You Don’t Have to Tweet to Twitter November 15, 2011: [Follow Me on Twitter] “In a brand new direction A change of perception On a brand new trajection” - UB40 [Disclosure: Benchmark Capital is a major investor in Twitter, and my partner Peter Fenton sits on the Twitter BOD.] Twitter is having a remarkable year. Active users have soared to over 100 million per month, with daily actives now above 50 million. So, Twitter’s traffic has been growing in leaps and bounds. Twitter suffers from two key misperceptions that need to be resolved before the business can reach its true potential. As its roots are in communication, a key part of the Facebook value proposition is sharing information. The second, and more critical, Twitter misperception is that you need to tweet, to have something to say and broadcast, for the service to be meaningful to you. Twitter is an innovative and remarkable information service. Some who understand this point have suggested that Twitter is merely a “Better RSS reader.”
Infographic: Media Consolidation – The Illusion of Choice How much choice does the mainstream US media really offer? Family financial blogger Frugal Dad has created this infographic that lays out the extent of media consolidation in the US, where just six media giants control 90% of all TV, news, radio and film. How Gmail destroyed Outlook As of this week, Gmail has reached perfection: You no longer have to be online to read or write messages. Desktop programs like Microsoft Outlook have always been able to access your old mail. There is a certain bliss to this; if you've got a pile of letters that demand well-composed, delicate responses (say you're explaining to your boss why you ordered that $85,000 rug), unplugging the Internet can be the fastest way to get things done. Farhad Manjoo is a technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of True Enough. Follow Google's not alone in providing this option. To get offline access, you first need to download and install a small program called Google Gears (except if you're using Google's Chrome browser, which comes with Gears built in). Now that Gmail has bested the Outlooks of the world, it's a good time to assess the state of desktop software. The shift has been a long time coming. Desktop e-mail presented its own challenges, though.
Ron Paul: the Only Candidate to Condemn Racial Profiling at CNN Debate Nov 23, 2011 Ron Paul was the only Republican candidate at the CNN debate to point out that racial profiling is wrong. Fear mongering and sabre rattling were on full display as Republican presidential candidates bickered about national security at last night’s CNN debate. Yes, there were warnings about evil Iran wanting to destroy Israel, rumblings over shady Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, loads of discussion about securing our borders from scary Mexicans and even a little mention of AIDS aid to Africa, which Rick Santorum callously equated not with human goodness, but national security. “The work that we’ve done in stabilizing that area, while humanitarian in nature, was absolutely essential for our national security,” he said, because “Africa was a country on the brink.” In the midst of all these topics came another controversial issue, the TSA, and how to improve it. Long a target for right-wing ire, the TSA catches a lot of flack for intrusive pat downs and extraneous searches.
Facebook vs. Google: The battle for the future of the Web - Nov. 3 FORTUNE -- Paul Adams is one of Silicon Valley's most wanted. He's an intellectually minded product designer with square-framed glasses, a thick Irish accent, and a cult following of passionate techies. As one of Google's lead social researchers, he helped dream up the big idea behind the company's new social network, Google+: those flexible circles that let you group friends easily under monikers like "real friends" or "college buddies." In the long history of tech rivalries, rarely has there been a battle as competitive as the raging war between the web's wonder twins. In one corner is Facebook, the reigning champion of the social web, trying to cement its position as the owner of everyone's online identity. Although Larry Page, Google's co-founder and its CEO since April, was born just 11 years before Mark Zuckerberg, his counterpart at Facebook, the two belong to different Internet generations with different worldviews. Google Larry Page was not pleased. Facebook The war
Farmers markets double, local food sales to hit $7 billion, USDA says Locally produced foods could pull in $7 billion this year, according to a new U.S. Department of Agriculture report. Whether sold directly to consumers through farmers markets, roadside stands or middlemen such as supermarkets or restaurants, the market for food grown nearby is growing fast. The industry hit $4.8 billion in sales in 2008, according to the report. Sales made straight from farms to buyers doubled in two decades to $1.2 billion from $650 million in the 1990s, according to the report. The surge may coincide with increasing interest in healthful eating and artisan cooking, trends that have encouraged major companies such as Burger King and Domino’s Pizza to focus on fresh ingredients. The USDA found that more than 80% of local food producers are small farms making less than $50,000 in gross annual sales. Demand is strongest in metropolitan areas, especially in the Northeast and on the West Coast. Domino's launches a line of artisan pizzas -- Tifany Hsu
Inside search engines' war on bad results - tech - 15 December 2011 ANYONE can publish on the web, but it would be better if some people didn't; the world does not need another site that provides advice on how to unlock an iPhone or find cheap car insurance. Now new evidence shows that search engines have upped their game to make sure their results are not dominated by such low-quality sites. Search engines are meant to pick out high-quality sites amid the sea of knock-offs, but even they get overwhelmed. As recently as March, for example, the first 10 results from a Google search for "how to organise your desktop" contained nine links to pages churned out by "content farms" - websites that publish reams of articles, often of dubious quality, that aim simply to attract clicks and advertising dollars. That prompted New Scientist to ask computer scientistRichard McCreadie at the University of Glasgow, UK, to look into the issue. The results are striking. The story is far from over. New Scientist Not just a website! More From New Scientist Promoted Stories
Top US foreclosure law firm threw Halloween party where staff dressed as homeless, foreclosed-upon Americans From a NYT opinion piece by Joe Nocera, "What the Costumes Reveal"— On Friday, the law firm of Steven J. Baum threw a Halloween party. The firm, which is located near Buffalo, is what is commonly referred to as a “foreclosure mill” firm, meaning it represents banks and mortgage servicers as they attempt to foreclose on homeowners and evict them from their homes. I'm not one to incite illegal activity, but christ, guys: if there were ever a house that deserved T-P-ing on Halloween? Read the rest, and see all the photos, here.
Infinite Stupidity It might be useful, with such a statement like that, to review some of these big events. Obviously one of the big events in our history was the origin of our planet, about 4.5 billion years ago. And what's fascinating is that about 3.8 billion years ago, only about seven or eight hundred million years after the origin of our planet, life arose. That life was simple replicators, things that could make copies of themselves. And we think that life was a little bit like the bacteria we see on earth today. That life ruled the world for 2 billion years, and then about 1.5 billion years ago, a new kind of life emerged. It was another 500 million years before we had anything like a multicellular organism, and it was another 500 million years after that before we had anything really very interesting. After about 500 million years ago, things like the plants evolved, the fish evolved, lizards and snakes, dinosaurs, birds, and eventually mammals. A lot of that sounds familiar to us.
Tunisia Tastes Democracy: Early Results Point to Victory for the Islamists - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International Just before 7 a.m. on the day that Tunisians tasted democracy for the first time, the first person in line at the polling station in the chic Tunis district of El Menzah 6 was a princess. Her name is Salwa Bey, an older woman with dyed-blonde hair wearing a gold-colored dress and matching Ray Ban sunglasses. Her uncle was Tunisia's last monarch, King Mohammed VIII al-Amin, who was a marionette of French colonial power, forced to abdicate when the country achieved independence in 1956. Half a century later, Salwa Bey was full of emotion as her country took its first tentative steps toward democracy on Sunday. Her hands trembled as she entered the polling station at the Billel elementary school. She presented her identification, and after election officials located her name on their list she dipped her right index finger into a container of ink. It took her a long time. Behind her thousands of people queued, the line stretching out for hundreds of meters. Orderly Election