July 2009
Steve Rubel Makes A Break
Looks like I was one of those that influenced Steve Rubel to rethink his blogging: he decided to move to ‘lifestreaming’ on Posterous and drop his traditional longer format blogging:
The Steve Rubel Lifestream - It’s Official: I am Moving from Blogging to Lifestreaming.
Posterous continuous to get insanely useful. They just added auto-posting today to YouTube and...
June 2009
The New Typepad
TypePad - Ginevra’s Profile, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Gladwell And Anderson Talking Past Each Other
Malcolm Gladwell reviewed Chris Anderson’s Free and attempted to dislocate some of the more vaporous claims Anderson makes about an economy based on abundance, not scarcity. For example, Gladwell notes that the true driver of energy costs is the infrastructure and plant, not just the resources being burned up:
Anderson wants to take “too cheap to meter” seriously, because he believes...
China Shuts Down Virtual Economy
China Bans Gold Farming — InformationWeek.
Trading virtual goods for real money has been banned in China, putting hundreds of millions of dollars in economic activity at risk.
Housecleaning and Facelift
I have made peace with /message being hosted on Typepad. It is just impossible to imagine moving it. If anything, I may at some time start a new blog, but in the meantime, this is what I have arrived at:
All the current blogging platforms lack the features I would like to have, unless I go down to the bare metal and build my own social foundation. And of course, if I did that, no one else...
Games, Flow, and Happiness
Virtual Goods, Real Pleasure, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Came across this great diagram in a presentation from Ami Jo Kim on the economics in online games.
The implied two-by-two matrix defines so much of what happiness means in life: when the challenges we face are high enough to match our skills (and vice versa) we are in a state of flow. Otherwise, we are anxious, apathetic, or...
Twitter, an Evolving Architecture
Evan Weaver, lead engineer in the services team at Twitter, recently gave a talk on Twitter’s architecture at QCon London 2009. Abel Avram has a good writeup of the presentation, if you are given to deep strategies about performance (see InfoQ: Twitter, an Evolving Architecture).
The upshot is that Twitter has been converting the architecture away from microblogging architecture...
What? No Links?
Today’s Paper - New York Times, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Do other readers of the NY Times have this happen, too? I seem to not get the links to various sections of the Times. Here, business, week in review, and editorials are all lacking links to the various stories. WTF?
Posner Wants To Ban Links To Save Newspapers
After a few paragraphs that recapitulate the downfall of newspapers (without ever mentioning that their downfall has come from their own inept policies), Judge Richard Posner suggests that linking to copyrighted material without express permission might be the only way to protect those that own the copyrights:
[via The Becker-Posner Blog: The Future of Newspapers—Posner]
Expanding ...
Layar: First Augmented Reality Browser?
[via BMD Love Blog.]
Android only.
Gary Hamel on Managing Generation Y
Gary Hamel sums up a 12 point list of characteristics of the ethos of web culture, basically stating management better wise up.
Gary Hamel on Managing Generation Y - the Facebook Generation - Gary Hamel’s Management 2.0 - WSJ
With that in mind, I compiled a list of 12 work-relevant characteristics of online life. These are the post-bureaucratic realities that tomorrow’s employees will use...
Open Enterprise 2009 Study - Midyear Findings
We have posted the midyear findings of the Open Enterprise 2009 Study.
In the Fall of 2008, I became disenchanted with the sorts of information I could find about actual adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and techniques with the enterprise. Either I was drowned in mind-numbing marketspeak produced by vendors in ‘white papers’ and case studies, or else I was confused by analytic papers from...
More Etiquette Lessons
[At Meetings, It’s Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners - NYTimes.com by Alex Williams]
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Yet another piece wagging it’s finger at all the people remaining connected during business meetings: the war on flow.
Strangely this one doesn’t mention Twitter as a contaminant, just email and Blackberries.
Some Stats On Retweeting
danah boyd and some colleagues at Microsoft Research have posted a draft paper on her blog (see apophenia: Understanding retweeting on Twitter). Leaving aside some of their more weighty comments, I thought I would post some pf the stats on retweets they collected from at 720K+ sample of public tweets:
22% of tweets include a URL (‘http:’)
36% of tweets mention a user in the form ‘@user’;...
Fewer Movie Critics
[via Ideas and Trends - Hollywood’s Blurb Search Reaches the Blogosphere - NYTimes.com]
‘But there are fewer and fewer print and television movie critics around. At least 55 movie reviewers have been laid off or re-assigned from newspapers around the country since January 2006, according to a running tally on the Web site of The Salt Lake Tribune.’
Have you missed them? Not...
3 tags
A Useful Bit Of Microsyntax: RE
The new release of Tweedeck was released yesterday, and Iain Dodsworth and crew implemented (along with a long list of other new features and improvements) a small bit of microsyntax that he and I discussed a month or so ago: RE.
RE is based on the everyday notion of a RE — ‘in reference to’, or ‘with regard to’ — that business folks have used for decades in...
3 tags
A Useful Bit Of Microsyntax: RE
The new release of Tweetdeck was released yesterday, and Iain Dodsworth and crew implemented (along with a long list of other new features and improvements) a small bit of microsyntax that he and I discussed a month or so ago: RE.
RE is based on the everyday notion of a RE — ‘in reference to’, or ‘with regard to’ — that business folks have used for decades...
Amplify Listens, Adds Bit.ly Support
Amplify: A New Take On Linkblogging, er, Clipblogging.
Amplify: A New Take On Linkblogging, er, Clipblogging
Amplify: A New Take On Linkblogging, er,...
I have tried various ways to record links (bookmarks, etc.) and have them displayed on my blogs.
I used Delicious for a long while, but it seemed too disconnected from blogging. A few months ago, I started to use Tumblr and created messagelinks.tumblr.com and groundlinks.tumblr.com. However, they aren’t really like other tumblr blogs, because their content is almost exclusively links,...
5 tags
How Will Twitter Be Governed?
A recent post by Marshall Kirkpatrick, How Twitter’s Staff Uses Twitter (And Why It Could Cause Problems), makes some interesting observations and raises questions about the direction of Twitter based on the way Twitter staff use it:
We’ve examined the posting and following habits of people on the company’s staff and found that Twitter team members don’t follow very many...
Newspapers Are Committing Suicide With The...
[via Xark!: The newspaper suicide pact by Dan Conover]
‘What will these media executives do when that reality hits them? When these debt-burdened chains, stripped of journalistic talent by a decade of profiteering, their web traffic reduced by 60 percent by their paid-content follies, their pockets emptied by the cost of the proprietary paywall systems offered by Journalism Online...
Life On Open Social Media
[from BRANDTRUEBOY | Generation FLoW(er)!]
Life on open social media platforms flows continuously without beginning or end. There are no season finales, sequels or prequels. The streams are in a constant state of flux. They consist of users who are both helping to define it and being defined by it as they oscillate in and out of the various streams of which they are members. There is a...
Heil and Piskorski Twitter Research: Raises New...
In a recent post at Conversation Starter, Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski cite recent research that they conducted analyzing the Twittosphere:
[from New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets - Conversation Starter - HarvardBusiness.org]
Twitter’s usage patterns are also very different from a typical on-line social network. A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely....
Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad: Elite 8, er, 9 Announced
Janetti Chon has announced that we have 9 contestants in the next round of the Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad. We have 9 due to a tie.
1. CumulusIQ - The on-demand knowledge marketplace 2. Bantam Networks - Networked collaboration meets social CRM 3. SocialWok - Facebook + Twitter for business 4. Brainpark - Where information comes alive 5. YouCalc - Custom analytics on demand 6. BillFlo - Machine...
