Blog Posts

All my blog posts and articles

Page 98 of 142 (2828 total posts)

October 2007

Facebook, the new America Online?

Doc Searls has a new post about Facebook which I came across in Scoble’s Link Blog. It mentions something that I’ve been thinking about too. Is [tag]Facebook[/tag] the new [tag]America Online[/tag]? Here’s what I mean: Back in the bad old days, there were services like AOL, [tag]Compuserve[/tag] which were very popular. I was a committed user. Built-in information sources, built-in instant messaging, built-in ecommerce, built-in email, built-in search, single signon. ...

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Is Facebook the new Google of acquisition-lust?

In the past, clever [tag]entrepreneurs[/tag] (yours truly not included, alas) have built companies and products with a very specific plan or desire or hope or scheme to be acquired by some deep pocketed parent-to-be. Perhaps create a bit of MS Windows Software that looked just like an Office App, interoperated beautifully with Microsoft apps, was written in C#, didn’t run on anything but Windows, hoping to catch the eye of Microsoft (remember Visio?). Well I am sure this is still going on with Microsoft, especially since Balmer announced that MSFT will be acquiring 100 companies per year (quantity over quality?) But lately the cool kids deci...

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Steven Pinker on Why We Curse

I know that access to my blog is blocked at least by EMC (heard so from friends there) so I will refrain from quoting this article’s first word: “ucking became the subject of congressional debate in 2003, after NBC broadcast the Golden Globe Awards. Bono, lead singer of the mega-band U2, was accepting a prize on behalf of the group and in his euphoria exclaimed, “This is really, really, ucking brilliant” on the air.” (from Pinker on Why We Curse) It’s actually a serious article about linguistics, culture and human nature. Well written, well reasoned and interesting. Read Steven Pinker, Why We Curse, “What the F***?”

[GEEKY] Weakness in Mac OS X Software Update

Everyone loves how much easier Mac OS X makes it to install software. Well sort of. It’s a place where new users easily get stumped. What the heck are those .dmg files anyway, and where’s the installer? Well this post isn’t about that. After all, it wouldn’t count as [GEEKY] if that’s all it did. Being a neat freak, I have sub folders in my Applications folder, which as you know is the default place for software to be installed (“just copy the file, what could be easier?”) Turns out that for Apple supplied software, e.g. iPhoto and friends, the automagic software updater depends on finding them at the top level of Applications. If they aren’t there, they don’t get updated and you aren’t alerted to available updates. Mystery solved. So if for some reason you seem not to be getting an update you know is available, check whether you might have moved the application somewhere, hiding it from the [tag]Software Update…[/tag]

Hackers and the elections

In New Scientist Tech, an interesting article about hackers and the elections: “The web may not deserve its reputation as a great democratic tool, security experts say. They predict voters will increasingly be targeted by internet-based dirty tricks campaigns, and that the perpetrators will find it easier to cover their tracks.” (from Hackers could skew US elections”) Read the whole thing here.

Temporary phone numbers and eBay

When you are selling or buying something on the web, say eBay or Craigslist, it always is a question whether to give your ‘real’ phone number out. I just came across Numbr.com (credit Lifehacker, and several others) which appears to have a neat solution to this. Simply, it gets you (for free, but doesn’t everything have to be free nowadays?) a temporary phone number which will anonymously forward calls to your real number. Simple and useful. Check out Numbr.com.

Is Newser this weeks Daylife?

Newser.com is a new news site, with the tag line: “Faster, Smarter News.” Seems like it does some kind of automatic classification of news by one of 9 major topics and organizes it automatically and attractively. It may or may not be trying to personalize what it displays for me. To my eye it is similar to Daylife.com. Remember Daylife? It flashed pretty good a few months ago, but haven’t really heard much more about it. Again I am not sure whether it does any personalization or how that works. As someone who follows these kinds of products pretty closely, I don’t immediately see the key differences. Do you?

Lotus alums getting acquired left and right: Zingku and Buzzsaw

In recent weeks there have been two exciting announcements of acquisitions of companies started by friends of mine, and not coincidentally, ex-Lotus Development Corporation folks. Congratulations to Mussie Shore, who started Zingku on his announcement that he’s entered into an agreement to have Google acquire their Zingku service. And congratulations to: Rick Treitman, Mike Kraley, Paul Kleppner, and many others on their announcement that Adobe Systens has signed a definitive agreemenet to acquire Virtual Ubiquity, makers of Buzzword. Way to go!!!

September 2007

Enterprise 2.0 – What’s in it for you?

Enterprise 2.0 is one of those terms that is being bandied about by various people. In the Portals and KM Blog, Bill Ives has written a couple interesting run downs of what’s going on in that world. In “Description and Reviews of Enterprise 2.0 Tools”, there’s a good summary of some of the new open source and commercial tools and services that support Enterprise 2.0. Awareness is especially impressive, and one that I know well, as I’ve been working with them for the last 6 months or s...

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LinkedIn has photos, finally

Finally, welcome to the 20th  century, [tag]LinkedIn[/tag]: “It’s taken four years for LinkedIn to add photos, when every other [tag]social network[/tag] has done it forever. The site for business professionals has always kept a conservative, business-like tone. But although it says the decision has been driven by members, LinkedIn could not have escaped noticing that business people are using sites like Facebook to network both personally and for business. Adding photos ticks a box marked ‘we can be as friendly-looking as Facebook too guys’.”

Shelby is back from Liberia

My friend Shelby has been living and blogging from Africa over the last year or so. From reading it you can tell what a unique experience she has had, and that she comes back a changed person. Welcome back, Shelby! Check out this post from Plantains and Palm Trees: “[snip…] Going from Liberia to the US, my overwhelming thought is always this: It’s not that they’re poor and we’re rich. It’s that they’re incredibly poor and we’re incredibly rich. [snip…]” Read her blog, there are lots of other interesting and revealing stories.

OpenID not all happyness and light?

I don’t follow the Identify world that closely and like everyone I’ve now come across services who suggest that you log into them with an [tag]OpenId[/tag] account. So I have one now too. It’s free. It’s decentralized. What’s not to love? Well apparently it isn’t 100% love. Read this article, by [tag]Stefan Brands[/tag], who admittedly seems to be closely associated with a competing service, [tag]Credentica[/tag], which might well be the anti-OpenID. So he’s got his own biases: “[snip…]OpenID was designed as a lightweight solution for “trivial” use cases in identity management: its primary goal is to enable Internet surfers ...

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State department has a blog team

Apparently the US State Department has a team of bloggers who get into discussions on boards and blogs around the world, taking an interesting alternative approach to the usual formal, high level diplomacy: “…The State Department team members themselves said they thought they would be immediately flamed, or insulted and blocked from posting….” This is pretty interesting, and yet another sign of how blogs are infiltrating all aspects of life. Read the whole article: “At State Dept. Blog Team Joins Debate”, from the New York Times.

[geeky] Google Groups missing key functionality

I’ve been living inside a couple of [tag]Google groups[/tag] lately, posting questions and waiting for answers. (Which ones? Ruby on Rails: Talk and [tag]Active Scaffold[/tag]: Ruby on Rails plugin) Much to my surprise and [tag]productivity-loss[/tag], it’s not possible to request an email alert when someone posts an answer to your question. Odd, this is a oldie-but-goodie feature in many many mailing lists. So I am reduced to checking manually every day or so. (You can see it annoyed me sufficiently to bother writing this 🙂

Interesting pointer from Francois on the marketing potential of Facebook et al

Check out this post from Emergence Marketing: ** "Unfortunately, the reality is that many spammers have already invaded Facebook, Myspace and other similar sites. Go check the walls of the most popular interest groups in Facebook to see for yourself – many are littered with posts that are total sales pitches or with information that is totally irrelevant to the group’s conversation." (from**: What is the marketing potential of LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace)