March 2010
82 posts
“Is this a legitimate organisation? Only they’ve been sending threatening...”
– A Drowned In Sound forum thread on the Performing Right Society, “PRS for Music”.
Tchotchke... →
…(typically pronounced as “Chach-Kee”) — originally from a Slavic word for “toys” - are small gewgaws, knickknacks, baubles, lagniappes, trinkets, or kitsch. The term has a connotation of worthlessness or disposability, as well as tackiness, and was long used in the Jewish-American community and in the regional speech of New York City.
And didn’t Thom Yorke...
“Three women walk into a pub and say, ‘Hooray, we’ve colonised a...”
– Bill Bailey (via brilliantology & bingoparaphernalia)
Someone add this to the Wikipedia page on meta-jokes please.
“I discovered something early on in terms of how product development works, and...”
– Music and merch. Bands over-think design. Fans want big loud logos. (via rickyv)
I think this is true of a lot of creative products. While those creating them want artistry, the people buying them purely want function - and that may well be social function, in which case simple indicators often...
Self-publishing for the iPad →
mrgan:
Before we knew what to call the iPad, I expressed hope that Apple’s reinvention of the book (which may end up being a big part of the iPad story) would include a sort of iLife for writers: a simple, fun, and elegant way to self-publish books. Apple didn’t do this, but it looks like smaller services like Smashwords will do their best. Whether they’ll do an Apple-level job of it remains to...
“Wikipedia is written by 75% males who are on average 25 years old, a study has...”
– The Guardian
“Universities in the UK should beware of treating overseas students as...”
– BBC News
I’ve seen this first hand, but have lots of lovely Scandinavian friends as a result, so it’s not all bad.
I'm still intrigued by DailyBooth... →
It seems to have a really strong community of people who love it. And I like the fact that it knows its audience…early teens who don’t seem to care about that the very concept of the site is quite superficial.
I also have a theory that it partly provoked Tumblr’s introduction of photo replies in order to stop DB capturing too much of the audience in that demographic that Tumblr...
“In addition to having the most awesome name ever, Maj. Gen. Justice also heads...”
– TUAW - “US Army meets with Apple, discusses tech for soldiers”
I bet AT&T signal’s rubbish in Basra though.
Why Behavioral Economists Love Farmville →
newsweek:
(Even though we honestly think it’s kind of a waste of time).
Added to Instapaper - but as an aside, I love how the Newsweek Tumblr is slightly more informal and irreverent than the rest of the publication’s output.
“Foods high in fat, salt or sugar, the national lottery, alcohol, infant baby...”
– The Guardian says that even under proposed new, liberalised TV product placement legislation these products would still be banned from receiving paid placement in programmes.
“Of course, it’s easy to see why the tech community has mobilized around the...”
– The Startup Visa Act Must Be Stopped
Tumblr now has a Blackberry app.
But I wish the team would make the user experience of the iPhone app as delightful as the website.
Call me a moaner, but I don’t like markdown…
(ONML).
“While Farmville does seem borderline exploitative at times, I also am amazed at...”
– Nabeel Hyatt - Are you a progressive or conservative on the game industry?
“My attitude toward my own writing is simple: I assume that everything I write is...”
– ‘The Genius in All of Us,’ by David Shenk
“I predict education will be our biggest export 10 years from now.”
– Gordon Brown
bijan sabet: My trouble with eBay →
Selling on eBay is awful in my experience […]
Click through for Bijan’s full post - I’ve just left the following comment:
I’ve had exactly the same experience. eBay has become something it was never meant to be - it started as a place for hard-to-find or potentially high-value goods, but has become simply “Craigslist with a payment system”. This results in the...
“It’s like the Salem witch trials, and healthcare is the witches. There is...”
– Democratic congressman Barney Frank on the protests around the healthcare bill.
This morning in Number 10
GB: "Obama's got a healthcare bill? That's not fair, I want one!"
Aide: "We already have universal free-at-the-point-of-use health care, Prime Minister".
GB: "What *can* I announce then?"
Aide: "Erm...an iPhone app?"
“Get ready to never ever ever leave your phone on the bar, ever.”
– Nick Douglas on PayPal’s new “Phone-Tapping Money Transfers”.
“The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined...”
– Don’t blame us, blame the algorithms!
Tumblr directory
Been doing a very unscientific experiment recently: it seems paid placement atop the (fantastic new) Tumblr directory (specifically the “startups” section) yields fewer new followers than organic placement lower down the page after being nominated by other Tumblr users.
I assume this is because organic placements also appear alongside the dashboard, whereas paid ones don’t.
I...
“In 5 years time, talking about ‘social games’ will be like talking about...”
– Kristian Segerstrale of Playfish, quoted by John Willshere on Twitter.
I’ve seen variants on this sentiment quite a lot, more often about “social media” than “social games” (in fact someone replied to @willsh saying this soon after).
(via blackbeardblog)
Loads of cool stuff cut for...
“Founded in 1984, Nissan’s Sunderland factory employs around 4,000 people.”
– The Guardian on the manufacture of a groundbreaking new electric car, the Nissan Leaf.
I’ve of course always known that large factories are integral to regional economies and employment markets, but for some reason I’ve been ignorant of the fact that they can be quite *this* huge. ...
“The danger is that it becomes a dysfunctional swiss army knife which would be a...”
– Bijan Sabet on the subject of the ideal music social network, but this goes for any product: tech, social, whatever.
See also: Woolworths, retail banking, buying decent produce from town centre supermarkets.
“Windows Phone 7 Series won’t be able to cut and paste, as Microsoft...”
– The Register
Hehe, I wonder what the internal meetings were like: “well, it worked for Apple…”
“On certain days, we’re consuming more Internet capacity than Sweden has as a...”
– Spotify CEO Daniel Ek
“Remember, the best engineered products don’t win; the best customer...”
– Startups Have Too Many Engineers (via viiv & mikehudack)
“Often the accessibility features built into operating systems or mobile devices...”
– Is quoting yourself one of the most egotistical things a blogger can do?
“I’m convinced that customer acquisition is the most overlooked and understated...”
– 5 things I “knew” (or should have known) before starting a company, but didn’t fully understand until now (via hiten)
“The gadgets of the information age have had nothing like the transformative...”
– The Boring Age: 10 Ideas for the Next 10 Years
“eBay noted that Paypal represents 50% of total payments on Facebook, and by the...”
– Another gem from Mark Mahaney at Citicorp. (via pauldubois)
Rafer sez: It took me a day to realize it, but virtual goods are already 5%+ of EBay’s overall revenue, and PayPal is nearly 30% (?) of it. This is some of the sexiest revenue on the planet. Is it really priced in to EBay’s stock?
“Synchronisation is the abused mistress of the music industry with...”
– Simon Pursehouse of Sentric Music
Not as witty as he usually is, but just as insightful!
University of Brighton: Gifting in a Digital World →
Interesting student competition being run by University of Brighton. Nothing to do with Little World Gifts (the startup I work for, new readers), just came across it online, but very interesting that the concept of digital giving is being discussed in education like this.
“Rather than warehouse their children in factory schools invented to instill...”
– The Dropout Economy - 10 Ideas for the Next 10 Years
I agree with the general principles at play here, but the specifics of this article sound like someone at Time magazine has been reading a bit too much cyberpunk fiction.
Newspaper economics: online and offline →
If you’ve not seen this post by Google’s chief economist yet, it really is essential reading if you want to understand the future of journalism, or even digital content in general.
Which are your favourite art blogs?
I’ve had a look in the Tumblr directory and there are lots of pretty pictures, but I want NEWS and (not too in-depth) ANALYSIS. (Not just looking for Tumblr-based ones though).
Gawker don’t have one, so I don’t know where to start… ;-)
The dullest blog in the world →
It could be real…
“One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we...”
– William Gibson (via bashford)
He was of course referring to virtual gifts ;-)
“Roughly 50% of the cost of producing a physical newspaper is in printing and...”
– Google Public Policy Blog
“Maybe the whole thing will feel hokey to people who expect their $500 gadget to...”
– Neven Mrgan on the iPad, in particular the page-turn UI metaphors of iBooks.