June 2008
58 posts
One Man, One Long List, No More Web Ads -... →
the idea that a guy working in his den at night while his wife watches TV downstairs can so easily allow people to block most ads reminds some of how fragile Web profits may be
globeandmail.com: I killed Tim Russert (on... →
No, it was more like the primal instinct that makes people shout “First!” on online forums, a recognition of the improbable act of stumbling across a special place at just the right time. After I had done my duty, dozens of others piled on, tweaking, retweaking, fixing and updating until my work was moot. But I got to that particular page first, and that left me ever-so-slightly chuffed.
WinExtra » FriendFeed vs. Twitter & Why Twitter... →
It is inevitable that parts of Twitter will change after all that is the way of development but it is equally true that FriendFeed will also change during its growth. That does not mean though that one will be better that the other or that one of the services will kill off the other. They both serve totally different needs. Yes we will have people who will use both but we will also have people who...
Preoccupations - I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip... →
EARLIER this year, I became tired of my usual morning ritual of spending hours catching up on e-mail. So I did something drastic to take back control of my productivity. I stopped using e-mail most of the time. I quickly realized that the more messages you answer, the more messages you generate in return. It becomes a vicious cycle. By trying hard to stop the cycle, I cut the number of e-mails...
Magna: DVR Usage Climbs →
DVR impact on broadcast ratings is significant and growing, according to data released by media agency buying unit Magna Global USA. Magna’s research shows that while less than one fourth of all U.S. TV homes have DVRs, they account for 9 percent of the Big Five networks’ TV ratings, and 15 percent of viewing by adults 18-49.
MediaShift . Digging Deeper::Online Video Ads... →
So many people are watching online videos, but so few advertisers are trying to reach them. So what gives? The problem for marketers is that the most popular video site, YouTube, is filled with user-generated content that is too edgy or unprofessional for brand advertising. Many online videos are too short for people to sit through “pre-roll” video ads that play before the content, and people...
A Company Computer and Questions About E-Mail... →
Mr. Sidell was no longer an employee when his mail was supposedly read. And he said in his complaint that it went well beyond the company’s rights to read e-mail messages from the personal account of a terminated employee to his lawyer.
McCain Advisor: We Don't Need Facebook; They're... →
The bigger point: Being President of Facebook or King of MySpace doesn’t mean much, period. Recall that Obama dominated Hillary Clinton on Facebook by the same margin as McCain, but only narrowly won the nomination.
San Francisco may name sewage treatment plant... →
a group going by the regal-sounding name of the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco is planning to ask voters here to change the name of a prize-winning water-treatment plant on the shoreline to the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.
TechBlog: The mouse is dead? Long live the mouse! →
gesture-based computing requires a wider range of motion to get things done
Lucas Conley: Product Placements To Get A Closer... →
Product placement on broadcast TV is soaring — up 39% in the first quarter of 2008 alone.
The Other RIA Desktop Platform: Curl Nitro -... →
Curl is another player in the RIA (Rich Internet Applications) space, going up against Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe’s Flex platform, and OpenLazlo, among others. The Curl platform provides developers a way to build web-based apps that can’t be easily built using Ajax or other web-based technologies. Those apps can be deployed both within the web browser or on the desktop via Curl...
Fuel Prices Shift Math for Life in Far Suburbs -... →
Suddenly, the economics of American suburban life are under assault as skyrocketing energy prices inflate the costs of reaching, heating and cooling homes on the distant edges of metropolitan areas.
Piercing through the myth that always on and... →
What if everything becomes immediate. What if the news is there right now, delivered faster than the blink of an eye. What if we all can have 24×7 contact and interaction. What if the “instant” has become part of the plumbing of the Internet? If “instant” becomes the norm, then it will decline in value. If everyone has instant access to the same information, the act itself becomes less valuable.
Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant →
I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues. Let me give you my experience from yesterday.
U.S. High Tech Said to Slip - NYTimes.com →
Because the federal government does not issue a sufficient number of green cards or work visas to talented foreign students studying here, there are a “tremendous number of unfilled jobs,” said Christopher Hansen, AeA’s chief executive.
Microsoft Pledges Windows XP Support Through 2014... →
Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has committed to providing support services for its soon to be retired Windows XP through 2014 — a full 13 years after the operating system was originally released.
Techdirt: Will Always-On Gadgets Change The Way We... →
Carr’s piece was sort of the modern equivalent of parents from a generation ago worrying about kids using calculators in school and forgetting how to do math. Of course, that didn’t happen. It just allowed individuals to better use the tools at their disposal to do even more interesting and complicated mathematics.
A VC: Checking Out Google Trends For Websites →
there is no service that gets third party web traffic measurement exactly right
"You have to treat your employees like customers"... →
“You have to treat your employees like customers.”
Vitamin Features » Building and managing virtual... →
Get to know each other It’s not always about business. Nothing helps a team gel more than learning about each others personal lives. It’s easier when you work in the same office, but in a virtual team you need to make time for it. We’ve celebrate with shots of vodka in Campfire. We send each other pictures of our home offices. We remember birthdays or occasions and announce them to the team. The...
The AP's Real Problem Isn't Bloggers: It's Its Own... →
“I mean, we’ve always had access to news from all over the state. It was just, you know, it went through the AP mill. I frankly think we’re getting better, more distinctively written stories because they’re not going through the AP mill.”
Social Investing Site Covestor Is Now Open to the... →
We decided to start off by creating a high-barrier-to-entry community where you had to share to participate to build the base. The long term objective is really about building a mass follower proposition for the world’s best self-directed investors and to enable others to invest directly alongside them (de-insitutionalizing fund management) and that requires it all to be open and public.
Rob Pegoraro - Building a Better Browser: Firefox... →
This time, Firefox developers — employees of the Mountain View, Calif., nonprofit Mozilla, plus outside volunteers — stopped pretending that we all bookmark our favorite pages with the care of reference librarians.
/Message: Feedly: Turning Goggle Reader Into A... →
Feedly: Turning Goggle Reader Into A Social Flow
Learning from Flickr's Co-founders on Their Way... →
Customer Service is The New Marketing One of the most important elements of Flickr’s early success was its incredible engagement with its users. Flickr management spent what might have seemed like a totally unreasonable amount of time welcoming new users to the site, participating actively and promptly in forums and highlighting the best photos uploaded. That kind of engagement can turn...
Daily Herald | Teens say e-mail just doesn't cut... →
high school and college students don’t mind using e-mail as a bridge with older adults. But when it comes to social communication, most view e-mail as Samuel Morse viewed the Pony Express - yesterday’s news.
Brought to You by . . . Anyone? -... →
“If you are responsible for a brand that has been around for 50 years, you clearly are more cautious,” said Kelly Twohig, who manages digital investment for Starcom, a media agency. “You have less license to innovate.”
Brought to You by . . . Anyone? -... →
The biggest U.S. advertisers, which have long supported other formats — television, radio, print — have not fully embraced the Web. So while print and video outlets face enormous pressure to transfer their wares to the Internet, many in the industry wonder where the money to support online content will come from.
Subtraction: Spacing Is Everything →
If it’s true that in comedy, timing is everything, then in design, I say that spacing is everything. Or at least it counts for a heck of a lot. This is especially true for Web design, and especially true again for the design of interfaces, which is what the bulk of Web design boils down to. The number of pixels separating elements in an interface plays a critical and frequently underestimated role...
Technology Review: Adapting Websites to Users →
John Hauser, a professor of marketing at the Sloan School and the lead author of a paper on the research that is slated to appear in Marketing Science, explains that a website running the system would detect a user’s cognitive style. It would watch for traits, such as whether or not the user is detail oriented, and morph to complement that style. The changes would be subtle. “Suddenly,...
Some employees buy own laptops, phones for work -... →
Nearly 40% of professionals recently surveyed by researcher In-Stat paid for a laptop that they regularly carried. Cellphone users often picked up their bill. And company-provided personal digital assistants (PDAs), cameras and Global Positioning Systems (GPS) are relatively rare, says the survey, released Monday.
Help! Family Spam Is Crushing My Inbox! : NPR →
Stop e-mailing me spam. Love, Dad. Controversial spam can cause major family rifts. Kallos recalls an especially contentious e-mail brawl involving a mother who became so offended that her grown daughter had asked her to stop forwarding political content that she disowned her. So before you forward something on, ask yourself whether the person would enjoy it. If you’re not sure, hit delete....
New York Press - GINA PACE - Feeding Frenzy →
“One thing we’ve discovered is that email is not the perfect medium for every kind of conversation,” said Paul Buchheit, a co-founder of FriendFeed. “If you are sharing funny links of good videos or an interesting article, email turns out not to be the best way to share those…it can pile up and you start to feel guilty and anxious and not sure if you’re ever going to catch up.”
/Message: Overload, Schmoverload: The Myth Of... →
While people may think the appropriate unit of measuring the benefits of social tools is personal productivity, it isn’t. As we have moved from hierarchical, top-down, centralized work — think Henry Ford’s assembly lines or the pre-Internet global corporation — to networked, bottom-up, edgewise work personal productivity has been trumped by network productivity. Network...
Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast -... →
Companies are also realizing that there is money to be made in helping people reduce their digital gluttony. Major corporations around the world are searching for ways to keep software tools from becoming distractions, said John Tang, a researcher at I.B.M., who is a member of the new group.
When Micro-blogging Grows Up - O'Reilly Radar →
Once more stable services and business models emerge, I still think micro-blogs will evolve to share some of the properties of the blogosphere described above. Micro-blogs from traditional media sources will be among the most popular.
Web 2.0: How Wachovia justified wikis, blogs,... →
Having trouble justifying to your company’s top brass why you should make investments in internal Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis and social networks? If so, take notes from Pete Fields, senior vice president of the Charleston, N.C-based bank’s e-commerce division. This morning at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, he unveiled the business case he made to Wachovia’s top executives...
A Smart Social Media Play From... Coca-Cola? →
Coca-Cola quietly launched one of their first social media applications last weekend, a bookmarking widget for Facebook called CokeTag. (Coke Singapore also has a Facebook application out, promoting a tie-in with UEFA EURO 2008.) CokeTag is not only a smart play from the company, but also a fairly useful app as far as profile widgets go. The app allows users to create customizable Flash bookmark...
Location-Tracking Startup Sense Networks Emerges... →
What if you could look at your cell phone and see a heat map of where everybody in the city was at that very moment? The more people at any given location, the redder it would appear on the map. That’s what Citysense does. It is a mobile application that is supposed to help you figure out where the hottest clubs and night spots are so you can go there (or avoid them, depending on your preference).
Technology Review: The Future of Mobile Social... →
Whrrl, for the iPhone, enables something Pelago’s chief technology officer, Darren Erik Vengroff, calls social discovery: using the iPhone’s map and self-location features, as well as information about the prior activities of the user’s friends, Whrrl proposes new places to explore or activities to try.
AT&T Embraces BitTorrent, May Consider Usage-Based... →
AT&T will begin testing usage-based pricing starting this Fall. That’s driven by the economics of building network capacity, he says, not by an attempt to make more money. According to Donovan, one percent of the company’s customers account for 20 percent of the network usage; the top five percent account for 40 percent of the usage. Because the network must be able to accommodate...
The Hidden Danger of Gmail Labs - Bits -... →
But any creative process alternates between tightness and looseness, between brainstorming and prioritizing. And I think that Google’s ever-expanding array of services already suffers from the ills of too many different authors. While most of its products have relatively spare interfaces, the products differ as to how they work and, taken together, are harder to use than they should be. Consider,...
Instant Messaging Proves Useful In Reducing... →
esearch showed that instant messaging was often used as a substitute for other, more disruptive forms of communication such as the telephone, e-mail, and face-to-face conversations. Using instant messaging led to more conversations on the computer, but the conversations were briefer, said R. Kelly Garrett, co-author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State.
In Japan, Cellphones Have Become Too Complex to... →
Experimenting with different key combinations in search of new features is “good for killing time during a long commute,” Aoki says, “but it’s definitely not elegant.” Japan has long been famous for its advanced cellphones with sci-fi features like location tracking, mobile credit card payment and live TV. These handsets have been the envy of consumers in the United...
How User Interfaces can make or break a new... →
The reason for my bold statement is that that very same interface everyone loves doesn’t function well when you are mobile! - iPhone is not mobile - Try making a phone call while you are walking around, literally. The touch screen provides no tactile feedback, the buttons displayed are way too small for selecting contacts, letters or numbers, and the amount of actions needed to select a contact...
RIM (RIMM) and E*Trade (ETFC) Now Allow... →
Today, E*Trade (ETFC) announced that people with a Blackberry can trade stocks while they are walking around town, having lunch, or riding in a car. The AP writes that the new application “will allow users to trade stocks and options, set up portfolio watch lists and get news.”
Cellphone Tracking Study Shows We’re Creatures of... →
New research that makes creative use of sensitive location-tracking data from 100,000 cellphones in Europe suggests that most people can be found in one of just a few locations at any time, and that they do not generally go far from home. “Individuals display significant regularity, because they return to a few highly frequented locations, such as home or work,” the researchers found.
Twitter To Get More Like High School, In A Good... →
CEO Jack Dorsey says “Twitter is working on adding the ability for users to separate their contacts into groups.”
We are what we buy | Salon Books →
Instead of being more hostile to what he calls “commercial persuasion,” the consumers he observed seem very much involved with brands and products. If traditional advertising has become a less effective way of fostering that involvement, the commercial persuasion industry has in turn been fiendishly resourceful in coming up with alternative methods, infiltrating hitherto unexploited...