“The risk now is not that SOPA will pass. The risk is that we’ll think we’ve won. We haven’t; they’ll be back. Get ready to have this fight again.” – Clay Shirky
Did you donate $30 to Acumen Fund on Seth Godin’s promotion page so you can get his new book, Linchpin, before others do?
Seth is using an interesting approach to find his most dedicated user base. The first 3000 to donate on his page will get his book. As he says:
Originally posted 2009-12-02 12:56:28. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces.
http://www.googleartproject.com/
This is great. Check it out. You can have a tour of the world’s most famous museums without leaving your computer seat. This will be a great educational resource.
Originally posted 2011-02-08 10:25:18. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
It’s very true these days. Ask me my close friends’ and family’s phone numbers. I don’t know them all. Ten years ago that would be an impossible thing for me not to know. These days my phone remembers for me.
I develop pages in CSS, HTML, JavaScript and PHP. But do I know all the styles and properties of CSS classes? Well not every single one of them. Why? Dreamweaver will give me a list to choose from when I type and I’ll just fill in the blanks. I remember most of the technical syntax I learn, but using libraries and references can help tremendously. Saving time and redundancy.
Being an encyclopedia of knowledge is useless, we’ve got Wikipedia now. What I save my memory for is anchors. An anchor of information that I can use to look up the full array of knowledge of the subject on the Internet. Or I remember ways of thinking. Things like:
Unless these lines of thinking stop being true, I don’t remember much else but lines of thinking or anchors. Why remember a way you used to do something when things are changing really quickly?
Today’s value creation comes from employees who know how to quickly find resources, work in many different ways and can work on a higher level than memorizing alone.
Originally posted 2010-02-08 13:13:38. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
Days after Apple boss Steve Jobs described Google’s “Don’t be evil” slogan as “crap”, it has emerged that Google may be planning to launch a competitor to the new Apple iPad. The revelation comes four weeks after Google rolled out the Nexus One smartphone as a competitor to Apple’s iPhone.
Source: Smarthouse.com
Originally posted 2010-02-03 08:33:13. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
With Google’s new geo targeting added to their search, I started to think about the future of geo marketing campaigns.
It is already easier for me to search for dog walkers in my area through geo targeting and it is probably helping businesses like this grow exponentially as they are better able to get the word out to relevant potential customers.
In the future I’d like to see how Google’s street view will change over the years. Hopefully usability of moving quickly down the streets will improve. Imagine in the future where you would zoom into street view, go down the street and see new condominium development with pictures, videos and floor plans?
Down the street is McDonalds with their menu and latest promotions. Community events will be posted at the library, town halls and squares. Streets would show the latest street festivals coming up. I’d imagine that company’s would also post these street views on their website, to quickly communicate which geographic areas are supporting activities, events or promotions.
I wonder how it would be organized to access this information easily and not look cluttered? I can also see companies wanting to display their logos, instead of or with Google’s icons.
Geo targeting in the search will display images and links to Google’s street view, and perhaps the resources (menus, floor plans, videos, etc) associated to place. How about searching for all street festivals in a defined area you drew on Google Maps? This would be a handy feature as well.
Geographic searching is the flip side of online communities. Companies and people will always be somewhat restricted to a geographic area (unless we figure out how to teletransport ourselves and physical goods… crossing fingers!). Geo searching helps to support our physical communities and their organization systems. This in turn can help online communities grow through understanding of each geographic region without needing to be there; one can research the area and all it’s buildings and offerings from their computer.
Of course all of this is speculation. Hopefully it’s got people thinking about the future of geo searching and it’s applications. I’d like to hear others thoughts on this. Where do you think geo searching is heading?
Originally posted 2010-11-23 18:21:33. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
Summary of SlideshowRule #1: Listen
Rule #2: Engage
Rule #3: Measure
Originally posted 2009-07-20 09:15:50. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
I find Facebook a fascinating subject! I also just saw The Social Network this weekend and am super hyped now.
Facebook is really so fascinating because of the social element. Their ability to focus on human interaction instead of computer algorithms is an amazing feat.
Chris Cox, the Social Chief of Facebook is working on more ways to apply social norms to Facebook. It was his team of programmers and designers that created the ability to sort small groups of friends. See article on Facebook’s ‘Social’ Chief Pushes Human Interaction.
The pitfalls of these groups is that your friend could add you to a group you didn’t approve. Cox believes that this isn’t a problem as you would un-friend the person who keeps doing something that you do not approve of, just like the real world. What I find interesting is that they see this as an advantage because it allows some of your friends to be leaders of the group. Some people may not organize anything on Facebook, while another friend organizes everything and gets their friends to join as well.
I do agree that the real world is made up of different type of people, with different engagement levels. I currently follow a friend’s, Trina Boos, newsletter on advertising and online news called Ad Lounge. I would never create a newsletter like this! It is too long and tedious… and thank goodness she does this as I love to read the newsletter to stay updated in my field!
While most concerns seem to stem about privacy issues (friends adding you to groups without your permission), in most cases I fail to see the privacy concern. Truly I think the biggest disadvantage is how surrounding yourself with friends’ ideas, opinions, tastes will drastically narrow your worldview. As Facebook and other websites become more social, I believe some efforts may have to go into diversity again. Giving new and fresh content to the user so that a little oxygen is added to the narrow minded social group. Kinda like the Amazon of social content. “You say you like these topics? X number of people also like this content. Check it out!” All while not annoying the user. A challenging task, yet lucrative business if you are able to tie it to companies and brands.
If done properly it will be seen as relevant and helpful. Otherwise it will be seen as spam. And we’ve already seen some Facebook advertising experiments gloriously fail because it was viewed as intrusive spam… plus a privacy issue once again. “Christine bought underwear at Gap.” Thanks Facebook my friends really needed to know this… including my employers. This never really happened to me. It’s just an example of how we don’t want to share everything.
Pushing new topics to a user won’t be quite as intrusive but could be annoying and defeat the purpose if done wrong. However I do believe if you find the right “rules of engagement” you can be successful with a lot of new concepts. I think Facebook is showing this to us everyday.
Originally posted 2010-10-12 14:42:41. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
Here’s an example of adding security to information that could be accessed through AJAX from a user that signed out but didn’t close all their tabs.
I was using my computer and I went to a tab where Facebook was open. This user was logged out using another tab. When you do this, it will log you out of Facebook across all tabs. Thinking it was me who was logged into Facebook, I went to check the friend request I had. Then it gave me this error: “You are not permitted to do that.”
So what’s interesting is that I can see the Friend Request with photo and name (I changed this to an icon and fake name for privacy). You cannot go deeper than this. I can’t see their mutual friends or confirm/deny.
This is a good example to illustrate how you have to think about the many uses of the interface when creating such collaborative sharing environments. With new ways of sharing information come new ways of protecting information.
Originally posted 2010-10-16 14:00:02. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
I have a Twitter account. I also have a Facebook account. I also have:
I’m sure I’ve forgotten some. I am trying to bookmark all my social media sites so I remember them. It’s really an experimental approach to social media. I like to see what all the sites are doing socially and technically. I also like to post to them all from this blog and any status updates.
There are really too many social media sites asking for my profile information again and again. We really need this streamlined. Plus why do I need to create the same username for another website? Use OAuth and OpenID instead.
Most social media websites are still making me upload the picture myself. Poo, that’s extra work.
Facebook is appropriate to export their profile pictures to use in all other social media sites. They already have some support with other social media sites. If the user doesn’t have a Facebook account they could still use “Facebook picture widget” to add a picture. This will be hosted on Facebook. When/if this user gets a Facebook account it will use the user’s email address to hook up the original profile picture widget. Or something like that to make our lives easier 
No probably not and I know why. Twitter doesn’t let you categorize things… yet. I’ll post more personal status updates on Facebook, more industry related updates on Twitter and more job related updates on LinkedIn.
Sometimes I use Ping.fm to post updates to most of my social media sites. But Ping isn’t added to most articles on the internet. Twitter is almost always added. That means these other social media sites aren’t getting as many updates as they could.
I am setting my sites on Twitter. They did invent the idea of 140 character updates. Such a thing should also have categories and easily import to all other social media sites. Please Twitter? Please other social media sites? You need to support them and focus on your core technologies.
No! I’ve already wrote this several hundred times. Find it from one of the other sites!!
Social media sites should accept my RSS feed and post a status update when I write a new blog. It should show the title and a limited amount of text from the content with a link to the full article. That’s all I need.
Then everyone can see when I’ve written something new. Twitterfeed is currently pushing this content out to Twitter and Facebook. Feedburner is sending the RSS to email addresses and allows people to sign up to multiple RSS readers. Still too limited for my taste. For some reason I cannot get Ping.fm to push out the blog posts to all my social media sites. The Ping.fm plugin doesn’t seem to be working. Boo.
Originally posted 2010-10-28 14:27:50. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
