- Mobile Gaming Device — Cantor Gaming (division of Wall St’s Cantor Fitzgerald) has released a Windows Mobile device to make live bets during a game. Real-time isn’t just for trading, it’s also for sports gambling too.
- Copyright Isn’t Just Hurting Creativity, It’s Killing Science (Video) — Larry Lessig tackles science. I’ve been grappling with technology transfer and the commercialization of academic research for a while, and most scientific discoveries aren’t immediately useful. Some, a rare few, are eventually useful, but even then only after a long time and lot of money spent making repeatable, efficient, and scalable processes from those discoveries. Most science is useless in this sense, never leading to product, so perhaps the general advance of knowledge would happen faster if we worried less about universities doing the commercialization and instead let them get back to focus on discovering more about the world around us. (via BoingBoing)
- This Tech Bubble is Different (BusinessWeek) — notable for this killer quote: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he [Hammerbacher] says. “That sucks.”
- How US News Abandoned Print and Learned to Love Its Data — now has multiple revenue streams including advertising, lead generation, special-edition print, and licenses, all keyed around its data.
"advertising" entries
Four short links: 28 April 2011
Mobile Gambling, Science Copyright, Failure of Advertising, and Data Businesses
Four short links: 15 April 2011
Tweets as Ads, Do Not Track, OnePage Site, and Lessons Learned
(the author apologizes for the late publication of this item)
- Twitter’s Biggest Problem: Tweets are Ads — having just been to my first social media marketing conference, I see what the author’s talking about. Would you want to pay for advertising in the middle of a sea of free ads? (via Hacker News)
- Safari and Do Not Track Support — now that there’s a technical mechanism for consumers to opt out, the next step is to mandate that publishers respect it. Problem: compliance with do-not-track is largely invisible, so there’s nothing like the feedback loop you get with Do Not Call lists where ANY telemarketer is instantly identifiable as a lawbreaker. Instead, you’ll only know Do Not Track is not working if you see useful advertisements. What the–?
- OnePager — a library-focused one-page website for libraries, attempting to focus the library on providing useful information rather than a lot of it. There’s a lesson here for almost every institution with a website. (via Nina Simon)
- Max Levchin’s Lessons Learned — some resonant ones: You can have successful teams where people hate but deeply respect each other; the opposite (love but not respect among team members) is a recipe for disaster.
Four short links: 11 April 2011
Facebook for Non-Profits, Groklaw is Goneburger, Map Ads Mandatory, and Corruption Fought
- Fundraising on Facebook — only 7% [of companies surveyed] cited social networking as one of their most effective sources for customer acquisition […] only 2.4% of non-profits were able to raise over 10k through Facebook in 2010. (via Chris Brogan)
- Groklaw Closes — There will be other battles, and there already are, because the same people that propped SCO up are still going to try to destroy Linux, but the battlefield has shifted, and I don’t feel Groklaw is needed in the new battlefield the way it was in the SCO v. Linux wars. PJ did a wonderful thing and we’ll miss both her and GrokLaw. (via Don Christie)
- Google Maps ToC Changes — we now require that any new Maps API applications going forward display any advertising delivered in the maps imagery, unless the site concerned has a Google Maps API Premier license. (via Flowing Data)
- Root Strikers — Lessig’s new project. Thoreau wrote, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” The root of our political evils is money. Our goal is to build a network of rootstrikers—to talk about this issue, clearly identify the problem, and work together towards practical reforms. At the moment it’s “post and comment” site, a forum, but I hope he’s building an army to channel to other acts. Check out his splendid talk on the subject.
Search Notes: The future of advertising could get really personal
Google mines data for more predictions, Yahoo and Bing evolve the search experience, and how search could change advertising.
In the latest Search Notes: A look at how Google is using its data to make even more predictions; Yahoo and Bing continue to evolve their search experiences; and a look at how search could change advertising and help a few other industries along the way.
Four short links: 23 March 2011
Health Prediction, Fake Ads, Bogus Patents, and Realtime Graphing
- The Heritage Health Competition — Netflix-like contest to analyze insurance-claims data to develop a model that predicts the number of days a patient will spend in hospital in the coming year. $3M prize. (via Aza Raskin)
- Historically Hardcore — fantastic fake Smithsonian ads that manage to make the institution sexy. Naturally they’ve been asked to take them down.
- Another Plato Innovation Ignored — turns out the above-the-fold doodle has a long and glorious history, culminating in a fantastic demonstration of our broken patent system.
- Graphite — Enterprise scalable realtime graphing. Apache 2.0-licensed, written in Python. (via John Nunemaker)
Four short links: 9 February 2011
Javascript Library, Devops Speeds, Kindle Sales, and AOL's Master Plan
- isotope — dazzling Javascript library.
- Designs, Lessons, and Advice from Building Large Distributed Systems (Slideshare) — in the words of Matt Webb, through whom I found it, There’s a lovely collection of numbers from Jeff Dean at Google, about how long common computer processor and network operations take. […] What makes this more human is this comparison, which reveals a little bit about computer time: your equivalent to a computer looking up data from a chip is remembering a fact from your own brain. Your equivalent to a computer looking up data from a disk is fetching that fact from Pluto. Computers live in a world of commonplace interactions not the size of a house, like us, but the Solar System. On their own terms, they are long, long lived, and vast.. (via Matt Webb)
- Amazon Selling More Kindle Books Than Paperbacks (New Scientist) — Since the beginning of the year, for every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold, the Company has sold 115 Kindle books. Additionally, during this same time period the company has sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books. (via Brad DeLong)
- The AOL Way — the leaked business plan for AOL’s content farms. I was fascinated by how big companies plan, but this is yet more sausage best made unseen. Most sausagey for me was Slide 33 showing the fantasy: a story suggested by high searches and advertising possibilities, with heavily “SEO optimized” text. (via Chris Heathcote on Delicious)
Four short links: 27 January 2011
New Browser, Google APIs, NFC Checkin, and XSS Prevention
- Mozilla Home Dash — love this experiment in rethinking the browser from Mozilla. They call it a “browse-based browser” as opposed to “search-based browser” (hello, Chrome). Made me realize that, with Chrome, Google’s achieved a 0-click interface to search–you search without meaning to as you type in URLs, you see advertising results without ever having visited a web site.
- Periodic Table of Google APIs — cute graphic, part of a large push from Google to hire more outreach engineers to do evangelism, etc. The first visible signs of Google’s hiring binge.
- NFC in the Real World (Dan Hill) — smooth airline checkin with fobs mailed to frequent fliers.
- XSS Prevention Cheat Sheet (OWASP) — HTML entity encoding doesn’t work if you’re putting untrusted data inside a script tag anywhere, or an event handler attribute like onmouseover, or inside CSS, or in a URL. So even if you use an HTML entity encoding method everywhere, you are still most likely vulnerable to XSS. You MUST use the escape syntax for the part of the HTML document you’re putting untrusted data into. That’s what the rules below are all about. (via Hacker News)
Pages before ads and other Facebook marketing tips
Authors Dan and Alison Zarrella on how businesses can put Facebook to use.
Traditional marketers and businesses tend to downplay Facebook's utility. That's a mistake, according to Dan and Alison Zarrella, co-authors of "The Facebook Marketing Book." In this interview, they explain why engagement is the key to Facebook campaigns.
Four short links: 13 January 2011
Strict Javascript, Data Corporation, Business Models, Graph Visualization
- Strict Mode is Coming to Town (YUI Blog) — Javascript gets strictures. In addition to the obvious benefits to program reliability and readability, strict mode is helping to solve the Mashup Problem. We want to be able to invite third party code onto our pages to do useful things for us and our users, without giving that code the license to take over the browser or to misrepresent itself to the user or our servers. We need to constrain the third party code.
- Public Data Corporation — UK to form a corporation to centralize both opening and commercializing government data. “A Public Data Corporation will bring benefits in three areas. Firstly and most importantly it will allow us to make data freely available, and where charging for data is appropriate to do so on a consistent basis. It will be a centre where developers, businesses and members of the public can access data and use it to develop internet applications, inform their business decisions or identify ways to run public services more efficiently. Some of this work is already taking place but there is huge potential to do more. Secondly, it will be a centre of excellence where expertise in collecting, managing, storing and distributing data can be brought together. This will enable substantial operational synergies. Thirdly, it can be a vehicle which will attract private investment.” Did I wake up in crazyland? Private Investment?!!
- What If Flickr Fails — thoughtful piece about business models. Among all the revenue diets a company might have, advertising equates best with candy. Its nutritive value is easily-burned carbohydrates. A nice energy boost, but not the protein-rich stuff comprised of products and services that provide direct benefits or persistent assets.
- Arbor.js — graph visualization library in Javascript.
Four short links: 10 November 2010
Facebook Behaviour, Multitouch Modelling, Early Ads, and Gaming Public Transportation
- Risk Reduction Strategies on Facebook (danah boyd) — Mikalah uses Facebook but when she goes to log out, she deactivates her Facebook account. She knows that this doesn’t delete the account – that’s the point. She knows that when she logs back in, she’ll be able to reactivate the account and have all of her friend connections back. But when she’s not logged in, no one can post messages on her wall or send her messages privately or browse her content. Two very interesting practices designed to maintain not just some abstract idea of “privacy” but, more important, control.
- Beautiful Modeler — a software tool for gestural sculpting using a multi-touch controller such as an iPad. (via Andy Baio)
- How Telephone Directories Transformed America — this caught my eye: Less than a year after the New Haven District Telephone Company issued its first directory, it issued a second, and that one augmented listings with advertising. (via Pete Warden)
- Chromarama — a game that shows you your movements and location as you swipe your Oyster Card in and out of the Tube. Points are awarded for avoiding rush hour, visiting new stations, etc. They say they want to change behaviour, but I don’t believe people ride public transportation to collect points, so they travel when they have to and so won’t change their commute times. Would love to be proven wrong, though. (via Roger Dennis)