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2007

  • 1 min read

Jeff Jarvis on the whole Imus situation

Check out this post from BuzzMachine:

"[snip…]At the Online Politics conference a few weeks ago, Joe Trippi said, “Every one of these candidates is going to get caught in a macaca moment.” They will mess up. They will say something in an unguarded moment. Yet we want them to be unguarded. We want them to be human. So when they are human and they do mess up, we can’t demand their scalp for every screwup. We have to judge whether this was merely a mistake or whether it revealed a fatal flaw in their character. And we need to be make that judgment ourselves, not under the threat and deadline of the press-conference piranha. We cannot run politics and the nation by the tyranny of the gotcha moment. I will also warn of the danger of life in the age of offense.[snip…]"

(from : On Imus)

  • 1 min read

“This is the Discover card Fraud department. Call 1-800-555-1212 – IMMEDIATELY

Sounds ominous, right? So I call them up, and I hear a serious voice telling me to please hold on, then I hear the official sounding "you are being recorded" beep beep beep.

Then the voice comes on the phone and says, "Thanks for calling Discover Card. Please give me your Discover Card number."

What would you do? I am worried about fraud on my card, right? But do I know who I am actually talking to?

  • 2 min read

Vista is out-of-sight (not necessarily in a good way)

I just had the pleasure of going through the initial set up of Windows Vista on a brand new HP notebook. Here are some of my impressions:

  • It's pretty, with translucent window title bars and colors. Somewhat mac-like, but really the Windows XP influence is just below the surface. Listening to Microsoft's stories, I guess I conclude that they spent lots and lots of time on the kernel and system services and maybe less on re-inventing the user experience.
  • The out of the box experience is so - so. They have lots of OEM partners who have installed a whole bunch of stuff that jumps in your face asking to 'help you', register you, etc. And the problem is that they are not all that coordinated with each other, with different look and feels sometimes, and contradictory instructions. Perhaps it's unfair because Apple controls almost everything about the out of the box experience. In the case of this particular notebook, it's unclear whose cares more or less about the experience: Microsoft or Hewlett Packard.
  • Fairly often your work is interrupted and you are asked such fun questions like: "Installation Service would like to access this directory, is that OK?" I suppose it's in the name of security, but I am not sure whether it is accomplishing what they intend.
  • Take a look at this article about a A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. It's quite long and exhaustive but interesting.
  • I guess if it wasn't for the fact that this product had such a tortured, long, and much promoted journey into the world I would give it a B+ but given the history and the promise I think that's being generous
  • 1 min read

Craigslist’s Dirty Little Secret

I love Craig's List. If you've heard of it (!) and are interested in online factoids, you'll may be interested in this post from Compete Blog:

"Analysis of eight major American cities shows erotic services consistently garners the highest number of individual visitors for February – almost always twice as many as the next ranking category, averaging 265,000 people per city."

(from : Craigslist’s Dirty Little Secret)

  • 1 min read

A great look back at Napster’s history

Today we hear that EMI is going to sell DRM-free music over the iTunes Store. I haven't studied the fine print yet, but it's clearly a big deal no matter how it reads. Here's an interesting look back at Napster who in a way started it all. Check out this post from Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing:

Shawn Fanning created Napster in his dorm room at Northeastern. It was the fastest-growing application in the history of the Internet. We changed the world but failed to achieve business success. Here is a glimpse into the inside story of Napster, and at the end, some lessons learned for entrepreneurs.

(from : How Napster changed the world - A look back 7 years later)

  • 1 min read

The myth of multi-tasking

I sometimes feel like I don't multi-task quite as well as "everyone else". So I was interested in this post from 43 Folders:

Yesterday’s New York Times front page ran an article pulling together the results of several recent studies looking at how interruptions and attempts to multitask can affect the quality of work as well as the length of recovery time.

[snip…]

My own feelings on the myth of multi- tasking are well-documented, but it’s fascinating to see research interest focused in this area — although it’s certainly not surprising, given its potential impact on knowledge workers and the industries that employ them. Again, from yesterday’s NYT article:

The productivity lost by overtaxed multitaskers cannot be measured precisely, but it is probably a lot. Jonathan B. Spira, chief analyst at Basex, a business-research firm, estimates the cost of interruptions to the American economy at nearly $650 billion a year…

The information age is really only a decade or two old in the sense of most people working and communicating on digital devices all day, Mr. Spira said. In the industrial era, it took roughly a century until Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1911 published his principles of “scientific management” for increasing worker productivity.

“We don’t have any equivalent yet for the knowledge economy,” Mr. Spira said.

(from: NYT: New data on the problems of “multitasking”)