Hi Dooode.

So Pitted.

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 00:33:43 -0500

So Pitted.

"So what does it really take to create a gadget? A smart product design, a realistic expectation of..."

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 22:00:39 -0500

“So what does it really take to create a gadget? A smart product design, a realistic expectation of time and costs, and the ability to put together the right team, say entrepreneurs. Wired.com interviewed several hardware entrepreneurs to find out what works and what doesn’t.”

- For Hardware Entrepreneurs, Getting From Idea to Reality Isn’t Easy | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

I would like to make a gadget.

nickdouglas: POE News Good comment on POE: ‘Pixar was...

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 21:36:57 -0500

nickdouglas:

POE News

Good comment on POE:

‘Pixar was founded on the principles that computer animation should not look like it was done by a computer (just using one). Lasseter in particular made a huge deal about how to map what traditional animators had learned into CG in order to make things work. The other studios seem to try to reproduce reality to add fantastic elements to, and have only been very slowly learning how to do basic things like squash and stretch.

For whatever it’s worth, Pixar’s process is very traditional - they do the whole movie in animatics and pencil tests and the like to get the story and timing and such down solid before they start doing it in 3D.’

hiten: Study: Males vs. females in social networks | Royal...

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 13:41:12 -0500

hiten:

Study: Males vs. females in social networks | Royal Pingdom

"The fact is, the Demand way may be inescapable. A senior executive at a major media company likened..."

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:58:56 -0500

“The fact is, the Demand way may be inescapable. A senior executive at a major media company likened Demand’s algorithmic-based content-creation factory to what he saw in the advertising industry in the past decade. Experience, relationships, and gut checks started losing out to raw data. “To customers, advertising may not look that different, but the systems to deliver the right ads to the right consumer at the right time have changed dramatically,” he says. “The content systems are going through the early, early stages of that right now.””

- The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model | Magazine

"Plenty of other companies — About.com, Mahalo, Answers.com — have tried to corner the market in..."

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:45:57 -0500

“Plenty of other companies — About.com, Mahalo, Answers.com — have tried to corner the market in arcane online advice. But none has gone about it as aggressively, scientifically, and single-mindedly as Demand. Pieces are not dreamed up by trained editors nor commissioned based on submitted questions. Instead they are assigned by an algorithm, which mines nearly a terabyte of search data, Internet traffic patterns, and keyword rates to determine what users want to know and how much advertisers will pay to appear next to the answers.”

- The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model | Magazine

"Journalists, the Web is not how our profession ends. The Web is a wonderful vehicle for..."

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:27:48 -0500

“Journalists, the Web is not how our profession ends. The Web is a wonderful vehicle for storytelling, explaining, doing civic good and empowering readers who want to dig for information. If you want to know how our profession ends, look at Demand Media, starting with Roth’s poignant portrait of an experienced video journalist shooting noisy, out-of-focus footage for $20 a pop. This is the journalist as Chinese factory worker — except for a lot of rural Chinese the factory is a step up. You know the old joke about the sign that reads Good, Fast, Cheap — Pick Two? Demand Media took that and turned it into an irony-free business plan. The joke, unfortunately, is on the rest of us.”

- Hey, Demand Media! Get Off My Lawn! « Reinventing the Newsroom

This is a really nice article, not necessarily for the ode to journalists losing out to stupid long tail content creators, but rather he is right in thinking about how Demand and AC’s models will have to shift as pagerank will continue to favor engagement activities in content that ‘industrial search’ doesn’t currently take into account.

Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinman

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 13:44:05 -0500

Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinman

"the probability of another steve jobs occurring is vanishingly small. i doubt that another startup..."

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 19:09:47 -0500

“the probability of another steve jobs occurring is vanishingly small. i doubt that another startup could produce a steve jobs. it is a combination of intelligence, market savvy, strong personality, and ruthlessness that makes him successful. not many people can exhibit all those qualities to make it work.”

- Update on the Steve Jobs post from an Apple alum | Andrew Chen (@andrew_chen)

bijan: This opening story from todays NYT says it all. The TV...

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:52:52 -0500

bijan:

This opening story from todays NYT says it all.

The TV is a nice form factor for large viewing of one thing, in time, The Web. I hope the boys in Cupertino are hard at work on the hardware side of it.

"But Metcalfe’s law presumes that creating more communications pathways increases the value of..."

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 20:45:00 -0500

“But Metcalfe’s law presumes that creating more communications pathways increases the value of the system, and that’s not always true (see Brook’s Law: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”). Having watched the rise and fall of SixDegrees, Friendster, and the many other proto-hominids that make up the evolutionary chain leading to Facebook, MySpace, et al, I’m inclined to think that these systems are subject to a Brook’s-law parallel: “Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.””

- How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook — Facebook — InformationWeek

For the first time today, this was validated for me. I was asked to name a top 10 list and I thought it would be awkward to answer given the social setting on Facebook. ie. I didn’t feel like answering based on my social network. That’s kinda fucked but it also mirrors real life, which is actually pretty cool and means FB, from an evolving platform perspective, is on to something. People will always seek out private settings in life, but when the digital world mirrors the real world, +1.

"Around 1970, he became aware that the use of hard-steel pitons made by his company were causing..."

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:41:14 -0500

“Around 1970, he became aware that the use of hard-steel pitons made by his company were causing significant damage to the cracks of Yosemite. These pitons comprised 70 percent of his income.[4] In 1971 and 1972, he introduced new aluminum chockstones, call Hexentrics and Stoppers along with less successful steel Crack-n-Ups, for climbing, and committed his company to the advocacy of the new tools and a new style of climbing called “clean climbing”. This concept revolutionized rock climbing and led to further success of his company, despite destroying the sales of pitons, formerly his most important product.”

- Yvon Chouinard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The point that I am trying to make is that some technological innovations are so revolutionary that..."

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:28:36 -0500

“The point that I am trying to make is that some technological innovations are so revolutionary that they change everything. The Gutenberg Press led to the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, journalism, the Enlightenment, and, arguably, representative democracy. It created what is today a European continent with near universal literacy. Before movable type, Europeans depended on priests to know what was inside of a book. Now they simply open its cover. That is a revolutionary difference. But what is important to remember is that not everyone benefited from the printing press. Scribes all across Europe protested. There aren’t good records of their protests, but I can just imagine their reasoning: that people would be overwhelmed by too much information; that they would become isolated reading at home rather than coming to church; that mediocrity would prevail if publishing was put into the hands of ordinary people. Basically, all of the same criticisms we hear of the Internet today. In the end, the scribes lost and the printing press won. With the benefit of historical perspective, we view the result as inevitable. And we are seeing the same dynamic play out today with traditional journalism and the participatory internet.”

- MediaShift Idea Lab . Changes in Media Over the Past 550 Years | PBS

MediaShift Idea Lab . Changes in Media Over the Past 550 Years |...

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:24:01 -0500

MediaShift Idea Lab . Changes in Media Over the Past 550 Years | PBS

Digg and Tweetmeme

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:41:00 -0500

This is happening faster than I would have thought.

Digg

TweetMeme

"After a meeting with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong earlier today, Khan came away thinking that the company..."

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:46:41 -0500

“After a meeting with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong earlier today, Khan came away thinking that the company is ready to do just that. As Khan notes, AOL’s display woes didn’t just start last year. It actually began shortly after the creation of now-defunct Platform-A unit over two years ago, when the company tried to integrate the various ad tech acquisitions it had made the previous two years. As result, AOL shifted most of its premium ads through Ad.com, the anchor of Platform-A group, which Khan said only reinforced a desire for discounted CPMs among buyers.”

- JP Morgan: AOL Will Hold Back Its Ad Inventory From Advertising.com | paidContent

I’m really starting to like Tim Armstrong.

jryu: “For me the most fun of climbing was bivouacking.” [pic]...

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:14:23 -0500

jryu:

“For me the most fun of climbing was bivouacking.” [pic] via reddit

Fucking awesome.

"When Amazon tells you that the Kindle is the highest-selling product on Amazon, you’re..."

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:07:19 -0500

“When Amazon tells you that the Kindle is the highest-selling product on Amazon, you’re supposed to think of it as you’d think of anything else: as a strong, reliable metric in gauging how well a product is doing in general. The thing is, there is no “in general” for the Kindle. There is only Amazon. Anyone who wants a Kindle and doesn’t normally shop at Amazon has to make an exception. Anyone who wants a Kindle and doesn’t normally shop online has to make an exception. The Kindle didn’t outsell the iPod Touch—not even close.”

- Kindle Outsells Every Other Product On Amazon (And What That Really Means) - kindle sales - Gizmodo

Amazon has been pissing me off ever since that 1984 incident. Good post by Gizmodo showing the concern when a company has too much control over the supply and the chain it runs along. It all feels a little dishonest.

"damn, I’m proud to be an American.” He told a story about being driven to Camp Bondsteel, the home..."

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 13:16:42 -0500

““damn, I’m proud to be an American.” He told a story about being driven to Camp Bondsteel, the home of American peacekeeping troops in Kosovo, and seeing, standing together, “a female colonel, a black captain, a white sergeant and, literally, a Hispanic private.” Turning to his Kosovar driver, he said: “That’s America. And until you understand that here, you’ll never be free.””

- Joe Biden - Second-Most Powerful Vice President in History? - NYTimes.com

Good read.

"thousands of people explored a new way of interacting with merchants, posting messages on Twitter..."

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:51:04 -0500

“thousands of people explored a new way of interacting with merchants, posting messages on Twitter and getting replies from store employees, often within minutes.”

- Some Jostling, but Less of a Frenzy Among Shoppers - NYTimes.com (via fred-wilson)

What we call ‘conversations to scale’. You can now talk to all your customers at once in a way that is indexed, searchable, ‘surprising & delightful(Brand Term)’ and permanent. This opportunity is the biggest thing yet(loosely defined as social) that the web has offered for commerce.