May 2012
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“iTunes is dead. But it’s still the big play. Microsoft became trapped in the...”
– Guy English
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Circa Blog: The Right Package for the Right... →
There are some smart folks over at Circa:
The language change is minimal - from “content” to “information,” but the subtle shift alters how we think about a product and how users can engage with it.
Creating “content” implies a certain packaging. We are producing “video” content or “text” content. Even “multimedia” content denotes a packaging with a pretty bow for the consumers to...
“The average web page is now more than 1 megabyte.”
– GigaOm
“By carrying around two iPads I can keep more windows open, without being...”
– Tyler Cowen details his personal tech ecosystem
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“We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable. That leave you with the...”
– Jonathan Ive
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Make Your Own Magazine →
The Verge reports:
Arc90, the team behind Readability, is today introducing Readlists, a new website / web app that lets you create your own ebooks from your favorite articles online… The concept is simple: click “create Readlist,” paste in whichever URLs you’d like in your book, add a title and custom descriptions, and share.
You can export your book in either the...
“Opinion polls show over 75 percent of Greeks want to stay in the euro, but two...”
– Reuters
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“ABC 4 confirmed through another independent source that the Apple deal is pretty...”
– ABC4.com
“In one tenderness test, researchers cooked muscles to medium, punched out...”
– NYTimes
This will never end up on a How It’s Made.
“In 2001, this is not a joke, we were in a meeting with Bill (Gates) and a bunch...”
– Robbie Bach on the decision to focus the original Xbox on the broadband market. (Via GeekWire)
Soon to Be: "Women: 0%" →
I can’t believe anyone would think this would lead to sustainable business:
On Friday afternoon, about 20 bars around San Francisco are set to have special “facial detection” cameras turned on as part of a new smartphone app by Chicago-based startup SceneTap.
The cameras, which are mounted above the door of their client bars, scan patrons’ faces as they enter and exit...
“Funny enough, I started my first meetings on the Blade Runner sequel last week....”
– Ridley Scott
Hampton Fancher to write.
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Ignore the IPO noise for a moment: the criticisms, the estimates of earnings, and other buzz. These pale in comparison to Facebook’s largest achievement, which is worth putting into context.
Facebook has organized roughly 1 in 7 people on earth, or 900 million people.
They’ve built a design and interaction system used across the world by a massive amount of cultures. Mandarin, with...
Facebook now worth 104 Instagrams →
With every Kickstarter, your initial purchase is a story and club membership. Eventually you get the thing you thought you bought.
Networks like Facebook and Tumblr have helped drive demand for stories. With more opportunities to tell stories, we need more fodder. Kickstart sells us these. The watches, iPod docks, comics, and games are secondary.
Everyone who sells anything should take heed....
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Buffet's Media Moves
Buffet is sitting out the Facebook IPO:
“The idea that something coming out … that’s being offered with significant commissions, all kinds of publicity, the seller electing the time to sell, is going to be the best single investment that I can make in the world among thousands of choices is mathematically impossible.”
But Berkshire Hathaway just bought 63 newspapers...
“Real estate agent Jeff Appenrodt said a client of his recently was among 51...”
– This’ll go well. (Via latimes.com)
“Because of this population distribution, the half of the U.S. living in the...”
– Another reason to reform the Senate, says Leslie Ogden of Tufts Daily (Via SimonWDC)
“As opposed to Obama’s years of public tiptoeing around the idea that gay...”
– Rich Juzwiak explains why Jay-Z’s support for gay marriage is so important.
Here’s what Jay-Z said:
It’s no different than discriminating against blacks. It’s discrimination plain and simple…I think [announcing support of gay marriage is] the right thing to do, so...
“To those who argue programming is an essential skill we should be teaching our...”
– Jeff Atwood
I think Bloomberg is a straw man: few people are mayors or CEOs, and such upper management types perform people-centric jobs. Bloomberg and his peers probably wouldn’t benefit from learning to code, beyond understanding the basics of how software works. (Which, yes,...
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“In other words, JPMorgan Chase, entirely without any help from the government...”
– Barney Frank, national treasure.
“A theoretical physicist friend likes to say, only partly in jest, that there...”
– What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics? - Quora (via felixsalmon)
Wouldn’t this hold true for any true field of knowledge? X for anthropologists/computer scientists/chefs/chemists? Perhaps math’s abstraction is more suited to this tact, but a presumed...
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“Those who are saying the game is changing for the worse, well, they don’t...”
– Junior Seau on whether football is becoming too soft.
About that Logic... →
You’ll go far with leaders like this, North Carolina:
Tami Fitzgerald, who heads the pro-amendment group Vote FOR Marriage NC, said she believes the initiative awoke a silent majority of more active voters in the future.
“I think it sends a message to the rest of the country that marriage is between one man and one woman,” Fitzgerald said at a celebration Tuesday night....
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Sina Weibo updates its "Community Conventions" →
Of special note is article 13:
Article 13: Users have the right to publish information, but may not publish any information that:
Opposes the basic principles established by the constitution
Harms the unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of the nation
Reveals national secrets, endangers national security, or threatens the the honor or interests of the nation
Incites...
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Shell Apps and Silver Bullets →
90wpm:
Web technology is great for many things. Replicating a native app experience is not one of them.
If you’re thinking of going with HTML5 for your company’s app, read this and think again. Great arguments from someone who seems to know their ass from a hole in the ground.
AKA: don’t judge a framework/language/technique by its demo app.
This not only applies to HTML5, but...
“Born in Los Angeles, he was raised in the Mojave Desert, and was inspired at an...”
– Ambient composer Harold Budd has a fantastic Wikipedia lede.
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Abraham Lincoln Filed a Patent for Facebook in... →
Nate St. Pierre writes:
Lincoln was requesting a patent for “The Gazette,” a system to “keep People aware of Others in the Town.” He laid out a plan where every town would have its own Gazette, named after the town itself. He listed the Springfield Gazette as his Visual Appendix, an example of the system he was talking about. Lincoln was proposing that each town build a centrally located...
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When will legal writing become a programming...
New York Magazine reports on an interesting development in computer/human relations:
The Southern District of New York recently became the nation’s first federal court to explicitly approve the use of predictive coding, a computer-assisted document review that turns much of the legal grunt work currently done by underemployed attorneys over to the machines.
Last month, U.S....
“How do you write for children? I really have never figured that out. So I...”
– Maurice Sendak, who died today at 83, discusses creativity and his latest work, ‘Bumble-Ardy,’ in an interview with The Atlantic. Read more.
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“In something called the Orion Molecular Cloud, truly vast amounts of water are...”
– BLDGBLOG
“The Pentagon halted its cooperation with Marvel Studios’ blockbuster movie The...”
– Danger Room
“We couldn’t reconcile the unreality of this international organization and our place in it. To whom did S.H.I.E.L.D. answer? Did we work for S.H.I.E.L.D.? We hit that roadblock and decided we couldn’t do anything” – Phil Strub, the Defense Department’s Hollywood...
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“We have fewer things you can click, and they’re bigger.”
– Peter on designing the Dashboard. (Via Storyboard)
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“Local news outlets get less than one half of one percent of all pageviews in a...”
– Nieman Journalism Lab boils down an FCC commissioned report by Matthew Hindman.
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“It may not be out of place to note here the difference between gray as spelt...”
– Field’s Chromatography (1856) is blowing my mind.
The fine language and discussion of color in this book is almost magical. It’s like a spell book for wielding hues and tints; something that must have been a magical talent in the mid 19th century. Field’s evokes a way of seeing...
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More nerds would be DJs if they knew that assembling a crate of records is just like building a Magic deck.
Too bad Yahoo didn't Google him first. →
Kara Swisher writes:
A Yahoo spokesperson just confirmed as true allegations from an activist shareholder Dan Loeb of Third Point that its CEO Scott Thompson did not have a computer science degree as claimed on his bio and in regulatory filings.
He does not, a mistake that the Silicon Valley Internet giant is calling an “inadvertent error.”
Except this is a mistake that goes back 10...