A little speech on social media from one of the Reddit founders:
Official Link
Interesting to note that he says that the internet is a level playing field. On other sites (e.g. Digg), power users drive the submissions. Certain people have followers, and no matter what they post, it'll be on the front page - that's a hotbed for advertisers.
Wow, formatting the video to be the right size is a pain in the butt.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Memes and Greenpeace
Friday, October 30, 2009
Goooo.....ooogle?
Google is a great source for any sort of research, if you are any good at phrasing your searches (or if you want to mess around with Boolean). But, there are many creative ways to use it for research.
Recently, there was a post discussing Link's "Excuse Me" on Reddit (Possibly the most annoying catchphrase of all time - video at your own risk).
The results were charted into a rather negative exponential looking graph, with one slight bump around 41. This kind of experiment is done a lot, with a lot of different words (I wish I could find them again, but think "lol" with lots of o's) and usually, the chart has a significant drop off in negative exponential fashion (NOT logarithmic... dunno why) with a slight bump in the 40's range.
The most popular one of these is likely the Khaaan! example, from Star Trek's Wrath of Khan. Once again, it picks up at around 40, probably due to the attention span of a person holding down a single button.
Based on eBay examples (i.e. the need for TypoHound) it's a pain in the butt to find anything spelled incorrectly - surprisingly, most people have excellent grammar. However, from this, it's clear that certain typos do work, to maximize your Google search results. Probably the bigger takeaway is that there's a very specific length of time that a person is willing to wait for anything online - so you better make sure your site loads in under that length of time. My guess is that the average amount of time somebody is willing to hold down that button is around 2 seconds, and that the space in the Google toolbar does not fit too much more than that (it fits around 50 characters, which is a bit over 2 seconds).
Just some foo...ooooood for thought
Monday, October 26, 2009
Goodbye Geocities
I know I haven't posted in a while, but I had to post something to commemorate the last day of Geocities.
Today, October 26, 2009, is the last day of Geocities. While the site is still technically open, they have not been allowing new accounts for a while now.
It's kind of sad, since many people have made their very first website on Geocities (others may have chosen Tripod or Angelfire, but Geocities always seemed the most user friendly. As the last one standing, as well, this marks the end of an era of user-created web content (that was supported heavily by advertisements).
Websites such as those, which were more or less a tutorial on how to write HTML code (either that or end up with a background that offends the eyes) are pretty much gone - it seems as if people now either create more content (building their own site from scratch and paying to host, etc.) or more specialized content (webcomic hosts like Comic Genesis or blog hosts like Wordpress are abundant, while whole site creation seems to have gone the way of the dinosaur). I guess in part it speaks to a need of specialization on the internet, but I actually think it's more a point of a) bringing like-sites together (e.g. the Blogger network is probably far more connected than all the disparate Geocities sites) and b) more user friendly creation tools that streamline site creation far more than Geocities ever did. With pretty much every site being customizable nowadays, (hello, gmail and Photobucket) the need for Geocities has really dwindled.
Still, it's a sad day in the world of the internet - the last bastion of free webhosting seems to be coming down. At least we get to enjoy a bunch of Geocities jokes like the one over at xkcd.
As a side note, I'm starting to use Tooltips in my links now - if you hover over one, you get a short text comment. It's usually unnecessary, but it allows me to be snarky so I enjoy it~
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Monopoly
Just a heads up; Hasbro has teamed up with Google to advertise Monopoly in a new and creative way: A worldwide game of Monopoly using Google Maps!
It starts today so get cracking. I personally think it's a great idea, 'cuz it's NEW, and that's actually a lot harder to do than you'd expect.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
They're a bunch of Twits.
This blog seems rather empty - maybe it's because I hate talking about Twitter. It's so pervasive that all the news seems to be about it (and it's usually people who all rave about it, but have no idea how to do anything profitable with it).
It's been gaining steam in sports circles - they're breaking news and starting feuds. The NFL (No Fun League) is putting a stop to that, though; probably due to any potential gambling fiascos (like a QB saying his arm hurts before a game?) Is any player really that stupid though...
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