July 2009
Mainstreaming iPhone
iPhone at the turning point?
The same 24 hour period that has Mike Arrington swearing off iPhone has George Colony suggesting that the iPhone will be a Blackberry killer.
The technoweenie avant garde gripes about iPhone — based on spotty and inconsistent coverage from AT&T, flashless camera, Apple’s AppStore misdeeds, and lack of access to other VoIP solutions — are...
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Hootsuite Adopts CoTweet's CoTag/Sig Microsyntax
Hootsuite has announced support for microsyntax to support the identity of individuals sharing the same Twitter account. They are calling the convention a ‘sig’, like ‘signature’, as in the email signatures that are in wide use.
The convention is simple: a user indicates their identity by using their initials at the end of a tweet, preceded by the carat character...
Barnes & Noble eReader Terms Of Use: Equally...
If you thought that the announcement of Barnes & Noble’s partnership with Plastic Logic might lead to a more benevolent alternative to Amazon, A look over the terms of use for the existing eReader (which works on my iPhone) suggests they retain much of the same rights that Amazon has.
For example, their control of digital media makes “ebooks” unlike books in that they...
The Fall Of Arbitration Clauses And Bars To Class...
This is not a law blog, and I am no lawyer. However, the recent flap about Amazon’s dekindling of Orwell’s works led me to dig into the Kindle license agreement looking for loopholes.
I said at the time that Amazon was headed for court:
So, a close reading by a law-savvy lay person suggests that Amazon never stated that it had the rights to dekindle books or other materials...
Michael Linton on Open Money
Open Money: Trailer from alan rosenblith on Vimeo.
Thinkernet: A New Series On The Twitter Ecosystem
I have signed up to contribute to Internet Evolutions ThinkerNet (they relaxed the thinking part especially for me), and rather than trying to boil the ocean, and attempt to describe everything that is happening, though, I thought I would explore one corner of the rapidly expanding Web, a corner I am increasingly finding myself working in: The Twitter Ecology.
You’d have to have been...
Google Calendar: Now With A Mess Of New Options
I added a background image, Turned on “next event”, and displaying several other timezones’ current time. Check out Labs for these and other new features.
Google Calendar, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Appliances and Applications: Tools Eavesdropping
I have been talking a lot about what I am calling Twitter appliances, by which I mean tools that listen to our streams and take actions based on what we say. I contrast these with applications, where we have to go and tell the tools what to do.
Microsyntax plays a big role in my thinking about Twitter appliances. For example, geoslash (like the tweet “I will be in /New York City, NY:...
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Sponsored Posts Microsyntax: AD Better Than #ad
I got pulled into a conversation about marking sponsored tweets in some obvious way, and the result is posted at Microsyntax.org: Sponsored Posts Microsyntax: AD Better Than #ad.
Nokia: The General Motors Of Phones?
A tactical sale of the Symbian professional services unit to Accenture speaks volumes about the changing fortunes of that old school cell phone OS, and Nokia’s need to revamp itself:
[via Nokia Dumps Symbian Services Unit by Olga Kharif]
On July 17, Nokia announced it will sell its Symbian professional services unit to Accenture. The division provides engineering consulting and...
Kindle License Agreement, Annotated
I finally found the Kindle license agreement, via an InformationWeek piece, and wondered if there was anything in it that suggested that they have users’ acceptance of the right to dekindle materials.
Here it is, with my annotations embedded in square brackets.
Amazon Kindle: License Agreement and Terms of Use
Last updated: February 9, 2009
THIS IS AN AGREEMENT BETWEEN YOU AND...
In defence of Techcrunch and Michael Arrington -...
In defence of Techcrunch and Michael Arrington - Telegraph Blogs.
No, rather than turning this into a debate about Arrington’s (lack of) ethics, I’m more interested in what it tells us about our prurient interest in Internet start-ups like Twitter. The real story in this non-story is the convergence of pop and tech culture. The level of hysteria greeting this intimate yet generally worthless...
How Semantic Tools Fail Us
I was reading at the Zemanta blog about new ways to use that company’s technologies, and I saw the following story:
The story is about Net News Daily’s use of Zemanta. Fine. At the bottom the Zemanta guys are using their own technology to search for related stories, which would be fine if they were other stories about Zemanta use, or how Net News Daily and perhaps other media...
Amazon DeKindles Orwell
In an amazingly Orwellian twist, Amazon has dekindled George Orwell’s works — 1984 and Animal Farm — from Kindle “owners” worldwide. David Pogue gets the inherent wrongness involved, but doesn’t go far enough into this post-industrial accident, perhaps:
This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author...
Blackbox Republic: Sex 2.0
The world, or perhaps more narrowly, America, is uptight about sex. Well, at least most are. Paul Begala recently quipped, on Bill Maher’s Real Time,
I’m a Catholic. We’re taught that sex is a dirty, vile, disgusting act that you save for the one you truly love.
That sums things up pretty neatly for most folks. There is an extremely narrow set of behaviors that dignify sex, in...
Blogging Tools
I have been making some changes in the blogging tools I use, so I thought I would spell out what I am using and why.
Typepad
I am still involved in long form, slow twitch blogging, like this post. I had thought that I would be migrating all my blogging to Tumblr, because of their once-innovative social sharing model. However, Typepad has recently unveiled a new version of their blogging...
Cringely Misses The Point on Google and Microsoft...
Cringely (in NY Times) suggests that Google has no interest in becoming the browser and OS of choice, since most people use Windows and IE, where most Google searches originate. Is he smoking something?
Op-Ed Contributor - Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me - NYTimes.com.
The vast majority of Google searches are, of course, done on PCs running Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer. It is not...
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The Future Of Money: Richard Smith And The Dollar...
I followed a mention in some online journal, back at the end of June, to an online whatzis called The Dollar ReDe$ign Project. The man behind it is Richard Smith, a brand strategy consultant, whose work is showcased at ThinkCreateBelieve.com, whose company is The Extent Or Measure Of A Surface, and whose main blog is The Daily Blend.
He’s been interviewed all over, most recently on...
In-Depth Look Inside the Twitter World
A recent analysis by Sysomos of Twitter data leads to some amazing conclusions:
[via Sysomos | In-Depth Look Inside the Twitter World]
Over the past few months, Twitter has experienced explosive growth, attracting celebrity users such as Oprah, and a growing mountain of media and blog coverage. Sysomos Inc., one of the world’s leading social media analytics companies, conducted an ...
A New Take On Operating Systems: Responding to...
Everyone is all spun up to the point of having their heads explode about Chrome OS.
This is being cast in a very obvious way: an attack on Microsoft whose future remains tightly linked to Windows.
But what is happening here is the first foray into a new generation of user experience, and unltimately, a new paradigm for the Web, more than for the desktop.
Way back in October 2007,...
Typepad 2.0: Ready For The Next Phase
I recently gave the new Typepad a trial. Note that I was strongly biased against Six Apart ever getting it together and doing something innovative and cool with the aging Typepad system. I had skinned my knees and bumped my head on all the weird, fucked-up, and plan dumb design decisions embedded in the old Typepad, as only a hardcore, heavily invested user can do.
So, I had planned to exit ...
New Research Discovers Way To Avoid Organizational...
Alessandro Pluchino and colleagues from Universita di Catania used an agent-based simulation approach to try to figure out how incompetence happens in organizations, and how to avoid it. This replays the Peter Principle — “All new members in a hierarchical organization climb the hierarchy until they reach their level of maximum incompetence.” — and suggests that there...
David Weinberger on News and Nets
[via News is a network by David Weinberger]
The notion that newspapers give you your daily requirement of global news — which works out to wondering, along with Howard, if there is such a thing as “news” — seems to me to be as vulnerable as the old idea of objectivity. Like objectivity: (1) It’s presented as one of the basic reasons to read a newspaper; (2) it hides the fact that it’s...
Russia Has World’s Most Engaged Social Networking...
According to a recent study by comScore, Russia has the most connected population for web-based social networking, so long as you exclude internet cafes and mobile access. (I wonder where the most connected place is with those considerations folded back in?)
[via Russia has World’s Most Engaged Social Networking Audience - comScore, Inc]
Two-Thirds of Global Internet Users Access Social...
Intangible Money + Cell Network Banks = Secure...
Olga Morawczynski is a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh, posting some of her work on mobile banking in Africa at the CGAP (Consultive Group to Assist the Poor) website. She noted that the normal flow of fund transfers in Kenya — from the cities to rural relatives — reversed during recent violence there:
[from Findings from the field: An observation on M-PESA...
The Symmetries of Loyalty
A recent research study published in The Journal Of Marketing (Are Women More Loyal Customers Than Men? Gender Differences in Loyalty to Firms and Individual Service Providers by Valentyna Melnyk, Stijn M.J. van Osselaer, & Tammo H.A. Bijmolt) debunks the conventional wisdom about women being more “loyal” customers than men. It seems that men have a different sort of loyalty,...
Social Networking As Business Tool: Still Early...
FaceTime, a vendor of security solutions, discovered — how surprising — that those in charge of IT decisions within businesses would like social networking to be secure. Yawn.
The other results are interesting, though:
[from FaceTime Survey: IT Managers OK Social Networking, as Long as it’s Secure and Compliant] 30 percent would not consider a Web security platform that...
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The Future Of Money: Bruce Sterling
When you are interested in magic, you might want to talk to a witch doctor, so when I started to think about the future of money, I thought I should talk to a science fiction author. Who better? As it so happens, I know one.
Bruce Sterling is a well-known science fiction author, perhaps best known for his contributions to what is now known as “cyberpunk”: near future, post...
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Alternative currencies: Is Small The New Big?
A recent piece by Ben Block at Worldchanging suggests that alternative currencies seem to pop up in bad times, but may not have a real impact on local communities, even in the worst of times:
[from Worldchanging: Bright Green: Local Currencies Grow During Economic Recession by Ben Bolt]
At least 4,000 complementary currencies are now estimated to be in circulation worldwide, compared with...
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The Future Of Money: Christian Nold and The...
I am launching a new interview series examining the future of money. I plan to be talking with all sorts of people: artists (like today’s Christian Nold), futurists (like Jamais Cascio), writers (Bruce Sterling interview later this week, and Steven Berlin Johnson in the near future), economists, philanthropists, and all sorts of other people interested in where this is headed.
This...
Shoshanna Zuboff Bitchslaps Harvard Business...
Wow! One of the handful of “management gurus” that I admire, Shoshanna Zuboff, has written a blisteringly stark condemnation of the way that Harvard Business School, and the rest of the MBA mills, have indoctrinated a generation of piss poor business leaders.
[The Old Solutions Have Become the New Problems - BusinessWeek by Shoshanna Zuboff], via Bruce Sterling]
The idea of...
UX Is The Beating Heart Of Tech
[via satori, ai]
Scrapbooking: Principles For Social Tools
In a recent post (see How Will Twitter Be Governed?), I pondered the potential for conflict between the aspirations of social tool developers and the communities using those tools. I have started to think about a set of principles for social tools that might somehow serve as a foundation for this.
So I have been eagerly looking for others’ thoughts on this subject, and when I saw...
Is Enterprise 2.0 For Band Geeks?
Venkatesh Rao suggests that Enterprise 2.0 isn’t taking off until the cool kids start pushing it:
[via Can Enterprise 2.0 Afford to be Boring?]
The exciting people, by and large, are missing. One part of the reason is hard to fix. The exciting people — say the guy leading the consequential re-org, or managing the “bet the company” product launch, is probably far busier than everybody ...
Honing The Balance: Brad On Accessibility
[via A VC, Saying No In Less Than 60 Seconds]
[…] my goal: to minimize the amount of time I spend on things I don’t care about which allows me to maximize the amount of time I spend on things I care about, while still being very accessible.
Community Currency Magazine June 2009
Community Currency Magazine June 2009, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Found a link to a publication dedicated to local currencies, called Community Currency magazine (see here). The magazine is published by Mark Herpel, who was formerly the editor of Digital Money World at b5 media. Mark may be motivated somewhat by the fringe-y ‘back to the gold standard’ end of the world...