Percolate!
We’re being involuntarily leveraged by automatons.
ReadWriteWeb: How Pinterest Uses Your Content Without Violating Copyright Laws.
ReadWriteEnterprise: Blogging Declines Across the Inc. 500.
Not surprised. Companies selling products will have an easier time with shorter form content. Getting niche bloggers to write the long stuff, for free or for sponsorship, is the cheaper route.
NY Times: Does Technology Affect Happiness?
“Among the crucial questions that the researchers were not able to answer is whether the heavy use of media was the cause for the relative unhappiness or whether girls who are less happy to begin with are drawn to heavy use of media, in effect retreating to a virtual world.” This article will be the subject of many conversations, I suspect.
Rob Galbraith DPI: Q+A with enlight photo’s James Madelin about ioShutter.
Remember this? Hooks your iOS device to your DSLR. There’s been a lot of buzzing interest about this. The whack is the price of the cable, not the app.
SF New Mexican: CenturyLink customers ‘outraged’ by outage.
Hmmm. CenturyLink should pony up the ‘coffee tax’ price for these folks having to sit at coffeeshops, at the very least.
technology review: One eBook Platform to Rule Them All.
Signed up ages ago, I think I’ve received two emails. Perhaps they’re more prepared now.
CodingBetter: Mythical man month - 10 lines [of code] per developer day.
Interesting discussion.
RWW: Researchers Use Twitter-Bots To Increase Human-To-Human Interaction By 43%.
Are you tweeting with a person, or a robot? I expect brands will invest heavily in this.
Habari Project.
Anyone used it? Opinions? The ability to use PostgreSQL, and the protection against SQL injections is quite nice.
10,000 Words: Quickly Start Your Own Dropbox-Synced Blog with Scriptogram.
Very beta, but looks quite interesting. Wonder if it could handle 80,000+ posts ... ? It’d need some major archive layout work, I think.
SF New Mexican: Damaged cable disrupts Internet service.
“Internet was inaccessible to CenturyLink customers in most of downtown Santa Fe and Tierra Contenta ...” I’m on Comcast. Redundancies, folks?
Nieman Lab: Meet Deep Dive, the NY Times’ experimental context engine and story explorer.
NY Times: Police Use of G.P.S. Is Ruled Unconstitutional.
Pew Research: Tablet and Ebook sales over the holidays.
Tablet and E-Book users almost double.
Day One: Mac Journal Application for iPhone, iPad and Mac Desktop.
Hmmm. They should purchase, and integrate Momento. It not only is a writing environment, but also catalogs all your weblogging and social media activity, as well.
GigaOm: Hacking solutions to the world’s resource problem.
Wrestling big data in interesting ways.
The 99%”: On Criticism, Cynicism & Sharpening Your Gut Instinct.
“… cynicism is a form of doubt resulting from ignorance and antiquated ways.” Oh, great.
RWW: Why Apple, Why Does it Have to Be Like This? The Cold Cynicism of the iBook EULA.
“What a terrible thing to do to a book; to brand it forever constrained for sale by a single vendor only.” Well, that puts a distinct damper on my excitement over the announcement.
ars technica: PIPA support collapses, with 13 new Senators opposed.
Surprisingly, the Right is moving more than the Left. Does Hollywood have such a stranglehold on the Dems?
CSS1K.
Ah, this brings back memories of the original 5K.
The Atlantic: Average Kindle Book 6 Times More Expensive Than Self-Published Titles.
“In 2010 there were zero self-published titles among Amazon’s top 100 bestselling books. In 2011 there were 18. What is drawing customers to these books in such large numbers, many of which are from new authors? Price, says a new report ...” I suspect a section of the market just wants a lot o’ good-lookin’ covers in their book reading app.
Speaking of which. Nosing around on someone else’s tablet or smartphone currently has the cachet of snooping in a medicine cabinet while visiting a friend. Noone admits doing it, but everyone does it. I hand mine over to a client or friend to show a particular item, that interest lasts for 15-30 seconds and then the snooping starts. Seems to be as natural as breathing for just about everyone. I’m going to squirrel away some real doozies on mine, just to scare the hell out of snoopers.
The Atlantic: Time for a Royalty System for Aggregators?
“NewsRight has identified the most aggressive “scrapers”—the scores of sites that search the Internet for news in a range of subject areas and characterize themselves as ‘media databases’ or ‘media monitors’ and sell subscriptions to corporations or government agencies without compensating news organizations. The scale of these businesses has apparently reached a size that, over time, could make a difference to the bottom line of the content generators.” Some of these scrape my stuff regularly - I see the stats. They can’t decide on popularity or stickiness themselves, so they look to good old webloggers to do it for them.
Pinterest is getting some buzz.
Anyone finding it of use, more than say, Tumblrs?
Nieman Journalism Lab: Simplifying publishing could mean a flood of new content.
I’ve discussed the idea of a Hypercard for book publishing, but I doubt we’ll see a program with HC’s sheer Swiss-Army-Knife practicality. As with web design and development, there are forces that want the publishing process to be complex. All the new ebook formats are circling around HTML5 and CSS3. This will bring print software closer to web development IDEs. How simple is HTML5 and CSS3? *cough* Sure, there may be a half-dozen ‘simple’ e-book apps ... but their features will be limited, and the path to more complex authoring will be well-trodden. So, want a *decent* ebook published? Expect to pull out your wallet.
