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links for 2010-03-10

  • "From a news point of view, getting story data from a writer and keeping it in a database is a solved problem. There is excellent free software out there that does this much better than I could ever hope to. What blogware does not do well is arrange stories hierarchically. Where Holovaty is right is that these blobs (and 99% of news on the web now is in blob-form) need to be repurposed, because blogware isn’t designed with news judgement in mind. This is why I wrote Homer. Homer is for news homepages."

links for 2010-03-09

  • "The conclusion of our study is that, summing the conservative, low-end estimates of 11 categories of economic impact yields an aggregate estimate of the current costs of digital exclusion at over $55 billion per year. Furthermore, over time, the costs of digital exclusion are likely to increase, as technological advances in key sectors enhance the efficiencies enjoyed by digitally included populations and therefore magnify the costliness of being excluded."
  • "Snap Groups is a free, web-based service that helps you connect without the chaos of other online communities. Here's what's great about Snap Groups:

    * Snap Groups is faster than other online groups because it lets you send and read messages, called snaps, in real-time
    * No email flooding your inbox – and no spam or viruses!
    * Read replies and conversations without battling unwanted headers, links, graphics, and ads
    * See the public groups your friends are in, and what they are posting about
    * It's easy to unsubscribe from a group – or make groups private – with a single click
    * Automatically Tweet and email your friends from Snap Groups to invite them to your group!
    * It's easy and free to register, so join Snap Groups, and you can start posting in seconds!"

  • Public TV:

    "This 3-part series takes viewers on an in-depth tour of the science of human emotions in an effort to truly understand what makes us tick. Every day, it seems, some new study reveals a previously hidden epidemic of depression, anxiety or other psychological problem. At the root of the confusion lie 3 key questions: what is biological, what is cultural and what can we do when things go wrong?

    "After centuries of assuming that we humans, with our mysterious minds and messy emotions, were just not fit subjects for study, science has developed some startling insights into human nature. Using the latest cutting edge research from neuroscience, startling observations from social science and experts in psychology, the series explores the biological need for social relationships, how to manage negative feelings and the search for greater happiness, unveiling a new understanding of what it means to be human."

  • This probably is mostly smartphones, not feature phones:

    "25.1 million people are accessing Facebook via a mobile Web browser, a growth of 112 percent from January 2009, according to new research from comScore. Twitter use via a mobile browser grew 347 percent to 4.7 million users. MySpace lured 11.4 million users. In total, some 30.8 percent of smartphone users accessed Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites via their mobile browser in January 2010. Apple's iPhone 3GS and Google Android devices such as the Motorola Droid and Nexus One make it easier for users to access applications they would normally only be comfortable using from their PCs and Macs."

  • "Spotty or expensive service can be limiting to users. Societal norms often leave women in charge of raising families and caring for the home, work that does not earn an income for women to afford a cell phone or airtime. In countries where the cost of making calls is prohibitively expensive, users are left to rely on either SMS messaging or beeps – calling other users and hanging up, so that the recipient calls back the original 'beeper' using their minutes.

    "These work-arounds have distinct downsides; SMS requires literacy in a language supported on cell phones, is relatively expensive as a means of communicatins comparied to women's incomes, and beeping requires having contacts that can financially support making phone calls."

  • "A new report, “Women and Mobile: A Global Opportunity,” by the GSMA Development Fund, the Cherie Blair Foundation and Vital Wave Consulting, tackles the issue of the gender gap in mobile phone usage with a focus on low- and middle-income countries.

    "The report gathered its data through field research, and surveys of 2000 women in four countries (Bolivia, Egypt, India and Kenya), in-depth interviews with mobile telecommunications leaders and academics, and statistical analysis of outside data sources (the GSMA’s Wireless Intelligence Database, statistics from the United Nations, and others). The report found:

    "A woman is still 21% less likely to own a mobile phone than a man. This figure increases to 23% if she lives in Africa, 24% if she lives in the Middle East, and 37% if she lives in South Asia. Closing this gender gap would bring the benefits of mobile phones to an additional 300 million women."

  • Great overview/link list from Steve Buttry.

The Onion: How will the end of print journalism affect old loons who hoard newspapers?

Pretty much says it all. It may be the only market they have left:


How Will The End Of Print Journalism Affect Old Loons Who Hoard Newspapers?

links for 2010-03-05

links for 2010-03-04

  • "Foursquare may still be relatively small (around 450,000 users), but wow have they been able to woo certain areas of the mainstream quickly. We already know about the deals with Conde Nast, Marc Jacobs, the New York Times, and others — some of which are pulling in revenue. And then there’s the Bravo deal, which has already included a commercial spot. But now, Foursquare is getting love in the bright lights of Vegas.

    "Yes, the pictures above and below were taken at the Miracle Mile Shops attached to the Planet Hollywood hotel in Las Vegas. As you can see, the huge ads entice users to check-in at the mall. If you do so, they might highlight your check-in, any tips, and even show who the current mayor (the Foursquare user who has checked-in most often) of the mall is prominently."

  • "Seen from the perspective of traditional business, social enterprise can seem like a madman’s pursuit. That was Tom Tierney’s initial experience when he left Bain and Company to found the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit dedicated to helping organizations that serve others. In this audio lecture, Tierney takes us from the niggling little voice asking if he was leading his life in a meaningful way through his adventure to break with his old but lucrative life and pursue something that would truly make a social impact. He spoke at the Innovation Summit, an event organized by Civic Ventures and sponsored by the Center for Social Innovation to celebrate social entrepreneurs over the age of 50."
  • "Google removed SearchWiki, the feature that allowed you to customize search results by promoting them, removing them or adding comments below search snippets. SearchWiki cluttered search results and the aggregated results from public SearchWiki pages were rarely useful."

links for 2010-03-03

  • "10 to the 27th power is a colossal number, but will it be accepted as being hella big?
    "An oft-hated slang word coined in Northern California has been proposed as a worthy entry into the field of scientific measurement when calculating enormous numbers. Austin Sendek, a physics student at UC Davis, wants the number of 10 to the 27th power — a trillion trillions — to officially become "hella" big.
  • See the comments for excellent rebuttal of this point:

    "Sadly for me researchers also found one other trait—but only in males—is linked to higher IQs: sexual exclusivity.

    "Kanazawa did not find that higher or lower intelligence predicted sexual exclusivity in women. This makes sense, because having one partner has always been advantageous to women, even thousands of years ago, meaning exclusivity is not a "new" preference. For men, on the other hand, sexual exclusivity goes against the grain evolutionarily. With a goal of spreading genes, early men had multiple mates."

    "(Savage:) But smarter guys, against-the-grain types, have just one. Because monogamy goes against the grain for men. Or it did. I would argue that honest non-monogamy is against-the-grainier these days than sexual exclusivity or, failing that (as so many monogamous folks do), maintaining the appearance of sexual exclusivity."

links for 2010-03-02

  • "Essentially, "The Crazies" is a stereotypical zombie film, where a mysterious outbreak happens in a small town's water supply. A cast of characters have to gruesomely fight their way to freedom, all while not getting infected themselves. But Director Breck Eisner found a way to take the played-out zombie genre and create a unique blood fest that had everybody in the theater freaked out."
    (tags: film zombies fun)

links for 2010-03-01

links for 2010-02-28

  • "As Internet culture has grown, we’ve come to romanticize certain kinds of unmediated, old-fashioned “human” interactions. But this fantasy ignores how much of normal social interaction is fleeting, bite-size, instant, tweetlike. Humans have always talked to each other via a kind of analog Twitter. These new technologies just get us there with maximum efficiency. Meeting a new person is thrilling, in a primal way—your attention focuses completely, if only for a nanosecond, to see if the creature in front of you has the power to change your life for better or worse. ChatRoulette creates this moment over and over again; it privileges it over actual conversation. Eventually, I realized that clicking “next” was not so much a rejection as it was pure curiosity, like riding a train past an apartment building at night, looking briefly into as many lit windows as possible."

links for 2010-02-27

  • "Most of us can't afford to live exclusively within Apple's (or Microsoft's) ecosystem. Work often gets in the way of personal preferences, whatever they may be. We're also more and more inclined to experiment with new devices, and most of these aren't built by Apple or Microsoft. When this happens, we're left scrambling for workarounds to the otherwise flawless experience technology "monogamy" provides.

    "…Rumors are swirling that Google is preparing an iTunes competitor. There are plenty of reasons why it should, and here's one more: monogamy doesn't work in technology, because no vendor dominates innovation once and for all."

  • "An as-yet-unexplained Facebook glitch flooded my inbox last night and this morning with 128 private messages written by complete strangers to their friends — or, in the case of the person who wrote, “I might kill you for this,” their enemies. The misdirected missives range from mundane logistics (”hey whats ur adress so i can send u my bat mitzvah invites?”) to family squabbles (”Until I start hearing some thank yous from you, I will be unable to give you rides home after dance”) to love triangles (”I am EXTREMELY jealous of you”) to unrequited-love notes in foreign languages (”léger nuage de malaise hé oui, entre nous deux“).

    "It’s obviously troubling that any of this landed in my inbox, even if the bug only affected “a small number of users for a short period of time,” according to Facebook. But as a seemingly random slice of the unseen Internet, the errant messages are also totally fascinating."