July 2008
67 posts
TechBlog: Six ways the iPhone has changed my... →
I’m constantly seeking Wi-Fi. While the iPhone 3G’s data network is much faster than the EDGE network used by the original model, it’s still significantly slower than Wi-Fi, which both versions can access. My BlackJack, which was a 3G device, didn’t do Wi-Fi, so I had no choice there. If I’m out and about, I find myself constantly checking to see if an available, open...
TechBlog: Six ways the iPhone has changed my... →
I’m spending more time texting. For some reason, I was not a big user of text messaging on the BlackJack, and even though I prefer its physical keyboard to the virtual one on the iPhone, I now find myself texting more than ever. It may have to do with the iPhone’s SMS interface, which looks a lot like iChat from the Mac OS. It feels more like chatting to me, so I do it more often. It...
Buyers Want Newspapers to Reinvent Model →
Survival may require papers to step even further outside their comfort zone. Margy Campion, Novus’ vp, buying and planning services, gives papers credit for being more flexible with rates and more willing to open the door to formats that push the ad-edit line—for example, front-page ads and watermark, or shadow, ads in which an ad is printed faintly under editorial copy. Traditionally run under...
As Bush's presidency wanes, so does interest from... →
One downside of this diminished coverage is less watchdog reporting in a major hall of power.
IRS cellphone rule called outmoded - Los Angeles... →
The law requires employees to keep detailed records of all calls made on their work-issue cellphones, indicating whether they were business or personal. If they don’t, the phone and wireless service are deemed a perk that must be listed as taxable income to the employee. … UC is considering halting its practice of issuing cellphones to most employees. Instead, the university system...
No Bull, Cuil Had Problems - Bits - Technology -... →
“We were overwhelmed with traffic that was not the standard pattern,” Ms. Patterson said. “People were looking for their names a lot.” That meant that the cache, which stores common queries in memory to save time, was overwhelmed. Meanwhile the overflow cache, which uses a hard disk, had a bug so a lot of searches produced no results. There were some other problems involving something they call...
Complaining Bloggers Have a Cable Company’s Ear -... →
Brian D. Solis, who runs a public relations firm, FutureWorks, that specializes in social media, said companies like Comcast are “taking what used to be an inbound call center and turning it into an outbound form of customer relations” that can also help spot problems before they get out of hand.
Internet Endangers Big-City Tradition: The Bike... →
Anecdotes from the Big Apple to San Francisco and parts in between suggest the click of a Send button is undermining the bike-messaging trade. In the last two years, three messaging companies in San Francisco have folded. Courier service Bucky’s of Seattle trashed its bike fleet last year. And there are nearly 1,000 fewer bike messengers in New York than a decade ago.
MediaShift . Digging Deeper::Young Newspaper... →
While a certain amount of turnover is expected and normal among the youngest practitioners of any craft — in pursuit of career advancement or reflecting a simple change of heart — these messages seemed different in both volume and intensity. A majority of younger journalists (age 29 and below) in nearly every pilot seemed to us to be saying, “We’re leaving because the changes we see as necessary...
Textbooks, free and illegal, online - The Boston... →
publishers have begun offering less expensive paperback versions of some titles, and are themselves selling many legal electronic editions, or e-books, over the Internet. For instance, McGraw Hill Cos., a major textbook vendor, offers most of its titles in electronic form, at lower prices than printed editions. A McGraw Hill physics textbook that costs $135 in hardcover can be downloaded for $80...
Beyond the API: Why Companies Should Have a... →
Web sites are only one kind of presence that companies can have today. Social Networks like Facebook and MySpace, mobile platforms like iPhone and Blackberry, browser extensions and RIA Applications all have an equal - sometimes considerably larger - share of users attention. Figuring out which presence should be delivered by the website vs. a third party is an important question that each company...
Can Si Newhouse Keep Condé Nast’s Gloss Going? -... →
But some people inside Condé’s stylish Times Square headquarters, as well as experts outside, wonder whether the company, by choice or necessity, will tighten its belt in the years to come — and risk losing some of its cachet along the way. Analysts point to the economic vise the Internet has already put on newspapers, and question whether the luxury goods market — the cash cow for Condé magazines...
With a Surge in Iron and Steel Prices, Thieves Are... →
Long Beach is considering plastic covers, and Miami has started welding the covers in place. Cleveland is sealing manholes with tar, and Phoenix has assigned four police detectives to a task force that is investigating the thefts.
Phone Giants Fight to Keep Subscribers -... →
AT&T is not the only company facing a changing environment in the communications business. All of the major telecommunications companies — AT&T, Verizon and Sprint Nextel — are figuring out how to make more money from customers as they spend more time sending text messages or browsing the Web on their wireless phones, rather than talking.
M.T.A. to Seek Higher Fares to Help Close Budget... →
The authority faces steadily rising costs, particularly for fuel, as well as sharply declining tax revenues due to a slowdown in the real estate market. Just six months ago, the authority predicted that its shortfall for 2009 would be slightly more than $200 million, less than a quarter of its latest projection.
MediaShift Idea Lab . A Call for Quality Comments... →
the real benefit of a comment system is the way it can drive collective intelligence. To put it in less geeky terms, comment systems should take the voices of a large group of people (the collective) and present what they have to say in a way that spreads knowledge and facilitates wisdom (the intelligence).
App Store is a Solution to The Penny Gap at The... →
I’ve talked about The Penny Gap on this blog before, and to summarize my thoughts: The Penny Gap is not an problem of economics, it’s an internet usability problem. The act of paying for something online (regardless of the cost) requires collecting so much more information (CC#, Paypal Acct, Exp Date, etc) which is subject to data entry errors and form fatigue… If paying $0.01 for a service had...
The Future of Computer Applications: Help Me or... →
The new entertainment is based on a couple of patterns. First is brevity. With increasing (and nowadays unbearable) amount of information and choice, modern entertainment software knows it has your eyes for only a limited time. Twitter is the proto entertainment riding the exponential curve of popularity. The reason is it’s short. But there’s another aspect to Twitter that’s part...
Junk Charts →
why bother graphing the data if the reader needs to read the data in order to understand the chart? We call this the self-sufficiency test. The graphical elements of a pie chart can’t stand on their own.
The Mobile Web: Its Not Just for Smartphones -... →
Motorola and Samsung, according to the company’s research, are two popular brands for mobile Web browsing in the United States. Nearly 36 percent of all mobile ads served up by AdMob were sent to a Motorola phone, the company said, with the Razr and Krzr coming up as the first and second most popular models. Samsung phones came in second at 14.1 percent. Worldwide, Nokia and Motorola phones are...
Business Technology : Why Most Online Communities... →
One of the hot investments for businesses these days is online communities that help customers feel connected to a brand. But most of these efforts produce fancy Web sites that few people ever visit. The problem: Businesses are focusing on the value an online community can provide to themselves, not the community.
SitePoint Blogs » Study: Why Most Online... →
Moran’s study revealed that even though 60% of businesses put over $1 million into branded online community building efforts, 35% have less than 100 members, while less than a quarter have more than 1,000. Moran outlined three reasons he thinks that that majority of online communities are failing to gain traction with customers.
Postbulletin.com: Teens herald the death of e-mail... →
“I’m just attached to my cell phone,” explains the 16-year-old McClatchy High student. “I really only use e-mail for (sending) attachments or keeping up with (school) assignments.”
BlueBlog: What We Can All Learn From Summize →
Twitter’s acquisition of Summize provides a good case-study on how-to, and how-not-to, commercialize new web services.
Will The World End if Mainstream Users Ever Learn... →
If mainstream users learned how to use the internet, it could be devastating for an online economy based on monetizing their ignorance. Everyone knows that’s true for spammers and phishers, but the numbers indicate that there are a whole lot more people than that who are dependent on user ignorance. Luckily for them, there’s plenty of it to go around.
2 New Subway Entrances Open at Columbus Circle -... →
officials of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority formally opened two new stairways on the northwest corner of Broadway and 60th Street
Illinois Residents Get More Spam Than Anyone Else,... →
“different socioeconomic factors and levels of security awareness” explains the varying spam rates. We figure that’s a polite way of saying the denizens of some states are just more Web-savvy than others.
Study: Readership Holding Steady, Print Beats Web... →
Even as newspaper financial results fall off a cliff, readership is staying stable, the latest edition of the Readership Institute (RI) tracking study finds. The study of 3,000 readers of 100 papers across the U.S. found that overall newspaper readership had declined only slightly since the last study in 2006. Readership among young people continued to decline, but slowly.
Real Time - WSJ.com →
Put it all together, and bit by bit the case for having a page of one’s own emerges — as one poster in a Slashdot conversation on the subject put it, “Your name is essentially your very own brand; might as well try to paint it in a decent light.” Will that evolve into a social expectation? Not immediately, I’d wager — but in time, absolutely. And if so, Facebook...
TechCrunchIT » Blog Archive » Back on Track →
Beyond interface comes the oft-cited problem of how to consume this stream of data, the “you can’t just sit in front of your monitor all day” critique. Never mind that that is exactly what the financial markets require with ever more rapid flow of data, analysis, and response every minute of every day. With the iPhone and other smartphones now proliferating, who do we know who isn’t already in...
Confirmed: Twitter Has Acquired Summize -... →
Summize could help Twitter begin to develop a business model. We’ve long contended that data mining and sales were the ideal path to monetization of Twitter.
NYC: Statues on Parade: Cleveland Indians on... →
The Cleveland Indians statue stood outside 150 East 58th Street, between Lexington and 3rd Avenue.
How CAPTCHA got trashed | The Industry Standard →
By January 2008, Yahoo Mail’s CAPTCHA had been cracked . Gmail was ripped open in April. Hotmail’s top got popped during the same month.
And then things got bad. There are now programs available online (no, we will not tell you where) that automate CAPTCHA attacks. You don’t need to have any cracking skills. All you need is a desire to spread spam, make anonymous online attacks...
Older E-Mail Users Favor Fast Replies -... →
over the last three years, the most experienced users of the Internet had been scaling back slightly on their Internet use, and had begun to check their e-mail less often than new users. “They’re saying, ‘I’m tired of it defining my life,’ ” he said. “ ‘I’m tired of being chained to it.’ ”
McCain’s Conservative Model? Roosevelt (Theodore,... →
He said, ruefully, that he had not mastered how to use the Internet and relied on his wife and aides like Mark Salter, a senior adviser, and Brooke Buchanan, his press secretary, to get him online to read newspapers (though he prefers reading those the old-fashioned way) and political Web sites and blogs. “They go on for me,” he said. “I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down...
How the Google generation thinks differently -... →
This year, researchers at University College London reported the results of a five-year study into the “Google Generation”. When they examined the behaviour of those logging on to the websites of journals, e-books and other sources of written information, they found widespread evidence of “skimming activity”. Users viewed no more than three pages before “bouncing out”.
Techdirt: PR Guy Says Bloggers Should Shut Up And... →
if we have any sort of de facto “public trust” with our readers, it’s to write about what we think they’ll find interesting — and they’ve made it clear they don’t care about press release “fake news.” And if we ridicule PR people — it’s not simply for sending us a press release. It’s for clearly not reading the site where we...
63% Of IT Depts Say Web 2.0 Will Impact Their... →
The most startling number to come out of this recent study - a survey of 260+ I.T. professionals - is that 63% are now expecting social technologies to impact the business world. Even more interesting is that they feel that the impact will be a positive one - only 3% of respondents viewed Web 2.0 negatively. However, that’s not to say they don’t have their concerns. They are wary of...
/Message: Twitter Spam: What Can We Do? →
Could we somehow take advantage of our network to help Twitter find and eliminate spammers even quicker?
Obama Voters Protest His Switch on Telecom... →
In recent days, more than 7,000 Obama supporters have organized on a social networking site on Mr. Obama’s own campaign Web site. They are calling on Mr. Obama to reverse his decision to endorse legislation supported by President Bush to expand the government’s domestic spying powers while also providing legal protection to the telecommunication companies that worked with the National Security...
Teens Buying Online but Spending Less - eMarketer →
young people prefer the “sensory stimulation that accompanies shopping with friends at stores,” preshopping online is training teens to be smart shoppers and to stretch their dollars.
Reality Check: Internet Poses No Threat To TV →
So says Nielsen, which reports that the average American watched 127 hours of TV in May, up from 121 hours last year. They also spent 26 hours spent on the Web that month, up from 24 hours a year ago.
Silicon Valley's biggest social networker - Los... →
“Reid has a belief that every person is his or her own brand,” said Cohler, the former LinkedIn and Facebook executive. “He means that in a good way, not a cheesy way. He believes that we are all our own organizations in the world today, and that the things that power and drive goodness in the world are relationships and trust.”
New Quicksilver builds | Hawk Wings →
Etienne Samson is now producing new alpha builds which he is posting on the Quicksilver Google Code page . The latest build is timestamped 25 June and another build is imminent.
Who Will Call Jesse Helms a Racist? →
“On the day his decision became known, the New York Times described him as ‘a conservative stalwart for nearly 30 years,’ the Boston Globe as ‘an unyielding icon of conservatives and an archenemy of liberals.’ The Washington Post identified Helms as ‘one of the most powerful conservatives on Capitol Hill for three decades.’ “Those were accurate...
Rights like free speech don't always extend online →
The governmental role that companies play online is taking on greater importance as their services — from online hangouts to virtual repositories of photos and video — become more central to public discourse around the world. It’s a fallout of the Internet’s market-driven growth, but possible remedies, including government regulation, can be worse than the symptoms.
Business & Technology | Google era reshaping... →
In the Internet marketplace, Varian notes, users can easily switch to another search engine by typing in another Web address, so there is no tight technology control, as there is with proprietary PC software. Similarly, Varian says, advertisers and publishers can switch fairly easily to rival ad networks. But economists and analysts point out Google does have network advantages that present...
Advertising - Networks Try New Ways to Keep People... →
This year, for the 2008-9 television season, the networks are betting on a panoply of pod-busters — unconventional content meant to entice viewers to pay attention during the commercial breaks, which are also called pods.
Web Form Design Patterns: Sign-Up Forms, Part 2 |... →
Let’s conclude with a brief overview of the findings presented above. Please keep in mind that we have considered only sign-up forms. * sign-up forms don’t have any hover, active or focus-effects (84%), * hints and help are either static (57%) or dynamic (33%) and appear below the input field (57%) or on the right side of the field (26%), * static validation is as popular as dynamic validation —...
The human factor in Social Media trends (part 2) «... →
Communities connected by location, interest, expertise, immersed into the physical world that surrounds them. We will see the same behavior there as we see now in the public, but the real value for the individual user will be obtained from these smaller communities. It will lead to less information and more knowledge. And this trend or effect will be driven by the most personal interaction device...