January 2009
Ginx: Twitterizing The Web
I glanced at Michael Parekh’s blog and noticed he was now streaming his tweets there in a sidebar, like many others. A tweet caught my eye, something about $AAPL, using the Apple ticker. I clicked the shortened URL in the wteet, from a new service I hadn’t heard of: Ginx. Here’s what came up:
Ginx, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Looks like Ginx resolves the shortened ...
TwitterSheep
Courtesy of TwitterSheep, a tag cloud built up from the aggregated bios of all my 6200+ followers on Twitter:
TwitterSheep, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Ma.gnolia Data Corruption: How And What To Back...
Larry Halff at Ma.gnolia had to make a terribly difficult announcement about data corruption and loss at social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia.
Ma.gnolia, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Leaving aside the specifics, the general issue raised is really important in the Web world we live in: what recourses are there for backing up your data when you use these services?
I use Tumblr for...
Gmail Offline, Flaky Mode, Outbox
I am trying the new Gmail offline capability, and I got a kick from the ‘flaky mode’ term:
Gmail Offline, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
What isn’t so cute is that the Remember The Milk plugin for gmail seems to have stopped working when I turned on Offline. Hmmm.
Update 12:24pm: RTM seems to work fine.
Update 12:30pm: So the only visible changes are the inclusion...
URL Shorteners: Please Resolve
guest post by Adam Hertz
Twitter’s 140 character limit, and the resulting need for URL shorteners, have created a niche opportunity that many companies have sought to exploit. It makes sense for the URL shorteners: By positioning themselves at this (temporarily) crucial bottleneck, they hope to provide various services to publishers: analytics, link counting, ad-serving, and so on.
...
Staction: Another Run At Workstreaming
I got pinged by the folks at Paste Interactive that they were launching a new app called Staction. The email was written in a way that would suggest that I had been part of the beta, but this was the first look I had gotten.
Staction is a work-oriented streaming application, like Present.ly or Yammer. However, it’s market orientation seems more in line with applications like Basecamp...
Venture Capitalists Running Scared, And Who Can...
Recent research confirms what those of us close to the tech industry know anecdotally: the VCs are running scared.
[from Maybe We Should Call Them Venture Pessimists - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com]
Venture capitalists need a healthy dose of optimism to do their jobs — betting millions of dollars on young ideas and hoping they turn in to the next big thing. These days, though, that optimism is...
Oliver Marks And I Discuss Open Enterprise 2009
Over at the Open Enterprise 2009 blog Oliver Marks and I discuss the project in a short video.
In essence, I layout our aspirations, which are to discover what enterprises are learning about Web 2.0 technologies and the practices to apply them productively. Oliver points out we hope to distill what we hear into actionable guidance for the community. And we both talk about the crowdsourcing...
Should Yahoo Buy NY Times?
Eric Savitz relates that Gene Munster of Piper Jaffrey is suggesting that Yahoo move onto the course of action that I suggested for Google: namely, buying the NY Times and Twitter.
[from Should Yahoo Buy The New York Times?]
In a research note late last week, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster provided some eye-opening suggestions for what Yahoo ought to do next in a piece titled “An Open...
Rachel Weidinger on Tipjoy: Do Micro Donors Still...
Rachel is peeved because the controls for privacy for the Tipjoy micro-donation system are not fractured across the app and Twitter posts, meaning that it is hard for users to control what is public and what is private:
[from /Ground: On Tipjoy: Do Micro Donors Still Have Rights?]
Do you want a record of all the donations you’ve made to show up in search results for your name? Do...
Jeff Jarvis Channels David Weinberger
I wish I had heard David’s talk, although going to Germany for DLD might have been a bit much. His talk was Knowledge In The Age Of Abundance, summarized by Jeff Jarvis:
[via Weinberger’s Wisdom]
[…] knowledge, as we’ve traditionally known or referred to it, is singlar, binary, simple, scarce, and settled. Those properties of knowledge, he says, are, not by accident, are...
Louis Gray Is Wrong About Twitter Funding
Louis Gray is wrong in so many ways in his response to the news that Twitter is being valued at $250M in a new venture round:
Quite simply, now is a very difficult time to attain a high valuation. Venture funding is dropping dramatically, and positive exits for companies are rare. Practically nobody is talking about going public, so to make money, you would have to do it the old fashioned...
What Can We Learn About Social Networks From...
[originally published in Centrality, 15 April 2005]
Recent network research into traffic patterns and flow may shed light on the “flow” in social networks:
[from NewScientist.com by Kate Ravilious]
Traffic should flow best in cities when only a limited number of roads lead to the centre. This counter-intuitive finding could allow planners to prevent gridlock by closing roads...
Nick Carr and Steven Levy on Private, Public, And...
Gabriel García Márquez once wrote “Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.”
Recently, the juxtaposition between different social spaces seems to be grating on the nerves of a few prominent members of the commentariat, when what was private becomes public, or what might have been secret is revealed.
Nick Carr thinks social sharing is creepy:
...
Open Enterprise 2009: Research Study and Report
I am glad to announce that Oliver Marks and I are collaborating on what we hope will be the definitive study into both the state of the practice and the future trends for Web 2.0 adoption in the enterprise: we call this project Open Enterprise 2009: Research Study and Report.
Over the next six months, Oliver and I will be poking and prodding to find out what companies are actually doing,...
TypePad's Big Improvements To User Experience: Ha!
After a much touted, long awaited upgrade of the user experience at Typepad, I have to state that I am underwhelmed.
As just one tiny example of absolute UI stupidity that refuses to die, consider the date interface below.
TypePad - Edit Post, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Imagine for one minute that you’d like to date a post, say 16 December 2006. This interface does not allow...
Advertising and The News
Jeff Jarvis, a man I respect greatly, does not actually advance the discussion about the options for print journalism in his The lie of print advertising (followed by good news).
I think the problem lurking below the words in his post is that is he is set on the continuation of the current organizations that provide the ‘news’ to us, today. For example, in his section on...
Taking Ads Off /Message
The other day I decided to drop advertising here at /Message.
First of all, it never amounted to very much money.
Second, it was ugly to see a server or a car being hawked on the upper right hand corner of /Message, so that I could get 16¢ if you clicked on it.
Third, its an old, old model.
I am hoping that someday I can move to a model like Techmeme, and allow a select group of companies...
Why (The King Of Love) Is Dead - Nina Simone
Once upon this planet Earth, Lived a man of humble birth, Preaching love and freedom For his fellow man.
He was dreaming of the day Peace would come to Earth to stay, And he spread this message All across the land.
“Turn the other cheek,” he’d plead. “Love thy neighbor,” was his creed. Pain, humiliation, death he did not dread. With his bible at his side, From...
Dance
Saachi & Saachi appropriate the idea of flash mobbing for a feel good TMobile ad.
[via t-mobile: dance. « shape+colour]
Ethan Zuckerman on Bads News For News
Ethan Zuckerman makes a strong case that traditional journalism — newspaper news — has been propped up by irrationally high prices for advertising simply because there was not a/ a reliable way to measure its results or b/ viable alternatives. The advent of online advertising may spell the end of news as we know it:
[from …My heart’s in Accra » Is ad-supported journalism...
Jyri Engestrom on Jaiku's Future
In the barrage of announcements made earlier this week by Google, where they apparently were jettisoning a long list of questionable products or at least gulagging them, several members of the commentariat went a bit overboard and said that Jaiky was being deadpooled. In fact, it is being converted into an open source project (see Google Shake Up: Jaiku Sidelined, Moving On Twitter?).
Jyri...
New Tumblr UX In V5
I have been using Tumblr more all the time — I recently switched to posting my ‘bookmarks’ for /Message and /Ground to tumblr blogs called /Messagelinks and /Groundlinks instead of using Delicious — so I appreciate the UI tweaks on the dashboard in the new v5.
New Tumblr UX, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
The ride sidebar allows quick switching between posts...
How To Type ♺ On Mac, And The Reasons Why Not
There are a lot of arguments against using the ‘♺’ recycle symbol for retweet:
It is a unicode multibyte character, which means it is not well supported in old, old architectures like Windows XP, cell phones, and other cob-webby places.
It is not shorter that ‘RT’, but longer, so it uses more characters than it appears to.
It is hard to type.
I can’t do much...
Power Twitter Supports Google Maps
I got a tweet this morning from Narendra Rocherolle (@narendra) of 83º about a new map rendering feature in Power Twitter, the new client they’ve built for Twitter. They have introduced a map rendering capability:
Power Twitter Supports Google Maps, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
The problem is that you have to shorten the URL first, before posting it into Twitter or Power...
Identi.ca Wants To Become Jabber, Inc.?
I guess the VCs at Montreal Start Up hadn’t foreseen that Google was about to make Jaiku an open source project before deciding to fund Indenti.ca to do the same thing.
In all fairness, the Identi.ca play seems more like following in the footsteps of Jabber, inc, who supported the Jabber/XMPP standard for years, playing nice with the open source weenies, but making a ruggedized, ...
Google Shake Up: Jaiku Sidelined, Moving On...
Looks like Google orchestrated a major product line shakeup, and announced on a newsday when everyone might be looking the other way, with Carol Bartz taking the helm at Yahoo and Steve Jobs taking an ‘extended leave of absence’ at Apple.
Most interesting to me are the deadpooling of Dodgeball (I guess we all expected that after the founders quit and spit on Google as they walked...
New Twitter Code For Retweet: ♺
I saw this go by tonight, from my pal @quepol (Hillary Hartley):
[via twitter]
♺ @jcroft : You can sign up for 97 Bottles w/o an invite if you use an OpenID. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. I t’s OpenID evangelism!
The cool thing in this tweet — I really don’t know the context of the conversation — it the use of a new code, namely the recycle...
Micropayments To Save News Industry? Nope.
David Sarno wonders if micropayments could help save news reporting: what if you had to pay a penny to read the full blow-by-blow about last night’s game, or the editorial on Obama’s newest?
[from Micropayments: A rainbow for journalism…or a Hail Mary?]
Clay Shirky is a digital media consultant in New York who’s pointed to a number of faults with a pay-as-you-go system,...
Peter Kim's Hand Jive: To Infinity, And Beyond!
Peter Kim seems to be making a call for transformation of social media, but he’s not, really: it’s hand jive, designed to draw your attention away from what he’s really doing. It’s a foil to (re)announce the launching of yet another consulting business, using a Buzz Lightyear sort of rhetorical style that makes my teeth itch.
Let me dissect his ‘essay’:
...
Bartz To Head Yahoo
Carol Bartz, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Kara Swisher says that Carol Bartz has been offered and will accept the CEO spot at Yahoo.
[from Bartz to Be Yahoo CEO: Now What Next? | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD]
One thing is sure: Bartz does [k]now tech, unlike former CEO Terry Semel. And she also know how to run a company like clockwork, unlike outgoing CEO Jerry Yang,...
Dunbar's number - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Link: Dunbar’s number - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person
links for 2009-01-12
A User’s Guide to 21st Century Economics - Umair Haque New rules for the new economy from Haque. (tags: umair+haque econolypse)
Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles - O’Reilly Radar Tim O’Reilly is writing a prologemena to finding purpose in the world of tech work. Fascinating. (tags: tim+oreilly work)
What is it About TweetDeck, Web 2.0's Bloomberg...
A typical Sunday, reading the NY Times online, scanning Twitter, drinking coffee, and listening to TV On The Radio.
I glanced at my @replies, and realized how much my twittering has changed recently.
Twitter / Home, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Every reply here was a retweet of something I had flowed along to others, either things that I had seen in Twitter that were interesting...
Ambient Antipathy
tombiro the more i poke fun at a particular political hashtag, the more people of that political persuasion follow me on Twitter.
jayrosen_nyu @tombiro That’s called “ambient antipathy.”
links for 2009-01-10
Networked link journalism: A revolution quietly begins in Washington state - Publishing 2.0 Scott Karp digs into emergent or networked journalism in the recent weather disasters in Washington state: “easy, popular, and cheap”. (tags: scott+karp emergent+journalism)
End Times - Michael Hirschorn Hirschorn dissects the challenges for the NY Times, and suggest we plan for its ...
Twitter Under The Microscope: Huberman, Romero and...
An investigation into the behavior of Twitter users leads to a major conclusion: the apparent, superficial social network based on following and followers conceals a deeper, sparser social network, where relationship really matters.
[from Social Networks That Matter: Twitter Under The Microscope by Bernardo Huberman, Daniel Romero, and Fang Wu]
Many people, including scholars, advertisers...
Adding Bit.ly Info To Every Post
Jon Steinberg tipped me off to a post at the Bit.ly blog, showing how to add Bit.ly info to every post:
[from How to Add a bit.ly Info Chicklet to Each of Your Tumblr Posts by Kortina]
Here’s a cool little javascript any Tumblr users can add to their blogs that adds a bit.ly Info Chicklet to each post. Add the following line to your Tumblr Custom HTML inside the {BlockPosts} section:
...
links for 2009-01-09
Seth’s Blog: What to do when the new thing doesn’t work “When the new stuff doesn’t work, do the new stuff more and better.” Don’t waste time using old media tricks to be successful in new media. (tags: seth+godin new+media)
A Short Twitter Exchange on Knowledge Management
[via Twitter]
@ckreutz to @elsua: do you know why there is no KM section on alltop.com?
@stoweboyd to @ckreutz: Because ‘knowledge management’ is an oxymoron
@ckreutz to @stoweboyd: yes true. :-) But how the heck do we call this thing humans do since they are on the earth. Talk and learn? #knowledge management
from @stoweboyd to @ckreutz: When people talk about knowledge...
Jeremiah Owyang Leveraging The Twittosphere
Jeremiah has an early January sort of post, exhorting us to reflect on our “career mission” as a focusing exercise. I don’t want to dig into that, honestly, although I think it’s sensible for any of us to contemplate what we are up to, and not just at the start of a new year.
What I found most interesting was Jeremiah’s inclusion of a pre-shrunk URL linking to...
Clay Shirky's on Media in 2009
The great misfortune of newspapers in this era is that they were such a good idea for such a long time that people felt the newspaper business model was part of a deep truth about the world, rather than just the way things happened to be.
The 500-year-old accident of economics occasioned by the printing press - high upfront cost and filtering happening at the source of publication - is...
Fred Wilson on MySpace
Every attempt everyone has ever made to try to dictate what a person’s Internet experience will be has ended up coming up empty.
Fred Wilson
[via NY Times]
links for 2009-01-06
For Sale at the New York Times: The Front Page | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD NYTimes sells ad space on the front page for the first time ever. (tags: nytimes death+of+newspapers)
Link By Link - All a-Twitter About Stars Who Tweet - NYTimes.com celebrities twittering. (tags: twitter)
Motorola Media Center
Link: Motorola Media Center.
MOTO W233 Renew delivers the quality you expect from a Motorola device while empowering you to reduce your carbon footprint. Not only is the plastic housing of Renew made from plastics comprised of recycled water bottles and 100 percent recyclable, but it is also the world’s first carbon neutral phone. Through an alliance with Carbonfund.org, Motorola offsets ...
CoTweet And CoTags
So, I guess it was bound to happen. Companies and other groups of Twitter users can share single accounts, but how do you manage corporate Twittering in the large?
Jesse Engle at Launchability has introduced the concept of CoTweeting and an eponymous tool to help corporate social media folks do it.
I am not sure exactly where I stand on brand twittering, but if people are going to do it it...
I Feel Good Now That I've Donated ....
We suffer from a collective delusion, in Western society, and it comes to the fore this time of year, like clockwork, as we make New Year’s resolutions. That delusion is that what we choose to do, how we live our lives, act, eat, and dream —- who we are, essentially — is in our own control. That through will power and hard striving we can change our ways, largely...
links for 2009-01-05
MAKE: Blog: Washing machine sends messages to Twitter when the clothes are done… The future of appliances (and all electronic devices): posting their state changes to the web. That’s Sterling’s spime meme, again. (tags: twitter spime)
More on social media and socialism
Peter Kim gets into a muddle when he suggests that social media does not imply socialism, and then conflates socialism with plagiarism:
[from Being Peter Kim: Social media isn’t socialism]
If you’ve started blogging, photosharing, or tweeting to any extent, then you’ve witnessed firsthand the “social” nature of social media. Individuals post opinions and...
Why I Am On Twitter (for Jay Rosen)
Twitter is the most spontaneous, sprawling, and talky social tool that I use: it amplifies everything else I do online and makes me smarter.
