i like the notion of a road trip to learn what your users are doing. beats going to web 2.0 conferences.
Tag: internet
Gather
Gather, which is a bit of a cross between Vox and Newsvine, emphasizes personal publishing and offers rewards for members of popular in-network blog posts and articles. (We’ve also written similar companies Multiply and Topix.net recently.) Gather’s substantial resources haven’t paid off with substantial popularity, especially considering the competition: 120K registered users and 700K unique visitors per month.
what do they need all that money for? to fail more spectacularly?
All the news that fits the print
“The great challenge was to edit those things as short as they could be and still have them make sense”. Great acclaim came to the editor who could artfully reduce wire stories to their absolute essence. One favorite K-heds, which ran in the Times in the 1950s, read in its entirety: Most snails are both male and female, according to the Associated Press.
the art of boiling a text down to its essence is being lost in the infinite room the internet affords
Craigslist Ambition
dissects the visual cleverness of craigslist (and how it is a yahoo-sized business in the making)
Now Craig’s lead-into-gold trick is that he gets his posters to accurately classify their spam. Into 160 categories. Holy Toledo Jacob Nielsen. You can’t have a pulldown with 160 things in it. 50% of your users wouldn’t get a pulldown with 3 things in it right. Ah, but it’s not a pull-down. 50% of the entire homepage is a giant selector devoted to classifying posts.
Anonymous Phone Numbers
Jangl provides an ID that users can give out to other people to create a VOIP number unique to a single relationship between 2 people. VOIP is used as the connection between any 2 phones, be they land lines, cell phones or VOIP calls.
multiple identities / identity intermediaries are starting to appear in the real world. this is how you deal with the ‘OMG teh internets have predators’
MoodJam
MoodJam is a visualization of your moods and other people’s moods. Use MoodJam to:
- Keep a record of your moods every hour, day, and weeks—as often as you want, for as long as you want.
- Visualize your moods in beautiful color strips.
- Learn about trends in your moods and colors you associate with specific moods.
- Share your moods with friends, family, co-workers, and other people who matter to you.
CMU does research with feelings journals. What is the world coming to?
Perspektive Schweiz
this nonpartisan polling site is now being used by all political parties to shorten the feedback loop for new ideas (instead of them being rejected at national votes). they are buying adwords to make people aware of it 😉
State of the Internet
Skype traffic = ~7% of global international long distance minutes
wow
US Internet Disconnect
To begin with, the FCC — of which I am a member — must face up to the problem. Today the agency’s reports seem designed mostly to obscure the fact that we are falling behind the rest of the world.
Internets
OMFG LOL!!!

2022-07-29: This collection of internet illustrations is quite something.

