quackquack

Oh dear where did I leave Junior? Roller buggy via @mjchapman

When people need to kick back, have fun, and party, I will be there, unlike your pathetic fonts. While Gotham is at the science fair, I’m banging the prom queen behind the woodshop. While Avenir is practicing the clarinet, I’m shredding “Reign In Blood” on my double-necked Stratocaster. While Univers is refilling his allergy prescriptions, I’m racing my tricked-out, nitrous-laden Honda Civic against Tokyo gangsters who’ll kill me if I don’t cross the finish line first. I am a sans serif Superman and my only kryptonite is pretentious buzzkills like you.

Via @grantbw.

Carl Malamud, Washington’s I.T. Guy. From the article: “His art is in figuring out how to free documents that aren’t restricted by secrecy but by the fact that the government has failed to put them online.” Via @timoreilly.

ABC News talks with the man behind @BPGlobalPR

Lego Hello World (most immediately via @butwait)

From MIT’s Technology Review:

The tweets are a mainstay of Google’s real-time results, but Google has not previously discussed how it ranks them. A fundamental Google strategy for identifying tweet relevance is analogous to that used by Google’s PageRank technology, which helps find relevant Web pages with traditional Web search. Under PageRank, Google judges the importance of pages containing a given search keyword in part by looking at the pages’ link structure. The more pages that link to a page—and the more pages linking to the linkers—the more relevant the original page. In the case of tweets, the key is to identify “reputed followers,” says Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, who led development of real-time search

Amazing before & after movie greenscreen clips via @jonwatts

@avinashkaushik on the virtue of failing fast, video from @kanter:

Avinash Kaushik on Failing Fast.

Avinash feels that in a world of finite resources, it is very important to experiment and fail fast.   With social media and on the web, experiments are fast, cheap, and scalable.  The learning that results is what brings your more success.   Experimentation also helps an organization make decisions based on audience feedback and analytics data, not your own hunches.  This try it, fix it approach leads to incremental improvements which in turn leads to better outcomes.

Martin commentary: One of the things I love about the web is that the kinds of decisions that get made by hunch or bluster can actually be checked by data. You can learn so much about your site use from checking comparative bounce rates and doing A/B tests, both of which are regular topics on Kausik’s blog.

Is Feedburner and Goo.gl faster than Twitterfeed and Bit.ly? Check my Twitter account for the answer!

Update: three hours later, the post still hasn’t come through Feedburner & Goo.gl. Closing down this experiment and sticking with Twitterfeed.

Some good tips. I more-or-less follow all these guidelines, though not always in the calculated way they suggest.

With over 300 million active users worldwide, and nearly 100 million in the US alone, Facebook can be a good platform for those wanting to grow their consulting business. While there are other social platforms for meeting new contacts or building your professional reputation, like LinkedIn or Twitter, Facebook offers a variety of ways for consultants to authentically market themselves to target contacts and customers.

One of the great things about Web 2.0 is the empowerment of average users. With Twitter and Facebook pages, individuals can now respond back to companies and organizations with a few strokes of the…

Its size, scale, and powerful brand image are attracting not just the region’s but the world’s attention. It may just be that some of the most important urban innovations in 21st century America end up coming not from Portland or New York, but places like Youngstown and, yes, Detroit.

Via scdemark.

Behaving badly online. The only qualm I have reposting this quote is that high schoolers often aren’t nearly as bad as the most vitriolic adults.

From A Tweet Unleashes Vitriol on a User in Britain (NYTimes).

“According to many sources, young emerging Christians need some safe way to rebel. They are not interested in experimenting with drugs, promiscuous sex or even real cigarettes, so they have chosen microbrew beer, R-rated movies, Coldplay and cloves. It makes them feel rebellious as they question their parents’ belief system, but they don’t have to go too far down the road of dangerous behavior or real rock-n-roll music.”

From @djword via @zoecarnate

An intern who spent time studying the Amish paper The Budget found it’s culture already mirrored the internet:

By assembling detailed reports from around the country, Ms. Best said, the editors of The Budget “have been doing for 100 years what we have only been doing recently — looking at news on the hyperlocal scale and asking each person what is on your mind,” she said in an interview from Newport, Wales, where she is a reporter at The South Wales Argus. “They are looking at the individuals to make a bigger picture. With the Internet, the power has shifted to many hands, but they have done that for a long time.”