contentious.com

"I've always disliked the idea that we have to download apps on our phones when the apps we use on the web are loaded in the browser on demand. But I've accepted the mobile app paradigm as something we will be living with for the next five years. I'm not sure it's five years anymore."

"HTML5 is a specification for how the web's core language, HTML, should be formatted and utilized to deliver text, images, multimedia, web apps, search forms, and anything else you see in your browser. In some ways, it's mostly a core set of standards that only web developers really need to know. In other ways, it's a major revision to how the web is put together. Not every web site will use it, but those that do will have better support across modern desktop and mobile browsers (that is, everything except Internet Explorer)."

If you have an e-mail list, use this to generate instructions for how your subscribers can whitelist your messages

SMS-based crowdsourcing of local civic ideas: "“It’s about people in a specific neighborhood saying let’s put in a garden here,” Barton continues. “I’d say it’s a more nuanced approach to crowd-sourcing, less the winner-takes-all model but rather getting a group to rally around something specific. The entire process is designed for maximum participation to some kind of constructive end. The basic idea was to reinvent public participation for the 21st century.”

"In David Simon’s world, a few brave reporters had the special knowledge and connections to get enforcement of open data and open records. In our world, the government policy needs to make data available as a matter of course, and crowdsourcing tools and communities need to give more people the knowledge and the courage that David Simon had to demand accurate information from the cops.
The world is different. Open data and crowdsourcing give more people the raw information and open government literacy that David Simon had. But we need the organizational structures, funding, and motivation to use them. There’s no guarantee how well the new way will work, but there are tremendous opportunities, and it’s up to us to make them work."

"Both the evangelical Christian yogaphobic position and the Hindu essentialist yoga-belongs-to-Hinduism position reflect religious fundamentalist tendencies to define ideas and practices not as human constructs that are subject to change over time, but as monolithic stable products that belong in specific traditions and accordingly do not belong in others."

Need your Trek fix? Go here, they have most of the episodes from all of the Trek series

" there's no breakdown of "social media" in this view of traffic sources, and with the dramatic rise of social media marketing, marketers need an easy way to segment and "see" this traffic separately from the rest of their referrers. We know it's mixed in with "referring sites" and "direct traffic" but luckily, there's a way to extract that data in just a few simple steps.

Step 1: Create a Custom Segment

Custom segments are the way to go for separating traffic into filter-able buckets for deeper analysis. GA makes this fairly painless…"

I don't agree with everything Barack Obama says or does. But I must say, I am damn proud that the president of my country would speak up to support and encourage LGBT teens to no despair, and to remind them that life gets better. That's leadership.

"Twitsper drastically changes the Twitter experience.

You can say, hey, I only want my closest friends to see this tweet. And this one's about sports, so I only want my sports buddies to see that one. And this tweet is a work-related inside joke, so I only want my work colleagues to see it.

You do this on Twitsper through pre-set lists. The creator and others on the list have the ability to send tweets back and forth that only they can see by using the app, which the developers hope will one day be integrated into Twitter itself."

" says he'd "never" say that Android was better than iOS, and that "Almost every app I have is better on the iPhone." Woz did say he lightly prognosticated that Android would become more popular "based on what I've read," but that he expects Android "to be a lot like Windows… I'm not trying to put Android down, but I'm not suggesting it's better than iOS by any stretch of the imagination. But it can get greater marketshare and still be crappy." He's not shy, that Woz — listen to him say it all for yourself after the break."

"Woz stressed that the iPhone, "Has very few weak points. There aren't any real complaints and problems. In terms of quality, the iPhone is leading." However, he then conceded that, "Android phones have more features," and offer more choice for more people. Eventually, he thinks that Android quality, consistency, and user satisfaction will match iOS."

OK, I feel a lot less guilty now about likeing wine so much 🙂

Reich’s new tract Aftershock, neatly coincidental with Larry Summer’s retirement from the White House, is a polite populist’s effort to seize a teachable moment in this season of anger. The disease in the economy and the public mood, he’s arguing, is not debt; it’s not even that we’re living beyond our means. It’s the 30-year trend to an obscene concentration of wealth — one percent of the population reaping more than 20 percent of the income — that has so diminished the means, so drained the purchasing power of the average American. Few politicians and policy wonks are as clear as Reich about the remedy to rebalance and build the whole economy: boost all incomes under $50,000 with direct supplements; and restore real taxes on the biggest earners with a marginal rate of, say, 55 percent. Today’s pattern of concentration, speculation, bust and stagnation recapitulates the crisis of the Great Depression, he’s saying. A

"to Google’s point, if people want to deactivate their Facebook accounts and/or try another service, they shouldn’t lose what they’ve created. When you join a new service, the best way it becomes useful and interesting is to quickly find and invite your existing friends (see: network effects)–and the best way to do that is to import a list of your email contacts.

The problem is you don’t own your friends’ email addresses; they do. Email is the only successful example of a decentralized social network."

"Ever heard of “Super-logoff” or “whitewalling”? They are ways to designate what some teens have been doing in order to have total control over who posts what (and when) on their Facebook page.

Imagine deactivating your account every time you log out of Facebook, and activating it again when you want to go on it. Or how about meticulously erasing each and every post, status update, link, or comment after you are “done” sharing it? If you take the Super-logoff route, then other people can’t post anything on your wall when you’re not there to filter it quickly. They won’t even be able to look you up. Whitewalling, on the other hand, keeps your Facebook content invariably current, of the moment."

This is from 2002, a useful definition of "white box mfrs":

"White box manufacturers generally assemble, sell, and ship PCs without a well-known brand name, usually to small businesses, educational, or government customers served by the small IT service providers Dell is targeting.

Most white box manufacturers focus on a specific region, but together they form the largest block of PC shipment market share, as tracked by IDC. In fact, IDC had to revise its estimates of the worldwide PC market earlier this year because it had undercounted shipments from white-box manufacturers.

Examples of large well-known white-box manufacturers include Brazil's TropCom, and Mexico's Alaska, a subsidiary of distributor Mexmal Mayorista."

"Likewise, his contention that “blogging is an ego-intensive process” has to grapple with the fact that some of the best blogging is just the reverse. It doesn’t square with examples such as Jim Romenesko, whose art is meticulously effacing himself from the world he covers, leaving a digest rich with voice and judgment so veiled you barely even notice someone’s behind it. In fact, contra Ambinder, I’ve found that one of the most difficult types of blogging to teach traditional reporters is this very trick of being a listener and reader first, suppressing the impulse to develop your own take until you’ve surveyed others and brought the best of them to your crowd. Devoid as it is of links, non-Web journalism often fosters a pride of ownership that can become insidious — a constant race to generate information that might not actually help us understand the world any better, but is (1) new and (2) yours. Unchecked, that leads inevitably to this."

"Despite burying the Soviet Union and having things their own way for 30 years (at least in Britain and the US), the end of history has proven to be a period as uncertain as any other. Far from ushering in a von Hayekian utopia, capitalism has been rocked to its foundations by a financial crisis few of its apologists saw coming. Keynes has been dug up and reanimated to get things going again, but at the same time the spectre of Marx has been disturbed and has taken to haunting their imaginations.

Zombies as a horror staple are the result of some unfathomable biological or supernatural crisis that cannot be reversed. They are mindless. They are faceless. They are ugly. And they want to invade your home and feast on your flesh. If this does not work as an allegory for bourgeois attitudes to and fears of the working class, I don't know what does."

Interesting analysis of the zombie culture phenomenon from a class and gender perspective. I agree with the class argument, but that's not the only way to view it.

I don't buy the gender argument. Too many zombie movies have strong female protagonists, and alpha males are as often buffoons as not.