The game of deliciously hard choices – Resort to Cannibalism
Why yes, it is a Flash game in which you try to beat your raft-mate and eat him before he eats you. Thank you for asking.
D.C. Douglas PSA For Tea Party And FreedomWorks Critics
Takes stones to be divisive and funny with such a marvelously patronizing tone. NSFW. Thanks Amy Lambert for the tip.
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Jack Dorsey on turning ideas into reality
Commit your ideas to paper before you worry about committing them to code. Get your idea out of your head so you can see it from a different perspective. And just as importantly, share it with others.
5 Lessons TV Should Learn After Losing Heroes | Wired.com
I loved the show. I loved all of it. But this certainly rang true for me. The part that got so frustrating was watching the team try and try to write Sylar’s character in a compelling way, and go completely off the rails every other week. There was just no thread.
“If you end up creating bad guys cooler than your good guys, let them ride. Don’t make them into heroes. Zachary Quinto’s Sylar is an excellent example of this formula gone wrong. If you start off a show with your primary madman chopping off the heads of cheerleaders, it’s exceedingly hard to flip him into a savior of mankind, even if he is the show’s most magnetic personality.
Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010: “”
Absolutely stunning images from Sean Stiegemeier of Iceland volcano action. Watch on Vimeo for HD goodness.
Clock calculates wasted time at meetings
Pretty much sums up how I feel about meetings in general. Nice visual reminder, this.
Facebook and “radical transparency” (a rant)
Sometimes, what a person says is magnified 1,000 times by who says it. This is one of those times. Danah is a smart person. This is worth reading.
What I find most fascinating in all of the discussions of transparency is the lack of transparency by Facebook itself. Sure, it would be nice to see executives use the same privacy settings that they determine are the acceptable defaults. And it would be nice to know what they’re saying when they’re meeting.
At it’s core this is a question of the changing tide of our cultural evolution. Jarvis once again nails it here:
* As I suggested here, it should study 16th century history about the origins of the public and private and understand that it is playing with bigger, more powerful and profound forces than even it knows. I just wrote in my next book that we are undergoing a similar shift in how society organizes itself with similar tools. Mark Zuckerberg says that he is enabling big change in society. I say examine that belief.
Yes, there is great, deep value in history. We’ve been through this transition before. We are innately social creatures. But that hard-wiring is difficult to scale cleanly. Moving from tribes of connections to villages to cities to distributed networks causes strain on the system. It’s true, we’re probably moving away from some of our plainer collective sense of privacy, but that doesn’t mean we individually walk away from our right to chose how we make that journey.
Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options – Graphic – NYTimes.com
This is fantastic. Note — two of the most important privacy options in Facebook are not actually available on the Facebook User Profile Privacy Settings page. How would someone just *know* that?
And, say what you will about Facebook transparency, there’s just no excuse for a privacy statement to be longer than the Constitution (minus amendments).
Global ad industry grapples with new spending trends
| Reuters
This is a message from the immediate future for small to medium-sized businesses, too. Big companies are recognizing the power of their own sites and the agility they have in creating content they control, and they’re spending money accordingly. The same can be true for smaller players.
“Technology is enabling companies to communicate in ever more sophisticated ways directly with their customers, while social networks like Facebook and Twitter offer ways for users to multiply the effect of corporate messages.
Chuck Richard, lead analyst at information advisory and research firm Outsell, says companies now spend more than half their online marketing budgets on their own sites. ‘It’s been 50 percent or more for the last three years,’ he says.”
It is … pretty much … what it is. My fav is the Imperial Walker.
Special Report: Can that guy in Ironman 2 whip IBM in real life?
| Reuters
Great article in Reuters today on Ellison’s involvement in the restructuring at Sun. He pokes fun at Schwartz’ blogging addiction, which is a treat to read. But more importantly, this bit on sales strategy:
“More infuriating, says Ellison, is that Sun routinely sold equipment at a loss because it was more focused on boosting revenue than generating profits.
The sales staff was compensated based on deal size, not profit. So the commission on a $1 million sale that generated $500,000 in profit was the same as one that cost the company $100,000, he said. ‘The sales force could care less if they sold things that lost money because the commission was the same in either case,’ he said. Ellison added that Sun also lost money when it resold high-end storage equipment from Hitachi Ltd, storage software from Symantec Corp and consulting services from other companies. Oracle is ending those deals.”
This, right here, is why companies like Apple are succeeding right now. They care first and foremost about profitability per unit. Market share means nothing if you’re not making enough to keep the lights on.
New Seattle’s Best: Best-er or Worse?
I quite like the new logo, but while it seems a departure for Seattle’s Best, it seems like more of an alignment with Starbuck’s (Best’s parent). I’m not sure that’s a wholly good thing.
In other news, the agency responsible — Creature — has a hyper-flashed-out site, which keeps forcing me to Adobe to download some new plug-ing after I’ve already downloaded it. So, I can’t see their fancy site. Which is aggravating, if you’re me.
The Most Corrupt States – The Daily Beast
Tennessee is number 1? That’s crazy-talk. At least a little interesting that the most corrupt states in the Union are south, deep south, and more south until you get to Nevada at #7. And congrats to New York and New Jersey for being right at the top of the bell curve.
Spoiler: Really want to escape corruption? Head to New Hampshire.
Here’s a quick link to the gallery of states in order of corruption.
The first time I played Portal, I did it in two sittings. I think my children had to eat or something, but their tiny collective voice was about all that could break my concentration from this game. With the exception of the Bard’s Tale series, to which I also lost much of my life as a youth, Portal is the most engaging game I’ve played on any platform.
Steam for Mac is finally out, and Portal is available for free for a few more days. Go download and get this fascinating puzzler. You have to play through it before Portal 2 hits the shelves.
Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative | Epicenter | Wired.com
Is there a substantive alternative to Facebook on the horizon? Google? Anyone? Hullo?
So in December, with the help of newly hired Beltway privacy experts, it reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile information public by default. That includes the city that you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes you’ve signed onto.
This spring Facebook took that even further. All the items you list as things you like must become public and linked to public profile pages. If you don’t want them linked and made public, then you don’t get them — though Facebook nicely hangs onto them in its database in order to let advertisers target you.
This Week in Google – ep 41 offered a terrific discussion on the nature of trust. I’ve made fun of Jeff Jarvis in the past, mostly because of the paranoid hand-wringing that always seems to emanate from his general direction, but the world needs more people who think deeply about these issues — guys just like Jeff. In this case, his point is that while Google started out as a company vested in publishing your public information to the world at large, then transformed into a company offering more services targeted at maintaining your private life and connections, Facebook started out as a company dedicated to helping you connect with a private network, and has, over the years, moved the other direction. The result is a certain cognitive dissonance that people-who-think-deeply-about-such-things can’t quite assimilate.
Those of us who choose to live our lives in public are stuck between a rock and a hard place. I, for one, would love to find an alternative to Facebook with simpler controls. The sometimes unfortunate nature of networks is this: you have to go where the people are if you want to do more than shout at an empty room.
A few months ago, I wrote a post about how to get more out of Facebook. My intent, at the time, was to write a series on configuring the application to protect your privacy, reduce Facebook apps annoyance, and allow you to connect with the people that are important in your life. I got one post into the series and got swept away by events. When I finally got back to it this week, I started digging into the terms and options after the last round of Facebook updates and have come to a frustrating realization: I think the original intent of my series is now impossible to deliver.
First, take a look at this visualization by Matt McKeon demonstrating the change in Facebook default privacy settings over time. If you have some time, peruse the comments, which have a few interesting points:
One thing which is almost as interesting is how much the effectiveness of the “most restrictive” non-default has also gone down in a similar pattern. Not only have the (enormously powerful) defaults become super-permissive, but facebook has reduced the ability of concerned parties, or really the small subset willing to keep constantly twiddling their privacy settings, to keep their private data private.
and…
There is this bizarre meme running through the press that, somehow, Facebook has a MONOPOLY on publishing personal information, and that we are all pawns in some sort of vicious commercial game, but that somehow we can’t STOP being on Facebook.
On the first point: given the convoluted nature of the latest privacy options panel, I’d be interested in data on the size of that subset since April 1, 2010.
On the second point: What Facebook has isn’t a monopoly. Monopolistic practices don’t enter in to this discussion. What’s disturbing is that Facebook has collected a massive amount of data on each of us, and has a documented history of changing the way they present that data — and to whom they present it — with each evolution of policy. The implication is that data I gave to Facebook under terms I once agreed to, is now offered publicly under terms I no longer agree to (or potentially understand), with limited clear method for user intervention.
If you’re more of a reader, check out this piece on BusinessInsider. In it, there’s a great review of salient language from the Facebook Privacy Policy as it was at each update from 2005 to present. The most interesting line is this from the update in April, 2010:
If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.
I’d sure be interested in someone more lawyerly than I am to translate that bit, cause here’s how I read it: If you don’t like it, don’t use it.
Come to think of it, pretty damned good advice, that.