erik Schonfeld....
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Tumblr Fixes Attribution
I’ve commented numerous times (and so have many, many others) that the approach taken by Tumblr to attribute content in reblogs is a mess. Well, they have fixed it, and have taken the innovative approach of creating attribution metadata for posts. This turns out to be something like what I recommended in Tumblr’s Reblogging Mess Solved, but not exactly.
Here’s what the Tumblr...
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“Life in Manhattan is like living inside a gigantic Twitter stream. What you get...”
– Free Range: Naked - Susan Orlean
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WatchMy keynote at Blogtalk 2010. I wrote a post (Blogtalk 2010: Notes And Thoughts On The Social Future) which explores some of the topics I presented, especially ‘Facebook is the new AOL’.
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“Basing my musical tastes on my iTunes downloads is like judging my eating habits...”
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@debcha via Peter Kafka
I agree that Ping has to move quickly past the naked ecommerce of music purchasing, and expand into Last.fm ‘audio scrobbling’ — build profiles based on what we play.
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Ev Williams: Twitter Will Actually Help... →
via @mathewi
Williams, on stage at a Girls in Tech event at Kicklabs, compared Twitter to email, where information overload can be incapacitating. “The problem with email is that it’s sender-driven, and sender-driven media doesn’t scale,” he said. On the one hand, the recipient hates email for being spammy because “the sender is motivated to send as much stuff as possible because it’s free.” On...
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Steve Jobs Told Me So Says Jason Calacanis
Jason Calcanis says he spoke with Steve Jobs about the Facebook flare-up. Whether he did or not, what he posted in his email newsletter is dead-on:
via email
Anyway, here is what Steve Jobs is thinking during the keynote:
Now, certainly you’ve heard about Apple’s huge data center in North Carolina. You know, the one that reportedly cost one *billion* dollars. Experts say that Apple’s data...
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Exclusive: Facebook Blocked API Access to Ping... →
Kara Swisher reports that Apple/Facebook deal fell apart just as the Ping announcement was being made:
According to sources familiar with Facebook’s platform, the social networking giant essentially denied Apple’s Ping access to application programming interfaces that would allow it to search for an iTunes user’s friends on Facebook who also had signed up for Ping. Normally, this API access is...
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A VC: Coworking Spaces →
If you are launching a startup or have one that is just one or two people, you should really try to get into a coworking space. It can be more cost effective, but that is not the best reason to do it. You’ll get knowledge sharing, energy, and a lof of camraderie. And you can’t put a price on those things when you are doing a startup.
Fred is dead on with this.
Watchvia ProphecyBoy Last week we took Socialbomb to O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference. We held a BoF session on getting social games away from the keyboard, and ran a full-scale, 30-person game of Socialbomb with the latest rev of the hardware at the Emerging Arts Fest.
We got a response better than any we could have expected, met some wonderful people whose work and opinion we greatly...
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The Original Loic LeMeur Puppet - eBay (item... →
Loren Feldman is tired of puppetry, and is auctioning off the Loic LeMeur puppet on eBay. currently going for $55. That’s a fair price, I think.
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“The company [Microsoft] could spend a half-billion dollars or more in marketing...”
– Microsoft To Pay More Than Half A Billion Dollars To Jump-Start Windows Phone 7 - Kim-Mai Cutler
And if the Windows 7 launch does not lead to a significant wedge into the market, will Microsoft drop phones? Will the board finally ax Ballmer?
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“Two months after Rupert Murdoch’s decision to erect a subscription paywall...”
– Has Rupert Murdoch’s paywall gamble paid off? - Ian Burrell
The short answer is: No.
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iTunes Ping: Social Music
Apple has rolled out the long-rumored and much awaited social iTunes in the form of Ping.
Ping is a streaming, social network-based suite of capabilities that has been integrated across the world of iTunes, in a way that is reminiscent of early versions of Last.fm, and using the now standard open follower model popularized by Twitter.
To use the service, an iTunes 10 user has to click on the new...
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Another Facebooking: June Siple Is The Most Recent...
Yet another person is fired for expressing unpopular or impolitic opinions: a high school teacher who was not looking forward to coming back to work in the fall, and said so on hre facebook page.
H.S. Teacher Loses Job Over Facebook Posting
On her Facebook page, (June) Siple called the residents of Cohasset “arrogant and snobby,” and said that she is “so not looking forward...
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Disqus Analytics Will Give Us More Insight Into... →
There are nearly 150 million people around the world now that use Disqus on a monthly basis.
Siegler profiles Disqus’ new analytics features. I will have to take a look.
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Google’s Earth - William Gibson →
Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products.
Gibson wonders about Google’s role in our world, and how it is a reflection of us, a tool that shapes us as we use it.
August 2010
73 posts
4 tags
Facebook is the new AOL →
Jason Kottke made the same statement I’ve been shouting recently, back in 2007: “Facebook is the new AOL”.
However, he did not suggest that social primitives would be built into our future operating environments. He simply stated that the Internet is richer than an app can ever be, so he definitiely had one side of my argument down way back when.
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9-Bits: I Want a Stupid 7-inch iPad
After using the iPad as my sole device last week in Ireland, I could imagine a small iPad, too. Especially with a bluetooth keyboard, which could also be scaled down.
9-bits:
Lance Ulanoff thinks The 7-inch Apple iPad is a Stupid Idea:
Kidding aside, I have not heard one good argument for the existence of this device. What’s more worrisome to me is that some companies like Samsung appear to...
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Blogtalk 2010: Notes And Thoughts On The Social...
Galway is a lovely place, and I have always wanted to see where ‘the hills sweep down to the sea,’ so Blogtalk 2010 was fun. I saw old friends, and made some new ones. But this get-together reinforced a few thoughts, which wound up in my keynote, as well.
The era of blogging is over: its impact as a goad, a competitive force on print media has been felt, and deeply internalized. Meanwhile, most...