October 2011
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MyZone: A Next-Generation Online Social Network →
Alireza Mahdian, John Black, Richard Han, Shivakant Mishra (Submitted on 24 Oct 2011)
This technical report considers the design of a social network that would address the shortcomings of the current ones, and identifies user privacy, security, and service availability as strong motivations that push the architecture of the proposed design to be distributed. We describe our design in detail...
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Engage! Why Google Is Talking Up Google Plus... →
MacManus can’t get Google’s Gundotra to share daily usage numbers on Google+:
Richard MacManus via ReadWriteWeb
At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last week, Google held a special press roundtable with Google co-founder Sergey Brin and SVP of Engineering for Google Plus Vic Gundotra. As he had been earlier in the day, Gundotra was relentlessly upbeat about the performance of...
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“It is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible...”
– Michel Foucault
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I Cracked It
The rumors are flying about Apple rolling out a game-changing TV, because of Walter Isaacson quoting Jobs as saying ‘I cracked it’. Some level of reserve is appropriate, I guess considering how old and entrenched the TV industry is. But, isn’t that a perfect recipe for disruption?
I’ve been talking about Apple’s push to win ‘the battle for the livingroom’...
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“People sometimes talk about the Internet as if it somehow supplants or replaces...”
– Matthew Yglesias (via soupsoup)
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Facing Planetary Enemy No. 1: Agriculture - NPR →
Dan Clark via NPR
Can we feed the world without destroying the environment?
It’s a good question, because agriculture is probably the single most destructive thing that humans do to the earth.
Consider: Cropland and pasture now cover 40 percent of our planet’s land surface; farming consumes nearly three-quarters of all the water that humans use for any purpose; farming accounts...
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“Ecosystems outlast organisms.”
– - Seth Godin, Cities don’t die (but corporations do)
Cities do die, actually, but very slowly. Usually cities decline when there is a cultural collapse, or when the cost of rebuilding aged infrastructure is more expensive than migrating.
However, Seth’s real point is that cities are...
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Bill Nguyen: The Boy In The Bubble | Fast Company →
Profile of Color CEO Bill Nguyen, one that makes him sound more than enigmatic, perhaps clinically hypomanic.
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“In 2010, Silicon Valley accounted for the lion’s share of venture-capital...”
– - Richard Florida, The Spread of Start-Up America and the Rise of the High-Tech South
Florida is making a super weak argument here. The entire south — southeast and south-central states, and Texas — collectively raised about $2B in venture in 2010, which is the same as New York City.
...
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In Re: bijan sabet on Some thoughts about Siri →
Bijan attributes new feature of iOS Notifications to Siri
bijan:
Siri plus geofencing is killer. I use Siri in the car. My common use is “remind me to xyz when I get home”.
One example: the other night, Lauren and I were out for dinner on a date. Kids were at home with the babysitter. My daughter called me and told me she lost her tooth. I was in the car when the call came. When I got off the...
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Why Is It Still Web 2.0? - Alexia Tsotsis →
Tsotsis attends Web 2.0 Summit and wonders why we haven’t started to adopt the term Web 3.0, which she associates with Reid Hoffman’s big data ideas.
Well, for one reason, six dozen other attempts to define Web 3.0 have sputtered and died like the attempt by Jason Calacanis to say that what he was up to at Mohalo was Web 3.0 or the many efforts to say that the semantic web is Web...
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“The debate about tools like Twitter Trends is, I believe, a debate we will be...”
– - Tarleton Gillespie, Can an algorithm be wrong? Twitter Trends, the specter of censorship, and our faith in the algorithms around us
Gillespie pulls back the curtain and shows the little man working the levers and knobs that control the public face of the great impartial oracle that we seem to...
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Rational Irrationality: Winner of the Republican... →
Curmudgeon John Cassidy says that the only winner of the most recent GOP debate was Twitter, but he means it in a demeaning, how-sad-we’ve-come-to-this sort of way. He seems to be saying that the journalists that use Twitter best can gain an outsized impact on media discourse about the race, as opposed to the good old-fashioned technique of the next morning’s editorials or the TV’s parsing of...
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“The strategic threat to Facebook is that power users have gone to Twitter or to...”
– Sean Parker, cited by Emma Barnett in Facebook power users ‘have gone to Google and Twitter’
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Are Social Tools Pushing Us Past β Superlinearity?
Tim De Chant comments on a 2009 research paper by Marcus Hamilton and colleagues which explores the mathematics of population density when humans first started moving out of Africa, around 50,000 years ago.
Tim De Chant, Density solidified early human domination
Our predisposition to living densely, they suppose, may have contributed to our stunning success beyond the savannas of...
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Shutting Down The Liquid City Kickstarter,...
Some friends have said that I set the target too high, others said my video was too long: whatever. It looked pretty clear that with 9 days left and only $2100 so far, I am unlikely to hit $10,000. So I am shelving the Liquid City kickstarter project.
However, I am going to write the book, anyway.
Things will be slightly different. I won’t be setting up an elaborate gated community on...
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Meetings Suck
Best finding: 9 out of 10 would rather communicate any other way than meetings.
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“The company has gone from having 30% of its 100 million users active every day...”
– Twitter Is At 250 Million Tweets Per Day, iOS 5 Integration Made Signups Increase 3x
The iOS 5 effect for Twitter. When will Apple buy them, and make Twitter a core protocol of the coming social operating system? iOS 6?
(via bijan)
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“The cloud is not just about flexibility of access to compute power and storage...”
– J P Rangaswami, Thinking about change
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“There was a time, not long ago, when you could sum up each company quite neatly:...”
– - Farhad Manjoo, The Great Tech War Of 2012
Manjoo says all four giants — Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon — will all ‘win’, which is just another way of saying that 2012 is just a battlefield, not the entire war.
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Report Points to Potential Impact of Mobile... →
Mobile technology is changing the lives of farmers everywhere, which will play a fundamental role in the 70% increase of food production that is needed to support the projected 9 billion people by 2050.
Deanna Krinn via Seedstock
‘Connected Agriculture,’ the title of a recent report by Vodafone and Accenture seeks to highlight the growing importance of farmers’ access to mobile communication in...
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Big Data in the Dirt (and the Cloud) - Quentin... →
Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Except the folks at Climate Corporation are crunching huge data about weather patterns, and packaging predictions into crop insurance:
Quentin Hardy via NY Times
A company called the Climate Corporation was formed in 2006 by two former Google employees who wanted to make use of the vast amount of free data published by the...
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“What is needed is a really smart way of turning advertising from a nuisance into...”
– - Josh Quittner, cited by Laura Locke in Flipboard editorial chief on how magazines are flipping out
Also notable:
So I think that as we move from a Twitter or news-feed sense of news to a restoration of relevance it becomes a lot more interesting. So, if I only have five minutes, I would love...
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The Multiplier Effect - John Hagel and John Seely... →
Mr Donaldson and Mr Cuomo [of MITRE] hired two social network analysis researchers from Babson College, Salvatore Parise and Bala Iyer, to ascertain where information flowed most swiftly and became more valuable, and what people, behaviors and tools most aided that performance, they told the Ivey Business Journal. They discovered that their technology-mediated networks emboldened individuals to...
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“In Dubai, traffic accidents fell 20 per cent from average rates on the days...”
– Traffic accidents in Abu Dhabi decreased significantly during the BlackBerry outage.
BlackBerry cuts made roads safer, police say - The National
(via heyitsnoah)
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What Happened To Downtime? The Extinction Of Deep... →
fastcompany:
Interruption-free space is sacred. Yet, in the digital era we live in, we are losing hold of the few sacred spaces that remain untouched by email, the Internet, people, and other forms of distraction. Our cars now have mobile phone integration and a thousand satellite radio stations. When walking from one place to another, we have our devices streaming data from dozens of sources....
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Data Reveals That “Occupying” Twitter Trending... →
Analysis of trending topics via-s-vis #occupywallstreet and other #occupyeverywhere yeilds insights about trending.
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Eventually there will be a subculture of ghosts.
vvintermute:
These people will not own cell phones. They will not run blogs or update statuses on social networks. They will not have email addresses, they will not watch movie trailers or download music or buy apps.
And in that way, they will not exist. They will be a part of no corporate consumer surveys, they will not receive personalized advertisements, google and facebook will know nothing...
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Goodbye Google Buzz: The World Barely Knew You -... →
Adam Clark Estes via Atlantic Wire
After a tough life, rife with privacy complaints and confused users, Google Buzz will die in a few months so that the company can better focus its efforts on their new social network Google . “Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past,” Google’s vice president of product Bradley Horowitz said in an official blog...
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Not Even Google Knows What The Hell Google Is |... →
I am apparently not the only person confused about Google’s confusion about Google+.
Sam Biddle via Gizmodo
Maybe Google knows it’s never going to top Facebook at the social game, because when asked, its description of Google+ makes very little sense! AllThingsD chatted up Google+ exec Bradley Horowitz, and he sounds… confused.
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BlackBerry Picked the Wrong Day to Die →
Brian Barrett via Gizmodo
[…] for those worried about the company’s future, the fact that this was a systemic failure and not third-party havoc should be positively chilling. They don’t know what happened. They don’t know how to fix it. They just know that it’s their own fault.
Meanwhile: Apple. There’s been plenty written here and elsewhere about iOS 5,...
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Going Back To Two Blogs
After experimenting a few days with collapsing everything I blog onto stoweboyd.com, I have decided that I am too set in my ways, and I’ll go back to posting politics, economics, and so on back on underpaidgenius. I may do a lot more cross posting in the future, though.
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Everything You Need to Know About iOS 5 in Seven... →
Good summary of new features in iOS 5.
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The Pig Passing Through The Python →
Bryce Roberts reports on two related and converging trends: the slow-down of investment into non-premier early-stage VC companies, and the number of early-stage companies shopping themselves around to prominent start-ups. Early stage capital is drying up, and that means a rafter of early stage companies won’t have adequate capital to lift off.
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“The average US consumer is never more than 3 feet away from their phone. The...”
– Stephanie Tilenius, Google’s VP of Commerce, cited in The End of Bricks and Mortar Retail As We Know It
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What do population density, lightning, and the... →
Investigating the likelihood of lightning strikes causing damage to telecommunications systems, NTT researchers stumble upon the 3/4 exponent — the same exponent underneath the relationship of placenames and population density (see The curious relationship between place names and population density) and other density-related phenomena:
Tim De Chent via Per Square Mile
Using past data on...
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“@gigaom: Skyfire puts mobile video on a bandwidth diet for carriers...”
– October 11, 2011 at 09:03AM via http://bit.ly/qaphdJ
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Facebook's iPad App Works Kind of Like an... →
Adam Clark Estes
It took months of waiting, a couple of false starts and a whole lot of speculation, but Facebook has finally launched an iPad app. However, the upgrade is much more than a tablet-friendly version of the website. Facebook is also carrying over its developer platform to mobile. This means that all of the slick new class of Facebook apps that Mark Zuckerberg announced a couple of...
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An experiment in opening up the Guardian's news... →
Guardian announces ‘open newsdesk’ — paper will publish (not all) of the stories it is working on, and hope to get early guidance from readers. Definitely trying to swim upstream ahead of curation into creation.
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“Amazon appears, if anything, to be following Apple’s lead, not Google’s. The...”
– Digital ecosystems: Open fire | The Economist (via mediafuturist)
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“Blip.tv released the findings of the largest research initiative to date...”
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TV Execs: Blip.tv’s Online Video Study Will Scare You
(via fredericguarino)
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