Blog Posts

December 2007

• 2007-12-03

  Are we (we are) heading for a recession?

  Just check out this well argued, detailed piece, “Wake up to the dangers of a deepening crisis”, by Lawrence Summers: “Three months ago it was reasonable to expect that the subprime credit crisis would be a financially significant event but not one that would threaten the overall pattern of economic growth. This is still a possible outcome but no longer the preponderant probability.

  Even if necessary changes in policy are implemented, the odds now favour a US recession that slows growth significantly on a global basis. Without stronger policy responses than have bee...

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  #business
• 2007-12-01

  Wikipedia on a map

  I am a huge fan of Wikipedia. Here’s a new neat hack: Wikipedia Vision. This is a live, animated, world map, showing in real time each edit to the Wikipedia, as it happens. Makes the world feel even smaller, doesn’t it? It’s a cool way to learn about topics in Wikipedia that you may not have known about.

  Check out Wikipedia Vision

  #wikipedia #maps

November 2007

• 2007-11-30

  Building traffic for your blog

  If you’re a regular reader you know that I’ve been studying Search Engine Optimization. As I’ve said before, it’s one of those topics that sounds like all common sense once you hear it, but then why didn’t you think of it yourself? Anyway here’s a good article with lots of good solid common sense about building traffic for your blog.

• 2007-11-29

  How to be creative

  I just came across this thoughtprovokingbit called “How to be creative.” It’s a quick read in the short form and at least for me, hit home. Here is an expanded form of the same ideas, with illustrations. Recommended.

• 2007-11-28

  How does Fake Steve get away with this?

  Everyone by now has heard that the Diary of Fake Steve Jobs is actually written by Daniel Lyons, a Senior Editor at Forbes. In a recent article, as an example, you can see, Fake Steve can be downright catty:

  “[snip…]I pointed out to Otellini that in fact this just makes Negroponte look like a jackass, which is why the Journal placed that statement into the story and attributed it to Negroponte.

  The way this technique works is they try to seem all cool and neutral but they’re really making Negroponte look like a donkey — and right on Page One of the world’s biggest...

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• 2007-11-27

  [geeky] Dang – I was looking for one of these just last week

  13 port USB hub Yeah very geeky, eh? All I was able to locate was 7-port USB hubs. Why not daisy chain them? I have reason to believe that while logically it should not matter, in practice it does.

  My reason is that I’ve read tech notes on at least one device that told me specifically to plug it directly into the USB 2.0 port of my computer and not into a hub. which made no sense to me, but made a difference in fixing a problem I was having.

  In the end I bought another 7-port hub (which seemed to be the flavor I saw most often) and plugged them together in a way to have as few “hops” as possible. All seems to work ok.

  In fact who knows if internal to the 13 port hubs there are 2 7 port hubs, daisy chained. Anyone know?

  #technology
• 2007-11-26

  The F-Word

  Over on Copyblogger, a good reminder of a bit of common wisdom: “[snip…]Yep, it’s the “F” word.

  Fear.

  Fear affects us all more than we care to admit, and it’s especially insidious for writers. Writing online is one of those activities where you’re really putting yourself out there, and the critics are always waiting to pounce. But as we’ll see below, failure and mediocrity are not the only things we fear.[snip…]” (from Copy Blogger: The Nasty Four Letter Word…)

  I cite this because reading it reminded me of a cute but fairly profound play on the word FEAR:

  F.E.A.R = “False Evidence (or ...

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• 2007-11-24

  The System Administrators Song

  “A song about those very special people that make sure your computer works. They are called System Administrators.”“…. sometimes he just presses caps lock and walks away, and wow, hey, my password works again! … “

  Funny!

  Technorati Tags: funny

• 2007-11-23

  Freebase.com is the semantic web

  I am not an expert in the semantic web but Freebase looks like it to me. I am surprised more hasn’t been written about it. It is absolutely amazing and head-spinning. I will have a hard time describing accurately, hence the headline. For me, it seems like Freebase does what the Semantic Web guys have been talking about forever.

  In Freebase’s own words: “Freebase.com is home to a global knowledge base: a structured, searchable, writeable and editable database built by a community of contributors, and open to everyone. It could be described as a data commons. Freebase.com is enabled by the technology of Metaweb, which is described at ...

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  #technology
• 2007-11-22

  The Time Machine Works!

  Check out this post from blog.payne.org: Well, I can report that Time Machine (the new back-up & restore utility for Mac OS X) works. My 364 day old MacBook suffered a complete hard drive failure, only TWO hours after completing my first full backup. I hustled to the Apple store right away, so I didn’t miss my one-year warranty window.

  (from: Involuntary test of Time Machine)

  I will wait just a little longer before committing to Leopard. It’s one of those, if it aint broke then don’t fix it kind of situations…

  #apple
• 2007-11-21

  Shakey-bakey Security

  “Establishing a secure wireless link between two gadgets could soon be purely a matter of holding them together and applying a vigorous shake.” (from NewScientistTech)

• 2007-11-20

  Google is the universe

  As you may have heard, I’ve been learning all about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) lately. I just came across this amazing little service called the DigPageRank Pagerank Checker. The story goes something like this. Google assigns every single page in the whole internet a numerical score called the Page Rank (PR). It somehow says something about how important that page is and consequently how high it should appear in your Google search results.

  Like Astrology, ...

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  #technology
• 2007-11-19

  Does Death Penalty Save Lives?

  Very interesting article in the New York Times discussing whether the death penalty saves lives, “According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented.

  The effect is most pronounced, according to some studies, in Texas and other states that execute condemned inmates relatively often and relatively quickly.

  The studies, performed by economists in the past decade, compare the number of executions in different jurisdictions with homicide rates over time — while trying to eliminate the effects of crime rates, conviction rates and other factors — and s...

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  #politics
• 2007-11-19

  TechCrunch Boston

  Two nights ago, Friday, I got to go to the TechCrunch Boston party at The Estate in Boston (which oddly enough doesn’t seem to have a web site.) Those of you who know me will be ‘surprised’ that I had to miss the ‘drinking-focused after party, held at an Irish pub, from 11:00pm on. Lately it seems like every week there’s another tech networking event in our area, which is great. This one was huge though, seemed like 500 or more people, elbow to elbow. Great fun!

  Here’s ...

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  #boston

October 2007

• 2007-10-31

  BlogBridge 6.0 is out

  We just released BlogBridge 6.0. It’s getting really good reviews so you may want to check out what I’ve claimed is the most powerful blog reader out there. One of the cool new things is the “What’s Hot” feature, which is kind of a built-in meme tracker, but based on your own interests. For example, below is my report for today. You can see BlogBridge does a really good job culling the stuff that I care about most. Pretty cool eh?

  ...

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• 2007-10-30

  Best way to protect against identity theft?

  I’ve come across these two services, priced similarly, sound similar. ID TheftSmart – The name sounds like they are a smart way to commit identity theft, but I suppose this is not what they mean.

  Lifelock – Their tag line is “Guarantee your good name” and one of their gimmicks is that the CEO has published his SSN for all the world to see which is fairly daring and clever.

  Do you know anything about the pros and cons of services like these, or the specifics of either or both of these?

• 2007-10-29

  Magic Firefox Phishing Message

  Pleasantly surprised to see this, and I didn’t even know it was checking for me:

  (not that I would have fallen for it 🙂

• 2007-10-29

  Good interview by Guy Kawasaki of Compete guys

  If you are interested in SEO, there are some good facts and factoids in this interview by Guy Kawasaki of Compete guys.

• 2007-10-26

  Pop!Tech 2007 – notes and thoughts

  My purely biased view of the most memorable presenters, quotes and associated links:

  Kiva.org uses their web site to allow you and me to make micro loans to entrepreneurs around the world. Jessica Flannery gave a terrific and enthusiastic talk and got me to go right to the site and sign up.Here’s Ethan Zuckerman’s exhaustive live blog of the Kiva presentation.

  ...

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  #business
• 2007-10-25

  How to Opt Out of Junk Mail and Catalogs: Useful from Chris Pirillo

  Check out this post from Chris Pirillo:

  "If you’re like me, you may receive a LOT of junk mail. Catalogs, mailers, credit card offers… they fill up my mail box. Thankfully, I’ve found a couple of free websites to help us out!"

  (Read the whole thing: How to Opt Out of Junk Mail and Catalogs)