June 2008
58 posts
Scan and Release: Digitizing the Boston Public... →
the BPL is facing the inevitable conundrum: Maximize the metadata but slow the process, or do grave less metadata but go at a far faster clip. The group seems to be leaning toward the latter, which makes sense to me. They’ve been using what Tom calls the “Curator Core,” a reference to the Dublin Core metadata standard for books. Trying to capture everything that might be useful is a task beyond...
May 2008
64 posts
http://www.cafepress.com/friendfeed →
Official FriendFeed merchandise.
37signals: An Introduction to Using Patterns in... →
To make better sites — sites that are functional, beautiful, and “usable” — we have to break our design problems up into small independent chunks based on the real issues within our requirements. Christopher Alexander, who came up with this stuff, calls these chunks patterns.
Christopher Alexander on the difference between a... →
The difference between the novice and the master is simply that the novice has not learnt, yet, how to do things in such a way that he can afford to make small mistakes. The master knows that the sequence of his actions will always allow him to cover his mistakes a little further down the line. It is this simple but essential knowledge which gives the work of a master carpenter its wonderful,...
The Next-Gen Web: Browser Storage Support →
“DLL hell” has been succeeded by “plug-in hell”, as a variety of companies present their versions of what the next-gen web will look like
Twitter / Mickipedia: OH: why do I need to know... →
OH: why do I need to know someones real name when I know their alias?
Ex-Colleagues Ask, 'What Happened?' -... →
In the book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” McClellan says he retains great admiration for Bush but portrays the president as stubborn and isolated. Calling the Iraq war “unnecessary” and a “strategic blunder,” McClellan alleges that senior administration officials began a campaign in 2002 to...
LIVE Rupert Murdoch At D (NWS) - Silicon Alley... →
You changed your mind on that, right? “When I saw how much money was involved,” yes, I did. 1.1 M subs paying $100 a year, and I think they should pay $150. It has value. Rich people in Florida love it. They have to read it. “They have nothing else to do.” We can definitely extract much more for our content than we’re getting. We have 2,000 excellent journalists, and...
Making the Web Searchable: The Story of... →
The point of any experiment is to draw the right conclusions. Looking at the facts, Mika and the Yahoo! search team realized that they could not count on enhancing search by leveraging metadata on today’s web - it simply does not exist to the extent needed. At the same time, it was clear that enhancing search results and cross linking them to other pieces of information on the web is...
Wireless Broadband Boosts Economy - Bits -... →
Productivity gains from people using wireless broadband services will generate $860 billion in additional gross domestic product in the next 10 years, higher than the $600 billion estimated in earlier findings from 2005, says the study
With Migrant Workers in Short Supply, a Farmer... →
Mr. Bittner cut down 25 acres of sweet cherry trees, some of which were 30 years old. He also dug up 20 acres of peach trees that were 12 to 15 years old. In all, he razed more than 10 percent of his fruit orchards this year, a decision that he said was a direct response to the immigration situation. There will be no harvest from the newly cleared fields until at least 2011.
Wired Campus: Tulane Signs Onto Online Roommate... →
students can always fall back on Facebook for background checks on potential and assigned roommates—which is exactly the reason why Tulane opted to use RoommateClick. “Over the last few years we have seen such an increase in calls in July and August with requests to change rooms because of what students have seen on MySpace or Facebook,” said Marty Brantley, Tulane’s director of housing services....
findability.org: Tom Chi: Interview →
Search Assist has two components. First, auto-complete identifies when users need search suggestions by measuring typing speed and responding to hesitations. This feature has dramatically reduced the number of misspelled queries. Second, auto-suggest identifies related concepts, and helps users to move forward (refine), backward (expand), and sideways (related).
Cover Story - Emily Gould - Exposed - Blog-Post... →
some people have always been more naturally inclined toward oversharing than others. Technology just enables us to overshare on a different scale.
Online stores offering tailor-made services -... →
An increasing number of retailers have distinguished themselves from the pack by giving users a little something extra beyond intuitive navigation and easy checkout. One shopping service, for example, sends periodic e-mails alerting customers to sales of brands they pre-select as favorites. Another retailer offers an “online stylist” who can answer questions before a purchase. A Web...
Is There a Cure for the 'Distraction Virus'? →
In a recent blog post, essayist, programmer, and programming language designer Paul Graham offered the profound insight that Internet-based distraction “is not a static obstacle that you avoid like you might avoid a rock in the road. Distraction seeks you out.” And “as we learn to avoid one class of distractions, new ones constantly appear, like drug-resistant bacteria.”
Macworld | Craigslist Tops U.S. Mobile Browsing →
Mobile Web surfers in the U.S. spend more time on classified-ad site Craigslist than on any other Web site, and they spent nearly twice as much time browsing as their British counterparts in March.
Spud Web →
But if you don’t draw that line, your list will fill up with semi-strangers, and you’ll be less likely to share personal information you want your real friends to see. (Facebook offers a way to classify your friend list to let certain clusters see different things, but it’s a pain to go through your list and categorize people.) And making those distinctions is easier said than...
Corporate Twitters Worth Following - And Some You... →
Deadbeats - @google, @apple, @verizon, @microsoft, @aol, @bestbuy, @netflix, @viacom, @timewarner, @cocacola, @pepsi, @tacobell. Some of these seem to be “owned” by the companies, like Google’s (GOOG). Some are clearly not, like @netflix, which is “for sale” by a guy named Tom, who’s also sitting on @usatoday and @yelp. “Twitter has a policy of giving the...
Get Satisfaction’s Ear on the Twittersphere →
Using Summize’s public APIs, Get Satisfaction now records all of the messages on Twitter that mention brands of supported companies. Did you just complain about your experience on eBay? Go here to see your message seeded as the start of a possible discussion thread.
To Thwart TiVo, a Nod to Television’s Golden Age -... →
The networks are also reusing a popular advertising ploy of the past: the live commercial.
Hueniverse: Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part... →
Facebook offers an interesting approach to their friends feed which in a way is a very similar challenge. Facebook offers users abstract controls over what kind of content to show and then provides a feed that is an approximation of what the actual accurate aggregated status really is. What this means is that Facebook is showing a timeline that is good enough but not fully reliable and in the...
Microsoft's "Cash Back" Google Search Killer:... →
Microsoft will not likely offer enough “cash back” on each purchase to make the service worth using for most users. The search business is wildly and fantastically profitable in aggregate, but it is composed of billions of small-value revenue events. 1 million $1 clicks generate $1 million of revenue for Google, but even if Microsoft gives 50% cash back on each click, that’s only...
Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You... →
After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!
Report: The Mobile Web is the New Hangout -... →
According to Opera’s survey of the more 11.9 million Opera Mini users in March, almost 41% of mobile traffic now goes to social networking — up to 60% in some countries, including the US. Compare that to about 6% of total web traffic for social networks outside of the mobile web. That’s not overly surprising, though, given the recent proliferation of new smartphones aimed at...
Micro Persuasion: The Hyperconnected vs. 84% of... →
The first piece of research from Parks Associates (via Dwight Silverman and CNET) reveals that one-fifth of all U.S. heads-of-household have never used e-mail. Based on the conversations I had in Europe this past week, this is even more pronounced outside the US where high mobile penetration makes things a bit more complicated to track. Meanwhile, a separate white paper from IDC/Nortel (via Jackie...
Nortel: The Hyperconnected: Here They Come! →
Nortel tasked IDC to conduct a global study of almost 2,400 working adults in 17 countries. The study focused on quantifying the state of today’s connectedness, tracking its acceptance and use across devices and applications as well as determining the pace of its growth and impact on the enterprise. Here’s the essence of what we found — enterprises around the world are facing an...
Can a Dead Brand Live Again? - Rebranding - River... →
A great deal of what happens in the consumer marketplace does not involve brands with zealous loyalists. What determines whether a brand lives or dies (or can even come back to life) is usually a quieter process that has more to do with mental shortcuts and assumptions and memories — and all the imperfections that come along with each of those things.
U.S. Plans Steps to Ease Congestion at Airports -... →
By both capping flights and auctioning slots, the thinking goes, carriers that now dominate the three airports will not be able to use that dominance to raise ticket prices. Allowing the existing carriers to remain without new competition would be “a formula for failure,” said D. J. Gribbin, the general counsel of the Transportation Department.
PC World - Business Center: 20% of U.S. Has Never... →
Roughly one-fifth of all U.S. households are disconnected from the Internet and have never used e-mail, according to research firm Parks Associates.
A VC: It's Not The Data, It's The Flow →
What you cannot commoditize is the desire to create a social graph on a web service and the desire to maintain a social graph on a web service and the flow of data into and around that social graph. … Social web services need not fear data portability. They need to fear others providing a better experience. Because when others do that, the flow of data moves and they aren’t in the...
They’re All Connected - New York Times →
Also, the Gantry has gone beyond the Google Group to add BuildingLink.com, which allows paperless communication among building residents, staff members and managers. “The Google Group is more informal — let it all hang out and share,” Ms. Burns said. “BuildingLink is the official channel.”
/Message: Beyond Blogs: The Conversation Has Moved... →
The way I am getting tugged to blog posts is increasingly as a mention within a conversational bite in Twitter or Friendfeed. I then click out of the flow to see the larger post, and offer my view in the flow — not on the blog — and then I return to the flow, where I will be spending most of my time.
Social Media Marketing And Brands: Be... →
Brands should not lurk on social networks they are the equivalent of corp virtual artifacts that go unvisited in
second life.
Bad Words, Overused, Can Lose Their Sting - New... →
[the] boundaries between public space and private are being erased. Cellphones contribute mightily to that, said another sociolinguist, John V. Singler of New York University. “The range of places where it’s O.K. to use that word has grown enormously,” Professor Singler said. By now, he said, “the real taboo words — and even these depend on who’s saying them — have to do much more with race.”
Did Twitter beat media with earthquake news? | The... →
So perhaps the winner is a lot more difficult to pick. Internet users on Twitter managed to beat the real-time newswires with first reports of the quake, but the wires came back with the context that pointed to the quake’s seriousness much faster than Twitter users could.
Steve Rubel vs Stowe Boyd - Fischmarkt →
Rubel speaks of faint signals that pose challenges. Attention crash is a major one: We can’t really keep up with the hundreds of emails. (I imagine Stowe Boyd has a thing or two to say about this.) Digital curators who pre-filter information can help fight information. While it’s a great term, this idea seems a bit oldschool, at least in the sense that curators could be replaced by...
Facebook's Profound Strategic Error →
Facebook wanted to rule the world; to dominate it; to be the next Microsoft. That’s not revolution - it’s just strategic fascism. And it should be intuitive that fascism cannot hold in a world where power is getting more and more radically liquid by the nanosecond. It’s a delusion; a kind of deep corporate psychosis; the blind fetishization of power and coercion, with no concern...
Why You Should Use FriendFeed →
FriendFeed lets you not only see what your friends are doing, but act on it. Also, as your friends find more people to follow on FriendFeed, you can be exposed to the best from their friends, getting you to find new people and new interesting items. … Because FriendFeed aggregates activity from many places, it definitely has the potential to be noisy. But the team at FriendFeed has thought...
Why Twitter Matters →
How could tiny Twitter ever become such a titan? It’s not the core technology, which is simple, but instead the community. Twitterers find and follow the people they care about on the service. Late in April, following one of Twitter’s outages, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington wrote: “I realized that in the last two months a subtle shift occurred: I now need Twitter more than...
E L S U A ~ A KM Blog by Luis Suarez » Blog... →
Thinking out of the Inbox - More Collaboration through less e-mail
E L S U A ~ A KM Blog by Luis Suarez →
IBM Social Computing Guidelines: Executive Summary
Google Maps Adds More: Wikipedia Entries and... →
If you go to Google Maps, you’ll notice there is now a “”More” button right next to “Street View”” and “Traffic.” If you click on it after getting a map, you will be given the options to tick “Photos” or “Wikipedia.”
Dash Opens Up APIs For Its GPS Device to... →
Dash Navigation is opening up its in-car GPS device to outside developers through an API program.
Why you might soon think you're hearing things →
The technology works by beaming waves of hypersonic sound at a pitch that is undetectable by the human ear. The waves continue until they smash into an object such as a person’s body. The waves then slow, mix and re-create the original audio broadcast. If the person steps out of the waves, they are no longer obstructed and are rendered inaudible. … Using the technology, marketers can...
To Curb Truancy, Dallas Tries Electronic... →
Jaime used to snooze until 2 p.m. before strolling into school. He fell so far behind that he is failing most of his classes and school officials sent him to truancy court. Instead of juvenile detention, Jaime was selected by a judge to be enrolled in a pilot program at Bryan Adams in which chronically truant students are monitored electronically. Since Jaime started carrying the Global...
Why Yelp Works - Bits - Technology - New York... →
What Yelp did differently than these others, as Jeremy Stoppelman, the site’s co-founder and chief executive describes it, was to spend most of its energy attracting a small group of fanatic reviewers. It didn’t try to pay for reviews, as some sites have. It didn’t subordinate the users’ contributions to professional reviews, as on Citysearch, or to directory information, as on yellow-pages sites....
Why Filtering is the Next Step for Social Media -... →
Aggregated services are not only used for entirely different purposes, but also cater to different audiences. Consequently, who you may be catering to is dependent upon why you may be using the service. While some articles or content submitted to services may overlap, this is only because there are overlapping interests for the different audiences on these platforms. How does this affect noise...
The Moment The Post-Materialist | Brutal,... →
Superdense living may not be conventionally beautiful, but it does seem to appeal to creative types. Richard Florida found one possible reason why. In a research paper entitled Urban Density, Creativity and Innovation, Florida and his team found a positive relationship between urban density and the number of new patents filed. Density, he concluded, is a key component of innovation. Maybe someone...
What People Say When They Tweet - ReadWriteWeb →
We teamed up with Summize to take a closer look about what people are talking about in the Twitosphere. Summize looked at about 4 million Twitter status update messages (tweets) collected from the public time line over a seven day period running from April 27 - May 3. We saw approximately 200,000 active users (users that sent at least one message) during that period, of which 60% tweeted in...