What caught my eye in the last few days:
- Computers Disconnect Kids from Parents–I’ve found that my desire to keep my kids as interested in the outside world as they are in the inside world has been a great incentive for me to get my butt away from the computer and my head out of my cellphone’s mail reader. I didn’t set up email after my last cellphone crash, and I leave it on the charger during the weekends. Teaching kids, who are as distracted by technology as we are, how to focus on the now is as important as teaching them how to drive the computers. Teaching them has forced me to do it myself, and I’m loving it.
- YPulse–“Ypulse provides daily news & commentary about Generation Y for media and marketing professionals”. Daily dose of what’s on kids minds.
- Comedy Central’s Motherload–broadband comedy site with multiple “channels”, playlists, etc. Designed for “snacking” on 4-5 minute clips rather than 30m shows. I completely disagree with their thesis that “TV is the best place to watch full length TV”. I hate watching TV on the TV, I love it on my laptop. If I could get the flexibility of my laptop in my TV experience, I might change my mind.
- Noboto interview with Why The Lucky Stiff–his OSCON segment was weird and wild. This is definitely on the weird rather than wild side. [Via]
- Everyware: Planning for user experience in ubiquitous computing–notes from a talk on the need to consider users when building software into everything around us. “Domain of action: body (e.g., pets, SenseWear by Body Media), room (e.g., Sensacell), street (e.g., facial pattern recognition for identification), the project of everware is the colonization of everyday life by information processing.” I love the 5 principles of ethical design. Sample principle: #3: Be conservative face. Let people save face. It’s always social systems. Don’t necessarily embarrass, humiliate or shame their users. Design “moments of amnesty.”. Very relevant to ETech and the idea of ambient interfaces to reduce interruptions.
- Notes from a Martin Wattenberg lecture at SIMS–Martin is a visualization guru working for IBM. He did the map of the market and the baby name visualization and has been working with us on the book market visualizations you might have seen at any of Tim’s recent “State of the Tech Book Market” talks.
- Goodbye–interesting to see people moving from self-employment to working for others. It bucks the startup trend, but it’s nice to see labour flowing in all directions. Their rant about ethnographic/market research is great.
- Summaries of PopTech talks–fascinating reading.
- The Interesting Economy–interesting thoughts, heh. I’ve been looking at it from a higher level: Y! et al. are not buying companies with great revenue figures, they’re buying interesting companies. This means entrepreneurs are being rewarded for something other than building a sound company. I doubt this is sustainable for very long.
- Sync iTunes to Phones–I wonder how long this will last. Apple has a history of treating any application not foreseen by the Apple Business Plan as something to C&D or slam the doors on. I think Apple wants a slice of the $4B ringtone market more than it wants happy users able to transfer songs to their phones.
- Producing Open Source Software–Karl Fogel’s latest book. Pick it up in PDF, HTML, or print. Covers everything from mailing list Reply-To fights to the finer nuances of governance decisions.
- WorldKit goes open source–Flash-based mapping based on GeoRSS. “The license for worldKit will remain the same: free for non-commercial use, a license purchase required for commercial use”. Are there true OSI-approved licenses with these restrictions?
- SyncroEdit–like Writely but they’re an open source project. I’ve been waiting for this: in theory, companies will want Writely-style functionality within their firewall, so their business plans and marketing documents don’t get send across the intarweb. I have never thought that there’d be much of a business in “word processing on the web”, regardless of how much I love Writely, but I think that wikiwyg-style components are ingredients of much better and bigger apps that will be a business.
- Doing the Numbers on the AOL-WeblogsInc Deal–calculating the value of blogs and traffic. Assuming blogs are valued by the # links into them (questionable), blogs might be worth upward of $500 per inbound link.
- Great Guinness Ad–“The Rhythm of Life”. I find that Apple-leftarrow in a Firefox window with a Quicktime movie in it causes the move to play backward. Do this and see if you can find the continuity error.
- Remember the Milk—another todo list manager web app. This must be 1982 again and we’re all reinventing Borland Sidekick, only now we Terminate and Play Resident (Evil) instead of Terminate and Stay Resident. Sorry, folks. Long way to go for that joke, I know.
- Blockbuster could have bought Netflix for $50MM–I doubt Blockbuster would have known what to do with Netflix. Think of it like this: if BB had bought Nf, would the Netflix part of Blockbuster be a $1.4BB company now or would Blockbuster have crushed it to avoid killing its cash cow regional stores? I know what my money’s on.
- MC Hammer visits Google–note the Web 1.0 poster on the background. Merlin, MC Hammer has gazed upon your countenance and thought, no doubt, “WTF?”
- Outsource Your Life–I think it’s a joke, but I have so fantasized about having an assistant to do all the things that I completely suck at in my life.
- New Zealand Innovation Fund–great to see things happening in my own (soon-to-be) back yard.
- Fads are So Yesterday–the fad of cool hunting has cooled into a new take on market research. Interesting to learn how much those reports cost. Ay ay ay!
- Ernie Cline–how did I not realize how unbelievably awesome he is when Chip Salzenberg pointed me to him way way way long ago?