February 2011
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(11) The results of the experiment by Tom Williams... →
Yes, I won 5th Most Interesting at Launch last week. Like 2nd prize in a beauty contest.
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It's War of the Silicon Valley Boosters - Yahoo!... →
via Atlantic Wire
Two sources tell us that Arrington has tried to persuade attendees and sponsors not to participate by threatening bad or—maybe even worse in the buzz-driven industry—no coverage on TechCrunch. One entrepreneur, who would only speak anonymously because he said he feared retribution from Arrington, said Arrington had told him his company would no longer be covered on...
“Many people naturally think and speak about a company as if they were speaking...”
– Arie de Geus, quoted by Engin Erdoğan in Answers on Business Strategy (Quora)
“Businesses should treat technology like a special effect. If you’re James...”
– Michael Schrage on Value-Creation, Experiments, And Why IT Does Matter
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What I Want in My New Google →
Vivek Wadhwa says search is broken and that social search is the answer. But he doesn’t go so far as to say ‘meaning is the new search.’
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Dropping Out Of Blogs And Into Streams
Here’s another take on the rise of short format and the decline of long format on the social web. Without a discussion about streaming it all sounds like a series of fads:
Verne Kopytoff, Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter
The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14...
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The Fall Of The Unions, The Rise Of Trade Populism
Krugman clearly explains what Scott Walker is up to in Wisconsin, and explains why it is in the interests of the average American to take sides with the unions against the oligarchs. But will we?
Paul Krugman, Wisconsin Power Play
Why bust the unions? As I said, it has nothing to do with helping Wisconsin deal with its current fiscal crisis. Nor is it likely to help the state’s budget prospects...
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Another Lesson About Cognition And The Web: Lara...
I am all for teachable moments, but Maureen Dowd and the tut-tut, tsk-tsk bloviators are connecting the wrong dots following Lara Logan’s sexual assault in Egypt and the fooforah that followed. Dowd starts by taking aim at Nir Rosen, whose unfeeling and reptilian comments led to him losing a fellowship at NYU, and probably his relationship with The Nation, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic....
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MORE/REAL Stylus Cap on Kickstarter →
cameronmoll:
Replace the cap on your favorite pen, turn it into a touchscreen stylus. Continue to use the pen. Best of both worlds. $15,000 and climbing.
(At some point, all of us are going to run out of discretionary funds for supporting Kickstarter projects, I would imagine. But clearly, we’re not there yet.)
Raises an interesting economic question: If people are contributing a rising...
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Hiding In Plain Sight: Publicy and Social...
I have written a great deal about our transition online from an ethos of secrecy and privacy (a la email, and groupware) in the pre-social web, to a social web in which publicy (or publicness) is displacing and remaking the premises of social interaction.
Danah Boyd has introduced a great metaphor into theis discussion: social steganography. Here’s a discussion about teens, making the case...
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More Data On Teen Email Use
My recent post on teen email use (see Teens Hate Email) led to a wave of Twitter and Disqus comments, some of which are simply answered by a relatively recent — Apr 20 2010 — report from the Pew Internet folks. When looking into teen mobile use, they determined that teens are moving away from email use:
by Amanda Lenhart, Rich Ling, Scott Campbell, and Kristen Purcell, Teens And...
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Daily Editor Rallies the Troops -- Adam Pasick →
Folks, Egypt is over - time for us to get focused on covering America.
- Jesse Angelo, editor-in-chief of Rupert Murdoch’s iPad-only tabloid, The Daily, trying to get his ‘crack team’ of reporters to start reporting, and stop paying attention to that revolution thing over there.
“It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”
– Jim Jarmusch
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““That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the...”
– PlaceSite: Key Concepts (via Instapaper)
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Bijan on Meritocracy inside our social networks
bijan:
There is no doubt that I enjoy following celebrities on Twitter. If you hit my twitter profile @bijan you will see that I’m following a mix of celebs in business, sports and music.
It’s awesome to hear their unfiltered thoughts and when you get an @reply from them it’s quite cool.
But this post isn’t about celebs.
It’s about meritocracy inside of our social networks.
My favorite part...
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Teens Hate Email
The Comscore 2010 US Digital Year In Review demonstrates one fact very clearly: email is doomed.
Taking as a given that what the kids and young adults are rejecting today will die off quickly, it’s fairly clear that email is on a steep trajectory and will crash in the next decade.
I recall being almost ripped to shreds back at a 2005 Supernova event, when I predicted that email would...
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The Uneconomics Of Participation: Why Does Robert...
The problem with taking about for-fee versus free writing on the internet is that it has become strongly biased by those who are most interested in making money into being only about making money. AOL’s acquisition of the Huffington Post has set off a wide-ranging discussion, often based on financial analysis like Nate Silver’s at FiveThirtyEight, where he calculates the value of a post (very...
Shy people become super social on Facebook -... →
Shy people become super social on Facebook - studies Apparently shy people thrive on Facebook, according to a piece in the Washington Post. Socially awkward people who have trouble interacting face-to-face often make friends and maintain conversations easily on social networks, according to several studies. Because of this ease, shy people tend to spend more time interacting on Facebook that...
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Meaning Is The New Search, One More Time
The gray zone of SEO has been brought into high relief by David Segal’s exposé of JC Penney’s link scheme, apparently managed by SearchDex.
David Segal, Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets
When you read the enormous list of sites with Penney links, the landscape of the Internet acquires a whole new topography. It starts to seem like a city with a few familiar, well-kept...
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Social Business Design is design for companies...
How is it that I missed this post? Dave Gray is the founder of Xplane and now a partner of the Dachis Group:
Dave Gray, The Connected Company
Although we tend to design companies like machines, we instinctively and intuitively understand that, in the end, companies are not made of cogs, levers and gears. In the end they are made out of people. For top management, it would be wonderful if we could...
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Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work |... →
Douglas Copeland has written an ‘almost-biography’ of Marshall McLuhan, the patron saint of the internet, called Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!. I have yet to read it, but I am looking forward to it.
I like the title, which is taken from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, which featured McLuhan in a cameo. Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are waiting in a movie theater line,...
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Why Didn't Nokia Sell Out To Microsoft?
Considering that Nokia has basically handed over its future to Microsoft, why didn’t they actually sell themselves? Instead, they have become a “puppet state” as MG Siegler calls it.
The rumors of Microsoft wanting to acquire Nokia has been going on for a long while, and the recent crash of the stock in the market suggests that analysts and investors see this capitulation as a...
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In Opposition to Liberty and Progress - Edward... →
Peter Thiel, one of the PayPal ‘brats’, is one of the oddest people around, with profoundly bizarro political beliefs, as I have said before (see Peter Thiel, Techno-Utopian). Edward Miller has uncovered some new news that suggests his ideological bent is becoming even more neoconservative:
You may have heard of Peter Thiel, the right-wing “libertarian” co-founder of Paypal and early...
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What Is Bill Gross Up To?
Just saw that Bill Gross’ UberMedia acquired TweetDeck.
Gross must believe that there is an advertising option that he can thread across all these Twitter clients: UberTwitter, EchoFon, and now TweetDeck. There is no great business model in Twitter clients, per se. There’s dozens of competitors with largely undifferentiated products, and no real way to make serious money, even with...
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“Twitter is an enigma. A household name with an large and engaged user base. A...”
– - Roger Ehrenberg, Froth or famine?
I am in agreement.
My bet is that Twitter will remain independent for some time, like 2 years, but will be eventually acquired by Google, north of $25B.
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“I say that flat is the new black; that 2D is the new avant-garde; that a surface...”
– Steven Poole, Against Chrome: A Manifesto
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“Self sufficiency appears to be a worthy goal, but it’s now impossible if you...”
– Seth Godin (via kirklove)
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IPad Makes Space in Japan's Tiny Homes by Removing... →
Yusuke Ohki’s 2,000 books were crowding out his Tokyo apartment, so he scanned them all into an Apple Inc. iPad. Six months later the 28-year-old is running a 120-person start-up doing the same thing for customers.
I wonder if there is someone doing this in NYC?
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Full API now available - Instapaper Blog →
Marco Arment explains the econmics of his new full API: developers don’t have to pay to use it, but it’s limited:
From the Instapaper blog:
If you have already implemented the Instapaper API in your app, you don’t need to change anything.
If you’re writing support for Instapaper, and all you need to do is add pages to someone’s Instapaper account, they don’t need to be a Subscriber...
Why Fashion's Top Brands Are Flocking to Tumblr →
john:
I’m feeling some pressure to dress a bit nicer around the Tumblr office
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Nokia CEO Stephen Elop rallies troops in brutally... →
Looks like Elop is betting the ranch on… something.
He says Nokia has to join a successful ecosystem or build one. I have no confidence that Nokia can rally an ecosystem around Nokia products and standards, like Symbian. Here’s what I wrote in October 2009:
Stowe Boyd, Nokia Is Lost
I recall when I last spent serious time with the Nokia folks was in Barcelona, at the World Mobile...
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The Daily Wait →
John Gruber says Murdoch’s The Daily is dead because it is way too slow:
I’ve been reading The Daily each day since its debut Wednesday. Three days, three issues. My opinion of it has declined each day. Until I see an updated version of the app, I’m done with it. I noticed yesterday that it took way too long to load the day’s new issue. Today, I timed it. From the time I tapped the icon on...
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The Information Paradox →
continuum:
Lost Type’s ( http://losttype.com ) Muncie is everything I love it n a font: sans, machine-era, grungy. And made in 24 hours. #typography
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“We are free to disagree with Gladwell over what is more or less “interesting”...”
– - Maria Bustillos
(via soupsoup)
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Popplet Loses Users' Data
It’s a strange situation.
The other day, Monday, I started using a service called Popplet, that supports a mind-map-ish sort of presentation making and sharing, something like Prezi. Just after I created the first draft of a mind map related to my Social Cognition research initiative, I shared the link with Jorgen van der Sloot of Freedomlab.org, where I am a researcher-in-residence this...
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DVD Sales Falling Like Snow On The East Coast →
parislemon:
Wait, but the 30-day windows were supposed to reverse this trend. Remember? That was the whole point. And it was definitely going to work.
Warner Bros. DVD sales down 24 percent year over year. Sony sales down 20 percent. Paramount DVD sales down an excellent 44 percent year over year.
The fundamental problem remains: most movies simply aren’t worth owning. The studios need to...
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Revolution = Messiness At Scale, Again
Ingram picks up on the flimsy reasoning in Gladwell’s recent redux of his ‘Twitter is no revolutionary tool’ argument:
Mathew Ingram, Gladwell Still Missing the Point About Social Media and Activism
After weeks of discussion in the blogosphere over whether what happened in Tunisia was a “Twitter revolution,” and whether social media also helped trigger the current...
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“This week’s launch of Rupert Murdoch’s iPad “newspaper,” the Daily, is a...”
– - Scott Rosenberg, Murdoch’s Daily: post-Web innovation or CD-ROM flashback?
The Daily is the new CD-ROM.
(ht @jayrosen_nyu)
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The Church Of Savvy: Not Just In Politics, But In...
Jay Rosen has established the term ‘the church of savviness’ to refer to a belief system that ‘binds together our political press corps in Washington.’
Jay Rosen, Karl Rove and the Religion of The Washington Press
Conservatives think the ideology of the Washington press corps is liberal. Liberals think the press is conservative in the sense of protecting its place in the...
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Facebook Use Not Found To Correlate Negatively... →
Eszter Hargittai debunks recent ‘research’ that purported to find a relationship between Facebook use and loweer grades in college students:
Attempts by researchers to replicate the results of the widely publicized preliminary Ohio State University study failed to find a robust relationship between use of the popular social networking site and diminished grades.
“We found no...
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The Social Backlash: The War Against Social...
As the newest enemy of the future to come forward, and write (yet another) book that attacks the rise of a social culture, Sherry Turkle is being warmly received by the Sunday supplement naysayers, who desperately want to illegitimize what we are doing online. The newest example is below, where are are told that Twitter and Facebook are driving us crazy, our online relationships are ersatz and...
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Erich Schonfeld on News.me
Erich Schonfeld does a once over on News.me, the new Betaworks/NY Times collaboration on social news. He is likes what he sees:
News.me is a social news reading app that presents the news that the people you follow on Twitter are reading, and filters it based on how many times those stories are shared and clicked on overall. It pulls in data from not only Twitter but alsobit.ly, the betaworks...
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Official Google Blog: Microsoft’s Bing uses Google... →
Google runs a sting operation on Bing because Microsoft has been copying Google search results in Bing. I love the technique they use: synthetic query results for nonsense terms.
To be clear, the synthetic query had no relationship with the inserted result we chose—the query didn’t appear on the webpage, and there were no links to the webpage with that query phrase. In other words, there was...
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Big thinkers | Harvard Gazette →
[Lotte] Thomsen and colleagues at Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), studied the reactions of infants ranging from 8 to 16 months old as they watched videos of interactions between cartoon figures of various sizes.
“Since preverbal infants can’t be interviewed, their experiences and expectations must be assessed by their behavior,” Thomsen says. “Infants tend to watch...
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What Happened When I Asked AT&T To Reinstate My...
Original post: 27 Jan 2011
I emailed AT&T, suggesting that since Verizon is trying so hard to get AT&T iPhone customers to switch, and since many have reported being able to get their former unlimited data plans reinstated, I would like to get the old plan back, too, please. No dice.
[via email]
Dear Stowe Boyd, Thank you for taking the time to e-mail AT&T regarding reinstating...
Attention Turns to the Dangers of Distracted... →
In New York, a bill is pending in the legislature’s transportation committee that would ban the use of mobile phones, iPods or other electronic devices while crossing streets — runners and other exercisers included. Legislation pending in Oregon would restrict bicyclists from using mobile phones and music players, and a Virginia bill would keep such riders from using a “hand-held communication...
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The Daily: What we know so far - Hayley Tsukayama →
After a slight delay, Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper of the future is set todebut Wednesday in New York City. Apple Vice President of Internet Services Eddy Cue will take co-founder Steve Jobs’ place by Murdoch’s side to debut the tablet newspaper, which is made specifically and exclusively for tablets. It will have no Web presence, save advertising, and will not update as quickly...