July 2007
“MY NAME is Mohammed Sokor, writing to you from Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab. Dear Sir, there is an alarming issue here. People are given too few kilograms of food. You must help.” A crumpled note, delivered to a passing rock star-turned-philanthropist? No, Mr Sokor is a much sharper communicator than that. He texted this appeal from his own mobile phone to the mobiles of two United Nations officials, in London and Nairobi. He got the numbers by surfing at an internet café at the north Kenyan camp.”
—Dealing with disasters | Flood, famine and mobile phones | Economist.com
“There is something really powerful about public, asynchronous text communications where a reply is not expected. A great example is blogging…. Twitter provides a platform for banter that blogging doesn’t and it’s available in so many places via IM, mobile text messaging, or the Web that it induces a different sort of behavior. Twitter encourages people to adapt and invent behavior to suit their needs.”
—Twitter | Union Square Ventures: A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing
“Facebook has a huge active community. It is reported that of the 29 million active users, about half log in each day. This is a rarity among Web 2.0 companies (comparatively, Google Videos has about 3% active users)”
—5 Money Making Opportunities on Facebook
“In 1976 the Los Angeles Times published a page-one story about newspapers that began, “Are you holding an endangered species in your hands?”
—From print to Web: The Washington Post goes digital - August 6, 2007
“When CBS yanked sci-fi drama “Jericho,” it was caught off guard by the enormous fan reaction. The network, which eventually agreed to keep the show on the air, hadn’t realized that the program had a significant following among viewers who watched it on the web and via DVRs, said Leslie Moonves, CBS Corp.’s chief executive, at a recent event…. “Jericho” fans need to “show up on the television,” Mr. Moonves scolded. “That’s how we get paid.”
—Advertising Age - MediaWorks - TV Measurement Comes Up Short
“Over the years, one of the things that most of us old-timers (gak) will tell you is that you often get a “feeling” for a machine that’s more meaningful than what benchmark tests or performance numbers tell you. Some machines feel faster than others, for example. This is probably the best way to approach any analysis or comparison of the Mac versus the PC. In my opinion, I sense that the OS is more solid than Microsoft Windows, but I cannot say why exactly. I suspect that the modern underpinnings of the Unix kernel have something to do with it.”
—Me and My Mac: More Good Things About Macs - Columns by PC Magazine
“it’s only a matter of time before the mobile destroys (or at least radically shakes up) the projector market, just as it’s done with digital cameras, pagers, alarm clocks and calculators. More importantly, I think that this is half of the essential component that’s needed for the mobile to really replace the laptop altogether.”
—The Mobile Projector at MobHappy
“three genres of presence in urban space that involve the combination of portable media devices, people, infrastructures, and locations: cocooning, camping, and footprinting. These place-making processes provide hints to how portable devices have reshaped the experience of space and time in global cities. (from Mimi Ito paper)”
—All about Mobile Life - Place-making: Cocooning, camping and footprinting
“Fifty-seven percent of online adults have used the internet to watch or download video, and 19% do so on a typical day… More than half of online video viewers (57%) share links to the video they find with others, and three in four (75%) say they receive links to watch video that others have sent to them.”
—Pew Internet: Online Video
“We used to have this utopian view that the Internet would solve all of our societal divisions. On the Internet, no one would know you’re a dog, right? The reality is that all of society’s issues are simply perpetuated online. And that’s frustrating. I liked the utopian dream better, even if it’s not real. But if we accept the reality - that the Internet mirrors and magnifies offline values and views - we must start to think of what the implications of this are. Society is in a dangerous position when people who are different do not interact.”
—Responding to Responses to: “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace”
“In academic writing, I write for posterity. In my blog, I write to get an issue off my chest and to work things out while they are still raw. The informal language in my blog is intentional. The lack of citations is intentional. They are meant to signal that this is a work-in-progress. I want to signal that I’m thinking out loud.”
—Responding to Responses to: “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace”
“in the world of blogs, verbosity is akin to author suicide”
—Responding to Responses to: “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace”
“When studying post-structuralism, I was utterly fascinated by the idea of the death of the author. The idea is that once a text is put out there, the author matters not because the author has no control over how that text is interpreted. The weird thing about blogging is that the author is pretty darn present. I’m here. No one seems to realize that but I am.”
—Responding to Responses to: “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace”
“# Web 1.0 is like buying a can of Campbell’s Soup
# Web 2.0 is like making homemade soup and inviting your soup-loving friends over
# The semantic web is like having a dinner party, knowing that Tom is allergic to gluten, Sally is away til next Thursday and Bob is vegetarian.” —Making Innovation Flourish: The future is smart machines (and soup)
# Web 2.0 is like making homemade soup and inviting your soup-loving friends over
# The semantic web is like having a dinner party, knowing that Tom is allergic to gluten, Sally is away til next Thursday and Bob is vegetarian.” —Making Innovation Flourish: The future is smart machines (and soup)
“Nobody talks about users of dishwashers, or users of retail stores, or users of telephones. So why are we talking about “users” of computers, browsers, and software? Try, just for a day, to stop using this word. You’ll be amazed at how differently you think about the world. Web users become people looking for information. Application users become employees trying to get stuff done. Users of your Web site become customers. … And most importantly, social media users become people connecting with other people.”
—Groundswell (Incorporating Charlene Li’s Blog): I’m sick of users
“An ongoing investigation by the FBI into gambling in Second Life is believed to be directly related to Linden Lab’s sudden decision to ban all forms of gambling on Second Life.”
—Second Life Bans Gambling Following FBI Investigation
