December 2010
Hedge Fund Wants to Use Twitter to Predict Stock... →
Um, they’re already doing this…
I swear some sites are foregoing upgrading their flash players so I have to watch yet another preroll every time the video freezes.
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Roxy Music.
This song freaks me out. It’s...
As it awaits WikiLeaks bomb, Bank of America buys... →
No matter what happens when WikiLeaks releases an expected flood of internal documents from Bank of America, there’s one thing you can count on: All will be quiet over at BrianMoynihanBlows.com. Because BofA owns the rights to that particular domain name.
“If Sister Act gives religion a mild tweak, The Book of Mormon pulls every one of...”
– Vogue
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NPR Names Apple's Ping a 'Worst Idea of 2010' →
File under #whitewhine. I’m no Ping fan, but it seems to me there might be some worse ideas than a stillborn social network.
A few ideas for NPR, besides not having a good social network in iTunes:
Wyclef Jean raises money for Haiti with his questionable charity, then decides to run for president.
BP & co. decide that replacing the faulty cement on the bottom of the ocean isn’t...
WTF: CIA launches task force to assess impact of... →
Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force. But at CIA headquarters, it’s mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: W.T.F.
Amazing.
Home Alone, IV-X →
(Via McSweeneys)
“This year, 26.2 percent of all jobs added by private sector employers were...”
– NYTimes
Can economic and employee growth occur if employers aren’t staying at jobs long enough for learning and advancement?
The Kindle WiFi is Sold Out for Christmas
So says Amazon.
I think it’s safe to say this platform is sticking around for the long haul. Don’t go buying Nooks anytime soon.
“The $80 Roku XD streaming player is #9 on Amazon’s best-selling gadgets list,...”
– Roku CEO: Sales Doubled When Apple TV Launched
Go Roku! (via ericmortensen)
PHD Wins $1.4 Billion GSK U.S. Media Account →
I couldn’t ask for a better way to end a job: the privilege of helping creating great work with a great team and taking home an absolutely giant win.
Rebuffering is the new commercial break.
NASA Engineers Propose Combining a Rail Gun and a... →
Best headline of the day.
Wall Street Journal says apps may violate privacy,... →
This is getting absurd, WSJ.
Look, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you’re not paying for music, you’re the product being sold. Pay if you’re wary, or, just relax and realize that a server storing your taste in music isn’t the end of the world, let alone a problem.
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“Today, we already light up more than a rack of new servers every week.”
– Tumblr Staff: Getting ready for 2011
"Delicious Gifts for the Manchild Struggling to... →
Gizmodo is very frank with their audience.
hman:
Yogi Bear: Barely smarter than your average cartoon
‘Yogi Bear’ less funny than the average bear
‘Yogi Bear’: Dumber than the average cartoon adaptation
‘Yogi Bear’ Review: No Smarter Than the Average Sack of Doorknobs
Yogi Bear is better than the average family film
‘Yogi Bear’ is no better than the average kid’s flick
‘Yogi Bear’ dumber than the average bear
‘Yogi Bear’ is...
Official Google Blog: Governments shouldn’t have a... →
“No, you are!”
Also: bad word choice with ‘governance.’
“One of the first systems our engineers built in AWS is called the Chaos Monkey....”
– Netflix engineer John Ciancutti, on their Amazon Web Service tactics. (Via Netflix Techblog)
A semblance of myself is slowly being uploaded to Amazon. Until their servers stop, I will live on as a preference for cooking utilities, electronic gadgets, and deconstructionist criticism.
"The Speakularity" →
Over at the Nieman Journalism Lab, NPR’s Matt Thompson predicts a massive moment in our future: “The Speakularity.” Thompson writes,
At some point in the near future, automatic speech transcription will become fast, free, and decent. And this moment — let’s call it the Speakularity — will be a watershed moment for journalism.
After this moment phone conversations, press...
If you want to dehumanize your customers, require them to say words aloud to computers in order to navigate your customer service.
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Body Browser - Google Labs →
Googler A: “Hey guys, I’ve just thought up perfect the product idea to give something back to the people after our recent creepy behavior!”
Googler B: “This is perfect! According to our data, x-rays and body imaging search trends are through the roof this quarter!”
(It’s really cool. Body Browser is just a really, really unfortunate name.)
Search Is No. 2 Online Activity Across All Age... →
This is the stupidest metric I’ve seen. It’s like saying channel changing is the top TV behavior.
Pew, you should know better.
“iPhone games aren’t exactly cinematic, but I’ve definitely been...”
– Zero Punctuation reviews a selection of iPhone games.
I’m starting to think that Instagram is just a Tumblr app.
Court Upholds Ban on World of Warcraft Bot →
Apparently game playing robots are illegal under the DMCA:
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the Glider bot, which automatically kills enemies and performs other Warcraft functions while you’re away from your computer, is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act provision banning the marketing of products that circumvent a technological measure that “effectively controls...
Measuring the Value of Data: Scale or Sort
Twitter’s growth is stalling, reports TechCrunch. To put the problem in perspective, Erick Schonfeld adds some context:
At 24 million U.S. unique visitors, that makes Twitter.com about the same size as Yelp, and smaller than LinkedIn (28.5 million) or the Huffington Post (26 million). Twitter needs to reignite growth in the U.S. if it wants to ever be in the same weight class as Facebook...
Nestle is Buying Jenny Craig →
Not a joke. In this business world, this is called ‘double-dipping.’
Pun(s) not intended, but it’s never too late to make these things literal.
Law and the Multiverse →
Here is a blog that considers law, superheroes, and supervillains. Some recent discussions:
If Wolverine is nearly impossible to kill, does it constitute a crime if one tried? If so, what crime?
Do RICO laws mean members of Legion of Doom are more vulnerable to criminal prosecution?
Where should my secret lair be located to maximize jurisdiction and tax benefits?
The Problem with Targeting Geeks →
Google sent out a limited number of their Chrome OS netbooks to companies and developers, free of charge, to test, debug, and develop.
And what’s the first thing they do? Hack the thing to run Ubuntu.
Great Service: LinkedIn reset passwords for...
Just received an email from LinkedIn asking me to reset my password as my old one has been deactivated. Sure enough, my log-in for LinkedIn is the email associated with Gawker. Smart move: take advantage of the published passwords to squash false log-ins before they start.
“The internet is completely over.”
– Prince (via humancomputer)
“I called it quits at Google three weeks ago so I could help web users better...”
– Brian Kennish, a former Googler, who quit to build browser plug-ins to block tracking by Google and other entities.
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Is there a word processor that takes advantage of an internet connection?
