- Mobile Numbers (Luke Wroblewski) — eBay’s mobile shoppers and mobile payers are 3 to 4 times more valuable than Web only [...] Yelp runs ads on the mobile web, and those ads see a higher clickthrough rate than their desktop counterparts.
- Data-Driven Restaurants (Washingtonian) — Did Elizabeth bring your Pinot Gris within three minutes of the time you ordered it? Were your appetizers delivered within seven minutes, entrées within ten, desserts within seven? Were these plates described at the table before they were set in front of you? Were napkins refolded when you went to the restroom? Was non-bottled water referred to as “ice water” (correct) or “water” (incorrect)? (via Daniel Bachhuber)
- Rei Toei (Jesse Vincent) — Writing a plugin to give Rei a new superpower is a few lines of JavaScript. Very early stage project, but one to watch. Siri + ircbots + NLP = awesome. (Open source on GitHub)
- Content Detection Fail (Ars Technica) — five other media organizations (mostly television stations, including some from overseas) had claimed the content of his video through YouTube’s Content ID system. That video? A Google+ hangout where he played NASA videos of the Mars landing. Shonky rights verification is a problem, as Google pays ad royalties to those who claim the rights–creating incentives to lie. And as Google doesn’t pay any royalties while material is disputed and the dispute is unresolved, it’s not really in Google’s interest to make this work either. (via Andy Baio)
ENTRIES TAGGED "media"
Four short links: 13 August 2012
Mobile Money, Quantified Server, Mobile Chatbot, and YouTube's Content Detection
Four short links: 2 August 2012
Creative Business, News Design, Google Earth Glitches, and Data Distortion
- Patton Oswalt’s Letters to Both Sides — You guys need to stop thinking like gatekeepers. You need to do it for the sake of your own survival. Because all of us comedians after watching Louis CK revolutionize sitcoms and comedy recordings and live tours. And listening to “WTF With Marc Maron” and “Comedy Bang! Bang!” and watching the growth of the UCB Theatre on two coasts and seeing careers being made on Twitter and Youtube. Our careers don’t hinge on somebody in a plush office deciding to aim a little luck in our direction. (via Jim Stogdill)
- Headliner — interesting Guardian experiment with headlines and presentation. As always, reading the BERG designers’ notes are just as interesting as the product itself. E.g., how they used computer vision to find faces and zoom in on them to make articles more attractive to browsing readers.
- Google Earth Glitches — where 3d maps and aerial imagery don’t match up. (via Beta Knowledge)
- Campbell’s Law — The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. (via New York Times)
NBC #Fail
Choking the Olympic spirit for profit.
I’m violating my first rule. I’m writing angry. But…
I love the olympics. I love sport. And the olympics, still, despite it all, seem to me an incredible distillation of sport’s dedication, intensity, joy, humanity, and drama. Whether it’s the higher order game theory playing out in the biking peloton, the slowly evolving drama of the marathon, the sheer primal…
Four short links: 25 May 2012
Music Industry, Subscribe to Me, Pipe Progress, and Modern Careers
- Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss — transcript of a thoughtful music industry insider considering the effect of the net on the business. The other problem? I’ve been expecting for years now to see aggregate revenue flowing to artist increase. Disintermediation promised us this. It hasn’t happened. Everywhere I look artists seem to be working more for less money. And every time I come across aggregate data that is positive it turns out to have a black cloud inside. Example: Touring revenues up since 1999. Because more bands are touring, staying on the road longer and playing for fewer people. Surely you all can see Malthusian trajectory?
- Kottke on Quarterly — I eyed TED’s book club and thought “hmm, interesting business model: you like my taste, sign up and I’ll send you things”. Quarterly is a “my taste as a service” service. (via Sacha Judd)
- Pipe Viewer — clever little command-line utility to show progress of pipes.
- Sheryl Sandberg’s HBS Class Day Speech — two things stood out, beyond the honesty of the talk: If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat (that’s her quoting Eric Schmidt) and [careers] are not a ladder; they’re a jungle gym (her quoting Facebook’s head of HR). (via Sacha Judd)
Visualization of the Week: Avengers Assemble
Jer Thorp visualizes the history of "The Avengers."
In this week's visualization, The New York Times' data artist Jer Thorp visualizes the appearances of "The Avengers" in the comic book series.
A brief history of data journalism
Key milestones in data journalism's development.
In this excerpt from "The Data Journalism Handbook," Liliana Bounegru connects the dots between the earliest forms of data journalism, the rise of computer-assisted reporting, and today's data-driven media efforts.
Top Stories: March 19-23, 2012
Google Maps alternatives, inside Dart, and the upside of offline.
This week on O'Reilly: StreetEasy's Sebastian Delmont explained why his team left Google Maps behind, we looked at the ins and outs of the Dart programming platform, and Jim Stogdill considered the alternatives to always-on living.
My Paleo Media Diet
Turning off, opting out, and disconnecting to save my brain for the things I really want to use it for.
Jim Stogdill is tired of running on the info treadmill, so he's changing his media habits. His new approach: "Where I can, adapt to my surroundings, where I can't, adapt my surroundings to me."
Piracy is not a pricing signal
Lost sales from illegal downloads are lost because of convenience, not price.
The inconvenience of current downloads and streams are not a technology problem, they're a business problem. And rights holders perpetuate the piracy "problem" by not giving consumers the convenience that piracy does.
Four short links: 8 March 2012
Compete on Convenience, Minimal Viable Operating System, Awesome Font, Collaboration Integration
- Add Torrent Links to IMDB (Userscripts) — a glimpse at what the Internet could look like: from the site you research movies on, with one click you could then launch the download. If only the company that ran the movie research site had rights to the OneClick patent and the ability to offer movies for download. Oh wait, those aren’t the barriers. If only the movie companies would cease being nutjobs insisting on flogging their DRM-hobbled nags when the black market has x264 racehorses for less. They’re not competing on price, they’re not competing on convenience, they’re competing on the expected value of litigation. Now *that’s* a business model!
- JeOS — I hadn’t heard this term before: Just Enough Operating System. Take a standard distro, and strip it down to the bare essentials that you actually need.
- Font Awesome — a font with a zillion pictograms and icons. “An iconic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap”.
- Collabograte — a collection of integration recipes for collaboration tools so you aren’t broken on the “how do I get this thing set up with LDAP auth?” wheel which others have reinvented with their nose to the mixed metaphor grindstone. (via Kartik Subbarao)
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