September 2009
links for 2009-09-29
Zipcar parks its iPhone app - finally | csmonitor.com I love the notion of opening the door of a Zipcar from my iPhone. (tags: Technology zipcar iphone3gs)
New New York?
New York City is poised for a tech revival — cdixon.org – chris dixon’s blog.
There is also a nice ecosystem developing in New York City. Union Square Ventures is one of the best VC’s in the country, with early stage investments in companies like Twitter and Etsy (that were followed on by top West Coast VCs at significant markups). Bessemer is an old firm that has a managed to stay ...
More Important Than Working Hard
[via Working hard is overrated by Catarina Fake]
Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and...
Orwellian Nonsense At The Washington Post:...
The Washington Post’s senior editor Milton Coleman has published ‘guidelines’ to the paper’s staff stating that they cannot — for all intents and purposes — have an independent public life via the Internet. Sadly, the thinking behind this memo is not limited in some way to the executive offices of the Washington Post, or even the management of old school...
links for 2009-09-27
Post Editor Ends Tweets as New Guidelines Are Issued The WaPo holds onto ‘journalistic impartiality’ and abandons Twitter:
“When using these networks, nothing we do must call into question the impartiality of our news judgment. We never abandon the guidelines that govern the separation of news from opinion, the importance of fact and objectivity, the appropriate use of...
Tyler Brûlé Bristles At Twitter
The globetrotting Tyler Brûlé recently put down his Dom Perignon long enough to write a piece in the Financial Times about his recent trip to Japan. As he was drinking with some Japanese friends the topic of Twitter came up, and one of the group asked Tyler, “What is Twitt-ah?” This led Tyler off on a series of observations and scolding which I think trumps the usual Sunday...
Typepad Begins To Surface New Sociality
Typepad has been involved in a resocialization of their blogging platform, slowly and steadily rewiring the DNA of that mature platform into a vastly more interesting social tool.
Within the Typepad platform, users can follow each other in the now widely adopted open follower model (a la Twitter and Tumblr). More importantly, they have now begun to surface that richer social experience on...
links for 2009-09-25
Stephen Baker - The Numerati “I don’t understand the folks on Twitter and elsewhere who argue that $1 billion for the company is outrageous. A BusinessWeek analysis reports that H&M’s brand alone is worth $15.3 billion, and that Google’s brand is worth $31.98 billion. Even if you agree with me that those numbers are near meaningless, can we say that...
My First Sidewiki Comment
The first Sidewiki comment that i know about on /Message was posted by Jeremiah Owyang, in response to Owyang Sees Email In Sidewiki Future. He responds to my comments on his own review of Sidewiki (see here, if you have Sidewiki installed).
I posted the comment link via Twitter, which is a builtin capability, and Jeremiah used the email sharing feature to ping me.
I still think that...
links for 2009-09-24
BookBlog Blog Archive Twitter’s retweet - digg vs. call & response - Adina Levin’s weblog. For conversation about books I’ve been reading, social software, and other stuff too. Adina Levin dissects Twitter’s planned implementation of RT, and finds it wanting: “Twitter’s implementation of Retweet as a feature is a deep example of a principle of social...
Owyang Sees Email In Sidewiki Future
Jeremiah Owyang stumbles around in the brush, trying to figure out what Google is up to now that they have release Sidewiki. Sidewiki is not a wiki, but does appear on the left hand side of various browsers, so the name is merely half-wrong. And perhaps the product is too.
Sidewiki is a page commenting tool, reminiscent of Third Voice and Me.dium. Oddly, you have to install the entire Google...
links for 2009-09-23
braindump: NOSQL debrief NoSQL group meeting, concept is gaining ground (tags: Technology nosql sql databases)
NetFlix Everywhere: Sorry Cable, You’re History Reed Hastings wants to unmake the TV era: “The set-top box has proven to be a closed and well-guarded fortress against a world of clouds and openness. The cable and satellite industries, and their partners in Hollywood,...
Bloggers Are The Garbage Of The Web
Will the vilification of bloggers by media barons never cease?
Robin Wauters reports that media mogul Van Thillo recently said the following at an event hosted by Belgian Marketing & Management Association:
[via Van Thillo: “Bloggers Are The Garbage Of The Web” - Robin Wauters]
We have to get back to the basics. Reporters are well paid and thus are expensive to us. News...
4 tags
Getting To The Bottom Of Social Business
There has been a large and varied response to my recent post on social business (see Social Business, Not Enterprise 2.0, and the longer piece at the Enterprise 2.0 blog, Social Business: Why The Enterprise 2.0 Moniker Is Wrong).
Some have said that the 2.0 version numbering approach is positive, because it suggests an obvious alignment with Web 2.0, Government 2.0, and a long list of other...
links for 2009-09-22
F.C.C. Proposes Net Neutrality Rules for Service Providers - NYTimes.com “The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission proposed regulations on Monday that would require Internet service providers to treat all Web content the same with regard to transmission speed. Skip to next paragraph
The regulations were welcomed by consumer advocacy groups but might be a blow for major ...
Yahoo Dumping Zimbra
When Yahoo bought Zimbra for $350M in 2007 I wrote that it was the result of badly managed innovation following the 2004 acquisition of Oddpost for $30M.
And now, Bartz is dumping Zimbra:
[via Yahoo to Sell Open-Source Email Service Zimbra | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD]
According to numerous sources, Yahoo has been shopping around Zimbra, the open-source email company it bought...
I Am Still Confused
Not the best pass at trying to describe a new social tool:
[via email]
Many of you are confused as to what lissn is. To explain, lets jump back about 15 years. ~~~ The Internet was people. AOL keywords were fun, but the majority of those online were chatting in rooms or 1 on 1. Good times! Then websites arrived and chat rooms became ghost towns and wastelands which spawned social networks...
Social Business, Not Enterprise 2.0
I wrote a piece at the Enterprise 2.0 blog spelling out why the Enterprise 2.0 handle may not be helping much, and that we might want to talk about ‘social business’ instead.
[from Social Business: Why The ‘Enterprise 2.0’ Moniker Is Wrong]
In a time when we are shifting to a new, flow-oriented paradigm on information sharing and network-based coordination and...
links for 2009-09-20
New Media Demands a New Kind of Media Company Joshua Auerbach implies that future media companies will be more like web software products: “How should new-media companies address these forces? Is there a way for these companies to get the benefits of belonging to a media conglomerate without falling into traps? If the conglomerate structure does not work in new media, what will? In...
All My Techcrunch50 Tweets
[reverse chronological: newest on top]
stoweboyd: #clixstr made a huge #FAIL by charging $2.99 at #tc50 for their iPhone app. Should have been free today at least.
stoweboyd: Did he say Clitster? #tc50
stoweboyd: I am cheating on the #TC50 finalist poll, voting more than once.
stoweboyd: I just cast a #vote for @Threadsy in the #TC50 Favorite TC50 Finalist poll at ...
21 tags
TechCrunch50: What Ever Happened To Awesome?
[I am returning to my old 3 threes review format for conferences, starting with this week’s TechCrunch50. This format involves a description of the three most interesting, challenging, or compelling companies, people, and ideas from the event.]
What ever happened to awesome?
Maybe it’s just me getting old and curdudgeonly, but I had hoped that I would see 10 or so really ...
links for 2009-09-18
S.E.C. Seeks to Ban Computerized ‘Flash Trading’ - NYTimes.com The SEC slows supercomputer takeover of stock trading by banning flash trading (tags: Business flashtrading)
Posterous Theming: It’s here, it’s live, and it’s time to make your site yours! - The Official Posterous Posterous Posterous adds templating, knocks off Tumblr templates in toto: tumblr...
The Moguls’ New Clothes - The Atlantic (October...
The Moguls’ New Clothes - The Atlantic (October 2009).
Although Sumner Redstone likes to claim that he coined the phrase Content is king, it was originally popularized in connection with a series of ill-considered and now widely repudiated media deals undertaken by large Japanese consumer-hardware makers. This undistinguished pedigree has not dissuaded most major moguls of the intervening...
Seen At TechCrunch50: A Better Business Card
One of the coolest business card innovations is Mark Piller’s, which includes an area for notes:
Mark Piller’s Business Card, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Wait… isn’t that what the back is for?
links for 2009-09-16
andrea saveri In Search of Flow: An Emerging Culture of Attention - amplifying for resilience Saveri reviews various recent discussions on our shifting attention landscape (tags: attention flOw andreasaveri)
Microsoft’s vision for a “next-gen newspaper” looks like TweetDeck Nieman Journalism Lab Microsoft carries Tweetdeck to its logical conclusion, and expands all...
TechCrunch 50: Digital Bedtime Stories Are Icky
I am all for kids using computers, and toys that are integrated with the web. However, there were a few systems displayed yesterday that irked me.
Story Something is digital storybook system that allows parents to create personalized versions of kids stories, substituting characters names, locations, and so on with those of kids, parents, hometowns, and so on. The CEO, Jim Rose, started his...
Supernova 2009: Flow Roundtable
I saw in an email from Kevin Werbach that Supernova will include a roundtable on flow:
The Flow Roundtable: From Pages to Real-Time Streams
Only one thing missing: me! Imagining a roundtable on one of the themes I have been advocating since mid 2007 — moving from the ‘web of pages’ to the ‘web of flow’ — without me participating, well, honestly, it makes...
A Good Email Pitch
I generally dislike email pitches, and I get a lot. In past years I have worked to steer people to sending me twitpitches, which limits them to 140 characters at least. And then if they sound interesting I can explore via Twitter, which is also lightweight contrasted with a demo or phone call.
But today I got a good pitch by email [my comments embedded in brackets]:
Dear Mr. Boyd,
[I am...
Is iTunes 9 A Social Tool?
I was in the air for the Apple announcements today, but looking at the various screenshots and commentary Apple has drastically reworked iTunes. But I had been wondering, in advance of this event, would Apple really transform iTunes into a truly social experience for media, something on a par with what Last.fm did years ago?
Jobs was back, and made a series of announcements —...
Self Regulation In Internet Advertising? Don't...
Just as Congress mulls regulating Internet advertising, ad companies argue for self-regulation.
[Congress weighs landmark change in Web ad privacy.]
ANA Executive Vice President Dan Jaffe said self regulation is the best approach for managing an industry evolving as quickly as online advertising.
“Legislation would be too rigid because this is a moving target,” Jaffe said.
...
Neither Utopia Or Dystopia
“Neither utopia nor dystopia, the Internet is the expression of ourselves—through a specific code of communication, which we must understand if we want to change our reality.”
Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy
Anger at Makers When Gadgets Go Missing -...
Anger at Makers When Gadgets Go Missing - NYTimes.com.
On Web sites devoted to the e-book reader, including Blog Kindle and Amazon’s own Kindle Community board, many customers have been in a snit over Amazon’s policy on stolen Kindles.
Samuel Borgese, for instance, is still irate about the response from Amazon when he recently lost his Kindle. After leaving it on a plane, he canceled his...
Flickr, Twitter, Pictures, and My Hat
My Hat, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
So this spells the end of /Slash, my photolog at Tumblr.
I have been trying all manner of new ways to fool with pictures over the past months. None of them has been very satisfactory:
I started posting photos to a Tumblr blog, but the UI isn’t as interesting as whene I am posting random weird stuff from the web. And unless the folks I...
The Associated Press: Congress weighs landmark...
The Associated Press: Congress weighs landmark change in Web ad privacy.
ANA Executive Vice President Dan Jaffe said self regulation is the best approach for managing an industry evolving as quickly as online advertising.
“Legislation would be too rigid because this is a moving target,” Jaffe said.
Mike Zaneis, IAB’s vice president of public policy, added that self...
links for 2009-09-08
TG Daily - Twitter makes you dumb, says psychologist Reads like this researcher, Tracy Alloway, thinks Twitter is just the stream of Tweets, and not a stream of links that open up to the web. It’s who you follow that matters, as well as the basic nature of flow, which is about connection not efficiency. (tags: Science twitter workingmemory psychology)
Jacob Nielsen Makes The Case For Microsyntax
Twitter Postings: Iterative Design (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).
Text is a UI
It’s a common mistake to think that only full-fledged graphical user interfaces count as interaction design and deserve usability attention.
Categories and Tags: Can They Play Nice?
In a recent housecleaning frenzy I have restructured the categories here at /Message based on a structural distinction with regard to tags. I am using categories — as supported by Typepad — as an indicator of the type of the post, and not a meta tag. What I means is that I am not basing the category selection based on what I am writing about, but the sort of writing involved.
For...
Stowe Boyd, In One Paragraph
by Brian Solis I am known internationally as an authority on social tools and their impact on media, business, and society. I work as an analyst, advisor, futurist, and researcher, and I am principally known these days for my writing at /Message, this blog. I’ve spoken widely on the social revolution on the Web at venues such as Web 2.0. Enterprise 2.0, Next, mesh, Reboot, 140...
What is /Message?
/Message has gone through a lot of changes over the years. At the present time and looking forward into the future, this blog is my principal location for sharing my ongoing open research agenda.
By open research I am not claiming to be a classical academic or analytic researcher (see About Stowe Boyd). On the contrary. But I am pursuing (or advocating) what I have been calling the social...
links for 2009-09-07
People who RWW readers follow on Twitter 24 of the several hundred in Winer’s test set who follow RWW also follow me (tags: Technology twitter)
How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? - NYTimes.com “the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.” Krugman (tags: PaulKrugman)
Google ...
Research
I am not a researcher, in the classical, academic sense, nor in the way that marketing firms cast their surveys and focus groups.
But I do undertake projects where I pursue a line of inquiry, such as cross industry competitive analysis of bookmarking solutions, or interviewing 25 leading designers about user experience in social technology.
Most of my ‘research’ in carried out...
Advice
Over the past ten years, I have worked closely with a long list of social tools start-ups, including Bit.ly, Imeem, Freshbooks, MOG, TravelPod TravelPod, TuneIn, SixGroups, Bview, The School Of Everything, My6Sense, b5 media, JS-Kit, and many others. I also work, occassionally, with large companies that are trying to develop social technologies, like AOL, The Open University, and others.
An ...
links for 2009-09-05
Open the Future: Social Transition Stress Disorder Jamais Cascio updates Future Shock, and suggests Social Transition Stress Disorder is here, now. (tags: Health stsd jamaiscascio)
links for 2009-09-04
Amazon Offers Redelivery or $30 to People Who Lost ‘1984 32 - Digits - WSJ As predicted, Amazon is going to offer a settlement to the users whose 1984 copies were dekindled
UK Poll Shows Google Is A Stake In Microsoft's...
A recent poll of 1400 SMB users of Microsoft products in the UK by Accredited Supplier shows that Google is encroaching into Microsoft’s rice bowl very very quickly.
Key 13% Switching 29% Not aware of Google Apps 22% Undecided 36% Not switching
First of all, as shown above, 13% are planning to migrate to Google apps in the next 18 months. Note that nearly 30% had never heard of...
Sony Electronics News and Information
Sony recently announced a new, larger Sony Reader, a competitor to the Kindle. It includes a mobile modem so that users will be able to wirelessly download books.
[from the press release]
The Reader Daily Edition gives consumers wireless access via AT&T’s 3G mobile broadband network to Sony’s eBook store from just about anywhere in the U.S. Book lovers will be able to browse,...
Diderot on Information Overload
Denis Diderot, “Encyclopédie” (1755)
As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to...
links for 2009-09-03
Nokia dumps location-based service Friend View, falls in love with Facebook | last100 Steve O’Hear thinks Nokia has fallen in love with FriendFeed (tags: nokia ovi friendfeed)
The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine Flip redefines ‘better’ based on sharing, not how big the sensor is (tags: Business goodenough)
Nokia Gets Social With Two New...
Testimonials
.@stoweboyd - Stowe, I’ve said it many times, and I’ll keep saying it: your role in the universe is coining awesome words and powering them
Chris Brogan, via Twitter
Nokia 'Completes' Friend View
Nokia has gone gaga for Facebook, shutting down on of their own social networking ‘experiments’, with the amusingly coy phraseology of ‘completing’ the project.
Nokia seems to be operating around the assumption that Facebook is the center of the social networking world, since it has so far opted to ignore Twitter, MySpace, and Bebo.
