Category: Technology
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The Inbox Zero Thing
I really, really, really, dislike “productivity” books. And gurus. And methods. And things that can generally be characterized as dogmatic. But I like this. I know I’m late to this party, but for years, I thought Inbox Zero was some sort of Getting Things Done-related madness involving a lot of folders and filters and whatnot.…
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Not that every salesman in a flea market is sleazy, but…
This is why we use Twitter and Facebook and even Hunch and Quora to ask questions, search for products, and figure out how to replace dimmer switches. Searching Google is now like asking a question in a crowded flea market of hungry, desperate, sleazy salesmen who all claim to have the answer to every question…
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WikiLeaks and Tor: Moral use of an amoral system?
Reading the New Yorker’s piece on WikiLeaks, it’s hard to decide whether I’m reading about freedom fighters, skilled propagandists, or as is often the case, both. Without looking too deeply, although I have serious reservations about their editorial decisions from time to time, I believe in what WikiLeaks is trying to do, and I have since…
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Back to the Internet’s Future
Once in a while, I take a look through some of the links I’ve been saving, sharing, and publishing in the sidebar of my blog, Twitter, and a few other places, and try to scrape the pixelly cream off the top to immortalize (until the links break, anyway) a little bit of the Web, hung…
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We are all technologists now
A company launches a new phone, or is rumored to likely be planning to launch a fancy tablet computer, or a new browser, or upgrading its mobile data network, and thousands (millions?) of us have something to say about it. Really? What do we know about technology, business, strategy, and the machinations of multinational corporations?…
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Notes on managing technology decisions
Over at the Knight News Challenge blog, I’ve contributed a short list of tips on dealing with developers and choosing a platform for your project: “3. Hire human beings, not a programming language or Web framework. Unless you’re doing the programming yourself, stay focused on your end goal and steer clear of mandating how the…
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I forget useful code, but Snipt remembers.
If you’re anything like me, you’re not really a Web developer by trade, but you push around a little bit of code on an extremely regular basis. And often, it’s the same little bits of code over and over again. And every time you need to use it, you go flipping through text files, Google…
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Yes, I’m still talking about Twitter
Three links about Twitter you should see if you haven’t yet: Guy Kawasaki on How to use Twitter as a Twool. Katherine Boehret writes YASEOT (yet another simple explanation of Twitter), but it’s at the Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD site, so your editor and publisher will read it this time. Old Media New Tricks has…
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Sometimes, robots just aren’t enough
TechMeme adds a human editor to make adjustments when the algorithm fails: “Any competent developer who tries to automate the selection of news headlines will inevitably discover that this approach always comes up a bit short. Automation does indeed bring a lot to the table — humans can’t possibly discover and organize news as fast…
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Catering to information obsession
The moment that launched years of overzealous information consumption, filtering, sharing, and engagement, for me, was seeing Scoble’s feedreader on a screen in 2005. He was subscribed to 1200 feeds. Since then, he’s shifted his information production and consumption around from stream to stream as necessary to stay at the absolute front of the curve…