The Onion “covers” a new product release from SONY that, ummm…, well, it promises to be really cool.
Jason Perlow sent this along first. The language is a bit — well, a lot, really — rough. You may want to use headphones.
(I can’t seem to get the Flash embedding to work. Here’s a link to the original.)
February 10, 2009
Onion: SONY debuts new technical gear
February 10, 2009
New words for 2009
Susan Bray, the former Philadelphia talk show host now running a B&B in Australia, sent along a list of new words for the new year. Dunno where they came from but most of them are quite good, though a few don’t translate perfectly from the Aussie. My favorites:
February 9, 2009
Newspapers cut 9 percent of staff in 2008
Ow. Ow. Ow.
From AdAge:
The U.S. advertising and media industry slashed 18,700 jobs in December, bringing industry job losses in this recession to 65,100…
February 3, 2009
Not all Lego constructions have to be complicated
Very cute. Minimalist Legos about New York.
https://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/i-lego-ny/
More and more, I love the NYTimes’s blogs. Great writing and imagination, in a form and format that’s not right for print but perfect for online.
February 2, 2009
Nice Algorithm You Got There
Google would like you to believe that it’s all automatic, that there is this army of search spiders that digs out every last page and image on the Web and decides which is “better” for any given search term. It’s true, as far as it goes, but the company tends to carefully elide the human element that goes into its search result. Until something goes horribly wrong, as it did Saturday morning. For an hour, Google said every site on the Net was dangerous — itself included.
January 31, 2009
Do URL shorterners pass page authority?
This is something I’ve got to experiment with: do URL shorteners like TinyURL and bit.ly hurt a targeted page’s authority? And if they do intercept the authority, is the added traffic they drive worth the loss?
Services like TinyURL are extremely useful for sending pages with long URLs to people over e-mail or Twitter, where you only have 140 characters. But bloggers use them, too — because shorter URLs are just easier to deal with.
But how do those services redirect the traffic? When search engines find TinyURL and bit.ly URLs on the Web, where do they assign the authority: to the TinyURL URL or the underlying page? Because I don’t recall seeing bit.lys or TinyURLs in search results — and I look at a lot of search results — I suspect that they pass the authority just fine. But it would be a big deal if they didn’t; a few good backlinks can be difference between a non-existent search position and an excellent one.
January 31, 2009
Facebook and the 419 scam
Note to Amazon, Google, eBay, Facebook, and everyone else whose business is in The Cloud: a Customer Service link (and muscle behind it) becomes more important as your user base scales. Here’s why (from MSNBC):
In Rutberg’s case, criminals managed to steal his Facebook login password, steal his Facebook identity, and change his page to make it appear he was in trouble. Next, the criminals sent e-mails to dozens of friends, begging them for help….
One of his friends, Beny Rubinstein — a fellow Microsoft employee — fell for the story. At 10:30 p.m. that Wednesday night, he sent $600 via Western Union using an online service. The following morning, Rubenstein received a phone message from the imposter, asking for more money. So he went to a local retail store and wired another $600.
You do use different passwords for different services, right?
January 30, 2009
A distinct lack of cumulative learning
Note update after the jump…
A bunch of Big Thinkers got together recently to chew about the intersection of Big Media and Social Media,and concluded the following:
The overwhelming flow of information, crap, or junk cannot be stemmed, [NYU Journalism professor Jay] Rosen noted. “The way to make yourself valuable on the Web is: you edit the fucking Web,” he emphasized, sending smiles across the crowd’s faces. Journalists should serve as intelligent filters and middlemen if they hope to keep their jobs, Rosen added.
Now, I love Jay Rosen, but this makes me nuts. The idea of editors as filters of new media is not, like, new. That last link dates from 1995, and includes this: