everwas

Month: September 2008

  • Google Reader Power Readers – unlocked

    Browsing my feeds this morning I saw an ad for Google’s Power Readers feature appended on the bottom of a TechCrunch post. The ad pointed to the Google Power Reader page, an editorially crafted bundle of feeds made up of linkblog posts, generated by celebrities hand-picked and using Google Reader. This is the first time […]

  • Nokia and the Future

    Nokia and the Future

    In the shadow of today’s G-Phone and Android news, there’s some great stuff being posted over at Nokia’s Conversations blog about their annual The Way we Live Next conference in Finland. I’ve been thinking a lot about the potential of mobile lately. With the addition of location contexts and mobility, the benefits of a true […]

  • It’s not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure

    It’s not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure

    Thank you Daniela for pointing me to Clay Shirky’s keynote at Web 2.0 Expo last week in New York. In it, Clay gives a talk on Social Networks, Lifestreaming, and Privacy. It’s a timely talk as lifestreams go mainstream. I’m really happy to see someone like Clay talking about the social impacts of lifestreaming and […]

  • Mobile Social Address Books

    Facebook said last week that they aim to be the next Mobile Address Book. Just like the address book on my Blackberry connects with Yahoo’s corporate LDAP servers to look up the latest phone number or email of any Yahoo employee, Facebook and other social networks are building mobile clients to become the consumer version […]

  • Fact-checking your consumption with the cloud

    One of the benefits of pulling all your data together is that you can overlay data sets on top of one another for further insight. I only noticed this today but Pacific Gas & Electric’s Usage History section is great example. Here’s my gas bill over the past 24 months available to me when I […]

  • Was the drop in UAL shares engineered?

    A bit of lunchtime discussion about the whole United Airlines fake bankruptcy mess brought about an interesting theory. The reason the story from 2002 was picked up in the first place was because the headline was in the “Most Viewed” stories tab which is calculated automatically, most likely by looking at pageviews. So the obvious […]

  • Radar, cool hyper-local service from outside.in

    Image via CrunchBase outside.in, the local news site co-founded by geographer-historian Steven Johnson, launched a service called Radar which claims to feed you news from within 1,000 feet of your stated location. Similar to the other hyper-local services like EveryBlock and Topix, their service parses blogs and other social media for stories tied to a […]

  • Taking your finger off the button

    Shares of United Airlines dropped 75% yesterday because of a poorly designed template. The Google News blog has all the gory details including screenshots of the Florida Sun-Sentinal site which included links to a old story, UAL files for Bankrupcy, in its automated “Most Viewed” sidebar widget. The Google News robot crawled that link and […]

  • Alameda Family Kicks the Fossil Fuel Habit

    Congratulations to my neighbor Eve Pearlman who is challenging herself to life without an automobile. Eve sends her kids to the same school as ours and I’ve ridden with her husband a few times on the morning commute (I ride a bike to the local BART station now). I have a pretty good sense of […]

  • When Targeted Ads Hurt

    Rachel Beckman of the Washington Post writes about her experiences with Facebook demographic targeting. After my quaint status update about the muffin top ad, Facebook got even more vicious, like a schoolyard bully provoked by my initial reaction. With the knowledge that I was engaged to be married, the site splashed an ad across the […]