July 2011
52 posts
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June 2011
66 posts
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Hunch Blog | Mac vs. PC: A Hunch Rematch →
Hunch.com takes another look, through the prism of millions of questions its users have answered, at the differences between PC and Mac users. PC users comprised about half the answer base, Macs another quarter, and “neither” the rest.
The PC types are a little older and mainstream, the Mac types a little more caught up in being distinctive and hip. I would have enjoyed all the...
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ShortFormBlog: If you're looking to join Google+,... →
Ah, the tyranny of success. At least Google probably has the IT capacity to accommodate a lot of interest.
shortformblog:
before People who were on Google’s new social networking site had the ability to invite their friends to join in. That’s good because it allows Google to test their new service on a smaller amount of people, but make sure that they still have friends to talk to.
now It...
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“The essential lesson I’m always harping about to clients, here nicely put:...”
– Note to media: We are all brands now, so get used to it — Tech News and Analysis (via mediafuturist)
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Tom Petty To Michele Bachmann: Stop Playing... →
What is it about Republicans using cool pop songs for their campaigns without permission? First, most of these singers ARE likely to be liberal and annoyed by The Other Party using their tunes, but beyond that, there’s a whole long legal process of licensing music to play in everything from car commercials to coffeehouses to radio stations. People running for president typically helped put...
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Jon Huntsman Sr. Role in Jon Huntsman Jr.’s... →
I hadn’t been aware of Gov. Huntsman’s wealthy and influential father until a couple of recent stories, including this lengthy and generally balanced piece from The Daily Beast. But my first clue to Huntsman Sr.’s wealth was an interview I read a couple of days ago on the iPad-only digital magazine Project, where they interviewed a UK golf course designer whose projects tend to...
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“The Pope’s first tweet: ‘Dear Friends, I just launched News.va...”
– The Pope’s very first tweet, shared on the official Vatican account. (via abcworldnews)
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“Like the protected books, plays and movies that preceded them, video games...”
– Justices Reject Ban on Violent Video Games for Children - NYTimes.com (via infoneer-pulse)
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David Gray goes Groupon with new live album →
Got an email notice from Gray’s record label PR that his new live album will be available for $6 on Groupon. It sounds kinda goofy, but given that he’s had a very nice run lately with his studio albums and singles, giving a discount on the live album (I’m not much for most live albums, so any bargain like this might entice me to break out my wallet, where paying full freight...
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Sony cut online security staff two weeks before it... →
Awkward. Lay off netsec guys, then get a brand-crushing series of Internet attacks that expose the financial and other data of hundreds of thousands of customers.
A) Can’t help wondering if the break-ins ended up getting a little additional help from bitter former employees.
B) Right now, with hackers on a pretty epic run of break-ins, any prominent organization that cuts network...
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Bin Laden wanted to change al-Qaida's bloodied... →
Toughest. Rebranding. Challenge. Ever.
Often lost in the rhetoric over al-Qaida is one hideous fact: for all the talk it has spouted in many ways about recreating an Islamic caliphate, the organization has killed more Muslims than anyone over the past 20 years, usually intentionally. Changing the name wouldn’t change that fact.
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BRYCE DOT VC: If You're Competing On Features... →
Spot-on critique of the problem with Android-based phones trying to out-feature each other with impenetrable tech specs that most mainstream-market consumers can’t track/differentiate anyway. I hadn’t realized there had been an at least temporary crest in the Android market share beginning in March, but it does suggest that the system is in danger of lapsing into generic status that...
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Mobile devices overtake computers on Wi-Fi... →
This trend, mobile devices accessing the web even more than computers, will only accelerate as smart phones spread worldwide and become the main way many EVER access the Internet. How companies and communicators position themselves accordingly will make a big difference to their long-term success.
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Mac OS X 10.6.8 Now Available →
Usefully, it includes enhanced eradication of the first substantive malware to hit the Mac. It’s worth the upgrade for that alone, if you have a spare quarter-gigabyte of space.
parislemon:
Aka, the last one before OS X Lion.
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The Woman Who Gave It to Bill Keller About... →
Amusing exchange here. Keller, bless him, is pretty certain after a long stint at The Gray Lady, that he knows more about communication than most everyone. It may be possible that he’s badly wrong, or at least hideously out of date. Which may explain why he’s stepping down in favor of someone slightly better positioned to navigate this crazy new world of all-directions communication.
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Get "Get Real Get Right" by Sufjan Stevens for... →
Asthmatic Kitty offers up a free Sufjan Stevens song off his excellent “The Age of Adz” album, which was inspired by the documentary “MAKE,” about four self-taught American artists. “MAKE” is being released on DVD one of these days very soon. All very cool for you fans of outsider art.
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“These long wars will come to a responsible end.”
– President Obama speaking on #Afghanistan withdrawal. Read full remarks here. (via abcworldnews)
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Rick Sanchez: Move Over Twitter... Make Room for... →
Another journalist, Rick Sanchez, discovers Tumblr. It’s pretty much the Goldilocks tool for communication, no doubt about it. Welcome to the party, Rick.
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What Big Media Can Learn From the New York Public... →
Nice Atlantic piece on what the NYPL is doing online and elsewhere in the face of challenging budgets. I just downloaded the “Traveler’s Vade Mecum” from Google Books that was from the NYPL, and my iPad recently added the Library’s Byblios app, with more 19th Century books for browsing and enjoying.
Clever stuff, and much credit to them for this.
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Scotland Yard Busts Alleged LulzSec Mastermind --... →
Hard to call this rather rapid arrest a surprise after recent events, if indeed the suspect is a “mastermind” behind Lulzsec’s hacks of a public CIA site, all the sensitive details of 62 million UK census answers and more.
That said, the encapsulation of the members with secure IRC channels and other isolating security measures, as mentioned in the story, will make it tough for...
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Rick Perry aides scrambling to see if he still has... →
Texas governor gets a little bolder after a nice reception at a couple of early presidential-bid events, and now the Journal reports his staff is seeing if he still has time to get in and raise the money he needs, etc.
Given the recent en masse departure of numerous Gingrich aides included some folks who are close with Perry, I’m guessing it’s not particularly late for Perry to get...
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Bloomsday: How to Celebrate James Joyce's... →
And the Wall Street Journal on how to celebrate Bloomsday
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ULYSSES Meets TWITTER 2011 →
A fun project to tweet about James Joyce’s Ulysses on Bloom’s Day. Love this
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Soup: Tumblr is the Next Great Social Network →
Good observation here about the slightly different nature of Tumblr compared to its predecessors. It IS more visually oriented, and yet allows for adequate exploration/explanation of curated content and creation of new stuff than some of the predecessors whose DNA it shares. It has its own community, but as I point out to clients, makes it very easy to push that material out to other communities...
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Jon Huntsman announces that he will announce in a... →
So when did it become okay for a candidate to announce that they’re going to announce they’re running for president a week hence? Can we batter the offending candidate around the head and shoulders? Should we care if they probably don’t have much chance to get out of the first three primaries, and this might be their only chance to get coverage before returning to the wilds of...
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The Banned List: Top 100 | John Rentoul |... →
A generally brilliant list of Things That Should Be Avoided when writing. He’s a bit harsh on some things I’d be more inclined to overlook, and it’s definitely a Brit-leaning list, but it’s also an excellent place to start when culling the crud in your own writing.
Fowler and Strunk and White used to be handy with these sorts of things, but the pace of language evolution...
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Put a thousand books from the British Library on... →
From @ResearchBuzz: The British Library has put out an iPad app with 1,000 books from its 19th Century collection. How cool is this?
High-res scans that show all the engravings, embossed covers, maps and even paper textures. Searchable, browsable by title, even commentary on some books, all of which can be downloaded for later reading. This is fabulous.
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Meet Andy Carvin, verification machine →
As has been repeatedly detailed in other places, Carvin is the NPR senior strategist who transformed his Twitter feed into a must-read newswire about the changes taking place in the Arab world. Carvin sends hundreds of tweets a day that, taken together, paint a real-time picture of events, opinions, controversies, and rumors relates to events in the Middle East.
There are few established rules...
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Sloshed: Maybe We Should Be Judging Wines by Their... →
An amusing, but not wholly fanciful, look at classifying wine by the label. The author’s taxonomy actually ends up being pretty good, though too often, the “active animal” category DOES lead to some rather dubious mid-priced stuff.
As he points out, unless you’re a geek like me, who’s had to learn a bit of detail about good wine, judging a bottle by its cover...
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U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors... →
This is pretty fascinating stuff, providing the flexible technology alternatives to allow protesters to dodge repressive governments and still communicate over the Internet and cell phone networks.
The downside, of course, is that this can be used by the bad guys (or, at least, the guys who think differently than we do; what happens when Hugo Chavez and Bashir Assad start rolling this stuff out...
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Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie donate $500,000 to... →
Lovely to see Missouri boy Brad Pitt and his wife contribute a very large check to the relief efforts in tornado-stricken Joplin. It makes me think particularly kindly of this fellow Mizzou attendee (though I believe he didn’t quite graduate from the journalism school before striking out as a ne’er do well actor type).
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France Is Scolded Over Care of Great Hamster of... →
Am I the only person who has a hard time stifling a smile at the name “Great Hamster of Alsace?” It sounds like something from a Monty Python film.
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Hot news! FCC Report Cites Lack Of Local News, But... →
A just-released FCC report notices, shockingly, that we’ve seen a collapse in the amount of watchdog and investigative journalism being done at the local level. And the rise of online news services and sites, combined with non-profit investigative units, hasn’t come close to filling the resulting gap.
Okay, glad they’ve noticed. Unfortunately, after this hot news, there...
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J.J. Abrams' Super 8: How Kodak's low-cost super 8... →
A fun story in Slate about how Super 8 film influenced the creation of “Super 8,” and countless other movies made the past few decades by some of our best-known filmmakers.
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TIME FOR PEOPLE TO EAT CROW: The New York Times'... →
In which Henry Blodget says “I told you so” about the prospects for the New York Times paywall experiment. I guess I always thought the NYT would be able to impose a paywall, especially one constructed as theirs was to allow for casual users to get access to a linked story without having to pay.
The bigger issue, I believed then and now, is whether the Times’ experience has...
