- The Unengageables (Dan Meyer) — They signed their “didactic contract” years and years ago. They signed it. Their math teachers signed it. The agreement says that the teacher comes into class, tells them what they’re going to learn, and shows them three examples of it. In return, the students take what their teacher showed them and reproduce it twenty times before leaving class. Then they go home with an assignment to reproduce it twenty more times. Then here you come, Ms. I-Just-Got-Back-From-A-Workshop, and you want to change the agreement? Yeah, you’ll hear from their attorney. Applies to management as much as to teaching.
- Fixing Signin — The general principle can be stated simply, in two parts: first, give users a trust-worthy way to identify themselves. Second, do so with as little information as possible, because users don’t want to (and simply can’t) remember things like passwords in a secure way. (via Tim Bray)
- Retro Gaming with Raspberry Pi (Adafruit) — finally, a clear incentive for kids to work through the frustration of setting up their own Linux box.
- Mieko Haire — Apple’s fictious demo lady. Or is she fictitious? This is a new aesthetic-esque glitch, but while most glitches are glitches because you see something that doesn’t exist, this is glitchy because the fictions are actual people. Ok, maybe I need to lay off the peyote.
ENTRIES TAGGED "Marketing"
Four short links: 13 June 2013
The Contract, Fixing Signin, Pi Gaming, and Glitchy Marketing Constructs
The media-marketing merge
Can good content come from pay-to-play relationships?
I ran across a program Forbes is running called BrandVoice that gives marketers a place on Forbes’ digital platform. During a brief audio interview with TheMediaBriefing, Forbes European managing director Charles Yardley explained how BrandVoice works:
“It’s quite simply a tenancy fee. A licensing fee that the marketer pays every single month. It’s based on a minimum of…
Four short links: 10 January 2013
Engineering Virality, App Store Numbers, App Store Data, and FPGA OS
- How To Make That One Thing Go Viral (Slideshare) — excellent points about headline writing (takes 25 to find the one that works), shareability (your audience has to click and share, then it’s whether THEIR audience clicks on it), and A/B testing (they talk about what they learned doing it ruthlessly).
- A More Complete Picture of the iTunes Economy — $12B/yr gross revenue through it, costs about $3.5B/yr to operate, revenue has grown at a ~35% compounded rate over last four years, non-app media 2/3 sales but growing slower than app sales. Lots of graphs!
- Visualizing the iOS App Store — interactive exploration of app store sales data.
- BORPH — an Operating System designed for FPGA-based reconfigurable computers. It is an extended version of the Linux kernel that handles FPGAs as if they were CPUs. BORPH introduces the concept of a ‘hardware process’, which is a hardware design that runs on an FPGA but behaves just like a normal user program. The BORPH kernel provides standard system services, such as file system access to hardware processes, allowing them to communicate with the rest of the system easily and systematically. The name is an acronym for “Berkeley Operating system for ReProgrammable Hardware”.
Three kinds of big data
Looking ahead at big data's role in enterprise business intelligence, civil engineering, and customer relationship optimization.
In the past couple of years, marketers and pundits have spent a lot of time labeling everything ”big data.” The reasoning goes something like this:
Everything is on the Internet.
The Internet has a lot of data.
Therefore, everything is big data.
When you…
Four short links: 17 August 2012
Talking About Your Product, Moving On, Visible Turk, and Digital Nativity
- What Twitter’s API Anouncement Could Have Said (Anil Dash) — read this and learn. Anil shows how powerful it is to communicate from the perspective of the reader. People don’t care about your business model or platform changes except as it applies to them. Focus on what you’re doing for the user, because that’s why you make every change–right? Your average “we’ve changed things” message focuses on the platform not the user: “*we* changed things for *our* reasons” and the implicit message is because *we* have all the power”. Anil’s is “you just got this Christmas present, because we are always striving to make things better for you!”. If it’s deceitful bullshit smeared over an offensive money grab, the reader will smell it. But if you’re living life right, you’re telling the truth. And they can smell that, too.
- Goodbye, Everyblock — Adrian Holovaty is moving on and ready, once more, to make something awesome.
- Turkopticon — transparency about crappy microemployers for people who work on Mechanical Turk. (via Beta Knowledge)
- Digital Natives, 10 Years After (PDF) — we need to move away from this fetish of insisting in naming this generation the Digital/Net/Google Generation because those terms don’t describe them, and have the potential of keeping this group of students from realizing personal growth by assuming that they’ve already grown in areas that they so clearly have not.
Four short links: 9 May 2012
Version Control for Real Stuff, Educators on Food Stamps, Gestural Exploration, and Book Marketing
- We Need Version Control for Real Stuff (Chris Anderson) — This is pointing us toward the next step, a GitHub for stuff. If open source hardware is going to take off like open source software, we need this. (via Evil Mad Scientist)
- Graduates and Post-Graduates on Food Stamps (Chronicle of Higher Education) — two points for me here: the inherent evil of not paying a living wage; and the pain of market signals that particular occupations and specialisations are not as useful as once they were. I imagine it’s hard to repurpose the specific knowledge in a Masters of Medieval History to some other field, though hopefully the skills of diligent hard work, rapid acquisition of knowledge, and critical thought will apply to new jobs. Expect more of this as we replace human labour with automation. I look forward to the software startup which creates work for people outside the organisation; the ultimate “create more value than you capture”.
- Explore Exoplanets with Gestural Interfaces — uses John Underkoffler’s Oblong gestural interface. Underkoffler came up with the Minority Report interface which has fed the dreams of designers for years.
- Book Marketing Lessons Learned (Sarah Milstein) — I really liked this honest appraisal of how Baratunde Thurston marketed his “How to be Black” book, and am doubly chuffed that it appeared on the O’Reilly Radar blog. I was fascinated by his Street Team, but knew I wanted to bring it to your attention when I read this. Start with your inner circle. I had an epiphany with Gary Vaynerchuk. I asked: “Did I ever ask you to buy my book?” He said, “Yeah, I bought it yesterday.” I talked about his book, but cash on the table — it didn’t happen. He wished he had identified everyone he knows, sending a personal note explaining: “A) buy the book; B) this means a lot to me. You owe me or I will owe you. Here’s some things you can do to help: If you have speaking opportunities, let me know. For instance, I would love to speak at schools.” Make it easy for people who want to help you. Everything else is bonus. If you haven’t already converted the inner circle, you’ve skipped a critical step. “Let the people who already love you show it” is the skill I feel like I’ve spent years working on, and still have years to go.
True in spirit: Why I liked "Captain America," but didn't like "John Carter"
A common and honest essence unites characters and businesses alike.
Why is the "Captain America" film a better adaptation than "John Carter"? Because "Captain America" understands the essence of what matters about the main character. The same notion applies to the authenticity of business brands.
The sorry state of ebook samples, and four ways to improve them
A good ebook sample can turn a browser into a buyer.
Joe Wikert: "My gut tells me the revenue missed by not converting samples into sales is a much larger figure than the revenue lost to piracy. And yet, the publishing industry spends a small fortune every year in DRM but treats samples as an afterthought."
Top Stories: April 2-6, 2012
Data and context are always linked, data outputs beyond visualizations, state of the computer book market.
This week on O'Reilly: Mike Loukides explained why problems arise when data is taken out of social contexts, Robbie Allen looked at six ways insight can be extracted from datasets, and Mike Hendrickson analyzed the current state of the computer book market.
Top Stories: September 12-16, 2011
Building data science teams, the evolution of data products, and the grunt work of data journalism.
This week on O'Reilly: DJ Patil revealed the skills and qualities of great data science teams, we learned that new data products put emphasis on experiences rather than on the data itself, and Simon Rogers discussed the considerable effort that goes into The Guardian's data journalism.
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