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 […]
Continue reading... 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:
Continue reading... February 9, 2009
Newspapers cut 9 percent of staff in 2008
Ow. Ow. Ow.
From AdAge:
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading... 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.
Continue reading... 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 […]
Continue reading... 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 […]
Continue reading... 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 […]
Continue reading... January 29, 2009
Chasing Deuces
Did you know the Federal Reserve issues a $2 bill? Of course you did. (Steve Wozniak sure does.) That puts you one up on the guy I just talked to at local WaMu branch. I need to buy a bunch of dueces; never mind why. First stop was a Citibank branch, where I was told […]
Continue reading... January 28, 2009
Is a fresh start in the White House such a good idea?
OK, now that I’ve got your attention… At 12:01pm on January 20, the whitehouse.gov Web site got turned over to the Obama administration. The old site was swept away into the loving care of the National Archives, along with the rest of the Bush/Cheney documents — with the possible exception of the torture docs that […]
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