August 2007
links for 2007-08-30
Apple now sells more than one in six laptops in U.S. “Apple’s MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops accounted for 17.6% of June’s unit sales, an uptick of more than three percentage points from May’s 14.3%.” (tags: mac os x, apple, laptops)
To the trough of disillusionment we go! Matt Mower wonders about the lack of innovation in tagging. Ditto Paolo Valdemarin: maybe...
Scoble's Eight Ways = My One Way Not To Be...
Scoble compiles a bunch of thoughts into a couple of videos, called The eight ways you can be my friend (or enemy) online part 1 and part 2.
I don’t have 37 minutes handy to watch video, Robert. Burying something you’d like to share with the literate world into a couple of videos, with no text summary is one way not to be friendly. Just because someone is too lazy to type...
links for 2007-08-29
45 Excellent Blog Designs | Design Showcase Not a single one is Typepad. Grrr. (tags: blog blog+design design blogging)
Minding the Meeting, or Your Computer? - New York Times Conventional wisdom about laptop etiquette in meetings. Yawn. (tags: instant+messaging instant+messaging+etiquette laptop+etiquette meetings meeting+etiquette)
A World of Eloquence in an Upturned Palm - New York Times...
Movie Review: Focus (2001)
I watched the wonderful William H. Macy (a national treasure) and Laura Dern shine in this drama based on an Arthur Miller book about anti-semitic prejudice in WWII-era America. Meat Loaf Aday is solid in a supporting role, and the journeyman actor, David Paymer, is a stand-out as Fickelstein, the corner grocer.
Neil Slavin, photographer-turned-director, has this to say about his motivation...
Lost My Old Upcoming Account
Just a passing note for any Upcoming contacts who have received a request to make friends from ‘stowe.boyd’ — yes that’s me. My old account — where I was ‘Stowe’ — was lost along with my old Yahoo identity, the fall out from moving to a new mac, and inadvertently saying ‘yes, please email a new password to the email account on record with...
Friendships in the Connected Age: High Quantity...
Anne Truitt Zelenka and Steve Rubel wonder about the notion of friendship in the new connected age: is is quality or quantity?
[from Friendships in the Connected Age: Higher Quantity AND Higher Quality by Anne Truitt Zelenka]
The difference between in-person connectedness and web connectedness
The relationship between friendship quality and friendship quantity is probably U-shaped,...
links for 2007-08-28
Lunch over IP: Blog&Breakfast: Swiss reporters reinvent election coverage by sleeping at the candidate’s Bruno Guisanni comments on a project where L’Hebdo reporters sleep over at candidates’ houses to get to know them better… humanizing them, I guess (tags: politics social+media humanity+2.0)
The Future Is Here
For the first time, the number of homes with “no landline only cell phones” has surpassed the homes with “landline only no cellphones”:
[from Cellphone-Only Homes Hit a Milestone - New York Times by Alex Mindlin]
From September 2006 to April 2007, the percentage of Americans in cellphone-only households for the first time overtook the percentage in landline-only...
The Rats Are Jumping Ship
Gonzales resigns, at long last:
[from BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Bush ally Gonzales resigns post]
US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, embroiled in a row over the sacking of eight US attorneys, has formally announced his resignation.
And now will the Senate please investigate the firings a bit faster?
Channels Will Improve the Twitter Experience
Chris Messina has outlined (in a fairly voluminous way) a proposal for the use of hash tags (strings like “#tag”) as a way to help make sense of the noise within Twitter. He enumerates different sorts of “groups” that could be supported in Twitter, and then takes my concept of ‘groupings’ — ad hoc assemblages of people sharing a common interest...
New Yahoo Mail Has Integrated Free Text Messaging
It’s almost enough to get me to try Yahoo Mail again. Yahoo has announced a new Mail with integrated text messaging:
[ from Introducing The All New Yahoo Mail by John Kremer]
[…]
With the new Yahoo! Mail, people can send and receive free text messages in their email to and from any mobile phone number in participating markets including the US, Canada, India and the Philippines.
...
links for 2007-08-27
mturro » Lifestreams and Digital Identity M Turro is thinking like Steve Rubel about lifestreams. Need to start talking about workstreams. (tags: workstream michael+turro lifestream flow traffic+and+flow workstreamr)
You might not think it's spam, the law may think...
Tom expresses the feeling that most well-known bloggers share: a learned avoidance — if not physical disgust — of PR folks who bombard us with PR.
[from This is not a brothel…]
It really pisses me off that press people consider me an outlet to push their marketing messages. It upsets me that people in the world can look at me and only see ways that they can scavenge some...
Tempo
A cool hard drive gizmo, TEMPO, from cagninadesign, copies files as they are deleted, and LEDs on the side light up from the bottom as the drive is getting filled:
Can also be used as a more conventional external hard drive.
A Certain Time Of Day
It’s the time of day where the rising sun peeks through the small holes in the blinds in my office, so I have to shift every few minutes to keep the pinpricks of light from my eyes.
links for 2007-08-26
Welcome - Learn More about the MarketWatch Community - MarketWatch Community Marketwatch launches a social media 1.0 network: looks like a good set of features, but can closed silo networks compete with the open blogosphere? (tags: marketwatch social+networks social+media social+tools)
The Obvious?: Accountable in accounts Euan Semple can’t get the BBC — his former employee...
I Support The General Strike: 9/11/07
The time has come for the country to demand an end to the lies, abuse of power, and political insanity: check out General Strike: 9/11/07 to see what you can do on 9/11.
Chris Messina on Twitter Tags
Chris Messina suggests the use of the hash character (“#”) to precede Twitter tags… which are not supported by any tools yet:
[from yeah, I’m proposing that we use the hash (#) for tagging or grouping…
He then goes on, in his next tweet, to use the hash, making a startling(?) announcement:
Ok, leaving Citizen Space. Relocating probably to work more....
links for 2007-08-25
Pownce is competing with 37Signals, not Twitter! I agree with this analysis: Pownce is aiming at social project management (= “social coordination” or “workstreaming”), a space very near and dear to my heart (hint) (tags: social+tools pownce 37signals social+coordination work+stream social+project+management)
links for 2007-08-21
HP Cloudprint Service - New York Times Upload you doc, get a code sms’d to you, later print at a Cloudprint service… uh, isn’t that just like Google docs? (tags: hp, cloudprint, google, google docs)
Skype Outage Triggered By Microsoft Windows Patch
The Skype outage last week has been explained, and it appears to have been triggered by a gazillion Windows boxes rebooting after a new system patch had been downloaded last week:
[from Patch Tuesday update triggered Skype outage | The Register]
[…] Skype has blamed last week’s prolonged outage on the effects of Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday.
The latest security update from...
Keenan Boyd: Off To College
Keenan is off to college: Columbia College in Chicago, specifically.
I am very proud of Keenan’s poise and grace in the past few months, getting ready to head off to school. I visited the school with him a month ago for the orientation, and it’s going to be a good fit for him: core liberal arts program, with performing arts and various sorts of writing (fiction, journalism, and...
links for 2007-08-20
Brad’s Thoughts on the Social Graph an open source effort to build a social networking platfrom. (tags: brad+fitzpatrick open+source)
Silicon Alley Insider: Running the Numbers: Why Newspapers Are Screwed Blodgett runs the numbers, and newspapers are dying becauseit costs to much to create the content. (tags: silicon+alley+insider henry+blodgett)
MediaShift . Freebie-For-All::Free...
David Weinberger
[from Papers, please! And have a nice day.]
Personally, I prefer my totalitarianism to be unobtrusive.
Week In Review - Sunday 19 August 2007
I have been on semi vacation, and haven’t commented on the world wagging by much this week. But this Week In Review idea may be a permanent thing.
CEO Change = Sea Change?
The stepping aside of Dave Sifry and John Furrier from their CEO roles in Technorati and Podtech, respectively, has been discussed widely. Some view these transitions microeconomically, some as indicators of larger...
Rules Of Engagement, Revisited
I have had the opportunity in the past few weeks to realize that the ‘rules of engagement’ that I have laid down for myself are really not guidelines: they are in many cases actually iron clad rules that should not be deviated from.
If you are in the business of providing advice, you want to hook up with people that want to listen to — and respond to — the advice you...
links for 2007-08-16
Wildbit » Blog Archive » Social Software: The Dashboard – Social Networking and Subscriber-based Services. Chris Nagele’s comparative analysis of the dashboard as a design element in a variety of social tools (tags: social+tools design social+architecture chris+nagele)
TrailGuide Offers Basecamp on Your Mobile Do I need such a thing? Maybe just the to-dos and milestones. (tags:...
http://www.openparenthesis.org/2007/08/14/tripit/
I was introduced to Tripit — a new social travel application — in a pretty funny way. I received an email, inviting me to the service from Tara Hunt:
[via email]
TripIt beta — We organize your travel.
Tara E Hunt has invited you to the private Beta test program for TripIt, the intelligent travel organizer.
Tara E Hunt’s message to you:
Hey Stowe, You’d laugh...
Flickr Headache #73
I would really like to be able to move through my photo stream, one by one, based on a different size than the default. For example, I am doing an article with five screenshots, and I want to cut and paste the five shots into a blog post in medium size. To do so, I have to
select the first shot from the stream
click on “All Sizes”
select the medium size
copy the code for that...
George Black on Help From Professionals
George Black is a founder of Phuser, a new social start-up in the UK that recently had a serious hiccup in their adoption around the time that Facebook and Twitter started to become a real force in the world. He writes about some nickel-dime advice I offered over drinks one night in London:
[from Help from the Professionals]
[…]
Looking for inspiration I contacted Stowe Boyd who...
Margaret Mead
Never doubt that the work of a small group of toughttful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
links for 2007-08-13
YouTube - Social Networking in Plain English Common Craft makes great edutainment videos, but their fascination with the ‘six degrees” side makes their primer on Social Networks less perfect than others. (tags: common+craft social+networks)
Gnomedex In 60 Seconds. | 1938 Media Hilarious. (tags: jason+calacanis dave+winer chris+pirillo robert+scoble gnomedex)
Ethan Kaplan
We wield dangerous tools. They can and have been used against us, and our loved ones. In a world dependent on data, its the wielders of the math who hold the ultimate power, and those that can recombine math upon data upon material life that are more dangerous than any threat in existence.
Edward R Murrow
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.
Try To Make It Real Compared To What: Scoble and...
So, Ethan Kaplan went to Gnomedex, and was unimpressed with “these blowhard hacks who suck the life of the room with their own sense of self important [sic - importance]”.
Ethan is someone who I really enjoy reading, and Gnomedex seemed — from afar, granted — a bit choppy, to be generous. He suggests that a few of the presenters — Darren Barefoot and Derek...
New Flickr Uploadr
I fiddled with the new Flickr Uploadr. It’s simple, allows uploading of multiple docs, and supports batch and individual application of tags, descriptions, and so on. Very neat.
Simple three stage process:
Uploading:
Tagging, etc.:
It’s easy, but I am going to stick with the email uploading technique I adopted recently. It’s almost as simple, and has the added benefit of...
Mark Cuban Forgets How To Write
Mark goes to a meeting with tech gadgets, and discovers that he can’t write anymore:
[I Forgot How to Write ! - Blog Maverick]
[…]
What a disaster. I couldn’t write.
I literally couldn’t take notes fast enough because as I wrote, I realized I couldn’t read my own writing. Not only could I not read my own writing, when I tried to slow down so that...
/Message Is 9th "Message" Result on Google
I get a kick out of being ahead of Yahoo Message Boards!
Retired From Facebook
I took down a question I had posted at Facebook, but I don’t want to lose the results.
Calacanis Get Winered
Hanging around with Dave Winer seems to lead to the inevitable scene where Dave calls you an idiot, or sues you after getting involved in a business deal with you.
[from On getting “Winered” yesterday]
My friend Dave Winer heckled me from the back row and threw me under the bus on this blog yesterday (insert “with friends like these” joke here). Dave’s...
San Francisco Car Protection
So the trend that I first encountered in Lisbon, last year (see The Streets Of Lisbon) has made it to the States. Or maybe this has been going on for a long time, and I never noticed.
My SF apartment is on Brannan, near 4th. There is a side street off 4th that some enterprising type blocked off with traffic cones, and they were directing people into the street who paid for the service, as if ...
Jeff Jarvis on The Emergence Of Media Tribes
Wow. Only a few hours after my post about Social Networks And The New Tribalism, Jarvis posts on The emergence of media tribes, which is somewhat (distantly) related.
Must be something in the stars.
Stowe Boyd And The /Messengers: Coming To A Stage...
I Recant: /Irregulars (formerly /Work) Becomes...
After the pushing and shoving over the past few weeks about my plans for assuming the name The Brannan Street Irregulars for my business entity, I have rethought it, and decided to drop the name since it may lead to confusion. So the many vocal adherents of the Enterprise Irregulars can rest happy now.
Instead, I have decided to use the name /Messengers for this blog and I will refer to...
I Recant: /Irregulars (formerly /Work) Becomes...
Yes, I have recanted the stance I had taken with the Enterprise Irregulars regarding the name for my work-related blog. I have changed the name of /Irregulars to /Messengers (for more details, see /Messengers: /Irregulars (formerly /Work) Becomes /Messengers).
Please update your RSS feed if you were subscribing to that.
I Recant: /Irregulars (formerly /Work) Becomes...
Yes, I have recanted the stance I had taken with the Enterprise Irregulars regarding the name for my work-related blog. I have changed the name of /Irregulars to /Messengers (for more details, see /Messengers: /Irregulars (formerly /Work) Becomes /Messengers).
Please update your RSS feed if you were subscribing to that.
Lijit
Chris Brogan mentioned Lijit on Twitter this morning, so I took a look. Basically a way to aggregate various sources — your blog, your mybloglog network, your delicious bookmarks, etc. — and then search across them.
Did a good job of figuring my world out:
It seems to think that the list I have for upcoming events at /Message is a blogroll, but still it’s trying:
Then I...
Typepad Headache #507
Because I couldn’t get a Sphere plug-in to work with my Typepad ‘converted templates’ — where you give up the ease of having WYSIWYG editing and access to prefined widgets in order to have full access to your look and feel — I went back to basic Typepad templates on /Message. The experience as a whole has been great. Until now.
I discovered that I can’t...
Typepad Headache #506
Why isn’t there a way to reorder items in Typepad ‘TypeLists’? I mean the idea is fine: lists of things that you are going to display on the margins (sidebars) on your blog. Great. But adding new items only puts them at the top — no other option — and the can’t be reordered, which is plain stupid. Who designed that horrible design, and why don’t they...
Social Networks And The New Tribalism
Blonde 2.0 (I love that handle) reports on a survey conducted by An De Jonghe (who apparently blogs only in Dutch, alas Update: she emailed her english language blog info to me. Here’s the post on the survey results) on adoption of social networks. The survey has a very small number of participants (850) but the results may be revealing, anyway. It seems that more and more professionals...