“ All of the energy concentrated in one gallon of gasoline is enough to charge an iPhone once a day for almost 20 years.”
ExxonMobil’s Perspectives Blog
ExxonMobil’s intent is to illustrate our need for gasoline, but every time I see this figure I can only think that internal combustion engines could become more efficient.
Take note PR teams: this is a poor metaphor to use if your audience treasures their phones more than cars.
The new version of Tweetings uses a lifts Tweetbots’ switch control to toggle between mobilizer and full web. Interesting.
Update: Chartier informs me that not only is Tweetings a rip off of the unfortunately named but wonderfully designed Helvititweet, but this particular feature is ripped off note for note from Tweetbot. Go buy Tweetbot if you haven’t already. While unaware of its mobilizer, I already thought it was the top iOS Twitter app.
Ah, App Store politics.
On the Language of Marriage
Nick Kam dives into the Perry v. Brown opinion and discovers “the law clears at the 9th Circuit are having too much fun”:
We need consider only the many ways in which we encounter the word “marriage” in our daily lives and understand it, consciously or not, to convey a sense of significance. We are regularly given forms to complete that ask us whether we are “single” or “married.” newspapers run announcements of births, deaths, and marriages. We are excited to see someone ask, “will you marry me?”, whether on bended knee in a restaurant or in text splashed across a stadium Jumbotron. Certainly it would not have the same effect to see “will you enter into a registered domestic partnership with me?”
Groucho Marx’s one-liner, “marriage is a wonderful institution… but who wants to live in an institution?” would lack its punch if the word “marriage” were replaced with the alternative phrase. So too with Shakespeare’s “A young man married is a man that’s marr’d,” Lincoln’s “marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it simply purgatory,” and Sinatra’s “A man doesn’t know what happiness is until he’s married. By then it’s too late.” We see tropes like “marrying for love” versus “marrying for money” played out again and again in our films and literature because of the recognized important and permanence of the marriage relationship. Had Marilyn Monroe’s films been called How to Register a Domestic Partnership with a Millionaire, it would not have conveyed the same meaning as did her famous movie, even though the underlying drama for same-sex couples is not different. The name “marriage” signifies the unique recognition that society gives to harmonious, loyal, enduring and intimate relationships.”
Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers
“Two Paths diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one that uploads your entire address book without permission.” -Paul Haddad
“ Build task claims to succeed in spite of generating error messages.”
Content Creep Check-In: Salon’s Record Numbers
A few days ago I noted the continuing erosion of “content” based businesses; businesses that use page views and revenue, not quality, to gauge their output.
But enough of the Demand Media deathwatch, today we have some good news: Salon has turned themselves around by focusing on quality first. Kerry Lauerman, editor in chief of Salon, explains how Salon achieved a record year in 2011 and sees trends continuing in January:
We’ve also — completely against the trend — slowed down our process. We’ve tried to work longer on stories for greater impact, and publish fewer quick-takes that we know you can consume elsewhere. We’re actually publishing, on average, roughly one-third fewer posts on Salon than we were a year ago (from 848 to 572 in December; 943 to 602 in January). So: 33 percent fewer posts; 40 percent greater traffic. [emphasis mine]
What makes this all the more impressive is that only few years ago Salon was making the standard metric-centric decisions which lead to the content-crunch:
A few years ago, as Salon (like all publications), tried to right our ship in deeply troubled recessionary waters, we followed the familiar script of other sites — we laid off terrific staffers to lower our costs; we brutally pared down our expenses; we revamped staff priorities so that writers could simply produce more; we experimented in a fair amount of low-calorie aggregation. And yes, there’s that word: Aggregation, the most inflammatory (and sometimes, hilarious) in our industry… At its worst, we monitored Twitter and Google for trending topics, and dispatched an intern to cobble together our own summary of it, posted it quickly, then prayed to the Google gods that the effort would win, if only briefly, their favor.
Congratulations are in order to Lauerman and his team. It’s great to see Lauerman and Salon’s founder/CEO David Talbot betting on quality and succeeding. (Via Kerry Lauerman)
“ Windows in the building will not be opened nor are they allowed to be opened. This is for your own protection and safety.”
