Month: November 2010
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Longevity
I was just cleaning up some old blog posts and noticed that the link to a Honda viral video made over seven years ago is not only still live, but still generating comments. The video is hosted at albinoblacksheep.com, not affiliated with Honda in any way. Is it a wasted opportunity not to have this…
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Captain Haddock
Captain Haddock in Tintin in Tibet I jumped on the latest Facebook meme and changed my profile picture to a comic character from my childhood. My father, whenever he went on a business trip, would buy me a new Tintin book. After awhile, I had every single issue and would read them from cover-to-cover, over…
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$335k For Virtual Property, What Bubble?
Yes we all may laugh at people spending real money on virtual goods but for some it makes economic sense. Club Neverdie in Entropia is a “turnkey” business that runs itself. Set up as a place of entertainment, it generates cash that more that covers the initial cost of investment and has now attracted investors,…
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Using Wordle to Visualize Keyword Traffic
On Avinash’s excellent Ten Steps to Love & Success post on Web Data Analysis he writes about using the keyword tag cloud visualization tool Wordle to visualize search terms used to reach your site. Below is a visualization that I made in representing the top 500 phrases which were used to discover this site over…
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The Next Opportunity in Publishing
Much to the chagrin of my wife, I took over the remote on our internet-enabled TV (old macbook hooked up via HD cable to the back of our flatscreen) to catch highlights from the Web 2 Summit taking place this week in San Francisco. Steven Berlin-Johnson’s “high order bit” on the early history of book…
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Oulu Open Hack
I spent a couple days last week in Oulu (a city in Northern Finland) helping out on a hackfest. For more on the what, who and why, check out my previous post (Why we Hack). This post is to thank the sponsors and share how it went. What always amazes me with these type of…
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Why We Hack
Reposted (with modifications) from ouluopenhack where I’ll be tomorrow. It all starts with an itch. Something that bugs you. It’s some kind of “pattern” that you identify. A manual task that you find yourself doing over and over again that you want to automate. Why is the color printer always default to printing in black…
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Dekotora
Which came first? Transformers or Dekotora? – via Pink Tentacle
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Soylent, the macro made of people
More on this question of crowdsourced writing, (plugging wet-ware into software) comes Soylent, (yes, it’s made of people) a research project which has written a add-in to Microsoft Word. Hooked into Amazon Mechanical Turk, this project offers three services: Shortn – trim document length without changing meaning Crowdproof – distributed human proof-reading The Human Macro –…