Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet. Coverage of RSS technology that had largely faded from conversation reached a fever pitch this week with the July 1 shuttering of Google Reader. Digg Reader launched; Flipboard experienced some transition pain; and Anil Dash tries to direct attention to what matters. An undertold …
Friday 5 – 06.28.2013
Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet. Is the 800 million dollar valuation of Snapchat the sign of the bubble poised to burst or a smart bet on the need for ephemeral content in an always-on world? Here’s an interesting read on the valuation and the parallels with Instagram, including shared …
Farewell, “click here” – the disappearance of chrome
Chrome is an umbrella term for the navigational elements throughout user interface design. NN Group offers a useful description of chrome at all layers of human-computer interaction, from operating system to website to mobile app. Fun fact: Google’s browser derives its name Chrome in part from this term since it attempts to minimize visible UI chrome — most …
Friday 5 – 06.21.2013
Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet. Facebook, as widely predicted, rolled out a comprehensive Instagram video offering. Instagram opted for a 15-second format — practically longform compared to the mere 6-second Vine. Will 13 filters, editing capability, and a stabilization feature topple Vine? Twitter purchased Boston-area Spindle. The mobile-only discovery app …
Try it: Make the movie of your personal data
We’re all posting, tweeting, and sharing more than ever. How might all this micro-content we publish on the social web be boiled up into a story? I came across two interesting services that make a movie from your shared content: Vizify for Twitter, and Foursquare time machine. First, Vizify for Twitter lets you create what …
Friday 5 – 06.14.2013
Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet. Twitter quietly opened its analytics platform for general use. Now even small publishers can view and track follows, unfollows, and clicks to gauge performance of an account, and even download a CSV. Facebook embraced the hashtag. This development has been greeted by many as …
Try it: 3 ways to tell a story online
Compelling content is a differentiator in a world where everyone is an online publisher. That content can take entirely new forms: data visualization (like this recurring developments site from Beutler Ink) or inspired curation (like Brainpickings by Maria Popova). And of course multimedia plays an ever larger role in online storytelling. Last year’s groundbreaking New York Times feature …
Friday 5 – 06.07.2013
Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet. Despite the oft-declared demise of RSS, many recoiled at the announcement of a Google Reader shutdown in July. Feedly, Pulse, and others have picked up migrating users, but Digg has an upcoming launch of a social news site / RSS reader said to be …
The politics of spelling
What you call things clearly matters: global warming or climate change? High fructose corn syrup or corn sugar? Terrorist or freedom fighter? The knaidel/kneydl debate after the Scripps spelling bee is a reminder of the origins and implications of agreed, canonical spelling. Dara Horn writes an illuminating NYT Op-Ed about spelling as a political statement in …
The perils of context collapse
Social scientists call this “context collapse.” A joke that you make among friends would not be understood if you made the same joke among, well, everyone else. And even when you say things to a group of like-minded people — say, at an obscure conference where attendees might be tweeting or taking video — you …