How Location Based Services Are Changing the News: A Webinar I’m Doing Next Mont..
Tuesday, March 16, 2010

I was honored to be invited by the Poynter News University to present a webinar on the way that location based servies are (and will) change the news world . Pretty far out stuff! I hope you'll join me. I'll be flying out to Florida to present in person, but it's all about the online attendance so I hope you'll spend some time on April 1st joining us for this discussion. .. read more..

Why Big Data? Here’s Why I’m Interested
Wednesday, March 10, 2010

I just had my 2nd conversation this morning before coffee about this fabulous Economist special report on Big Data: Data Data Everywhere . The person I was corresponding with asked me why I was interested in this topic. Here's my answer. If this is something you're interested in, I'd love to know what it is about Big Data that captures your interest, too. What got me excited is just that this is a topic I think is fascinating. I'll tell you frankly: I think in big data there lies a lot of hidden patterns that represent both opportunities for action and for reflection. At RWW we're working on trying to find ways to mine data to find news first (we've got some interesting methods employed already) and personally, I think the world is an awfully unfair mess and I'm hoping that data analysis will help illuminate some of the hows and the whys. Like the way that real estate redlining was exposed back in the day by cross referencing census data around racial demographics and housing loan data. That illuminated systematic discrimination against black families in applying for home loans in certain parts of town. So too I think we'll find a lot of undeniable proof of injustices and clues for how we might deal with them in big data today. How about you? Are you interested in Big Data? Where does your interest come from? Related: Check out Ta-Nehisi Coate's critical analysis of one of the most prominent recent examples of social media data analyzed . I'm still reading it, myself. .. read more..

My New Bio, What Do You Think of It?
Friday, March 5, 2010

Working on a new bio, anybody got any feedback on how this reads? Marshall Kirkpatrick is the lead writer at ReadWriteWeb, one of the top technology news blogs on the internet and syndicated daily online by the New York Times. Marshall has established himself as one of the web's leading voices on bleeding edge technology thanks to his ability to find signal burried in real-time noise – primarily through the use of innovative research systems built for crowdsourced data mining and first mover's advantage. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, two dogs, two cats and three chickens. Above: Two thirds of said chickens. .. read more..

Some Nice Feedback About My Product Development Consulting
Thursday, March 4, 2010

I regularly do one-hour long telephone consulting sessions on launch planning and product development. I really enjoy doing that kind of work. My most recent client in that capacity was a pre-launched e-learning platform called Nixty . Glen Moriarty, Psy.D., CEO and Co-Founder of NIXTY, had these kind words to share about our work together. I thought I'd share them here. You can find more information about my consulting services here . Drop me a line if you'd like to discuss our working together. “Marshall provided us some great insight into our platform and user experience in particular. We had demo'd the product for a variety of different target markets, but we hadn't really thought through the user experience for one of our main segments. Marshall pointed out this blind spot and then offered several very practical recommendations to tighten up these parts of our platform. In addition, he provided us with some great referrals and pointed us to some hard-to-find resources. I wouldn't be surprised if one year from now, I reflect back on my conversations with Marshall as being pivotal to our success with acquiring and maintaining users. I strongly recommend his services, especially for those of you who might be trying to navigate the social Web.” Thanks, Glen! .. read more..

Check Out This Poll Widget
Tuesday, March 2, 2010

This is from Urtak and looks a lot like Hunch . I think it's a pretty compelling user experience. Poll creation is pretty weak, but easy. Let me know what you think and I'll tell you what I think of it once we're on the other side. It's messy, I can't figure out why it's cutting off the first few words of my first sentence above. .. read more..

My New People Tracking System
Sunday, February 28, 2010

I'm experimenting with a new system for discovering and getting to know important new people. I'm pretty excited about it. Of course it's about Twitter because Twitter is paying my mortgage . I wrote a little song about it, goes something like this: Just kidding, no song. I totally should write a song about it, though. If this system works well over time maybe I will do a little warbling about it after all. Thoughts? .. read more..

5 Cool New Blogs You Might Like
Monday, February 8, 2010

I've been meaning to share links to some of the blogs I've been coming across a lot lately and really enjoying. Check these out, you might like them as much as I have been. Got suggestions for other blogs that readers here and I should be subscribed to as well? Locationmeme is some good writing about the hot trend of social software based on location. See also Checkin Blog . The Next Web is an up-and-coming tech news blog, a competitor to ReadWriteWeb. These guys are really, really fast on a story. Hopefully once they've made all the more of a name for themselves for speed, they'll settle into writing more about what they think about the web. They're certainly right in the thick of things online. Mixergry is an awesome series of video interviews with entrepreneurs who have interesting stories. Augmented Planet is all about Augmented Reality. I'm a big Games Alfresco reader, but Augmented Planet is looking like a regular must-read as well. See also Tish Shute's Ugotrade . Finally, these might not be blogs but they are some of my favorite news sources of daily information. Two iPhone apps that I'm just in love with. The app for Newser offers a great summary of top news stories. It makes really efficient reading. And my absolute #1 top new favorite? Etsy Addict ! Yup, those are my (roughly) 5 favorite new blogs. How about you? Anything you've discovered lately that is becoming a must-read? .. read more..

What Did Zuckerberg Really Say About Privacy?
Sunday, February 7, 2010

I just noticed some posts around the web questioning my characterization of Mark Zuckerberg's on-stage declaration that the age of privacy is over . I left a comment on one of those blog posts that I thought I should post here as well. I thought pretty hard before posting that coverage of Zuckerberg's statements that I did. I asked myself: is this a fair way to characterize what he just said? I concluded that it was and I stand by that still today. So just for the record, here's the rough transcript I posted last month of Zuckerberg's literal comments, followed by my justification for why I've summarized them as I have. “When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?' “And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time. “We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are. “A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it. Here's why I believe he was saying, in those vague but important words, that the age of privacy is over. Zuckerberg did say that the era of privacy is over, he just said it one step away from literally and directly. He said this: our new privacy stance (X) is based on where we think the world is today and if we were to launch the site anew today, then that policy (X) is how we would have launched it. What is X? It is a policy wherein your profile photo, friends list and most importantly fan page subscriptions are irrevocably public and a variety of other types of user data are now by default public. He doesn't say “the era of privacy is over” directly, he says “our new privacy policies reflect the way the world is today” – but the phrase “our new privacy policy” equals: no more privacy about some things and public by default on others. It is a fundamentally more public position on privacy and one that Facebook team members have told me point-blank on a press phone call – yes, they are hoping to move people towards being more public and less private. So let me know, am I mischaracterizing things? I don't think I am. I don't think I'm putting words into anyone's mouth, I think I'm doing journalistic work interpreting the meaning behind public utterances regarding a topic I've been paying close attention to for a good while. .. read more..

10 Articles I Was Proud of Writing in January
Thursday, February 4, 2010

I was just looking over the archives of my most recent ReadWriteWeb articles and noticed there were a number of them I was quite proud of in January. I decided to highlight them here, in case you'd like to see any you missed. I wrote 40 articles last month on ReadWriteWeb and these are the ten that I'd be most disappointed about seeing just roll down the stream to be forgotten about. I hope you find a few you missed but enjoy a second chance to check out. Yeah, a bunch of them are about privacy on Facebook. But there are a number that aren't about that at all! Welcome to the Age of Robot Reporters One hour ago, three emergency vehicles responded to a report of an unconscious person at the world headquarters of Nike Inc. in Portland, Oregon. How do I know? An automated form-pumping robot from startup company Nozzl Media told me. Facebook's 1st CTO Launches His Next Company (Screen Shots) Adam D'Angelo was a programming genius who knew Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in high school, became the young company's first CTO and has just begun to unveil his new startup company, Quora. Built by D'Angelo and a team of crack young engineers, Quora is a real-time enabled Q&A site. The company calls itself “A continually improving collection of questions and answers.” How Chris Messina Got a Job at Google Chris Messina grew up in New Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state. As a high-schooler in the early 90's he held his school's website hostage after being suspended for running an ad on it for a controversial gay rights group. Now Chris is nearing 30, today was his 29th birthday, and he just announced that he's taken a job at one of the biggest, most powerful corporations in the world. Why Facebook is Wrong: Privacy is Still Important Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience this weekend that the world has changed, that it's become more public and less private, and that the controversial new default and permanent settings reflect how the site would work if he were to create it today. Not everyone agrees with his move and its justification. PowerOne: This iPhone App Builds iPhone Apps Elia Freedman used to have it made. He was a mobile app developer in the days of the Palm Pilot and he scored bundling deals that got his sophisticated calculator software into the hands of more than 15 million people. Differentiating his product from competitors “wasn't something we had to deal with for years,” he says, because of the favored position his app got in pre-loaded bundles. Now those days are gone. The Facebook Privacy Debate: What You Need to Know Facebook changed the world by helping 350 million people publish their thoughts, feelings, comments, photos, videos and shared links much more easily than ever before. It's the King of social networking. The network grew with a big promise of privacy at the center of what it offered: your information was by default visible only to people you approved as friends. In December that changed, in a fundamental way. We offer below a summary of the changes that were made and key highlights from the debate that's raging around the world about privacy, public information and Facebook. Given the role that Facebook plays in so many of our lives, this is high-stakes stuff. Why is Google Afraid of Facebook? Because Social Networking Could Soon Pass Search It's often said these days that Google and Facebook are major rivals, but how could that be if one is in search and the other, social networking? Traffic analyst firm Hitwise provided one very clear clue tonight when it published new numbers for web user activity in Australia. For perhaps the first time ever, social networking sites have surpassed the traffic search engines receive, Hitwise says. There is reason to question the company's categorization of web traffic, but the trend is worth examining none the less. The Era of Location-as-Platform Has Arrived The mobile location “check-in” is fast becoming the hot new status message type online. It was only a matter of time until “where you are” became a platform to build added value on top of just like “who you know” has on social networking sites like Facebook. Canadian newspaper chain Metro announced today that it has launched a deal with location-based social network Foursquare that will deliver location-specific editorial content from the paper's website to users' phones when they check-in near a spot Metro has written about before. The potential for services like this is huge. Westboro Baptist Church to Picket Twitter Headquarter s The Westboro Baptist Church, home of the best known anti-gay protest organization in the US, led by Pastor Fred Phelps, has a new target for its public outcry. This Thursday afternoon the organization will be picketing outside the San Francisco headquarters of Twitter. Privacy, Facebook and the Future of the Internet Today is the 3rd annual international Data Privacy Day and a whole bunch of companies are listed on the organization's website as participants. Google, Microsoft, even Walmart. Facebook is not listed as a participant and has stirred up a lot of controversy with changes to its privacy policy lately. Thanks for checking those out. I hope you'll come join me over on ReadWriteWeb where I write every day and every day try to write something I can be proud of. .. read more..

How to Use Twitter Tonight Without Seeing “Lost” Spoilers
Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Tweetdeck offers “exclude” filters! Now my Netflix TV viewing much later will not be spoiled! Awesome! Or, if you have stuff like that (iPad?) well there you go. Thanks, again, Tweetdeck! .. read more..

Who is right, me or the White House?
Thursday, January 21, 2010

Last night I wrote a blo g post about the launch of data.gov.uk and said it had 3X as many data sets as the US's data.gov . Today I got an interesting email from the White House (cool!) saying I was wrong. A number of other people disagreed with me as well. It's a fun little story, but the question comes down to: do you think that the US Geological Survey maps and related entries category that so dominates data.gov should be counted as equal contributions to the open data ecosystem? Let me know what you think. Note that I've reproduced an email below and at least one commenter has told me I was out of line to do so. I disagree. I think the email is very straight-forward, from a public official and ok to run with a question about whether the assessment of mine it is challenging is correct or not. No big deal, I think. I'm going to think about it some more, though. Hi Marshall, I wanted to reach out to you regarding your piece on Data.gov. Below is a blog post from WH.gov from Vivek Kundra that includes the latest information about the number of data sets available on Data.gov – 168,000. Your piece incorrectly states that Data.gov has less than 1,000 data sets. Your story also mentions “critics” of Data.gov who pointed that “it was filled with relatively non-controversial data sets”—if you are interested in representing both sides of the story I’d be happy to put you in touch with some folks. Below is the link to Vivek’s blog post: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/01/21/they-gave-us-beatles-we-gave-then-datagov Please let me know if you have any additional questions. Jean B. Weinberg Deputy Press Secretary White House Office of Management and Budget Here's my response. It's not buttoned-up and respectful, I suppose – but we're all bloggers now, right? Hi Jean, thanks for the email. Here's my take on it: data.gov has 969 records of “machine readable, platform-independent datasets.” It also has aprox 167k geodata records, almost all maps. That's a convenient way to say there are 168k datasets, but a big map dump doesn't seem that compelling to me. Maybe I'm wrong – but when I see the UK site sharing data sets like soldier suicides and number of abortions, that makes a big dump of geological maps on the US site seem anemic. I'd be happy to talk to someone who feels otherwise, though. Please do connect me with someone I can speak to about this. I've been very critical of data.gov since it launched and would be happy to be persuaded to feel otherwise. Thanks for sending me that link to Mr. Kundra's blog post by the way. I think I'll write a post in response and see if my readers see it the way I do. I must say, I found his post rather shocking in tone. Claiming that the UK is following the US's lead when the UK is working with Tim Berners-Lee who brought us the World Wide Web and has the very forward-looking semantic web paradigm in its sights – that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. best, Marshall Kirkpatrick VP of Content Development and Lead Blogger ReadWriteWeb In reality, I imagine that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Maps are hardly worthless and the US Geological Survey data that dominates data.gov isn't just maps. It mostly is, though, and my point is that data.gov is disappointing so far. What do you think? Am I being unfair? Should I change my perception and coverage of data.gov? I know I'm not the only person who feels critical, but I thought I'd run this numbers discussion past some more people to get some more perspective. .. read more..

How to Add Google Real-Time Search to Your Bookmarks
Saturday, December 19, 2009

Here's a great little bookmarklet created by Steve Rubel but posted on his Posterous blog in HTML instead of as a draggable link. That's fine if you're using a browser with decent bookmark support, but for some reason Chrome, otherwise the best browser around, is terrible about bookmarks. Laughably terrible, maddeningly terrible. It would make my laugh if it didn't make me so mad. Anyway, here's a link you should be able to drag up to your frustrating little Chrome bookmark toolbar, or to any browser's bookmark bar, for real time Google search. Click and drag this little puppy right here —> Real-time search Highlight a word or phrase on any page and then click that button, or just click it freestyle and enter a query. Then you'll see the freshest search results on the internet, per Google, including new web pages, Twitter messages and sometime soon posts from Identica, Facebook and more. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to delete all my bookmarks from Chrome, go set them up in the order I want them in Firefox and re-import them. How silly. Interested in leveraging the real-time web for your business? Check out the research report I just spent the last 3 months writing on the topic . .. read more..

Is Yelp Deleting Bad Reviews For Money? I Have No Idea
Friday, October 23, 2009

I've had this story about Yelp allegedly removing bad reviews for advertisers on my mind a lot lately and after Twittering about it today I got to talk to Yelp HQ on the phone. They promise they do no such thing. Do I believe them? I have no idea; I'm going to put “can I trust Yelp?” in the same category as other questions like “is there a God?” and “can Democrats be trusted to make the world a better place?” Questions that cannot be answered, I think. Yelp's argument is that advertisers get to put an ad, a positive review of their choice, on the top of their pages – and that confuses people. They are also very pro-active about deleting reviews they suspect may be fake. I know people get confused about online advertising. How else would Google be making so many billions of dollars? In clinical tests people are unable to identify paid vs. natural search results. When asked “how could it be made clearer?” they say things like “put them on the side of the page, put the word 'sponsored' near them or put them in a colored box.” All things that Google does in fact do. People just don't notice. It's an unprovable, un-disproval allegation ultimately. Would it be crazy for Yelp to do something that would so damage their credibility? It would if it could be proven. It might not if it couldn't be proven. For now I'll just appreciate the positive and negative reviews I see on Yelp and I'll check the review history of people I see posting there. And sometimes I'll just make up my own mind after patronizing businesses. I'd love to see Consumer Reports do a comparative review of Yelp, CitySearch and others. I told Yelp that, too. .. read more..

It’s My Birthday – Will You Make Me a Gift?
Sunday, October 11, 2009

Well folks, I turn 33 years old on Monday but I'm going to have to work so I'm celebrating it today. It's been a very big year for me: I got married and bought a house! There's a picture of my new backyard there below. I love our new house! And I love my wife, very much. A lot of other things happened but those are the biggest. It's been a great year for work as well, I'm learning a lot and having a lot of fun at ReadWriteWeb . What more could a lucky guy like me want for my birthday? (Less hair loss, dogs that walk themselves, college loans paid off, I could go on!) I'll tell you what I really need – OPML files! Bundles of RSS feeds I can import into my feed reader. My old Google Reader account is way too filled up with gadget blogs and other things I don't care about anymore and I haven't subscribed to anything that isn't a tech company's official blog in months. It's not right. So I'm starting with a fresh new start, using the Mac desktop reader Vienna . So far the only thing I've put into the reader is the OPML file of hundreds of women tech bloggers put together by Anne Zelenka almost three years ago! (Check out that post if you want to see how cutely naive my writing about OPML was just 3 years ago!) That's my wife with me on the right, not Anne Zelenka. That's cool, but I'd love it if for my birthday you, my friends, would send me OPML files of blogs on certain topics . Something cool. I don't need a file of the top blogs writing about the Semantic Web, I already have that. I don't need a file of the best blogs on youth marketing, I already have that and am not sure how I feel about it. This shouldn't be too hard to do, if you're unfamiliar. Just put a collection of feeds into a folder in any RSS reader and then export. Open it up in a text editor and cut out all the parts outside of that folder. Then send it to me! Or you could drop RSS feeds in this tool , publish, copy and paste into a text editor and send it to me via marshall@marshallk.com It would be so awesome if, for my birthday, a few people sent me really awesome OPML files. It's a curated collection of dynamic sources – a gift that really keeps on giving! Update: It's working! People are sending me awesome collections of blogs on things like Activity Streams data standards, web design, crafts and more. Thank you so much!! Do this for me and I'll build you a really awesome TweepML group for your birthday when the time comes. What do you think? Think anyone will actually do it and send me one?? We'll see! Even if no one does, I still got married and bought a house this year – so no big deal! .. read more..

This Real-Time Web Stuff is Amazing
Saturday, October 10, 2009

I'm doing loads of research in preparation for next week's ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit and a research report on the same topic. I've now talked to 43 companies who are building and/or using real-time technology and have seen some amazing use cases. I wrote about ten use cases last week but as I'm going through my notes now there are three more I wanted to share that illustrate the importance of all this. Real-time data collection is letting scientists find colleagues, related and recommended research in a matter of hours, instead of months or years, using software from a UK company called Mendeley . Mendeley is like iTunes or Last.fm for scientific research, the company even has the founder of Last.fm on its team. There will be someone from Mendeley at the Summit, too. Warner Brothers uses an Adobe AIR app they built to track traffic on artists' websites, media mentions and more, in real time. Catching data spikes in real time allows them to turn on a dime with marketing and product strategies. The RedCross national headquarters (and I'm sure a lot of local offices) use real-time systems to monitor breaking news about disasters around the world and co-ordinate volunteers. Work that used to take weeks is now done in minutes or hours – that means saved lives. Many people at RedCross HQ are subscribers to Breaking News Online , a fascinating service founded by a teenager in the Netherlands and now run by a small, distributed team of scrappy reporters around the world. All of those organizations are working hard at building even faster systems. Real time doesn't just let them do things they were already doing faster – it makes entirely new kinds of work possible. That's what Bret Slatkin, co-creator of real-time protocoal PubSubHubbub says: engineers should build their real-time systems to scale into entirely new use-cases that can't even be foreseen yet. This is really exciting, important stuff. I hope you'll join us at the Real-Time Web Summit to discuss it. If you can't make it, selected sessions will be live-streamed as well. .. read more..

Thank Goodness For Standards
Friday, October 9, 2009

I'm working on a big research report for ReadWriteWeb and decided the other day to start my writing in an outline format, which is unusual for me. I bought a $3 iPhone app that lets me create outlines, so I can work on it when I'm in my backyard or wherever else. I bought it happily because I saw in the description that it supported file export in OPML format, or Outline Processor Markup Language . That way I can send it to myself and edit it using a desktop editor made by an entirely different company. See? Standards enabled me to do work in new ways and gave me reason to spend money on someone's product. OPML was originally developed by Dave Winer . As was the OPML Editor I'm using on my desktop to do my work. OPML is most commonly used to export bundles of RSS feeds, blogs or podcasts but it doesn't have to be limited to “just” those kinds of information. RSS is of course something that Winer was also key in the creation of, as was podcasting (he created the enclosure tag that carries MP3 or other files in feeds) and RSS Aggregators (he wrote one ten years ago). Blogging too. That's all pretty damn incredible. Now Dave's working on real-time, microblogging and a new RSS reader called River2 . Why am I writing a blog post about Dave Winer's work over the years? Just because I was appreciating it again when it was so easy for me to buy that iPhone app for outlining and work with it on my desktop as well. Dave's a controversial guy, and that's probably an understatement, but he's my friend. When I realized that, once again, it was in large part the fruit of his work that I was benefiting from when exporting those outlines – it made me want to make a blog post about it. Thanks for all the work you've done over the years, Dave. It's really made a big difference in my life and work. .. read more..

Social Media Consulting Can Be Extremely Valuable
Monday, October 5, 2009

It's all the rage these days to say that “social media consulting” is nothing but over-priced advice dispensed by know-nothings to insecure companies about obvious things like communicating authentically online. Sometimes these critiques are funny (or very funny ) and some people are trying to defend their practices . There's been so much of this going on in the last week alone that I decided to respond in a post here. Update: I retweeted a link to this post two months after writing it because of this smart post by B.L. Ochman making the rounds today. There is no question in my mind that my consulting, at least, is extremely valuable and non-obvious. Check out the page of feedback I've received . Below is one example of a valuable project I've done for a client. I worked with Sun Microsystems last year to build a blog search dashboard tracking the most recent and most-discussed blog posts concerning a list of their products, during the Java One conference. People loved it and only an outside person with my experience and skills would have built it. It was social media consulting that wasn't obvious or just about “join the conversation.” Here's an in-depth explanation of exactly how I did it . Then I did an audit of the company's huge network of blogs, their wikis, their podcast portal and developer forums. I researched their competitors' work in those areas and interviewed specialists in each of those fields who looked through the Sun sites with me. I gave a rapid-fire presentation to an executive team that blew the minds of some very serious and capable people. They brought me back five times to work on different projects there, sent me 20% of my income for last year and invited me to meet and interview my childhood hero Neil Young when he spoke at an event. So is social media consulting just a joke? Not in my world, it's not. My contact info is in the right-hand sidebar, if you're interested in getting in touch. .. read more..

Theory: Twitter is More Likely to Be Meaningful Than TV
Sunday, September 27, 2009

Over the last two weeks I've interviewed people from 32 different companies working on building, leveraging or otherwise engaging with what's called The Real-Time Web. It's preparation for ReadWriteWeb's forthcoming Real-Time Web Summit (I hope you'll come) and a research report on the same topic. Believe it or not, Twitter is not the primary topic of all these conversations (thank goodness) but it does come up a lot both literally and as a metaphor. Many of the conversations aren't even about social networking, but many of them are. User experience and the streams through which real-time data often gets delivered are things I've been talking with people about a lot. In one of those conversations, Kevin Marks (formerly of Technorati and Google, now at British Telecom) told me the following: he believes that Twitter is more likely to be interesting than television because we opt-in to particular streams of other peoples' updates that we find interesting. That creates a positive feedback loop that encourages us to contribute something interesting in return and thus the ecosystem trends towards higher quality content. Do you agree with that? Marks also said this was an advantage that Twitter and other opt-in subscription-stream formats have over things like YouTube comments. What of the “I don't care what you ate for breakfast” critique of Twitter? Marks says that's just people who have an antiquated view of what belongs “in public,” based on a time when content had to go through expensive publishing processes before being broadcast to the public and thus had to be unusually important to be worth it. This is just one of several user experience related conversations I've been having about real-time streams, but I found it quite interesting. I like this theory. I'm not sure whether I agree with it or not (Kevin, let me know if I've mischaracterized what you meant) but I'd really like to know what others think. .. read more..

How to: Follow 724 Tech Analysts on Twitter With 3 Clicks
Saturday, September 19, 2009

I wrote what I thought was going to be a short post about following a large group of tech analysts on Twitter here, but then decided it was long enough and good enough that I should post it on ReadWriteWeb instead . Check it out. .. read more..

I’m Loving Me Some Tungle, Bet You Would Too
Thursday, September 17, 2009

I've been doing a mind numbing number of briefings with companies doing work on the real-time web since we announced the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, Research Report and Month of Special Focus yesterday at RWW. (By the way, check it out.) I found a wonderful service called Tungle.com that syncs with my Google calendar and allows other people to see when I'm busy or free in order to suggest meeting times. My calendar is here and I am SO appreciative of this service! I know there are other competitors out there, like TimeBridge for example but so far Tungle is doing the trick for me. Web apps like this remind me how a good app can solve a problem you hadn't even realized you had. Check it out, it might rock your world too. Related articles by Zemanta TimeBridge wants to make web meetings less frustrating (venturebeat.com) The Top 10 Apps for Scheduling a Meeting Online (readwriteweb.com) Tungle launches non-annoying scheduling service (news.cnet.com) .. read more..

www.josschuurmans.com: "Rebooting the news" | Dave Winer's and Jay Rosen's podca..
Monday, May 11, 2009

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50 most influential Twitter users in India « Gautam’s Net
Tuesday, February 24, 2009

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Adobe PDF Guide: How to Do Everything with PDF Files
Sunday, January 4, 2009

A great collection of Amit's best advice regarding PDF hacks. If you're not reading Digital Inspiration, you're missing out! .. read more..

Top Spots in Organic & Paid Search = Branding
Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Great write up of an interesting study on the perceptual impact of good search placement. This one's a keeper. .. read more..

A hunger for books | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books
Monday, December 10, 2007

Dorris Lessing's Nobel acceptance speech where she brings up critiques of the web's cultural impacts, among other things. An important read. .. read more..

The significance of Google’s Android
Friday, December 7, 2007

Looks like a good article on Android, 33 comments, consultancy blog. Marked toread. .. read more..

Massive Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) Video Recap
Friday, December 7, 2007

Can't wait to spend some time with this one. .. read more..

Thoughts on Seth Godin's keynote at SES [SearchEngineWatch]
Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Seth Godin is probably someone I should read a lot more of. He's a marketer, but interesting. .. read more..

Media Bullseye
Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Interesting new site for PR and marketing news regarding social media. Chris Brogan an early contributor. .. read more..

The Identity Corner » The problem(s) with OpenID
Monday, December 3, 2007

A long collection of links to critiques of OpenID. Looks real good. .. read more..

AOL, Netflix and the end of open access to research data | Surveillance State - ..
Friday, November 30, 2007

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Nick Carr on Google as Anomaly
Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Paul Miller excerpts and links to what's being talked about as one of Nick Carr's most interesting writings in a long time. That's saying a lot, because the iconoclast Carr is very, very smart. .. read more..

Who is afraid of the GGG?
Monday, November 26, 2007

Giant Global Graph? This ZDNet post is a great overview of the recent discussion kicked off by Tim Berners Lee. .. read more..

Help needed: A review of Google-funded 23andMe
Friday, November 23, 2007

Google-backed genetics startup; this blog seeks donations to pay for the $1k fee for the product. Sounds like a great idea to me, I'm real curious about this company. .. read more..

Teaching Online Journalism » Connecting people to people
Thursday, November 22, 2007

A good post about the value of identity on websites. Quotes my post about social network functionality but a plainly valuable collection of thoughts regardless. .. read more..

1. Individual videos I've found to share
Friday, July 6, 2007

1. Individual videos I've found to share by marshallkirkpatrick ( watch show ) 1. Video: Dramatic Chipmunk (marshallkirkpatrick) 2. Video: google final (beth) 3. Video: Video: RSS in Plain English (marshallkirkpatrick) .. read more..