Posts tagged as:

Internet

The "software company" bubble

August 21, 2011

It's amazing what you can see when you refuse to open your eyes -- or need to talk your book. Take, for example, Marc Andreessen's article in the WSJ titled "Why Software is Eating the World." I became skeptical when this line appeared in the introduction: And, perhaps most telling, you can't have a bubble [...]

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Value vs Valuation

July 18, 2011

I love this video from Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby: Attend a startup conference and you'll find that people there seem to believe that the mark of a successful company is the amount of money it's raised, not the amount of money it makes. Naturally, by this metric, Color is the greatest company in [...]

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Information economics

April 25, 2011

An excellent article in the NYT suggests that "information economics" is starting to have a demonstrably positive impact on businesses that harness data well. The most important observation, in my opinion, comes a bit earlier in the article: In a modern economy, information should be the prime asset — the raw material of new products [...]

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My new favorite study

December 12, 2010

The good news: a new study from the Pew Research Center shows that over a third of Twitter users read other users' tweets at least once a day. The bad news: nearly 50% of Twitter users do not look at other users' content more than once a week. In fact, 20% only browse other people's [...]

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The following plug-in has crashed

May 5, 2010

The new Google Chrome Beta has an integrated Adobe Flash plugin. The new Google Chrome Beta spends an awful amount of time looking like this: (Just trying to upload this screen shot with the WordPress flash uploader crashed Chrome not once, not twice, but three times... at which point I switched to the standard uploader.)

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Clay Shirky on the internet

January 19, 2010

Clay Shirky sees the internet poised between Invisible High School and Invisible College, the latter of which sounds a lot like an open source society: What did the Invisible College have that the alchemists didn't? They had a culture of sharing. The problem with the alchemists had wasn't that they failed to turn lead into [...]

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Modern confessionals

December 22, 2009

We all know that you can get some funny/interesting responses by typing the first part of a question into a major search engine's search box and letting it suggest the remainder. The NYT has gone so far as to investigate those suggestions themselves. I particularly enjoyed their description of search engines as "modern confessionals:" This [...]

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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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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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Web 3.0 is/isn't coming

May 26, 2009

Looks like I'm not the only one -- All Things D has declared we are on the cusp of Web 3.0: This year, as we convene the seventh edition of D: All Things Digital, we think something major is happening at the intersection of tech and media, and we think it deserves its own new hyped-up [...]

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QOTD: March of Progress edition

May 18, 2009

Just received this gchat from MB: i'm on a virgin america flight with wifi And now I know exactly how Alexander Graham Bell felt when he called Mr. Watson in 1876.

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When are users right about design changes?

May 12, 2009

I just saw this article about Google's data-driven design philosophy. It seems Google will not make design choices unless they are backed by quantitative findings that the change is a measurable improvement; users vote with their clicks. Adhering too rigidly to a design philosophy guided by “Web analytics,” Ms. Dunn [of the Stanford Institute of [...]

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Fact-checking the singularity

May 10, 2009

This movie made the rounds last year, but now that it's resurfaced on Mashable I need to revisit the frustration it has caused me. First, here's the video in question: It's a tour of the "pace of progress," designed to alternatively intimidate the viewer by revealing his lack of identity and insignificance and astound the [...]

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Scary (but not surprising)

March 28, 2009

Vast Spy System Loots Computers in 103 Countries (NYTimes)

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