I’m seeing more and more people criticizing SecondLife as being “overhyped” in the media. Often, it’s pointed out that SecondLife has far fewer users than a world-beating Massive Multiplayer game like World of Warcraft (WoW), the contention being that since WoW is 10x the size of SecondLife that they should have a similarly large amount of coverage. This point misses [...]
Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory of distribution is (at least to me) fairly self evident. I’ve just found in my personal life and that of my friends, more and more splintering of our attention and interests. That being said, his recent post about the Nintendo Wii’s Virtual Console (their downloadable games marketplace) was laughable. I have a Wii (6739-9360-9602-1441) and [...]
Wikipedia is making an understandable, but lamentable decision to add the no-follow link attribute to all of their outbound links. It’s a directive telling Google and the other search engine operators not to follow a particular link because it should not be considered authoritative. You can read more about it on Google’s site, titled: Preventing comment spam. Since Google launched [...]
PVP Online is an awesome online comic strip that is high on my daily reading list. I’m consistently amazed at how well Scott Kurtz is able to shove humor into every daily strip and at the same time carry forward a story arc: serialized humor at it’s best. Scott is a very bright guy and has a terrific take on [...]
The MIT AdverLab points to a study by Bunnyfoot stating that there is an “…engagement between video game players and in-game advertising in sports titles.” I’ve seen something similar in SecondLife: there are a number of different advertising networks who seem to buy up small blocks of land onto which they throw huge numbers of small posters for various SecondLife [...]
Another disturbing development from the Mac Shareware front: Garrett Murray developed an application called xPad (stickies, text edit replacement) for OS X and was selling it as shareware. He agreed to sell the website, application and some other bits of intellectual property to Brian Ball of macZOT, a shareware promotion website. Sales apparently weren’t as brisk as Mr. Ball would [...]
Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed has an interesting take on Google’s recent delisting of BMW’s German site. Two things to consider: 1. Was this actually done by a human being? I’m positive that Google must run “human” style web bots as well as the classic “Googlebot” (whose identifiable user-agent is keyed off by cloakers). Can you blame Google for a capricous [...]
I’m working on a new project (this is actually the first public mention of it) called OneToFive. It lets users create comparisons and ratings of whatever topic they are researching. I spent a good chunk of today cleaning up the homepage from its very rough beginning. This is necessarily an iterative process as I change, tweak, add and remove elements [...]
I just tried out the new Feedexa online RSS reader. It’s fairly slick, but has one big feature missing: a “Mark All As Read” command. There’s one for each individual feed, but not a global one. In some user scenarios this is a “nice to have feature”, but for a new entrant into a market that is seeking to bring [...]
I reported this to FeedBurner directly this evening, but was wondering if anyone else had noticed a similar phenomenon. My FeedBurner listing shows me as a huge hit with the Google Desktop crowd. So I installed GD and had my ego ground down a bit as apparently it just pulls in every feed it autodetects while you browse. It doesn’t [...]
