links for 2009-09-24

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  BookBlog Blog Archive Twitter’s retweet - digg vs. call & response - Adina Levin’s weblog. For conversation about books I’ve been reading, social software, and other stuff too.
  Adina Levin dissects Twitter’s planned implementation of RT, and finds it wanting: “Twitter’s implementation of Retweet as a feature is a deep example of a principle of social design – build simple software, watch users, and then turn a carefully selected subset of the patterns they develop through use into features. It’s important to be very sensitive to how to bake the pattern in, because subtle changes can have major effects on the social dynamic of the system.

  Twitter watched and implemented, but they implemented what is, in my opinion, the wrong thing. Or rather, they implemented the thing that turns the Twitter communication pattern into something more like competition, more like spam, and less like conversation.”

  
  
  (tags: Technology rt adinalevin)
  
  
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  Giz Explains: How To Fix the Airlines’ Stupid Portable Gadget Rules - Airplanes - Gizmodo
  
  Wilson Rothman probes the supidities of airlines gadget rules: “The only command we’re given is to turn stuff “off”—a command increasingly ignored for its incoherence. What does it mean for a phone or iPod to be “off”? Most people don’t even know. If the command is this easy to ignore with no consequences, the likely conclusion is that the gear really isn’t a threat. But if it is, the airlines may not discover their own boneheadedness until the danger reaches some lethal saturation point.”
  
  (tags: Technology airlines gadgets)
  
  
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  DEMO Names Two Winners For Top Media Prize: Emo Labs And Liaise
  
  “The winner of the ‘Enterprise’ category is Liaise, which allows you to automatically generate a To-Do list from your Email. The application performs semantic analysis to determine which portions of an Email message require an action, and can automatically generate a list of these, complete with different priorities and deadlines. Provided the technology works well this could prove very useful (no more trudging through the Email trenches to figure out what you need to do that day) but to be effective it will need to really work every time — it won’t do much good if it only catches most of your to-dos.”
  
  (tags: Technology liaise)
  
  
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  Time for Demo to change—a lot | Rafe’s Radar - CNET News
  
  Rafe deconstructs Demo in detail.
  
  (tags: Technology demo rafeneedleman)