That's what I tell my Gutenbourgeois friends, if they'll listen. I say: Create a service experience around what you publish and sell. Whatever “customer service” means when it comes to books and authors, figure it out and do it. Do it in partnership with your readers. Turn your readers into members. Not visitors, not subscribers; you want members. And then don't just consult them, but give them tools to consult amongst themselves. These things are cheap and easy now if you hire one or two smart people instead of a large consultancy. Define what the boundaries are in your community and punish transgressors without fear of losing a sale. Then, if your product is good, you'll sell things. (Don't count on your fellow Gutenbourgeois to buy things. They're clicking the little thumb icon on YouTube like everyone else.) If you don't want to do that then just find niche communities who might conceivably care about your products and buy great ad placements. It's a better online spend.

The story of Gopher's rise and fall is both fascinating and complex. Important influences in the process were both technological and sociological. This paper does not provide any one definitive answer to why history played itself out as it did. Instead, I have attempted to refute the very notion that such a unitary answer is either desirable or possible. I have found the concept of mind share to be a useful way of presenting the influences involved without the need to commit to a specific causal chain of events. My hope is that the result can contribute positively to the ongoing historical dialog on why the Internet that so many of us use developed in the way it did.

Though I'm not entirely opposed to this style—witness this very post—most of the blog's popularity derives from columns titled things like "Teeth and Blood" and "You Were Killed By A Bear And I Am Sad" and 5000-word exegeses on half of a Michigan football game, which are neither search engine- or link-friendly. With some limited exceptions (like throwing the name of each committed recruit into the post title, and providing SEO-friendly headlines for actual news posts) my philosophy has been to make the content as good, and as difficult to replicate, as possible. (Evidently I feel a good, weird title goes a long way.) The cookie cutter is eschewed.

ABSTRACT. The symbol-based, correspondence epistemology used in AI is contrasted with the constructivist, coherence epistemology promoted by cybernetics. The latter leads to bootstrapping knowledge representations, in which different parts of the cognitive system mutually support each other. Gordon Pask's entailment meshes and their implementation in the ThoughtSticker program are reviewed as a basic application of this methodology. Entailment meshes are then extended to entailment nets: directed graph representations governed by the "bootstrapping axiom", determining which concepts are to be distinguished or merged. This allows a constant restructuring and elicitation of the conceptual network. Semantic networks and frame-like representations with inheritance can be expressed in this very general scheme by introducing a basic ontology of node and link types. Entailment nets are then generalized to associative nets characterized by weighted links.

A traditional, clustered relational database requires a sizable upfront capital outlay, is complex to design, and often requires a DBA to maintain and administer. Amazon SimpleDB is dramatically simpler, requiring no schema, automatically indexing your data and providing a simple API for storage and access. This approach eliminates the administrative burden of data modeling, index maintenance, and performance tuning. Developers gain access to this functionality within Amazon’s proven computing environment, are able to scale instantly, and pay only for what they use.

Luke Wroblewski: What I try to encourage teams to do is reflect the core essence of their service with a few lightweight interactions. If you can make people successful along the way—even better. Will Wright, the creator of the Sims & Spore, has a belief that games should allow people to succeed within the first five seconds. That's a great philosophy to bring to gradual engagement. In fact, I think if you can use lightweight actions to allow people to accomplish something relevant to the core of your product within their first one or two interactions with your service, that's gradual engagement at its finest.

Currently, we have ten job queues running in parallel. At creation, each job is randomly assigned a queue and inserted — usually at the end of the queue, but it is possible for certain high-priority tasks to jump to the front. The queues each have a master process running on dedicated hardware. The master is responsible for fetching jobs from the queue, marking them as in-process, giving them to local children to do the work, and marking them as complete when the child is finished. Each task has an ID, task type, arguments, status, create/update date, retry count, and priority. Tasks detect their own errors and either halt or put themselves back in the queue for retry later, when hopefully things have gotten better. Tasks also lock against the objects they’re running on (like accounts or groups) to make sure that other tasks don’t stomp on their data. Masters have an in-memory copy of the queue for speed, but it’s backed by mysql for persistent storage, so we never lose a task.

A friend recently asked me for my favorite color picker tool so I thought I’d go ahead and compile them here plus some sites I use for color inspiration. Want more? Check out my delicious collection of webcolor links.

Everything was all well and good until I had to figure out how to use OpenID. I've been watching the development of this shit from the sidelines for a while (well, if reading something about OpenID blah blah blah on TechCrunch and saying, aw, that's cute, then getting back to work counts). I understand the problem that OpenID is trying to solve, but the approach is way too, uh, how to put this, San Francisco.

This method uses a mixture of DOM scripting, and a small ammount of perl (or any other backend language) to send SMS from the catalog.

saas blog

Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back tests in the actual environment that they will run.
Selenium IDE is not only recording tool: it is a complete IDE. You can choose to use its recording capability, or you may edit your scripts by hand. With autocomplete support and the ability to move commands around quickly, Selenium IDE is the ideal environment for creating Selenium tests no matter what style of tests you prefer.

DotMobi strongly encourages the use of emulators during the development of any mobile site since they allow you to get a rough idea of how the site will look without having to purchase multiple devices or incurring data charges.

(i.e. see just how crappy a lot of mobile browsers are, and understand why it took the iPhone to make people actually use a mobile phone.)

Come on, people — you could load a usenet thread off a floppy drive in that time! (ah, memories of timesharing 50 people on a 486-50)

I have some of these too.

"all source code must be turned over to the charities at the end of the weekend" - Ann Arbor Give Camp is a unique weekend developer event designed to allow developers, designers, DBAs and web enthusiasts to donate their time and talent to developing appl

it came up with "vielmetaphyiscs" and "vielmetaphor" for me. fun.

However, it must be clearly recognized that Hyper-G generalises, but makes full use of WWW and Mosaic facilities.

"We shall see a web spun of wires"

Find the gradient, then follow it.

Installing MAMP and running Wordpress locally on your Mac is a simple task, however I was unable to find any good documentation while I was attempting to do it for the first time which made it seem really difficult.

It's like Spain - for pants!

Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy. One man’s odyssey through the nightmare of infinite connectivity

WordPress 2.3.3 is an urgent security release.

suggestion for auto-fill for forms - to automate "renew all books at the library" task

Some of these kids, indeed, might end up having more of a “college” experience when they enter the workplace than beforehand. The workplace may be more surprising and maybe even more creative.

method and apparatus for automatically generating javascript events when outbound links are clicked on a site

The table below shows the largest 50 sites circa August 2001, based on monthly attention. More importantly, it also shows how that attention share has shifted since.

A shortage of online advertising sales reps has led to bidding wars, lavish perks, and fat salaries, reports Fortune's Jessi Hempel.

I'm a game designer living in Brooklyn, NY. Much of my personal work has revolved around 'big games' or location-based game projects. I am one of the founders and organizers behind the Come Out & Play Festival.

"There is some tendency, if not an outright mandate, to search for eyeballs," says Bob Steele, who teaches journalistic ethics at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank in St. Petersburg, Fla. "Part of it is that the technology now gives barometri

The redesign also importantly follows a trend toward verticalization (discussed in past columns) by delineating certain categories through a new, city-guide like interface. These include Restaurants, Health & Beauty, and Home & Garden.

Barrett talked to us last week about MySpace's new ad targeting program, FIM's performance compared to Google and Yahoo, and the limits of Facebook's marketing abilities. The news: profile targeting is in beta (as of two weeks ago) and will soon be expa

The problems of medical devices, consumer electronics, mobile, operating systems and platforms, kiosks and in-environment touchpoints seem much more engaging and a direct part of people's lives than most web sites will ever be.

handy, could need this. (if it's a feed, it can get back into this delicious stream)

server upgrade

todo: how does this look from the blackberry?

version control for wordpress; an update to a 2005-era plugin, with better coding, better ui, and that 2006 smell.

This plugin creates a backup of all changes to posts and pages and allows you to revert back to an old version if needed. (No updates since 2005; sounds like the right idea, though.)

“A big part of [it] is cross-channel — starting to bring the power and benefits of the different channels together,” something Borders couldn’t do before, said Kevin Ertell, vice president of e-business at Borders, Ann Arbor, MI.

note to self: downgrade my account, save some $

Gelernter envisions a giant beam of information - a Worldbeam - that's organized chronologically. All of your data is stored on the Worldbeam. You decide who can access its micro components and how. However, none of your data is stored locally on your PC.

deaf technology and assistive media blog

I think Facebook is the most interesting company in Silicon Valley right now, more interesting than Google.

That's because they are still young and innovating on a single dimension and doing it better than anyone.

aha, so this is what it does. could very easily use.

one of these, I'm sure, can send repeated events to twitter. would like an upcoming.org to twitter feed. I CAN HAS TWITTERS?

nice writeup in the Times about LibraryThing, featuring one of their 2000+ book users.

The Copyright Royalty Board decision on the royalties for to be paid by Internet Radio stations for streaming music during the years 2006-2010 was released to the participants in the proceeding today. And the rates are going up significantly over the nex

infosec dashboard of global threats and attacks

patrick hindert

in search of the framework that gets you results in the fewest lines of code

Learn how to reduce the number of HTTP requests required by your web pages by combining adjacent images and optionally imagemapping the links. This tutorial shows both client and server side techniques you can use to save precious HTTP requests and speed

prosper = microcredit for USA

US ranks up there with Slovenia at 65% of users who have broadband at home. China broadband growing at 90%/yr.

on web 2.0

very small standards for doing rich content

Marc Brown will be at Supernova 2005

Why does it specifically mention that the web browser may also use the gopher protocol, when it is written elsewhere that a web browser may use any protocol? Because the gopher protocol is especially meritorious, since it enables support of legacy systems

html text editor as edit input box. gpl, sourceforge