From the category archives:

Internet

The Greener Room

November 25, 2009

I'm pleased to present the new TGR: now with more green! I've spent some time over the past few weeks learning a little CSS, PHP and Java (and I apologize for being so late to that party). I've been experimenting behind the scenes with TGR and tonight I'm excited to make those changes official. So, what's [...]

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Choropleths galore

November 16, 2009

For a while, I've been following development of Indiemapper, a forthcoming web tool from the folks at Axis Maps. It should allow for easy map creation, including - yes - choropleths galore. However, the data analytics that will be available remain to be seen.

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Unnecessary summary

November 11, 2009

Has Mashable implemented a word count quota? In a post about Google's new search product codenamed Caffeine, they published a brief four-sentence note from the Caffeine development team... and then went on to summarize the note's "key takeaways" with two bullet points: Since the launch of the developer preview however, we haven’t heard much about [...]

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Things that keep me up at night: signing into Amazon

October 29, 2009

If you head over to Amazon, you may see this at the top of your logged-out screen: Now, there are times when you hyperlink nouns. In fact, most hyperlinks are on nouns, since they lead to more information on the thing referenced (think of the Wikipedia model). Sometimes, it is more appropriate to hyperlink a [...]

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Soylent Flickr

October 26, 2009

Flickr is going after Facebook.

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There's an app for that

October 22, 2009

Steve Ballmer fires across the bow: "Let's face it, the Internet was designed for the PC. The Internet is not designed for the iPhone," Ballmer said. "That's why they've got 75,000 applications — they're all trying to make the Internet look decent on the iPhone." I'm not sure what's more amusing - the absurdity of [...]

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Colors of Harvard Square

October 22, 2009

From Cartogrammar, an absolutely brilliant application of the Flickr API produces this map of the colors of Harvard Square: The map was created by taking geocoded photos from Flickr and calculating the average hue of the photograph, then plotting that color on the map and interpolating between all the resulting points.  Astoundingly, this image shows [...]

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Men are from mars, women are from gmail

October 22, 2009

ReadWriteWeb's coverage of a new study on webmail demographics contains one sentence that left me a little confused: Gmail, for instance, includes more females (53%) than males (47%). If those were election poll results, we would call it "too close to call," but in terms of tens of thousands of users, these percentage point differences [...]

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37Signals is worth $100 billion

September 29, 2009

Closely following the Twitter valuation news comes this brilliant satire from 37signals: 37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1... In order to increase the value of the company, 37signals has decided to stop generating revenues. [...]

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Because no one knows commodities like we do

September 22, 2009

Why did a post up titled "How To Play Natural Gas With Small Cap Stocks" pop up in Silicon Alley Insider's RSS feed? A little investigating (elementary, my dear Watson) shows that it's actually from The Money Game - another blog under the Business Insider umbrella. The blogs themselves and current RSS feeds show no [...]

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iPhones support push gmail!

September 22, 2009

Finally. I've been using Google's contact and calendar syncing increasingly, to the point that they are almost indispensable to me. Most critically, when my last iPhone broke I only had to wait a few seconds for my new one to download all of my information from the cloud. The addition of push email completes Google Sync's basic [...]

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Users still aren't right about changes

September 20, 2009

Once again, the self-proclaimed "experts" of social media are revealed to be not much more than some anecdotes and a keyboard. The latest is Dan Zarrella, who has written a vitriolic attack on Twitter's planned adoption of the retweet as an official mechanism. Zarrella does some excellent work in other areas, but I find him completely [...]

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Twitter's broken data model becomes slightly less broken

September 19, 2009

I don't usually have anything nice to say about Twitter (though I still ignore my mother's advice and say it anyway), but the company is finally taking steps to improve one of the most glaring faults with their service: retweets. Previously, retweets were simply new tweets that happened to contain old information. This created clutter [...]

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Speaking of fast flips...

September 15, 2009

My Google Reader was filled with a lot of headlines on Google's new Fast Flip service this morning, but none of them amused me quite as much as Silicon Alley Insider's confused monologue: 7:45 a.m.: Google's Fast Flip Makes Reading Print Publications Online Easier 8:40 a.m.: Google FastFlip Is A Gigantic Step Backwards 10:29 a.m.: [...]

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Bubble 2.0 datapoint of the day: "the Twitter age?"

September 14, 2009

The beginning of this Mashable post made me pause: How much buzz is one inappropriate publicity stunt during the VMA’s worth in the Twitter age? In the case of Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech, almost 300,000 tweets in one hour. What does it even mean for something to have "worth in the Twitter age?" [...]

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Hands, fingers, knees and toes (knees and toes)

September 10, 2009

Wikipedia is an incredible resource, but every now and then it gives me pause. Consider the first two sentences about the seventh-inning stretch: The seventh-inning stretch is a tradition in baseball that takes place between the halves of the seventh inning of any game. Fans generally stand up and stretch out their arms, legs, necks, backs, calves, fingers, elbows, [...]

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Search forecasts

September 8, 2009

Google Insights recently rolled out a new feature: 12 month search forecasts. The forecast comes from a relatively simple decomposition of the search volume into trend, seasonal and residual components. The model's out-of-sample performance is tested on the most recent 12 month period; if that prediction proves accurate, then the model is accepted. Here's what [...]

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Twitterverse demographics

August 28, 2009

I spoke too soon - another post from ReadWriteWeb manages to frustrate yet again. In an article claiming that teenage use of Twitter is on the rise, they present this chart: Let's do what RWW did not and actually think about what this graph is showing. For each age group, their use of Twitter is [...]

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What passes for news

August 28, 2009

ReadWriteWeb takes 600 words to conclude: What this means for Twitter is that the online chatter taking place on the popular microblogging site, while still an important vector for studying sentiment, is not powerful enough on its own to truly impact the overall success or failure of a movie. Really?! Does this mean there are [...]

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The million dollar question

August 20, 2009

Straight from GigaOm, emphasis mine: Despite all the hype and excitement around the real-time web, access to real-time information online is hardly a new phenomenon. That fact stuck with me after talking to Chris Cox, Facebook’s product director, last week at the social networking company’s headquarters. As he noted, “Real time has been around since [the [...]

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Test driving America's dashboard

August 3, 2009

Recently, the CIO of the United States released a Federal IT Dashboard, to show people exactly how their money is being spent. I've played with the site, and found it ultimately heavy on style and light on substance (3D graphs with slick animated transitions only frustrate me while I wait for results). But why read [...]

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The 100 users of Twitter

July 31, 2009

An interesting visualization of Twitter as 100 people is a good take on a popular infographic meme, but reveals a few inconvenient truths about these sorts of images. Firstly, although I am (not so) secretly pleased to see this illustration of Twitter's non-inclusive communicative nature let's not forget that Twitter, like so many other social [...]

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Evaluating returns to social media

July 21, 2009

A collusion by wetpaint and the Altimeter Group has resulted in a fanciful study on social media. Normally, a paper like this wouldn't be worth addressing, but the amount of attention being paid to its questionable conclusion warrants a closer look. And that conclusion is: [T]his landmark study has found that the most valuable brands in [...]

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CNN < supermarket tabloid

July 17, 2009

I echo John Gruber in my extreme disappointment that as we approach the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, CNN.com's headline story is tabloid fare on people convinced it was a hoax. I generally find CNN's journalistic standards to be barely above those of their "iReporters," but the decision to run this piece is [...]

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"A revolution in the American fantasy"

July 13, 2009

The RWW article I just discussed included a link at the end to an excellent discussion of American egoism and hypocrisy as epitomized by the glorification of the Twitter's recent role in Iran, decrying it as "a revolution in the American fantasy." While I found it a to lean a bit on the conspiracy side, and [...]

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No, Twitter does not deserve a Nobel Peace Prize!

July 13, 2009

Bubble 2.0 datapoint of the day: ReadWriteWeb is running an article with the title "Does Twitter deserve a Nobel Peace Prize? Maybe not yet, but it could someday." Fortunately, they acknowledge the idea is ridiculous for the moment and are really just responding to this outlandish post by Bush's Deputy National Security Advisor. Nonetheless, besides [...]

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Twitter, exposed

July 2, 2009

Twitter's data model is, interestingly enough, entirely user generated. Hashtags of every variety, retweets, and other methods of ascribing meta-information to tweets have developed outside any formal structural model or standard. The lone first-party implementation is that a "@" prefix links directly to a person, and even that isn't fully functional. All of my problems [...]

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Kottke on Twitter

June 25, 2009

No less an authority than Jason Kottke is taking up the "Twitter's data model sucks" mantle, instantly doubling the size of my little crusade. Actually, Kottke doesn't even attack Twitter, but rather sites that claim to provide Twitter-organization services, but it's close enough because it implicitly recognizes that Twitter doesn't have even a shard of [...]

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A Google Reader wishlist

June 24, 2009

Google Reader has become an inexorable part of my daily life. It's the only way I can keep up with the amount of reading I do each day, and as much as I love the service, there are a few things I miss. Here's my wishlist for Google Reader: Intelligent favorites: Right now, I have [...]

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Things that keep me up at night: academics' websites

June 22, 2009

Why are academics' websites so poorly designed? In fact, they go beyond bad design and border on unuseable. Taleb's disasterous fooledbyrandomness.com epitomizes the phenomenon. One of the images is actually displayed upside down! Andrew has pointed out that my marquee example was not to be, but do not be distracted by the beautiful celebrities: Taleb's [...]

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