On my Tumblr blog: thinking differently big, I've started a new series of articles about iPhone Apps for Geeks where I’m exploring the different apps for geeky daily tasks. If there are any categories of apps you'd like to see please drop me a line over there.
Showing posts with label bits. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bits. Show all posts
-
Sub DiggerPlus: A Cool Look Into What Your Friends are Digging ★
A couple of weeks back, I've just explained Vlad Stan why I think that using the social graph as it is today for recommendations or filtering engines still presents tons of limitations and traps. (in the quote below just ignore any reference to specific products and focus on social graphs and filtering aspects).
Digg’s Recommendation Engine was one of the biggest announcements in the history of the company, and yet it just never did it for me. Yes, I sometimes like to check out what my friends are digging, but in most cases it just adds to the noise, as I’d simply like to know what’s new without any additional filters, except perhaps the category.
[...] If you haven’t been just randomly adding friends to your friend list, Sub DiggerPlus will provide a nice insight into what they’ve been digging lately, and the fact that it all opens in the same browser window makes it simple enough to be enjoyable.
(via Sub DiggerPlus: A Cool Look Into What Your Friends are Digging)
Lie Telling Medium Of Choice ★
In a study of college students, Hancock found that 37% of lies were told via phone, 27% face-to-face, 21% using Web-based messaging and 14% through email.
Why so few lies via email? Because it leaves a trail, proof that the lie was told.
Aggregate, Curate, Publish To Create Local Media ★
If I was starting The Village Voice today, I would not print anything. I would not hire a ton of writers. I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople. I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I'd go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them. I'd do a bit of original reporting on the big stories but most of what I'd do would be smart curation, with a voice, and an opinion.
What Kind Of Content Is Popular On The Internet? ★
So, in conclusion, I think it is safe to say that the Internet is not just for porn. It's mostly for social media, search, shopping, and other utilities. And when it comes to content, geeks and gamers are still a very important audience on the Internet. I wonder if it will always be that way.
The Best Way to Change a Corporate Culture ★
Performance reviews and training programs define the firm's expectations. Financial reward systems reinforce them. Memos and communications highlight what's important. And senior leadership actions — promotions for people who toe the line and a dead end career for those who don't — emphasize the firm's priorities.
"You change a culture with stories. Right now your stories are about how hard you work people. Like the woman you forced to work on her wedding day. You may not be proud of it, but it's the story you tell. That story conveys your culture simply and reliably. And I'm certain you're not the only one who tells it. You can be sure the bride tells it. And all her friends. If you want to change the culture, you have to change the stories."
To start a culture change all we need to do is two simple things:
- Do dramatic story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then let other people tell stories about it.
- Find other people who do story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then tell stories about them.
Build an Insanely Great Web Service ★
New Concept vs. Doesn't Suck vs. Fast Follower vs. Niche
Your website falls into one of four categories:
- New concept: If you fall into this category, your product or service type does not have a name yet. It has no market space, category, or even articulated need yet. In a decade, the number of these concepts that actually gain traction is tiny. The number of them that get through the early-adopter phase to the mainstream (i.e. reach the 3-year milestone) is even smaller. In other words, good luck!
- Doesn't Suck: This one is easier. This is a service you can describe as "[something] that doesn't suck." Google first offered "search that doesn't suck," and then followed it up with Gmail, which is "email that doesn't suck." In other words, don't be afraid to go after mature markets in which the current services are not that good. Spend a couple of days browsing online and you will see plenty of such opportunities.
- Fast Follower: This applies to a new concept that makes your jaw drop and you think "OMG, this is so cool." And then you realize that doing something similar would actually be pretty simple. The first one to market with a new concept is not always the winner. It just looks that way because the originator gets lost in the dustbin of history when the better venture out-executes it. You need access to capital to do this right, because you have to move fast, which means hiring an A-Team. And A-Teams like to be paid a lot.
- Niche: There are thousands of these. Your niche might be geographic or a user type. Most niches are limited in scale and so do not require much capital. These are ripe for bootstrapping. But don't think niches are easy. Users will still be very demanding.
The 10 Online Ad Formats People Hate Most ★
Now this is something that the romanian online people should take a serious look at! Without any intention to sound harsh all these seem to be exactly what most of the romanian onliners are using. Yuck!
We asked usability testing firm Catalyst Groupto help us come up with a list of online ad formats people hate most.They are:
- Banner ads below headers
- Ads that look like content
- Dancing ads
- Auto-expanding half-page ads
- Banners next to logos
- Billboards in the top right corner
- Google text links interrupting content
- Ads with hidden close buttons
- Interstitials
- Page Take-overs
Ten Commandments from Entrepreneurial 'Evangelist' Guy Kawasaki - Knowledge@Wharton ★
- Make meaning, not money
- Make a mantra, not a mission statement
- Jump curves
- In product design, "roll the DICEE." (nb: Deep Intelligence Complete Elegance Emotive)
- Don't worry, be "crappy"
- Polarize people
- Let 100 flowers blossom
- Churn, baby, churn
- Niche yourself
- Follow the 10-20-30 rule
- Don't let the bozos get you down
(via Ten Commandments from Entrepreneurial 'Evangelist' Guy Kawasaki - Knowledge@Wharton)
Chris Anderson’s Counterintuitive Rules For Charging For Media Online ★
In one slide, Anderson comes up with the following rules for media companies trying to figure out how to make money online:
- The best model is a mix of free and paid
- You can’t charge for an exclusive that will be repeated elsewhere,
- Don’t charge for the most popular content on your site,
- Content behind a pay wall should appeal to niches, the narrower the niche the better
This is somewhat counterintuitive because it means media sites that want to charge for content should charge for their niche stuff instead of their most popular content. But that is exactly the right way to look at it if you want to maximize your advertising revenues. Let the popular content be paid for by advertising, and the niche, exclusive content can be sold to fewer people at a higher price. Anderson, whose last book was the Long Tail, predicts in media: “The head of the curve will be free and the tail of the curve will be paid.”
(via Chris Anderson’s Counterintuitive Rules For Charging For Media Online)
Cloud Futures Pt. 3: Focused Clouds ★
If you can’t be ‘best‘ or ‘cheapest‘, that only leaves being ‘first’. Since Amazon Web Services (AWS) clinched the ‘first’ and ‘best’ titles for the general marketplace, your best bet is to pick a subset of the market to focus on. Focused clouds find a sweet spot and exploit it.
Tips on Innovation & Enterprenuership from Jeff Bezos ★
- The trick to being an entrepreneur is to know when to be stubborn and when to be flexible. The trick is to be stubborn about the vision, but flexible about tactics
- [...] failure is not that expensive and it is part of work. If something fails, then you are going to shut it down and that is going to cut your losses. [...] However, the biggest focus should be errors of ommission, he pointed out. These are chances not taken.
- You need a culture that high-fives small and innovative ideas and senior executives encourage ideas,
- [...] prerequsites for innovation and inventing, but the biggest one is willingness to fail. You need to think for the long term and be misunderstood for a long period of time. “If you can’t do those things, then you need to limit yourself to sustainable innovation.”
-
Large-scale graph computing at Google ★
In Pregel, programs are expressed as a sequence of iterations. In each iteration, a vertex can, independently of other vertices, receive messages sent to it in the previous iteration, send messages to other vertices, modify its own and its outgoing edges' states, and mutate the graph's topology
Geeking with Greg: On the front lines of the Netflix Prize ★
We found that most nearest-neighbor techniques work best on 50 or fewer neighbors, which means these methods can't exploit all the information a viewer's ratings may contain. Latent-factor models have the opposite weakness: They are bad at detecting strong associations among a few closely related films, such as The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
What’s your business mantra ★
Because it’s easy to get sidetracked (or just blinded by all of the possibilities out there) I often suggest to companies that they come up with a “mantra”. It’s oversimplified and doesn’t work for every situation (and of course needs to be revisited as the business changes over time) but the idea is to boil the key drivers of the company down to a sentence or two – maybe some broad categories that define they most important areas of focus or possibly something that looks like a statement of purpose.
Ruby slippers ★
If you could make one thing come true that would change everything for your project, do you know what the one thing would be?
But for many sites, many companies, there isn't a thing. They can't articulate it. They have no wish. If you have no wish, how can it possibly come true?
Free and Geeky Places Worth Visiting in California - Travel Tips from John Graham-Cumming, Author of The Geek Atlas ★
In the San Francisco Chronicle, John Graham-Cumming recently detailed five uber-geeky spots in California and Nevada that won't cost you a penny to visit. From visiting the Computer History Museum to checking out the Joint Genome Institute, even if you're traveling on a budget you'll find plenty to do.
Adding HTML entities using CSS content ★
How do you use the CSS content property to add html entities?
A Lesson From Morty ★
But the point Morty made rang true to me and I've lived by his rule ever since. I never ever say that a specific provision is "standard". Nothing is standard. You either need it or you don't. Explain why
What Drives Consumer Adoption Of New Technologies? ★
So it seems to me that consumers are driven to new experiences that are simple and useful and/or entertaining. It is not enough to be the first to market with a new technology. You have to be the first to market with a version of the technology that is simple and easy to use.
Let's take ten of the most popular new consumer technology products in recent years
- iPhone - mobile browser with a killer touch screen interface
- Facebook - a social net with real utility
- Wii - gesture based user interface for gaming
- Hulu - your favorite TV shows in a fantastic web UI
- FlipCam - a video cam that fits in your pocket comfortably
- Rock Band - everyone can be a rock star for a few minutes
- Mafia Wars - a natively social game built for social nets
- Blogger - a printing press for everyone
- Pandora - drop dead simple personalized radio
- Twitter - blogging everyone can do in less than a minute
Extremely good comments:
Sometimes the best products / innovations are the ones which are open for everybody else to innovate on top of them. I call this innovation^2 (squared).
Finally products need to be simple, viral, usable, and FAST (eg. to adopt, understand, use etc.) - users have less and less time available for new products.
peer pressure - "so many people i know are into this, its not so alien, I should try it" (facebook, iphone, twitter)
media saturation - "i keep hearing so much about this, i should check it out" (facebook, iphone, twitter, wii, blogging, guitar hero, rock band, most "green" things)
familiarity - "oh that's new but so similar to what I already know and like, why not?" (mafia wars, hulu, twitter, pandora)
anxiety and insecurity - "holy moley it feels like everyone is into this, i don't want to be a luddite or out of fashion, i better check it out" (iphone, twitter, facebook, most "green" things)
Jim Kerr (long comment worth reading it all)
The most important engine driving consumer adoption of new technologies is when they remove an artificial barrier to consumer desire. I describe this as "consumers abhor a vacuum." The company that can fill this vacuum will have consumers flocking to its doors.
Ian Stewart (long comment worth reading it all) brings up: relative advantage, compatibility, simplicity, trialability, observability.
johndodds: Simplicity and purpose
Hemlock: An Open-Source Real-Time Web Platform ★
Hemlock, a new open-source framework for building real time web apps in Flash with an XMPP back-end has been released by MintDigital, a development shop in London and New York
