ideas grokked from the interwebs

Did Twitter beat media with earthquake news? | The Industry Standard

So perhaps the winner is a lot more difficult to pick. Internet users on Twitter managed to beat the real-time newswires with first reports of the quake, but the wires came back with the context that pointed to the quake’s seriousness much faster than Twitter users could.

Steve Rubel vs Stowe Boyd - Fischmarkt

Rubel speaks of faint signals that pose challenges. Attention crash is a major one: We can’t really keep up with the hundreds of emails. (I imagine Stowe Boyd has a thing or two to say about this.) Digital curators who pre-filter information can help fight information. While it’s a great term, this idea seems a bit oldschool, at least in the sense that curators could be replaced by collaborative filters. Talking of collaboration, this is another trend Rubel sees: The internet has been, is, and will be used in more and more collaborative ways. Think pledgebank. Rubel points out one problem of online collaboration, though; When our info lives in the cloud, be prepared for data leak. We’re talking about technological solutions, which are never perfect. At some point, some of your data will leak.

Why You Should Use FriendFeed

FriendFeed lets you not only see what your friends are doing, but act on it. Also, as your friends find more people to follow on FriendFeed, you can be exposed to the best from their friends, getting you to find new people and new interesting items. … Because FriendFeed aggregates activity from many places, it definitely has the potential to be noisy. But the team at FriendFeed has thought ahead about this, and delivered some extremely flexible filters to reduce the noise and have strong signal:

Facebook's Profound Strategic Error

Facebook wanted to rule the world; to dominate it; to be the next Microsoft. That’s not revolution - it’s just strategic fascism. And it should be intuitive that fascism cannot hold in a world where power is getting more and more radically liquid by the nanosecond. It’s a delusion; a kind of deep corporate psychosis; the blind fetishization of power and coercion, with no concern for value creation. … Facebook’s problem isn’t that people perceive it to be evil: it’s that it is evil.

E L S U A ~ A KM Blog by Luis Suarez

IBM Social Computing Guidelines: Executive Summary

E L S U A ~ A KM Blog by Luis Suarez » Blog Archive » Giving up on Work e-mail - Status Report on Week 13

Thinking out of the Inbox - More Collaboration through less e-mail

Why Twitter Matters

How could tiny Twitter ever become such a titan? It’s not the core technology, which is simple, but instead the community. Twitterers find and follow the people they care about on the service. Late in April, following one of Twitter’s outages, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington wrote: “I realized that in the last two months a subtle shift occurred: I now need Twitter more than Twitter needs me.” Arrington, who has nearly 17,000 people following his Twitterstream, continued: “It is now an important part of my work and social life, as I carry on bite-sized conversations with thousands of people around the world throughout the day. It’s a huge marketing tool, and information tool. But it is also a social habit that’s hard to kick.”

Dash Opens Up APIs For Its GPS Device to Developers

Dash Navigation is opening up its in-car GPS device to outside developers through an API program.

Google Maps Adds More: Wikipedia Entries and Geo-Coded Photos

If you go to Google Maps, you’ll notice there is now a “”More” button right next to “Street View”” and “Traffic.” If you click on it after getting a map, you will be given the options to tick “Photos” or “Wikipedia.”

Why you might soon think you're hearing things

The technology works by beaming waves of hypersonic sound at a pitch that is undetectable by the human ear. The waves continue until they smash into an object such as a person’s body. The waves then slow, mix and re-create the original audio broadcast. If the person steps out of the waves, they are no longer obstructed and are rendered inaudible. … Using the technology, marketers can target an audio message at one person in a crowd of hundreds, leaving everyone around that person unaware.

To Curb Truancy, Dallas Tries Electronic Monitoring - New York Times

Jaime used to snooze until 2 p.m. before strolling into school. He fell so far behind that he is failing most of his classes and school officials sent him to truancy court. Instead of juvenile detention, Jaime was selected by a judge to be enrolled in a pilot program at Bryan Adams in which chronically truant students are monitored electronically. Since Jaime started carrying the Global Positioning System unit April 1, he has had perfect attendance.

Why Yelp Works - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

What Yelp did differently than these others, as Jeremy Stoppelman, the site’s co-founder and chief executive describes it, was to spend most of its energy attracting a small group of fanatic reviewers. It didn’t try to pay for reviews, as some sites have. It didn’t subordinate the users’ contributions to professional reviews, as on Citysearch, or to directory information, as on yellow-pages sites. Instead, it structured the site to motivate people through the praise and attention that their reviews receive from others. “Yelp is about the reviewing experience,” Mr. Stoppelman said. “It is like a blog with a little bit of structure.”

The Moment The Post-Materialist | Brutal, Superdense Design Rises Again « - T Magazine - New York Times Blog

Superdense living may not be conventionally beautiful, but it does seem to appeal to creative types. Richard Florida found one possible reason why. In a research paper entitled Urban Density, Creativity and Innovation, Florida and his team found a positive relationship between urban density and the number of new patents filed. Density, he concluded, is a key component of innovation. Maybe someone should tell London’s new mayor.

Why Filtering is the Next Step for Social Media - ReadWriteWeb

Aggregated services are not only used for entirely different purposes, but also cater to different audiences. Consequently, who you may be catering to is dependent upon why you may be using the service. While some articles or content submitted to services may overlap, this is only because there are overlapping interests for the different audiences on these platforms. How does this affect noise levels? If you’re using a service to promote content, you may be considered noisy to those that are looking for conversations. If you’re using a platform to keep in touch, then those looking for content and in depth conversation surrounding particular content would need a way to block out idle chatter.

What People Say When They Tweet - ReadWriteWeb

We teamed up with Summize to take a closer look about what people are talking about in the Twitosphere. Summize looked at about 4 million Twitter status update messages (tweets) collected from the public time line over a seven day period running from April 27 - May 3. We saw approximately 200,000 active users (users that sent at least one message) during that period, of which 60% tweeted in English.

Techdirt: EA To Use Controversial Internet-Required DRM On New Games

The system requires a connection to the internet during installation to check the CD key is valid, and then registers the key with the users’ computer. After this the game will try to re-check the CD key every 5-10 days to ensure it hasn’t since been found posted on a forum, or used in some form of piracy. If the game can’t verify the key within this period it will continue to try for a further 10 days, after which it will stop working until the key is checked. The protection will also only allow the game to be installed three times.

A List Apart: Articles: Zebra Striping: Does it Really Help?

Zebra striping is used when data is presented in an essentially tabular form. The user of that table will be looking for one or more data points. Their aim is to get the right points and get them as quickly as possible. Therefore, if we set a task that uses a table, and zebra striping does make things easier, then we would expect to see improvements in two things: accuracy and speed. … I designed an experiment whereby participants were given data in a tabular form and asked to use that data to answer six questions. Three of the questions were asked when the table had zebra striping (i.e., was “striped”) and three of the questions were asked when the table did not have zebra striping (i.e., was “plain”).

Pearlstine Agrees Newspapers Screwed, But Not All Because Of Craigslist - Silicon Alley Insider

Case in point: The Washington Post’s recent 17,000-word, four-part series on IED’s in Iraq. Great story, Norm said, but probably better positioned as a book, or a premium download for Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle. “There might be 50,000 people in the world who want to read that story, but not the ones advertisers want to reach,” he said.

The Stats Are In: You're Just Skimming This Article - ReadWriteWeb

1) On an average visit, users read half the information only on those pages with 111 words or less. 2) People spend some of their time understanding the page layout and navigation features, as well as looking at the images. People don’t read during every single second of a page visit. 3) On average, users will have time to read 28% of the words if they devote all of their time to reading. More realistically, users will read about 20% of the text on the average page

Synchronoss: Unlocked iPhones Are Killing Us - Silicon Alley Insider

he gap between the number of iPhones expected to be sold and the actual number that we are activating continues to be significant, and we expect this trend to continue. As a reminder, Synchronoss is not paid on the number of iPhones that are sold, but rather the number that we activate. And as a result, we are materially adjusting our expectations as it relates to revenue related to the iPhone during 2008. To put these factors into perspective, we currently expect our related transaction revenue from the iPhone to decline by approximately $30 million in 2008 compared to 2007

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Ambient intimacy

Who cares? Who wants this level of detail? Isn’t this all just annoying noise? There are certainly many people who think this, but they tend to be not so noisy themselves. It seems to me that there are lots of people for who being social is very much a ‘real life’ activity and technology is about getting stuff done. There are a lot of us, though, who find great value in this ongoing noise. It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances. It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like.

A List Apart: Articles: Community: From Little Things, Big Things Grow

We needed a way to represent the culture of the place. So, as I sat on a train for several mornings with Heather Champ, Flickr’s very own community manager, we tossed back and forth The Thirteen-Or-So Commandments. Of course, they weren’t actually commandments, but rather guidelines that we wanted all our new members to at least skim. My personal favorite—”Don’t Be Creepy: You know the guy. Don’t be that guy.”—is something a lawyer would never write, and yet it speaks volumes. The other important point is that the “commandments” were designed to be open to interpretation, not to be conclusive. Writing guidelines like this is a great exercise for any team—it encourages reflection about the sort of culture you’re trying to foster.

Could An Open Source "Twittersphere" Save Twitter? Or Kill It? - Silicon Alley Insider

It is entirely possible that before Twitter makes its first penny, it will become too important to exist in its current form, and the community will feel it has to be replaced by an open source, distributed framework. This should strike fear into the hearts of anyone who decides open their API. While the Open API strategy has clearly sped up adoption, it may have worked too well. In fact, it may have worked so well that Twitter may be killed before it ever makes it out of the womb — by people who love it.

Ned Batchelder: CSS Homer, animated

Román Cortés’ Homer

Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger » Blog Archive Early adopter angst «

You really think that guy who I saw the other day on the plane using Windows 2000 and an old version of Lotus Notes is driving society? Riiiigggghhhhtttt. I’ve seen this discussion happen EVERY TIME there’s a new technology. I remember back in 1977 that only nerds could use personal computers. Very few people (not even Steve Jobs or Bill Gates) understood just how big that would become.