I think their decision to artificially promote Google Plus pages above more relevant pages on competing social networks is the modern-day equivalent of the ’90s era search engines turning their homepages into “portals”. A search engine should be designed to send users quickly and accurately away to whatever sites on the Internet they’re looking for. The ’90s-era search engine portals blew this, because the whole portal idea was to keep users on their sites rather than send them away. This Google Plus integration is the same thing — an attempt to keep users on Google.com for another page view or two.
Daring Fireball Linked List: Google’s Problem: Relevance
Exactly right. That’s what I meant when I wrote this a year ago. Google won search because they prioritized the best answer above anything else. They have crossed that line and it will hurt.
(via bijan)
(via infoneer-pulse)
Source: daringfireball.net
…the lecture was the most effective way to convey information. We had the industrialization, we had the invention of celluloid, of digital media, and, miraculously, professors today teach exactly the same way they taught a thousand years ago.
Innovation is at its most powerful when it works through imagination. While creative solutions are important, the power of imagination takes innovation to a new level, because when we create with imagination, we are not simply responding to a problem; we are building worlds.
A Rainbow At Its Peak
Horace Dediu presents yet another amazing way to look at the rapidly evolving computer industry (here are Dediu’s other fascinating looks of the past few days).
The PC looks like a rainbow at its peak.
The Macintosh looks like a roller coaster with a misleading small first hill that tricks riders.
Android, iPhone, and iPad look like fireworks just taking off…
Source: parislemon
As Internet users, we all skim above the surface of programming code. It’s a language that we interact with on a constant basis, yet, like tourists in a far-flung locale, most of us never learn to speak it. But code is slowly becoming an element of many of our careers. I find myself diving into HTML many times a day (twice to write this blog post, even).
A new Internet startup called Code Academy is trying to prepare the programming-illiterate for their impending techno-savvy future. They’ve developed Code Year, a free web-based education course that teaches the elements of coding—from the fundamentals to the nitty-gritty details—over the duration of one year. The organization claims that, if you stick with their lessons, you should be able to write a basic video game or build a website at the end of 12 months.
Source: utnereader
Truth wasn’t a threat when you only communicated with your audience through the one-way media of TV, radio or print. Back then it was easy to craft an image of a shiny green company and pay for that lie to be plastered everywhere.
In the social media world the reality is different. To engage their audiences, companies like Volkswagen want to talk to you, joke with you, and supposedly listen to you. It’s the digital equivalent of trying to be one of your mates.
So when Neil, a volunteer from our Camden group, pointed out Volkswagen’s latest Facebook post, which was chattily asking for advice for 2012, it seemed a good opportunity to chip in. Because we’re friends, right?
Consider Gutenberg time. The printed book did not begin to take on its own form until 50 years after its invention. At first, printers mimicked scribes, with fonts designed to look like handwriting, while printing itself was promoted as automated writing. ‘They appear not to have perceived the printed book as a fundamentally different form,’ writes Leah Marcus in her essay Cyberspace Renaissance, ‘but rather as a manuscript book that could be produced with greater speed and convenience.’ They simply didn’t see the possibilities.
Nor do today’s media companies – not fully, not yet. Look at how they’re using the web and new platforms such as the tablet. They’re still attempting to replicate legacy forms, content, business models, industrial structures, and control: Old wine in new casks.
blog.bufferapp.com: 6 Incredible Examples Of How Twitter Predicts The Future
1.) Twitter Accurately Predicts Politician’s Victory at New Hampshire Primary
2.) Twitter knows how you will be feeling this Friday
3.) Did Twitter predict the revolution in Egypt?
4.) Predict the future yourself with Twitter and Timeu.se
5.) Hedgefund to make bets based on Tweets – beats the market
6.) Predicting and stopping the spread of diseases with Twitter
Note: All of these predictions are of the kind of collecting data early and seeing a pattern in that data in order to see what is currently emerging. That is just a small part of what we use the word “prediction” for… Not that it is unimportant but it might be problematic to call it predictions without to define what kind of predictions it is…
Source: futuramb
Golden Age of Publishing Entrepreneurship?
This is worth a read, but the open question is whether an existing analogue-based enterprise can pull off a transformation to digital and not lose its shirt. Or, putting it differently: does the future belong to start ups who can afford to lose investor money as they do the R&D, market groundwork and play craps?
the dream of prediction also attracts a very different breed of prognosticators: one armed not with sheep guts, but with the tools of math and science. Instead of tea leaves or Tarot cards, they wield hard drives filled with data. They conjure up systems, not fantasies. By starting with information about what has already happened — immense quantities of it — and finding inventive ways to interpret it, experts in fields from public health to national security are building increasingly sophisticated predictive models, taking advantage of new technology and new ideas about how the world is organized to push the frontiers of what we can predict. The idea that you can systematize forecasting isn’t entirely new, especially in the realm of business and finance — an economics-oriented industry group called the International Institute of Forecasters is hosting its 32d annual meeting in Boston next June. But recent years have seen an explosion of interest and creativity in the realm of data-driven soothsaying, and some in the field predict — well, they think — that they are on the cusp of something big. “We are at a different place in analysis than we were before. We know how to find trends, we know how to handle data in [new] ways,” said Thomas Wallsten, a psychologist at the University of Maryland at College Park who is helping to develop a cutting-edge model for prediction that relies on crowdsourcing. He added, “We’ve become much more systematic.
Source: Boston.com
i think programming is finally being seen as it should be - as the literacy of the 21st century
Source: avc.com
The cutting edge of technology seems to be confined to the borders of our screens. People don’t freak out about the Nest or the Little Printer because they’re really such revolutionary devices – they aren’t. People are excited because these things portend the fulfillment of the promise technology has unwittingly made: that it will change the way we live, not just the way we consume.
Source: TechCrunch
