Archives for the 'miscTech' Category
The History and Social (Media) Influence of the Cheese Sandwich
Thursday, December 29th, 2011
Being some thoughts after reading Fred Wilson’s The Big Five of Social Media and Mocked and Misunderstood. With thanks and apologies to Redcliffe N. Salaman, author of a fantastic book. Shortly after Fred posted the two items linked above (both of which you should review now if you haven’t already), I found myself with a [...]
Identity : Anonymity :: Community : Network (?)
Monday, September 5th, 2011
There’s been a fair amount of discussion around Google’s “real names” policy on Google+ in certain circles. Most recently in my stream, Fred Wilson pointed to Corey Doctorow’s post on the topic, and the discussion around that post crystallized some of what I’ve been thinking on the issue. To be specific, the crystal is: The [...]
On Making Stuff
Friday, July 1st, 2011
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been spending whatever time I can spare on a little project: building kisttr, a Kickstarter Backer Tracker. It’s a pretty straightforward hack that allows you to “track” (or “follow”, if you prefer) a group of Kickstarter users and see what new projects they’re backing without having to visit each [...]
A Kickstarter Quandary
Tuesday, April 12th, 2011
It was inevitable — and in hindsight it’s surprising that it hadn’t happened before — but earlier this week I received my first email solicitation to back a Kickstarter project. “We notice and applaud you for helping so many people with their aspirations,” the email begins, which suggests that the project creators looked through some [...]
All About AdKeeper. And Alliteration.
Wednesday, February 9th, 2011
It’s no surprise that Scott Kurnit, the founder, thinks that AdKeeper will satisfy a very common (if not often expressed) need. And as he points out in a post on All Things Digital today, the idea doesn’t necessarily sound crazy. The two analog analogs he points to for AdKeeper’s model are: The broad popular attention [...]
Two-phase user adoption: from “oh, wow!” to “oh, yeah…”
Friday, August 27th, 2010
Note: I’m framing this post in terms of ExtensionFM because of a tweet, and because I believe that ExFM is a particularly interesting case, but this issue absolutely applies more broadly. A few days ago Lucas Gonze Twittered: I got drawn back into my Extension.fm setup today after forgetting it for a while. Important for [...]
Letter.ly’s Money Issues
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
A few additional thoughts around the “paid” part of paid newsletters; in short, I’m wondering whether introducing money into the system is actually worth it for personal email newsletter creators. 1. Money as Motivation for Writers A couple of letter.ly writers have mentioned the motivation to write that comes from having paid subscribers as a factor [...]
Obvious But Important
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010
Being a post on why I probably wouldn’t actually do what I asked Foursquare to do yesterday. Yesterday I vented via feature request, noting that Foursquare has the potential to offer me more information about why I might want to be “friends” with people that I don’t know in person. But in talking with a [...]
Conversationlists: Some Object, Strongly.
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
For the most part, the response to conversationlist.com has been really gratifying. A lot of people found it interesting, some found it really useful, and for the most part the criticism we’ve gotten has been well thought out and constructive. Sure, plenty of people found it uninteresting, stupid, or felt that something like favstar.fm’s dynamic [...]
Get Out of the Way
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
About a week ago I learned of last night’s checkins, a newly public service built using the Foursquare API. Once you allow the service to access your Foursquare account, it starts sending you a daily email listing your checkins for the past 24 hours or so. Reply to that email with some notes about each [...]
