ThinkFast: October 9, 2008
October 9, 2008 on 8:59 pm |
A draft version of the new National Intelligence Estimate “concludes that Afghanistan is in a ‘downward spiral’ and casts serious doubt on the ability of the Afghan government to stem the rise in the Taliban’s influence there.” The CIA has documented the worsening violence for nearly 2 years and “some in the agency say they believe that it has taken the White House too long to respond to the warnings.”
“Negotiations with some members of the Taliban could provide a way to reduce violence in sections of Afghanistan gripped by an intensifying insurgency,” Gen. David Petreaus said yesterday. He noted how Britain had helped reduce violence in Iraq through negotiations, remarking, “They’ve sat down with thugs throughout their history, including us in our early days.”
“Todd Palin talked with over a dozen state officials, many of them repeatedly, in his crusade to get a state trooper fired whom he considered to be a bad cop, a dishonest person and a threat to the Palin family, according to his sworn statement given Wednesday to a legislative investigator.” Andrew Halcro has a thorough analysis of Palin’s deposition here.
63.2 million: Number of U.S. viewers who watched the second presidential debate, easily surpassing the audience of the first debate (52.4 million). Forty-two percent of households in the top U.S. television markets tuned in to Tuesday’s match-up.
On the trail today: Barack Obama stops in the Ohio cities of Dayton, Cincinnati, and Portsmouth. Joe Biden campaigns in the Missouri cities of St. Joseph, Liberty, and Jefferson City. John McCain and Sarah Palin hold a town hall meeting in Waukesha, WI. McCain later holds an event in Mosinee, WI, while Palin talks to voters in Wilmington, OH. (more…)
ThinkFast: October 7, 2008
October 7, 2008 on 9:00 pm |
“American business, typically a reliable Republican cheerleader, is decidedly lukewarm” about John McCain’s health care proposals. Specifically, groups believe that McCain’s plan, “which eliminates the exclusion of health benefits from income taxes, would accelerate the erosion of employer-sponsored health insurance and do little to reduce the number of uninsured from 45 million.”
61 percent: U.S. households that “watched at least one of the two 2008 election debates aired so far,” according to Nielsen. “Homes headed by African Americans made up a larger portion of the presidential debate audience (14.0%) than the V.P. debate audience (12.3%). African American homes normally account for 12.2% of all U.S. TV households.”
In an effort to address the growing credit crisis, the Treasury is discussing a new plan to buy up “unsecured commercial paper, essentially short-term i.o.u.’s issued by banks, businesses and municipalities,” the New York Times reports. “If this were to happen, the central bank would come closer than ever to lending directly to businesses.”
Several tax experts said Sarah Palin “is required to pay federal taxes on $25,000 in reimbursements from the state of Alaska for her children’s travel expenses.” Palin “released her 2006 and 2007 tax returns on Friday, sparking a lively debate on tax blogs and among tax professionals over whether reimbursements and per-diem meal payments from the state should be subject to federal taxes.”
On the trail today: John McCain and Barack Obama will be in Nashville, TN for a Presidential Debate at Belmont University. (more…)
Brown Monday: open thread on today’s economic panic.
October 7, 2008 on 4:04 am |Floyd Norris, liveblogging the panic today at the NYT -- The Great Crash of 2008:
2:45 p.m. ET: If the S.&P. 500 closes where it is now, (1009.07, down 8% for the day) it will have lost more than 13% over the past three sessions. The only other time declines of that magnitude occurred since World War II was in the crash of 1987. Prior to that, the last one was in May 1940, when France fell to Germany.Discuss, and breathe deeply, folks. We're gonna get through it together. (ht for the hed @Howard Rheingold)
Video: "The 1929 Stock Market Crash newsreel."
UPDATE: Our community manager Teresa Nielsen Hayden points to this NYT analysis by Joe Nocera as "the most lucid explanation" for what's going on:
This is what a credit crisis looks like. It’s not like a stock market crisis, where the scary plunge of stocks is obvious to all. The credit crisis has played out in places most people can’t see. It’s banks refusing to lend to other banks — even though that is one of the most essential functions of the banking system. It’s a loss of confidence in seemingly healthy institutions like Morgan Stanley and Goldman — both of which reported profits even as the pressure was mounting. It is panicked hedge funds pulling out cash. It is frightened investors protecting themselves by buying credit-default swaps — a financial insurance policy against potential bankruptcy — at prices 30 times what they normally would pay.As Credit Crisis Spiraled, Alarm Led to Action (NYT via Balloon Juice.)It was this 36-hour period two weeks ago — from the morning of Wednesday, Sept. 17, to the afternoon of Thursday, Sept. 18 — that spooked policy makers by opening fissures in the worldwide financial system.
Also, everyone reading this blog should stop what they're doing right now and go listen to This American Life's epic episode from Friday: Another Frightening Show About the Economy.
Alex Blumberg and NPR's Adam Davidson—the two guys who reported our Giant Pool of Money episode—are back, in collaboration with the Planet Money podcast. They'll explain what happened this week, including what regulators could've done to prevent this financial crisis from happening in the first place. You can learn more about the daily ins and outs and join the discussion on the Planet Money blog.Here's the direct MP3 Link.
Record viewership for last night’s vice presidential debate.
October 4, 2008 on 6:14 am |Nielsen reports:
On Tuesday night, 69.9 million viewers tuned in to watch the sole vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin.
The Biden-Palin matchup set a new V.P. debate TV audience record, beating the previous high of 56.7 million viewers set by the debate between Rep. Geraldine Ferraro and then-V.P. George H.W. Bush in 1984*.
Biden and Palin’s debate also surpassed the first presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain, which drew an audience of 52.4 million last Friday night.
During the last presidential election in 2004, the vice presidential debate between V.P. Dick Cheney and Sen. John Edwards drew 43.6 million viewers.
Forty-five percent of households in the top local tv markets watched the debate. ABC had the top broadcast last night. Fox News topped the cable networks, with its “highest viewership in the network’s 12 year history.”
Palin Debate Prep Flowchart
October 4, 2008 on 1:41 am |
by Aden Renkai, via Political Wire (thanks Teresa Nielsen Hayden!).
Mobile Marketing: Better For Reaching Democrats
October 3, 2008 on 10:30 pm |
In this heated U.S. election season, both presidential campaigns have been using multichannel marketing techniques that have included everything from wikis to web sites and text messages to Twitter. It now appears that one of those channels, mobile marketing, is better at reaching Democratic voters than Republicans. But why is that?
Sponsor
Mobile Media Use
According to Nielson Mobile, a service of the consumer research-focused Nielson Company, 43 million Americans subscribe to mobile internet. Also, 33 million Americans use text messages, 32 million IM, 29 million download wallpapers/screensavers, and 4 million subscribe to and view mobile video.
However, when you break those numbers down by political preference, the following is true of mobile media in Q2 2008:
- Overall, 62% of Democrats are data users who use one or more data service on their mobile phone (compared with 55% of Republicans).
- Democrats are more likely than Republicans to use text messaging (53% compared with 46%).
- Democrats are more likely to use picture messaging and MMS (27% compared with 21%).
- Democrats are more likely to use mobile internet (17 % compared with 13%)
Apparently, someone already told the candidates of this news. It has been widely reported the numerous ways the Obama campaign makes use of mobile marketing for voter outreach. Already, they used SMS to announce Obama's VP choice. Unfortunately, the SMS message came after traditional journalists reported the news, not first, as originally promised. Still, the idea was unique and was the first attempt in leveraging the mobile medium in that way. In addition to the SMS VP announcement, the Obama campaign's mobile web site offers news, videos and ringtone and wallpaper downloads.
The McCain camp has not been as active on the mobile front, but that's not to say that conservative voters don't use mobile media. Their use just isn't as heavy. In fact, Nielsen reports that the conservative-leaning web site The Drudge Report has a mobile audience of 567,000 uniques per month, for example.
To see how the numbers break down even further by Democrat vs Republican mobile data use, check out the chart below:
Why More Mobile Democrats?
There are a lot of conclusions one can come to from reviewing this data, but perhaps the most telling is that the campaigns really do know their demographics. Statistically, young voters are trending Democratic, and, as we all know by now, today's young voters are what are known as "digital natives." These plugged in, tech-savvy voters (also called "Generation Y") are now coming of age and many are eligible to vote for the first time. By marketing to this group of active technology users, the Obama campaign is hoping to motivate them to go out and vote. The recent launch of the official Obama iPhone app is just more proof of the campaign's efforts to actively engage this particular group of voters.
Many reports about Generation Y make note that they are known to be socially conscious and politically involved, but the election will likely be the first time we see if those generalizations are true. If Gen Y turns out the polls in great numbers, then they will have proven that they are indeed different than the other young generations of voters who preceded them. Typically an apathetic bunch when it comes to voting, young voters have not yet had the impact on U.S. elections that they could if they made the effort.
The Obama campaign seems to know that mobilizing these young voters may be as simple as interacting with them on the platforms they feel the most comfortable - the web, social networks, and their phone.
DiscussZoho App Selection Explodes With Platform - But Are These Apps for Real?
October 1, 2008 on 3:31 am |
If you're familiar with Zoho, the online office suite for small and medium sized businesses, you probably know that they offer a whole lot of different applications. The 16 different apps the company has had for some time seems like a small selection now - today the Zoho Marketplace launched with hundreds of new apps built on the company's platform Zoho Creator.
Developers can build their own apps for free or for sale and Zoho allows them to keep 100% of the revenue from app sales. Are these apps for real? It's hard to say. We really like the idea, but Zoho is a complicated company.
The Marketplace Apps
As can be imagined, there's a wide range of quality in the apps in the marketplace today. In its announcement Zoho says that more than 100,000 apps have been created with its Zoho Creator database program, but it appears that only about 300 of those are included in the marketplace at launch.
It's hard to know how to find the best apps, to know which ones are effectively duplicates and we expect those issues to continue as developers flock to the platform. It's one thing to rustle through scores of sheep kissing apps on Facebook, or shiny GPS baubles in the iPhone platform - it's another to try and find apps in an office marketplace to run your business on.
Some of the app demos were loading only intermittently during our evaluation and that's not a good sign for something users are going to do business with.
Some, like HelpDesk, look strikingly robust. Others, like the very similar Issue Tracker, look downright insufficient - Issue Tracker's bug tracking app doesn't offer reporting as far as we could tell, for example.
Most of the apps in the marketplace right now are free. The variety of apps available is interesting; one called Camp Registration facilitates registration for events, includes an hour of customization and costs $150. That app can be embedded on any other website. This and all the apps in the marketplace offer a demonstration you can view before installing.
To some degree your trust in Zoho marketplace apps will likely begin as a matter of faith. Readers here presumably are willing to put some amount of trust in online apps in general. There's probably a little more skepticism about Zoho apps in particular. Zoho marketplace apps, developed by people outside the company all together, will be an even further leap of faith. Whether you can make that leap will depend in part on where you started regarding online apps in the first place.
Zoho Apps in General
Google's online office apps were expected to change the world, and by some limited accounts they've begun to. Many people, though, find Google Apps too lightweight and infrequently updated.
Zoho's office suite has faced criticism about being too lightweight but no one can say they are too infrequently updated. A July report from analyst firm the 451 Group reported that Zoho was slowing down on new product roll out and would be focusing on improvement of existing apps. That prediction appears now to be incorrect, but the rest of 451's analysis of Zoho is very useful. "At present, there's still something of a work-in-progress feel about Zoho, with some key functionalities still to come," report authors China Martens and Anne Nielsen wrote.
Ask any major CRM vendor who they're keeping an eye on in their rearview mirror, and Zoho will be among the first players they name. That's pretty impressive for a vendor that has largely relied on word of mouth and user experimentation to gain notice...The company is already well positioned to address the increasing app pricing and integration pressures from customers and has made some initial strides in establishing channel sales.
According to another report from analyst firm Yankee Group though, Zoho already offers a better enterprise collaboration suite than Google. That report tracks 16 collaboration suites head to head, further comparison results still pending.
Zoho tells a good story and is certainly an exciting company to watch, but sometimes the story gets a little more oomph than it deserves. Oliver Marks at ZDNet, for example, wrote this week that a story floating around the blogosphere that General Electric dropped Google Apps in favor of Zoho was not in fact true. Marks reports that GE is still evaluating both services and hasn't made a decision yet about either.
Conclusion: These Apps Will Work for Many People, But Not All
We love platforms, good ones are fascinating in their fecundity even if they are complicated for providers and participants. Zoho does have a lot of momentum in the small business world, so we expect there to be a lot of international developer interest. Will customers come to Zoho and stay? The price and selection are hard to beat so the company will likely win customers for whom those are primary concerns. Would-be customers who prioritize robustness may have a more mixed experience, depending on the apps they select from the marketplace.
DiscussThinkFast: September 30, 2008
September 30, 2008 on 9:00 pm |
Nearly 90 percent of Americans are concerned that the failure of the Wall Street bailout package “could lead to a more severe economic decline,” according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. In all, 45 percent supported the failed bill and 47 percent opposed it. 61 percent said that “there was insufficient assistance for the general public.”
“Sometime between Election Day and early December,” NBC News will make a final decision about who will permanently replace Tim Russert as the host of “Meet The Press,” the New York Times reports. Though the decision has yet to be finalized, the network is said to be “leaning toward an ensemble of hosts that would be led by Chuck Todd, NBC’s political director, and include David Gregory.”
Corinne Weber, a GOP county chairwoman in upstate New York, has resigned over a chain e-mail that she forwarded “to more than two dozen Republicans on Friday night that makes a veiled reference to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and suggests he is the Antichrist.” One county official pressing for Weber’s resignation said that the e-mail “didn’t reflect the views of the Republican Party.”
According to data from across 11 networks, the first presidential debate on Sept. 26 drew 52.4 million viewers, roughly 16 percent less than the 62.5 million viewers who watched the first debate between President Bush and John Kerry during the 2004 election.
On the trail today: Barack Obama will be in Reno, NV where he will discuss the current economic crisis. John McCain has scheduled a small-business round-table in Des Moines, IA. (more…)
57 Million Watched Presidential Debate: Nielsen Estimate
September 28, 2008 on 2:35 am |Michigan GOP attacks right-to-vote for the recently foreclosed
September 12, 2008 on 1:42 pm | Republican strategists in Michigan have confirmed that they plan to challenge the right to vote for people on a list of recent foreclosures, though these people may still be living in their homes, renegotiating or fighting the order. The largest foreclosure firm in the area donates hundreds of thousands of dollars to the GOP, and the Republican-controlled Senate killed the bills that would have given foreclosure relief. Michigan is a swing state.Joe Rozell, director of elections for Oakland County in suburban Detroit, acknowledged that challenges such as those described by Carabelli are allowed by law but said they have the potential to create long lines and disrupt the voting process. With 890,000 potential voters closely divided between Democratic and Republican, Oakland County is a key swing county of this swing state.Lose your house, lose your vote (via Making Light)According to voter challenge directives handed down by Republican Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land, voter challenges need only be “based on information obtained through a reliable source or means.”
“But poll workers are not allowed to ask the reason” for the challenges, Rozell said. In other words, Republican vote challengers are free to use foreclosure lists as a basis for disqualifying otherwise eligible voters.
Businesses Can’t Hide From 2.0: A Look At 2.0’s Impact Across Industries
September 6, 2008 on 11:00 pm |
If you were interviewing someone for a position with your company and they admitted that they didn't know anything about the new trends and innovations taking place in their field, what would you think? Likely, what you would think is "next candidate, please." In today's business world, job-seekers are expected to stay current with the happenings taking place in their area of interest. There was a time when those happenings were very much job-specific and anything having to do with technology fell squarely on the shoulders of I.T. That time has passed. Web 2.0 technologies lifted the veil of mystery surrounding computing technology and made it accessible to everyone. Today, if you're not staying current with Web 2.0 technologies' impact on business, then you're just not staying current. Period.
Web 2.0 Is Everywhere
No matter which department you're in, Web 2.0 technologies have had an impact. If you've been ignoring their prevalence and adoption, you're at risk of falling behind in your career and your business is at risk of losing ground to its competitors who are tuned into this trend.
Here at ReadWriteWeb, we deliver news about Web 2.0's impact on business in addition to news about web technologies in general. Depending on your area of interest, you can find a lot of great information on this subject in our archives. Or simply bookmark this post for easy reference.
Document Collaboration Suites
GroupSwim is an innovative company which has created an intelligent community building and collaboration SaaS solution. They aim to connect individuals and build knowledge utilizing social based methodologies. Read more.
DreamFactory's suite of Enterprise 2.0 applications consists of a Project Management module, a Time and Expense Module, a Document Manager, and a Team Calendar. Originally, the company was available on Amazon Web Services, but now DreamFactory's software will be available on Intuit's QuickBase platform, too. Read more.
Box.net offers collaboration functionality which allows any Box.net user can invite collaborators to any folder in their account. The collaboration feature is also fully compatible with all the OpenBox services, which extends online collaboration beyond just word processor documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, similar to what Google Docs currently offers. Read more.
The term groupware refers to applications that facilitate real-time communication, coordination and collaboration amongst groups of people. A number of startups are working hard to develop the nascent groupware market, so in this post we identify some of those startups and provide an overview of where the market is heading...read more.
What's the Deal With Wikis?
Only a handful of years ago, it was common to hear people laugh at Wikipedia. Anyone can edit it! How could you take it seriously? These days, just as blogs are, wikis are on their way to winning a reputation as serious publishing platforms. Wikis are now serious business. Read more.
Atlassian Confluence, makers of one of the most popular enterprise wiki solutions, offers Microsoft Office and SharePoint integration in their release of the Confluence 2.9 software. With these new tools, users no longer have to know the technicalities of wiki markup or even how to use the included rich-text WYSIWYG editor in order to make changes to the wiki - they can simply open up a Microsoft Office document instead. Read more.
WetPaint, a popular hosted Wiki solution, provides person-to-person and private messaging between users of their Wiki network. This means that Wetpaint Wiki users can now send single or multi-person private messages, to connect and collaborate with others about their interests. This post introduces wikis and discusees who is using them and for what purpose.First, wikis are described and then the range of wiki products in the market right now is explored. Read more.
Leave it to people in the wiki market to know how to collaborate. Nearly 20 different wiki providers have teamed up to offer a new Firefox extension that will notify users whenever they are on a page that is publicly editable, using a standard icon that sits in the same place the RSS autodiscovery icon appears. Clicking on the icon (img. on the left) will take you to that page's editing interface. Read more.
What's Office 2.0?
Web Office Defined: A Web Office suite is a combination of productivity, publishing and collaboration features. A Web Office both embraces the functionality of desktop office suites (e.g. Microsoft Office) and extends it by using Web Native features. Read more.
The State of Office 2.0: Over the past 10 years, Corel, Sun, IBM and others have tried to compete with Microsoft in the office software business, but thus far none of them have been able to take a significant chunk of Microsoft's large market share, which generates revenues exceeding $15 billion each year. These companies have tried everything; including Sun open sourcing their StarOffice suite and releasing it as the free OpenOffice. Yet, even this very compelling move has not been able to make a serious dent in the market. Read more.
Microsoft announced their Office Live Workspace is publicly available for everyone to access. The site, a free web-based extension of Microsoft Office, lets you access your documents online and share your work with others. Some say that the service's launch is a direct response to Google's entry into the web office space with their Google Docs online service. If that's so, then the question now is: did Microsoft just trump Google Docs? Or does Google Docs still rule online office suites? Read more.
The Web Office was a market that underwent a lot of changes in 2007. Our definition of Web Office is: A Web Office suite is a combination of productivity, publishing and collaboration features. A Web Office both embraces the functionality of desktop office suites (e.g. Microsoft Office) and extends it by using Web Native features. The 2007 year in review: Read more.
This is the perspective of a "skeptical, later early adopter"; the sort of person who Microsoft needs to retain and should have been able to retain easily. I don't spend time on productivity tools that may at some date make me more productive, but which today are just a frustrating time sink. That describes the majority of people. MS Office can be annoying, but it does work. So any serious alternative has to offer a significant advantage and at the same time make adoption a total breeze. Read more.
EditGrid, the main product of HongKong-based company Team and Concepts (TnC) Ltd., is a leading Web 2.0 online spreadsheet service that focuses on online collaboration and interoperability. Read more.
eXpresso was named as one of PC World's 25 Most Innovative Products of the Year for 2007. PC World succinctly summed the product up: "[it] allows Excel users to share their spreadsheets, online or off." eXpresso is different from the web office contenders that you normally hear about on ReadWriteWeb for three reasons...Read more.
Zimbra is looking to expand its platform to the iPhone. Recently they announced Zimbra Mobile for iPhone 2.0. Zimbra Mobile for iPhone 2.0 will allow iPhone users over-the-air two-way synchronization of e-mails, calendar, contacts, and photos between user mailboxes and mobile devices, and seamless "push" e-mail service for all Zimbra Collaboration Suite users. Read more.
News from the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco, 2008. Read more.
What's Happening in the Enterprise 2.0 Space?
A report released by Forrester Research is predicting that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is going to increase dramatically over the next five years. This increase will include more spending on social networking tools, mashups, and RSS, with the end result being a global enterprise market of $4.6 billion by the year 2013. Read more.
Enterprise 2.0 is Happening: If you're a business who has been ignoring the Web 2.0 trend and the spread of social media: look out, the tide is shifting and you're about to be left behind. The rise of social media didn't happen overnight, the power of the internet to unite people, the ubiquity of broadband, the rise of Gen Y, the development of new technologies for socializing on the web - all of these things and more have led to the rise of social media. And this new force is affecting change in the way that companies do business - now and for many years to come.
The break-up of behemoth, vertically integrated enterprises commenced in the 1970's, got a boost from junk bond financing in the 1980's, and accelerated in the 1990's with globalization. Now, late in the 2000's, Social Media (aka Web 2.0) is adding another gear that will accelerate the fundamental restructuring of the enterprise. Read more.
Most enterprise software sucks. That is my considered opinion from 30 years in the software biz. Words that come to mind are: bloated, inflexible and user hostile. The good news is that it is getting better, a lot better. The driver for change is what I call the consumerization of enterprise software. These new software champions typically have some if not all of these 8 main attributes...Read more.
The Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad program is a program that allows companies to showcase their products and compete for the opportunity to present their ideas to the community at this year's Enterprise 2.0 Conference. This competition, organized by Stowe Boyd, began in April when companies were invited to post their video pitches to the E2 web site. After the community voted, the list of contenders was narrowed down to five finalists who will now compete for the final spot. For that grand prize winner, the prize is free exhibit space at the upcoming conference. Read more.
SharePoint to run Enterprise 2.0? 9 companies are saying "yes," having recently launched Enterprise 2.0 offerings that integrate with SharePoint technology. If there's one thing that any I.T. pro knows it's the value of "maximizing their investment" in whatever servers they run, technology they use, or services they've signed up for. With strict budgets in place, no I.T. purchases are bought on a whim. Instead, each decision is researched, tested, thoughtfully considered, and, if worthy, purchased, then rolled out to become a part of the I.T. infrastructure. SharePoint is no exception. Read more.
Is 2.0 Affecting My Industry?
Yes! Check out the examples below of Web 2.0's impact on various industries and fields.
Finance/Banking
Google is announced that after more than a year of work on the problem, Google Finance is now offering real-time price quotes for any stock traded on NASDAQ. Read more.
Strands, the recommendation and lifestreaming service we've written about here before, announced a much anticipated deal that will put it in the driver's seat for financial recommendations served up to millions of online banking customers around the world. The company's recommendation test-case in music is no longer all they will be known for around the world. Read more.
We reported on a survey that revealed that 48% of online banking customers between the ages of 18 and 34 would be interested in using "secure gadgets for personal banking" if their bank offered them. More than a quarter of bank customers would consider switching to another bank if it took better advantage of web 2.0 technologies. While that survey was flawed in some ways, there is another access point to banking information that customer may want more than secure widgets: mobile. Read more.
48% of Bank Customers Want Web 2.0 Gadgets. WorkLight, a startup that offers enterprise 2.0 products, recently did a survey among Facebook users to find out their willingness to use Web 2.0 tools for secure banking. The survey was conducted among 1000 Facebook users between the ages of 18-34. The fact that the survey was conducted among Facebook users gives it a bias towards tech-savvy people. However there are some surprising findings. Read more.
Accounting
Online Accounting: State of the Market: Accounting software for small business and personal use is increasingly moving from the desktop to online. However, compared to other office software, this transition to online has been relatively slow. Partly that's due to user reticence: writing a document online and sharing it with others (via Google Docs, Office Live, Zoho, or whatever you use) is one thing. Entering sensitive financial information into your browser is harder to adjust to. Read more.
Project Management
Add this one to your web office toolkit - LiquidPlanner is an online, hosted project management tool that lets you access and update projects anywhere you have an internet connection. The service offers you and your team a complete project environment, social networking and collaboration features, and a probabilistic scheduling engine which tells you the probability of completing each task - and ultimately the entire project - by a certain date. With everything organized into a centralized dashboard that can be customized for each team member, everyone on your team can stay focused on their tasks and how they relate to the project as a whole. Read more.
The Clarizen project management software came out of stealth mode last year and has now just launched a new version with additional features. The latest version, Clarizen v 2.0, will be demoed at the "Under the Radar Conference," an event held on Microsoft's campus whose current theme is "The Business of Web Apps: Where the Web Goes to Work." Read more.
Enterprise 2.0 is a rapidly growing trend that takes the concepts and tools of social media (social networking, RSS, wikis, blogs, etc.) and re-purposes them for business use, wrapping them up into applications that make the tools at work seem more like the tools we use in our day-to-day lives. While these enterprise 2.0 apps give us that web 2.0 feel, it's rarer to see actual Web 2.0 services like Facebook or Twitter used by businesses. And although we've seen many people promoting the business use of Twitter, we had not yet heard about anyone actually going so far as to integrate Twitter into a non-consumer focused application. However, that's just what Joint Contact has done. Their PM tool now shows how tweeting can actually be a productive activity. Read more.
37Signals offers a range of applications, from simple, single-function apps like Ta-Da Lists (to-do lists), Writeboard (collaborative word processor), and Campfire (group chat) to more complicated apps like Basecamp (project management) and Highrise (group contact manager). Read more.
eProject is an on-demand Project Management company. More than 100,000 users at 650 companies currently use eProject's solutions. They run the gamut from Fortune 500 companies to medium-sized fast growing organizations. Read more.
Health
Health 2.0, web-based apps and services for the healthcare sector, is a nascent but potentially huge market for web 2.0. As of now, many of these apps have an emphasis on communication, information sharing and community. These are relatively easy things to address using Web tools. However we're starting to see health 2.0 apps try to tackle the enormous inefficiencies in the healthcare system - check out our description of Carol.com below. Also, in the longer term, we will see the Web being used in medical diagnosis and practice. Read more.
The Health 2.0 Conference is reviewed here and some of the health web apps that caught our eye as well as trends that are discussed. Read more.
Google announced the public availability of Google Health, after initially launching as a closed beta back in February. It is described as "a safe and secure way to collect, store, and manage [your] medical records and health information online" and is being positioned as a way for users to control their own medical records. Read more.
HR
Traditional resumes are boring. They become stale and out-of-date, they can't really showcase your work or achievements, and they end up just sitting in the bottom of someone's inbox. A paper resume, while professional, doesn't really let an employer get to know you. Many sites are trying to solve the problems of traditional resumes by providing job seekers a new way to stand out in the crowd. Read more.
The iPhone has been making headway in its battle to become a business-ready tool. Obviously, the addition of Microsoft Exchange support was a big step towards being considered a viable alternative to the traditional smartphones used at work, like Blackberry and Windows Mobile. However, beyond simply supporting enterprise email, the iPhone platform has a lot of potential to cater to the needs of its business users, too. Read more.
LinkedIn has an audience that is both younger (41 vs 48) and richer ($106k vs $98K). LinkedIn was also naturally crowing about their growth (189% for year ending Oct. '07) and the chart from Nielsen which shows comparative Facebook growth at 125%. Note that Facebook growth is from a higher base and the law of large numbers applies, but Facebook has always crowed about their growth rates vs the larger MySpace, so they have to live with growth rate comparisons to LinkedIn now. Read more.
Marketing
Viral marketing, user-generated content, online buzz: over the past few years, these terms have been representative of a new way of marketing to consumers that takes advantage of the current popularity of the social web. This new technique involves companies encouraging its customers to create content of their own in order to generate interest in the company's brand. Unfortunately, one of the potential side effects of this strategy is the potential for negative buzz. Despite this fact, a surprisingly low percentage of marketers are monitoring for negative responses. Read more.
Using the new pilot program from a company called Involver, Kiva launched a video campaign on Facebook to draw users to their site to lend directly to these developing nations. The video even features a button that appears at the end of the video encouraging you to "lend" money. Read more.
Mobile marketing startup, TextBound, has big plans to make text messages the new mass media for advertisers. Like we mentioned earlier, more and more companies are going to be betting on location based mobile ads this year, and TextBound hopes to capitalize on this trend. But unlike mobile social network/marketing vehicle, Fluc, TextBound isn't about connecting with your friends, it's about delivering ads to your cell phone via text message, then taking you to the mobile web for more details. Read more.
Recently, HiveLive announced a new partnership with Responsys, a marketing firm whose client list includes some big-name brands like Apple and Salesforce.com. Enterprise 2.0 is sure to follow. What Responsys offers their customers are on-demand email and marketing solutions that can be anything from web sites to email to mobile. With the new partnership with HiveLive, they can expand that offering to include enterprise social networks. Read more.
Widget platform Clearspring has an ad network that will allow widget publishers to monetize their widgets with advertising. The ads run inside widgets and come in a variety of formats. Clearspring has already inked deals with some of their largest widget publishers to run ads, including the NHL, 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate Films, Blockbuster, and Virgin Mobile. Read more.
Who’s doing the window-smashing in Minneapolis-St Paul?
September 4, 2008 on 1:17 pm | Over on Making Light blog, my friend Elise Matthesen, resident of Minneapolis-St Paul, has some skeptical questions about the supposed anarchist looters among the RNC protestors:I cannot help but remember some people I knew in college, one of whom turned out to be an informant and provocateur who infiltrated antiwar and other related groups. I thought of it again, sharply, when I read this LiveJournal post about a past event. I look at that photograph, where the “protesters” being detained and the officers ostensibly arresting them have matching footwear, and I read that no charges were pressed against the “protesters,” even though they were the ones committing acts of vandalism, and I cannot help but think “provocateurs.” Which brings me to the question I started with: Who are these people?Minneapolis / St. Paul: asking the right questionsSeriously. We have a lot of people who can look at photos and figure this stuff out. Supposedly the pro-surveillance folks are doing it to us. Let’s put our heads together and figure out who really broke stuff at the demonstration, and then let’s find out if they’re really regular protesters, idiots with a taste for vandalism and no political savvy, or provocateurs. Let’s find out if they even get charged.
Google’s Strategy In Japan: Avoid Yahoo And Take Over The Mobile Web First
September 1, 2008 on 4:35 am |
Google may be the leader in the worldwide search engine market, but in Nippon, it has some catching up to do: In 2007, Yahoo Japan saw a whopping 76% of the nearly 350 billion search engine and portal-related pageviews registered in the country, clearly outperforming Google (second with 5.4%, according to Nielsen Japan). More recently, ComScore shows that in July, Yahoo Japan had ten times as many monthly pageviews (21.9 billion versus 2.2 billion for Google) and nearly twice as many monthly unique Japanese visitors (46 million versus 26 million).
The Japanese web market is just too big to be shrugged off: The country boasts one of the highest Internet penetrations worldwide (74%, compared to 70% in the USA), a $5.7 billion online advertising market (out if one estimated to be worth $45 billion globally) and is ranked No. 3 in terms of total web population (94 million, about as many as Germany and the UK combined).
So how does Google challenge Yahoo’s position as the hub of the Japanese Internet?
In the West, the popularity of Internet portals has waned in the past years, but not in Japan, where seven sites in Alexa Japan’s Top 25 are of this kind. That forced Google to change its simplistic design for the local market: Similar to Google China, for example, the Japanese version now contains tab links to other Google properties. It also features a keyword suggestion function in the searchbox.
Nippon-only initiatives include allowing users of Mixi (Japan’s biggest social network) to embed Google Maps on their blogs, partnering up with web company Hatena (which operates Japan’s most popular social bookmarking service) and launching “One Green Project”, a microsite dedicated to prevent global warming.
But these measures are just of the cosmetic kind. In fact, Google Japan keeps localization of its fixed Internet site at a relatively low level (it doesn’t transform into a Yahoo-like portal site, for example). Instead, the company aims at taking over the Japanese market with a double-staged approach: Avoid Yahoo and take over the (bigger) mobile web market first to win the fixed Internet later.
Mash-up Strategy of Collaboration, Experimentation and Circumvention
Japanese cell phone carriers can regulate which search engine their Internet service subscribers use by default. A good spot on the official, pre-installed starting menus is crucial to winning the mass market.
That’s why in January this year, Google Japan inked a deal with the country’s leading telecom company NTT Docomo, following a partnership with the country’s No. 2 carrier KDDI au that started in 2006 (both mobile partners also were among the first to join the Open Handset Alliance but have been rather close-mouthed about Android development ever since).
Google’s mobile strategy—in Japan and possibly elsewhere—depends on whether the 74 million Docomo and KDDI au Internet subscribers will embrace the Googlization of their mobile web life. (Compare that number to the 15 million subscribers that the No. 3 carrier, Yahoo partner SoftBank, serves in this country)
Both NT Docomo and KDDi au incorporated Google’s search engine directly into their default start menus, synthesizing content from both mobile and PC web sites (including the display of contextual text ads). Users can also easily access Google Calendar, Youtube and other Google services. Some Docomo handsets now come with pre-installed Google Maps Mobile. In addition, Google gets access to a massive amount of behavioral data in the world’s most advanced mobile web market. So it’s no wonder Google Japan says its partnerships have had “a huge impact” on business and traffic (although it refuses to disclose specific details).
The company additionally uses insular, cell phone-enamored Japan as an isolated testbed for unique mobile web applications and services to be deployed worldwide at a later stage.
It’s not only about search and ads: KDDI au, for example, started to offer a rebranded, Japan-only version of mobile Gmail (“au one mail”). The service is free of charge and can also be accessed through PCs, doubling as a Trojan horse for Google to attack Yahoo Mail’s premier position in Nippon’s email arena. Japan is also the world’s first country where users can integrate animated picture characters into their mobile Gmails (very important in Nippon) and use Google Mobile to get extra-fast info after earthquakes strike.
The holistic strategy the company pursues not only avoids a losing, long-term confrontation with Yahoo Japan but also strengthens the brand among Japanese web users and the mobile industry in general. The company also gains insights on how to improve and adjust its search technology for the Japanese and international markets.
One examplary finding John Lagerling, head of Google’s Wireless Business in the region, publicly shares: Contrary to popular belief, traffic on mobile Google doesn’t get a big bump in the morning (when millions of Japanese commute to work and school) but peaks from 6pm through bed-time at 1am. Lagerling expects usage trends like this to be repeated outside of Japan once flat-rate data plans and browser-enabled handsets prevail on a global level.
Google’s multilayered strategy certainly makes sense strategically: Japanese people usually demonstrate unwavering loyalty in established, popular uber-brands like Yahoo. Google still needs to prove a) its now beneficial partnerships will sustain, b) it can really take over Yahoo’s place through the backdoor, c) what role Android will play in the future and d) how much Google’s Japan-specific experiences can shape the mobile web on a global level.
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Obama’s speech watched by 38 million viewers.
August 30, 2008 on 5:25 am |Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) acceptance speech last night reached a quarter of America’s households, according to Nielsen Media Research. In all, with over 38 million viewers, “more people watched Obama speak than watched the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing, the final “American Idol” or the Academy Awards this year.” The AP notes that “Obama’s audience might be higher,” since Nielsen didn’t estimate how many people watched on PBS or C-SPAN.
YouTube Comment Snob hides badly spelled, profane, poorly capitalized YouTube comments
August 29, 2008 on 3:44 pm |
Here's an idea whose time has come: YouTube Comment Snob is a Firefox plugin that nukes comments with too many spelling mistakes, weird capitalization or punctuation, and too much cussin'. It works pretty damned well, too. As XKCD has pointed out in the past, YouTube has the worst, just the worst comment-areas on the Internet. YouTube Comment Snob (via Making Light)
Day three of Democratic convention drew more than 24 million viewers.
August 29, 2008 on 5:29 am |Neilsen reports, “More than 24 million people watched the third night of the 2008 Democratic National Convention — a 7.5% decrease from 26 million viewers on day two of the convention. … In comparison to day three of the 2004 convention, which drew almost 18 million viewers, the audience for day three of the 2008 convention was still significantly larger (up by a third to 24 million viewers).”
Large numbers of African Americans tuned into Michelle Obama’s speech.
August 28, 2008 on 6:01 am |22 million Americans watched the first night of the Democratic convention. Nielsen reports, “A large percentage of African American households (24%) tuned in for the night’s speeches, which included a keynote address by Michelle Obama.” By comparison, 14.6% of white households and 7.3% of Hispanic households watched that night.
CNN wins ratings war on first night of convention.
August 27, 2008 on 6:45 am |TV Newser reports that CNN was the “big winner of the cable networks” last night, drawing an average of 3.7 million total viewers. CNN also beat a couple of networks. “At 10pmET, CNN drew 4.26M Total Viewers while ABC drew 4.17M and CBS drew 3.46M.” NBC was first of all networks with 4.71 million viewers. “Preliminary national television ratings data from Nielsen Media Research indicate that interest in the first night of the Democratic convention as covered by the three major broadcast networks was tepid, to say the least.”
Most Popular Websites For Kids
August 20, 2008 on 12:54 pm |
Continuing our coverage of the mainstream web, in this post we look at some of the most popular websites for kids. We've gathered information from a recent report (pdf) from Nielsen Online, via Marketingvox, which studied the online habits of Britons under the age of 23. We also polled friends of RWW via Twitter.
The Nielsen report concluded that entertainment sites have the greatest affinity with under 12s, games sites for 12-17 year-olds, and student and video sites for 18-22 year-olds.
We're all familiar by now with the latter 'young adult' demographic, who are big users of social networks and video sites like YouTube. But let's look more closely at what the under 12 and 12-17 year old demographics are using on the Web.
< 12 yrs Like Entertainment; TV Networks Dominate
The above table is ranked according to percentage of <12 yrs in the audience, so the sites listed aren't necessarily the largest ones. Also as it's a British study, somewhat predictably the BBC has the 2 sites with the largest audience. Despite those caveats, one trend is crystal clear here: most of the most popular sites for under 12's come from television. These brands dominate the list of top websites for this age group: Nick, Cartoon Network, the BBC's CBBC and CBeebies and Disney International. So the Internet, for under 12s, is very much about entertainment and unsurprisingly TV networks use the Net to extend their brands.
It's interesting also to note that there is potentially big money for startups targeting kids, in terms of acquisitions by the big tv networks. Just last year Disney paid US$700M to acquire virtual world Club Penguin, one of the sites listed above. And needless to say, kids love it. RWW reader Richard Lusk says that "my daughter (12 yrs old) LIVES on Club Penguin." Many other friends of RWW listed Club Penguin too (see list below).
The site at the top of the list, with 32% of UK Unique Audience Under 12, is Swedish fashion community site Stardoll. At this site, users can dress up and play with dolls virtually. Membership is free and the company states that most of their users are girls between the ages of 7 and 17. Stardoll says that it has around 16M users. It's had about $10M in funding so far from the likes of Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital Partners, so it is another example of how big the Internet market for kids is.
Recommendations from Friends of RWW
Many of RWW's readers are parents (including yours truly), so we asked on Twitter what other sites kids under 12 use. In my household, MyLittlePony and interactive pet games have been popular. Here is what others say, and we encourage you to add more in the comments to this post...
Mari Silbey noted that on HighlightsKids.com she can "do hidden pictures with my 2-almost-3-year-old. It's great."
Mikko Alasaarela said that his three under 12's "use game sites like miniclip, orisinal, kongregate, fantage." He also pointed out that "one of the most popular social networks for that age group is Habbo."
Shana Albert concurred with Mikko, saying that her son loves Habbo.
Nathan Hull said that "My nieces (4 and 7 yrs old) love pbskids.org"
Josh Morgan said that "yoursphere is a new one for kids. It's deal is that all participants are vetted."
Lidija Davis told us that her 9-year old boy loves gamespot.com and that he "visits all the time to get cheats for DS, Xbox". Lidija also said that he likes Club Penguin and Runescape and online games in general. Lidija noted too that YouTube is popular with under 12's - although, wary of the dangers, she said that "luckily my little people ask me to check first".
Jonathan Fields told us that his 7 year old daughter likes "club penguin, webkinz, stardoll, myscene, playhouse disney, pbsKids, and, of course, her blog".
Kevin Marks suggested runescape. He also listed toontown, webkinz, neopets, club penguin, and YouTube.
Andy Coffey tweeted that "my 6y/o loves lego.com".
Don Reisinger reminded us that Disney carries a lot of spyware!
Mike Brown said that Club Penguin is "hugely popular with our 6 and 10 yr old and lots of their friends".
Ben Tremblay suggested "http://pbskids.org/ and http://pbsparents.org/ There's also http://www.pbskidsplay.org/ but it's frabbed".
Dara Rochlin said that her "6 yo is a webkinz nut, can get on the laptop by herself and play, pbs kids, disney, build a bearville, starfall." As for her 11 year-old, he "likes addicting games, naruto arena, line rider, runescape, pivot, webkinz (to help his sister). Naruto Arena's a fav. He also likes miniclip, and castlewars (on kongregate)."
Online Gaming Big With 12-17 Year Olds
In this age group we start to see social networks make an appearance. In the UK, Bebo is very popular and so it's no surprise to see it ranked #1 in terms of users in the above table. In the US it would probably be MySpace, although we have no data for that.
But the biggest trend in this demographic is that online games sites - for example RuneScape, FreeOnlineGames, AddictingGames and MiniClip - are most popular with 12-17 year-olds.
The Mobile Web is also popular, with mobile phone social networking site Frengo (our earlier coverage) having the highest percentage (26%) of 12-17 year-olds amongst its audience in the UK.
The Nielsen report noted that "as children hit their teenage years, general entertainment sites tend to make way for games-focused sites".
Conclusion
For under 12's, entertainment rules. But there seems to be social networking aspects to that too, judging by the popularity of Club Penguin and StarDoll. After the age of 12, online gaming becomes more popular, and general social networks like Bebo and Facebook enter the scene. The Mobile Web is popular in the 12-17 age group too.
For more analysis about how kids use the Internet, check out Sarah Perez's great post Why Gen Y Is Going to Change the Web.
Please add more website suggestions for kids in the comments, and let us know what you think of these Web trends for the younger generation.
Image: pixelrobber
BBtv - Xeni interviews Buzz Aldrin: take us to space!
August 19, 2008 on 11:16 pm |Astronaut and space hero Dr. Buzz Aldrin speaks with Xeni about his belief that America -- and that means you! -- must return to the moon, and soon. His nonprofit, Sharespace.org, seeks to provide "affordable space travel opportunities for all." Buzz believes that commercial space vacations should not be available only to the wealthy elite.
Editor's note: the comment trolls really are taking over around here. One of them invades this very BBtv episode. Teresa, why doesn't disemvowelling work in video? We'll have to get our hamster-engineers right on that. (cameo by BBtv Production Assistant Rob Bergsma)
Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion, downloadable video, and instructions on subscribing to the BBtv video podcast.
Dog cloner Joyce McKinney sought over burglary to fund horse’s wooden leg
August 16, 2008 on 8:19 am |
Remember the story about the pit bull cloner who is suspected by many of being the same woman who kidnapped a Mormon missionary 30 years ago to be her sex slave? Well, she is now suspected of plotting a burglary in Tennessee to procure funds for an artificial horse leg.
Joyce Bernann McKinney, a former beauty queen who earlier this year paid £25,000 to have her dead pet recreated, is accused of instructing a 15-year-old boy to break into a house because she needed funds to help another beloved animal, her three-legged horse.Dog cloner Joyce McKinney sought over burglary to fund horse's wooden leg (Thanks, Teresa!)...
The Tennessee charges stem from McKinney's arrest in November 2004 after being found in a van with the teenager. According to prosecutors in Carter County, an area in north eastern Tennessee, she instructed the boy to burgle a house and was charged with criminal conspiracy to commit aggravated burglary and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Study: Parents corrupting unsullied children with killer game
August 13, 2008 on 11:40 pm |Filed under: PC, Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360
The most distressing news lies not in the fact that 61% of impressionable youths had been tricked into purchasing the games themselves by slick marketing and peer pressure, but the shocking revelation that 39% had been aided by someone else -- in 80% of these cases, parents themselves had thrust their child's ripe brain beneath the industry's oppressive mallet.
Speaking exclusively to Joystiq, renowned child psychologist Dr. Alphred Larmist described this turn of events as "the ultimate betrayal." According to him, parents could be the most dangerous conduit of pixelated poison. "Parents getting involved is the last thing we need," Larmist said. "If they take an active role in what entertainment their children partake in, this is the sort of disaster that could happen. Next thing you know, they're determining what's appropriate for the kids and going out and buying Grand Theft Auto. They're supposed to be on our side."
Dr. Larmist vowed he would take up the campaign to keep parents and their influence away from children. "If nothing is done, these video gamers will reduce our society to naught but chainsaws having bloody sex with each other."Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
World of Developmentcraft: academic paper on gold farming as a development activity in poor countries
August 9, 2008 on 12:54 am | On Salon, Andrew Leonard ruminates on a new paper that tries to analyze gold farming (doing repetitive in-game tasks to earn money that is sold to players) with international development. Richard Heeks's (University of Manchester) new paper "Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on "Gold Farming": Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games" is the first paper to explore gold farming from a development perspective, and as the title suggests, it is mostly a literature review and an attempt to define the areas for future research on the topic.This was a pure-gold find for me, as I'm working on a young adult novel called For the Win that expands my story Anda's Game (about union organizers who sign up gold farmers in the developing world), and I've been reading everything I can get my hands on about gold farming. Heeks's paper is absolutely enthralling (for me, at least), a very broad and thorough survey of what we know, what we think we know and what we definitely don't know about gold farming -- it was even worth putting up with the world's least readable typeface (though it gave me a splitting headache). (Coincidentally, Andrew Leonard is the Salon editor who bought and published Anda's Game in the first place).
World of development economics Warcraft, Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on "Gold Farming": Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games (PDF) (Thanks, Patrick!)
Continuing survival of the sub-sector also relies on overcoming some severe information failures – absence, uncertainty, asymmetry, and communication problems. These have produced many examples of both opportunism and adverse selection, with trading bringing uncertainty, risk and negative consequences. As expected, these seem likely to have suppressed real-money trading well below its "natural" level, and to have induced sellers into (potentially-hollow) assertions about their trustworthiness. Because of its virtuality, though, real-money trading has seen only a little of the localisation and intermediation one might otherwise expect in the presence of such information failures.Thirdly, continuing survival of gold farming relies on dealing with the many threats it faces. Some of these are business-generic such as ease of entry intensifying competition, or rising labour costs. Others are business-specific but just a low-level nuisance such as character killing or account and IP banning or fraud. Others still – patching, game redesign and marketing channel blocks – require constant innovation to stay one step ahead. And a final category is much more serious such as game company substitution or legal action by governments or game companies. Game companies probably take such action through a mix of economic, moral and personal in-game experience rationales. But one must recognise that gold farming bringsa benefits to these companies, while action against gold farming brings both anticipated and perhaps unanticipated costs.
NYT on trolls
August 3, 2008 on 1:09 pm |
Mattathias Schwartz of GOOD Magazine has a much-linked-to feature in tomorrow's New York Times magazine about trollius dickwadius internetius maximus, a subhuman web-based species better known as the common internet troll.
The piece is a really good read, but here's my one minor beef with it: "disemvowelling" is mentioned, without a hat tip to the person first known to have used it as a moderation technique: BB's own mod Teresa Nielsen Hayden (boo ya), whom I understand to be its inventor. She began using the technique in 2002 to moderate the worst-behaved commenters on her own blog. Snip from the NYT article's mention of this technique, which we now use on BB:
If we can’t prosecute the trolling out of online anonymity, might there be some way to mitigate it with technology? One solution that has proved effective is “disemvoweling” — having message-board administrators remove the vowels from trollish comments, which gives trolls the visibility they crave while muddying their message.
I'd insert a comment here about how the NYT editors' failure to namecheck TNH's genius is akin to something Hitler might do, then maybe I'd insert a url in that that sneakily hijacks the browser for a full-screen technicolor goatse kitten-porn gotcha extravaganza -- but then TNH herself would disemvowel me, and I'd join the ranks of the article's subjects, and all would be moot.
So anyway, here is my favorite part of the piece, spoken by arch-douche and "Craigslist griefer" Jason Fortuny:
All that having been said, there are only two ways to deal with a troll:1. Don't reply. Don't privately address him. Don't acknowledge his comments. Don't even make a passing reference in another blog post. Just pretend the troll doesn't exist. This gets rid of 90% of the trolls out there instantly. Then, if you're smart, shut up and quit blogging for a few days and logically re-evaluate the post that set the troll off. Chances are, there is a glaring flaw in your post that makes you look like an idiot or a nutjob, and that's why you got trolled. Don't post again until you're ready to amend it or defend it with better logic.
2. With the other 10% of trolls, you have to play the game. For every insult you receive from a troll, play along and join in the joke. If someone tells you're fat (because you probably are), don't get offended and rant. Just reply with a photo of a whale and say, "You mad skippy I'm fat! I would say this photo is me, but that wouldn't be fair. The whale isn't that big." If you can successfully take yourself and the insults less seriously, you will win the good graces of the troll and he'll either go away, or he'll chill out, knock off the insults, and you'll have made a new online friend. And trust me, it's good to have a troll for a friend.
Of course, now that I've revealed this, no troll is going to let up because you've all been warned and can no longer claim ignorance as an excuse. So, your only recourse is to just not be stupid and/or batnuts crazy on the Internets. If you can do that, everything will be just fine. However, just so I can be absolutely clear about this: if you escalate a war of words with a troll, you WILL lose. We know all the tricks. We have access to all the resources. We know all the laws. We're all friends with each other. We have done this thousands of times.
The Trolls Among Us (NYT. Thanks, Andrea James)
XKCD role-players reenact “I Love the World” strip
July 23, 2008 on 2:21 pm |These XCKD live-action role-players have reenacted the recent strip in which Randall paid tribute to the Discovery Channel's "I Love the World" commercial. It's just one of several on YouTube (and I confess that I recently donned cape and goggles and recorded a video of myself singing "I love the blogosphere" for a friend who's making her own version). I'm meeting Randall "XKCD" Munroe for the first time this summer and I'm really looking forward to it! Also: don't miss the WoW orc-dance! Link (via Making Light)
Win a customized Asus Mini painted by Donato
July 19, 2008 on 12:02 am | Tor Books is raffling off this gorgeous Asus Mini laptop that's been hand-painted by famed science-fictional artist Donato: all you need to do to win is sign up to get word when the awesome (yes, I've seen it) tor.com website launches:Link (Thanks, Patrick!)
As a promo for Tor.com, we asked Donato to paint an Asus mini computer which you, yes you, can win! To sign-up, go to Tor.com.The first time I watched this I realized what makes Donato Donato. There's a point about third of the way through where I thought he was done....and then he keeps painting.
The computer is in my office and is supposed to be on display at ComicCon. It's been hard to bat co-workers away from it. Should it go missing, my list of suspects is long.
AdMob: Mobile Web Use Doubled in Past 12 Months
July 17, 2008 on 2:47 am |
According to the latest data from mobile advertising marketplace AdMob, the mobile web has grown by over 100% in the last 12 months. AdMob's data also shows a 20% increase since May alone. Ad impressions on Apple's iPhone and iPod touch grew by 32% in June, making it the 9th most popular mobile device for online browsing in terms of ad impressions.
Of course, all this data is only based on AdMob's network of advertisers, but it correlates well with the overall trends in mobile web use we have seen this year, including a recent study (PDF) by Nielsen Mobile, which saw the number of mobile Internet user in the U.S. grow from 30 million in May 2007 to 40 million in 2008.
One other interesting data point in AdMob's report is that in June, 24.3% of its ads were served to smartphones, up 22.4% since May. While Apple's iPhone is not the leading phone for mobile Internet use by far, it definitely has made a lot more people aware of the possibilities of the mobile web and encouraged them to consider buying smartphones over regular phones. For now, though, the most popular device for accessing the mobile web in the U.S. is still the Motorola RAZR.
Overall, these are encouraging numbers for anybody who is developing for the mobile web. While there used to be regular discussions if the mobile web could ever become a mainstream phenomenon, the last year has clearly shown that users are becoming increasingly interested in using the Internet on their mobile devices and as more users are shifting towards smartphones, this trend will surely continue for the foreseeable future.
Nielsen: iPhone In Fourth Place Among Smartphones, First In Customer Satisfaction (Not For Long)
July 12, 2008 on 5:12 am |
Nielsen Online is publishing stats about the mobile industry in general and the iPhone in particular today. They note that Apple still trails HTC, RIM and Palm in the smartphone market (that’s likely to change rather suddenly over the next few months), but leads the pack when it comes to user satisfaction (they clearly didn’t poll users today).
2/3 of the 2.3 million US iPhone users are men, say Nielsen. 55% are under 35, whereas only 34% of all mobile users are under that age. Most iPhone users make over $75k per year. Most iPhones are also used with email, wifi and as a MP3 player, too. Basically, the typical iPhone user is a young, wealthy, male tech geek type.
More stats below.
What’s in store for the iPhone 3G?
- Nielsen Mobile reports that 3G networks can improve data transfer rates by about six times over 2G and 2.5G networks, on average
- Although some consumers may be frustrated at the mandatory in-store activation of the new iPhone, just 15% of current iPhone owners say they bought their phone online, compared to 68% who said they bought theirs in a store.
- 30% of smartphone users are likely to upgrade their device in the coming year
How many iPhones are already out there?
- Nielsen Mobile estimates that there are 2.3 million US mobile subscribers using an iPhone
- The iPhone accounts for 1% of all embedded mobile phone users in the US
How is the iPhone faring?
- HTC (25.2%), Research in Motion (23.4%), and Palm (19.3%) continue to lead the smartphone industry in market share, with Apple (11.6%) trailing in fourth place.
- Apple iPhone users report the highest overall satisfaction scores among major smartphone manufacturers
- 8% of recently acquired devices by AT&T subscribers were Apple iPhones
Who is using the iPhone already?
- Two-thirds (67%) of US iPhone users are male (compared to 48% of all mobile subscribers)
- 55% of iPhone owners are under the age of 35 (compared to 34% of all mobile subscribers)
- iPhone users tend to be more affluent with 63% earning above $75k (compared to 38% of all mobile subscribers)
- 24% of iPhone owners are Hispanic
- 9.7% of streaming video users and 4.9% of mobile internet users own an iPhone
What features do they use?
- 75% use the phones MP3 player
- 68% use the Wi-Fi functionality of the phone
- 76% send e-mail over their phone
How do iPhone users consume mobile media differently?
- 37% of iPhone users watch video on their phone (making them 10 times as likely as the average mobile consumer)
- 82% access the internet over their phone (making them 5 times as likely as the average mobile consumer)
- 17% stream music over their phone (making them 7 times as likely as the average mobile consumer)
- 20% play online games on their phone (making them 9 times as likely as the average mobile consumer)
Business or Pleasure?
- 15% say their company foots the bill
- 24% say they use their phone for business, but pay the bill themselves
- 61% say they are a personal user
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Penguin Great Ideas — gorgeous editions of classic philosophy
July 7, 2008 on 10:33 pm |
David Pearson Design highlights the beautiful, three-set "Great Ideas" collection from Penguin, which reprints dozens of classic works of philosophy and politics in some of the most gorgeous packages I've ever seen. Link to volume one, Link to volume two, Link to volume three, Penguin Great Ideas on Amazon (via Making Light)
RIP, Thomas M Disch
July 7, 2008 on 6:38 am | Sf author Thomas M Disch committed suicide at his apartment on July 4. Patrick Nielsen Hayden's eulogy paints a picture of a man who was brilliant, noble, foolish, difficult and angry. I only knew him through his fiction, from which I learned a great deal. Patrick writes:LinkI certainly read him; his SF novels of the 1960s and 70s, particularly Camp Concentration and 334, had an enormous impact on me. But “least read” may be true: according to publishing legend, his SF masterpiece On Wings of Song had a 90% return rate in its 1980 Bantam paperback edition. Despite that, he went on to hit bestseller lists with his 1991 horror novel The M.D. Just as unexpectedly, his children’s book The Brave Little Toaster was adapted into a popular Disney cartoon.
He could be hard to take, both in person and in his public interactions with the SF world. He played the game of literary politics hard, and sometimes lost badly. He frequently seemed to have no patience for his allies, much less his enemies. Of his other career, as noted poet Tom Disch, I can’t say much, except that to my mind the poetry was often good. In his later years he wrote a blog; after he began to post frequently on the depravity of Muslims and immigrants, I became unable to keep reading it.
The Disch I prefer to remember was no nicer than that, but much smarter: a brittle and brilliant ironist with a bright wit and no optimism whatsoever.
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