Posted on December 11th, 2007 by Andy
My Internet reality is increasingly attached to applications from Google. Nearly every week a new feature manages to mysteriously finagle a path into my daily routine of organizing, reading, searching, communicating, calculating, traveling, etc. Most recently, my personal Googlesphere added the ability to use both Google Chat and AIM accounts simultaneously from the same interface.
Even limited feature applications such as Google Docs and Spreadsheets are slowly winning my loyalty. The shift to both applications - despite obvious inferiority to Microsoft Office and Zoho - is primarily for convenience and collaboration. The process of composing a document in MS Word, selecting save, uploading the file into an email, creating an appropriate subject heading so the recipient will recognize the message, etc…
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Posted on December 10th, 2007 by Andy
Kudos to Radiohead’s successful experiment in music pricing. Praise to Prince for releasing an album as a free insert in the archaic, decaying newspaper industry. And finally, a high five for 50 Cent who recognizes that “File Sharing Doesn’t Hurt Artists.”
The aftermath of these headlines incited a wave of euphoria among die-hard fans and aspiring musicians worldwide comparable to the British Invasion or Elvis’s first pelvic gyrations on national television. The glory days have returned! Further examination, however, reveals several misleading messages hidden behind the topical glitter coating a DRM-free, file-sharing friendly music industry.
1. 50 cent is a superstar. Tremendous crowds provide tremendous opportunities for profit. During the last half of the 20th century, album sales were the primary…
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Posted on November 29th, 2007 by Andy
Until recently, searching for accurate, well-written pieces in the expanding blogosphere was a bitch. The struggle was particularly tiresome if you were not familiar with the first generation of authoritative sources such as TechCrunch, GigaOm, BoingBoing, etc. However, the quest for accuracy and refined writing skills was not surprising for those viewing blogs as an alternative to mainstream journalism - every amateur driven industry inevitably collects sub par content (porn anyone?). Digg and Technorati provided early solutions to the problem by aggregating content into a single platform. Unified content facilitates more accessible data, and thus the first semblance of a ranking system. These early aggregators, however, suffered (to this day) from bubbling eclectic news that does not always scream “know…
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Posted on November 28th, 2007 by Andy
The relationship-search connection attracts a variety of labels from leading Internet authorities. Facebook’s Zuckerberg ambiguously refers to the combination as a “social graph” - loosely defined as the map linking personal data through social applications. Internet visionary Tim Berners Lee recently hypothesized on the ”Great Global Graph” (he loves consonance), describing a new level of digital understanding in which different applications instinctively recognize the user’s established network. No more repopulating a social network upon joining.
Typically, descriptions of this new relationship -based connection are speculative, but the future is always available in the present. An example of the Berners-Lee vision exists through the convergence of web-based email services into social networking sites. Email accounts, especially those with large storage capacity like Gmail, are bursting with enough uber personal information to induce salivation throughout Facebook’s Beacon team.
Yahoo recently released a rudimentary module to incorporate Facebook information into…
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Posted on November 26th, 2007 by Andy
Continuing with yesterday’s theme of global technology initiatives, I decided to expose several startups located throughout Africa. Africa remains a drastically different continent than North America and Europe with different technological demands. However, the same bizarre company names are still apparent. The names are most likely a response to common domain scarcity and the desire to create a new dictionary entry, but could be demonstrative of the universal insanity of technology entrepreneurs.
Afrigator is a blog trending site similar to Digg, aptly named to represent the long tail of the African blogosphere. According to analytics on Afrigator, the site directs approximately 400,000 users per month to blog posts from specified African channels. The user base does not, however, appear to participate heavily in the ranking functionality of Afrigator (both the home…
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