April 2007
-
The Tom Sawyer Effect — Old Media Fallacy?
•
1 min read
Just when you think the traditional media is getting over their jealous gripe with new media we hear of the snarky Tom Sawyer Effect, websites that avoid the arduous task of painting the fence (creating content) and instead convincing your friends (customers) to pay for the priviledge of painting it themselves. Point taken, some lame…
-
Google Earth Convinces Bush to Act on Darfur
•
1 min read
On the bright side, this story of how President Bush acted after seeing a Google Earth depiction of the burned out homes in Darfur is a great story about the power of visualization. But really, was the administration waiting four years to act because the bullet points weren’t powerful enough? At least 400,000 people have…
-
Word of the Day: Capitation
•
1 min read
Capitation: The system of payment for each customer served, rather than by service performed. Gym memberships are a common example, as is U.S. medical care. It’s now applied to new businesses like office space for writers.
-
Cumulative Advantage
•
2 min read
Duncan Watts summed up an experience on cumulative advantage this week in the NY Times, based on the article ($) of a year ago in Science. It’s of importance to anyone in the position of publisher, having to try and select which of many candidates to invest in, as well as anyone scratching their head…
-
Does Strategic Thinking Reduce Stress?
•
1 min read
If you’re a designer, you can become very stressed over a small product detail, something so small most customers may not notice. If you’re a product manager, you may attend to the product details without stressing over them because you see the bigger picture of how the product competes in the market and what the…
-
Having the API Rug Pulled Out From Under You
•
1 min read
John Hagel observes how “the large Internet players are wearying of the high acquisition premiums for attractive Web 2.0 companies and are increasingly deciding to grow their own copy when they see an interesting venture.” So if you’re a start-up, what’s your new exit strategy? Hagel says… The only sustainable edge in Web 2.0, as…
-
John Backus, RIP
•
1 min read
While we associate the older programming languages — and business models — with the old economy, John Soat writing in InformationWeek reminds us everything old is new again… John Backus died. Backus, 82, was the originator of the Fortran computer programming language. Generally considered the first high-level language, Fortran was a lot easier to use…
-
Rettig on Market vs. Design Research
•
1 min read
I like just about everything Marc Rettig writes a whole lot, so I need to bookmark this new mailing list posting where he compares market research to design research… Market research typically attempts to answer questions of general trends, differences across a large group, general attitudes and preferences. Design research typically attempts to reveal latent,…
-
A Tiny, Giant Shift to Design Thinking
•
1 min read
If someone were to ask me to sum up in a tiny nutshell what I thought would be the single most useful change to make to start using design thinking, I’d recommend reducing the frequency of the times we ask, “Can we do this?” and increasing the frequency of the times we ask, “How can…
-
Do Publishers Underestimate Techies?
•
1 min read
Headline: Killing Page View is Suicide Publishing experts have proclaimed that the death of the ‘page view’ is near. This consensus is heated by the adoption of a new Web development technique called AJAX, but AJAX holds hidden dangers for publishers. Or, we could just use mod_rewrite to create unique URLs for each AJAX page.…
-
IA Summit 2007
•
1 min read
I was in Las Vegas last weekend for the Information Architecture Summit. It’s a great balance of intellectual stimulation and after-hours fun, and the only problem with the record attendance is not spending time with all the wonderful people there. I’ve gone the past several years, and it’s interesting to see the community maturing both…