January 2009
43 posts
1 tag
Watchuserfly is a new start up looking to help bloggers and companies understand their site visitors’ behavior much better. I love it. They record a persons’ actions on a site then allow it to be played back as a video.
Typically I do this through in-person sessions, but this has application at a much grander scale (even though this could also augment more traditional 1on1 interviews as...
2 tags
“Animal researchers believe that play serves as a kind of training for the...”
– Scientific American
2 tags
Privacy has changed
No longer is it easy to be a hermit, not talk to anyone, or live a recluse life. And I suspect it will only get harder to do so in the future. Why? Because of the way the Internet transforms our social lives.
Services like facebook, Twitter, and many others make our lives so much more transparent because we are beckoned to share the little moments of our lives. These moments are at once inane,...
1 tag
1 tag
“Once you stop having to pay for movies individually, once you’re able to freely...”
– Pogue, NYT.
2 tags
“It’s a bitter duality: We scowl at those who decide to chuck it all and...”
– Mark Morford, SF Gate
Link: Silicon Valley’s Fork in the Road →
An article from Newsweek, poses the question, “Could Silicon Valley become another Detroit?”
Who knows, but the simple fact that folks in Silicon Valley are raising the question sets this area distinctly apart from Detroit.
1 tag
“The survey of ten-year-old children found no evidence to support claims in...”
– Times Online
Next we’ll learn that the Wii Fit actually won’t help us substantially lose weight. And we’ll all be devastated.
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-1-25) →
Feist (5)
Moonbabies (5)
Bob Dylan (4)
John Mayer (4)
Corinne Bailey Rae (4)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
Wine vs. beer tweets
I’m surprised they are so close as I figured beer would get many more tweets. Perhaps wine is just talked about more than beer as its seen as a bit more special?
1 tag
“Three things have happened, in a blink of history’s eye: (1) a single...”
– Nicholas Carr
2 tags
Link: "Crap" iPhone App making $200/hr →
His second quote, where he gives a tip for making a popular app, makes me sad:
“work out that most of the people that download free apps are immature and seriously uncool. Then wrap an average idea that you think will appeal to immature and uncool people with some average graphics, and boom, top 10 app”
To me, this kind of app is more akin to buying something from a vending...
2 tags
blogging = thinking out loud
I was contemplating why I blog and among the obvious reasons, like to communicate or to express myself, my main reason for blogging is to think out loud.
I then wondered how many other bloggers are like me and use their blog as a platform to think out loud. Well, apparently a lot; see the google search below.
Given “thinking out loud” is a common reason for blogging, how could...
1 tag
“Cuts in air pollution in US cities over recent decades have added an average of...”
– BBC News.
For all the hype, we only get an average of five months?
1 tag
“If you want to build a great consumer internet company you have to be willing to...”
– David King, former Google manager - quoted in FT.com
2 tags
Live Streaming Obama Inauguration
There are two sites that I know of that are live streaming the Obama Inauguration: Hulu.com and C-SPAN.org. Naturally, I’ve been trying them both, but with limited success, at least as far as C-SPAN is concerned.
I guess it makes sense that the site with a commercial interest would have a much better experience, but I wish C-SPAN would have made their coverage more accessible. Also, it...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-1-18) →
Feist (29)
John Lennon (16)
Thievery Corporation (16)
The Smashing Pumpkins (9)
Forest Fire (9)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
1 tag
“Some 61% of those interviewed in the UK and US said setting up a new handset is...”
– Via BBC. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that mobile phone manufacturers might need to focus more time and energy on making their devices easier to use, rather than locking its customers into inane contracts.
1 tag
1 tag
“Most people my age would like to just pay for the channels they want, but cable...”
– NYT article on Boxee.
The good news for Boxee is that no one is in love with their cable company. It’s always good to have an unattractive competitor.
1 tag
1 tag
twitter as idea exchange
My favorite part of work is ideation - the process of collaboration that leads to new ideas. It’s the most fun, dynamic, and exciting work I do.
Given that I love ideation, I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few years about how to facilitate ideation in more areas of my life. In fact, I’d love to start a web-based solution to foster idea generation among people. And I...
1 tag
Paradox of the Web: Fragmentation & Aggregation
I was recently reading an article on Read Write Web about a proposed social media dashboard that will “let users integrate all their social networks from around the web into one central dashboard. He calls it the DiSO Dashboard.”
Regardless of what you think of this idea, it got me thinking about the paradox of the Internet: it facilitates fragmentation which in turn creates demand...
2 tags
“The Times Online suggests what might happen when technology fuels in-depth...”
– NY Mag - The New Journalism: Goosing the Gray Lady
1 tag
WatchRandom thoughts after viewing this video depiction of the history of the Internet…
‘Life enhanced’ should be the tagline for the Internet because it doesn’t actually add anything new to our lives. We were already:
communicating
enjoying media
researching various topics
sharing
donating
shopping
etc.
But, it does enhance (arguably) our ability to do each of these tasks (or at least...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-1-11) →
Balla Et Ses Balladins (33)
Wilco (15)
Moonbabies (13)
Forest Fire (13)
Andrew Bird (11)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
“Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the...”
– Time Online
1 tag
Nine Inch Nails understands how to use the...
I wrote recently that the Internet is a haven for fans because it allows such unique and exclusive two-way access for fans to interact with the sources of their fandom.
NIN gets it.
Recently they allowed fans to download the first 9 songs of their latest album free
Their website links to all the major social listening sites for ease of following
They offer a “remix” section asking...
1 tag
Getting things done as a means to exploration
Why do we make lists, grind away at our desks and generally try to get things done? For most, including me, it’s so that we can go home, which is a great reason.
But I want to offer up another reason (even though I’m a huge fan and advocate of going home):
Get things done so that you can explore:
New ideas
New companies
New relationships
New projects
I think exploration should...
1 tag
“Folks, it’s not the ideas; it’s design, implementation, and...”
– Comment on ask.slashdot quoting from The Zen of Graphics Programming”, Michael Abrash.
My take: ideas are meant to be built (or built upon) not sold.
1 tag
David Pogue: Many Ways to Plug In to Tech Savings →
Pogue’s take on technology that will save you money in 2009.
1 tag
Quality vs. Quantity: I want both!
With the avalanche of information coming at us from twitter and facebook updates, RSS reader news items, emails, phone calls, text messages, etc. many people have one of a few reactions:
I can’t keep up but I try and thus I’m overwhelmed
I can’t keep up and I don’t try thus I ignore most of the information
I can’t keep up, so I limit the # of blogs / people I...
1 tag
Best Places to Work (2009) via Glassdoor.com →
The Top 50 were selected from more than 11,000 companies reviewed by the nearly 75,000 employees who completed a 20-question survey on Glassoor.com in 2008.
Preview of top 5: 1. General Mills, 2. Bain & Company, 3. Netflix, 4. Adobe, 5. Northwestern Mutual. Click on the headline for the full results.
2 tags
“Internet users viewed 12.7 billion online videos during the month, representing...”
– comScore press release
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-1-4) →
Wilco (15)
Bob Marley (12)
Crooked Still (11)
Grateful Dead (9)
Dire Straits (9)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
3 tags
2 tags
Ad Agencies Fashion Their Own Horn, and Toot It →
This article in the NYT (click on the title of this post to read the full article) details Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s latest attempt at redefining what an ad agency is / does to make money. Instead of merely creating ads for clients, agencies are now creating products and services themselves. In the case of BBH, it’s a blog, called Mrs.O, that chronicles Michelle Obama’s fashion...
2 tags
“We spend so much time smoothing things out, we lose the opportunity for change,...”
– Seth’s Blog
3 tags
The curious nature of an insight
In order to do my job well I need to ask interesting questions of people and listen intently to understand their underlying motivations, which is actually quite difficult because I have (we all do) all sorts of biases about why people do what they do when they do.
But our biases block us from actually hearing what people are saying. And if we don’t actually hear what people are saying, we...
3 tags
3 tags
“What we call “authority” is the right we give others to author us, to enlarge...”
– Doc Searls