Although Open Home is an $3.99 app, I'd really call it a platform. With it, you can skin or customize your Android interface, add Live Folders, shortcuts and such. And there's tons of custom skins, fonts, icon packs for sale in the Android Market to enhance it. There's even an experimental 3D cube interface in the latest version as you swipe to other home screens, the screen rotates like a cube. I haven't dropped the $3.99 just yet, but I did install Open Home Lite, which is free. It wasn't until after installation that I realized the software adds two extra home screens to the Nexus One. I don't have enough apps and shortcuts to fill up seven screens just yet, but I'm heading in that direction, so the extra space will come in handy. Each of the screens can hold a custom descriptive title as well check this old but relevant video to see how one user categorized the screens on his HTC Magic.

Aside from the extra home screens, Open Home adds dedicated search on the left and an interesting little slideout drawer on the right side of the screen. Simply tap and swipe the star to pull out the drawer. I'm thinking of placing the most used apps in the little drawer so that they're available from any of the seven screens. And I don't even have to give up my Live Wallpapers since Open Home supports them on my handset. Perhaps one of the best features of all Open Home allows for home screen rotation to landscape mode, something I wish Android would support natively.

I'll be playing some more with the free, lite version of Open Home, but I'm already inclined to drop the $3.99 it's a small price to pay for two extra home screens and customization features.

Images courtesy of Better Android Apps

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req'd):

Google's Mobile Strategy: Understanding the Nexus One

First, let me inventory the raw materials that got me thinking this way. Recently JC Hutchins posted that he had been dropped as an author by St. Martins Press and that they would not be publishing the 7th Son sequels. The post lives between a gut-check and a crisis of faith from one of the pioneering new media creator/ novelist hybrid guys. He also posted about monetary realities of writers pubishing via ebooks. Not that long before this, I had listened to JC's Hey Everybody interview with Pablo Defendini and Ami Greko from The New Sleekness blog. It's a really interesting discussion about the future of book publishing by industry professionals young enough in their careers to be less invested in the status quo and more willing to help a new future emerge. (Side note 1: I met Pablo and Ami at last year's Dragon*Con in the classic SF con fashion I wanted to meet them, saw them in a hotel bar, asked if I could sit with them, introduced myself and hung out for an hour. Try it, it works! ) Much in my thinking was informed over the last month by the Amazon/Macmillan ebook pricing wars of far too large a trail to link to anything. In that debate I did first run across Joe Konrath, his fiction and some of his posts with amazingly open and detailed statistics of what he sells and what he makes from digital publishing. (Side note 2: I bought, read and enjoyed his book Whiskey Sour as fallout from the debate).

There are many other bits of thought in the mix, such as my feelings about beginning my own novel during NaNoWriMo and thinking about hiring my friends at Sterling Editing to work on it and what I might choose to do with such a book when)it is finished. That's enough of a prelude, though. Time to hit it.

JC Hutchins struck a nerve when he basically waved the white flag on his current way of working.

Creating podcast fiction does does not generate direct revenue for me. Based on anecdotal and statistical data, very few people are willing to pay for general podcast content, much less podcast fiction. Since my goal is to make a living wage with my words, the current monetization models including in-show advertisements will not deliver this. Dedicating time and effort to my non-fiction podcast projects will deliver equally underwhelming monetary results.

It is also apparent to me that using the Free model to promote a tangible product, such as I did with 7th Son: Descent and Personal Effects: Dark Art, does not deliver sustainable sales results. I have friends some of whom are my best friends, the most talented people I've had the privilege to know and work with who have absolute faith in this model. I treasure their trailblazing efforts and enthusiasm. My faith, however, has been fundamentally rattled.

Put simply: The new media model viably supports only the most blessed and talented of authors. The time, effort and money I invest in entertaining you for free pulls my attention and talent away from projects that can generate revenue. While podcasting, podcast fiction, and most importantly your support and evangelism has positively impacted my life and career in ways I'll never be able to fully express, I cannot continue to release free audiofiction if I wish to make a living wage with my words.

This is pretty big stuff in the world of podcast fiction. Hutch was one of the pioneers of the form and his getting picked up by St. Martins was considered a watershed and a validation for the medium. So if he can't make it in this world, what does that say about all the other podcast novelists who are less engaged, have less of a fan base, less sheer horsepower? Does it mean this medium is screwed?

I am positing that Hutch had a terrible misfortune of timing, that he arose as a viable author at exactly the wrong moment in publishing history. As he started down his path it seemed like the end game was to get a book deal with a major publisher. For writers of the last 100 years, this was the reasonable career success path for authors, and practically the only one. In the last few years though a sea change has happened so rapidly and thoroughly to flip that Hutch got his boat capsized in the process and he will be far from the only one. As crazy as it may sound, for a certain kind of author at this point I think a major publishing contract may seem like winning the game but is in fact losing it.

The red flags I got from the JC Hutchins post started here:

Examining the lead up to, and release of, the novel, I cannot see how I could have promoted it any better than I did. I literally went broke promoting this book and Personal Effects: Dark Art (another novel that will not have a sequel; it also underperformed). I conceived numerous brand-new online marketing campaigns that dazzled you and others. I asked you to purchase the novel, and many of you did.

If JC is literally going broke promoting 7th Son and Personal Effects book, I think a reasonable question to ask is What is St. Martins Press' role in this? If JC is willing and able to put so much of his own time and money into the promotion of the books, what value is he getting from the big publisher that is worth giving away 90% of the sale of the book to them? 50 years ago, and 20 years ago and 2 years ago, this made sense. It was pretty much impossible to get a book published and into the hands of the world in any significant way especially in a way that a writer could make a full-time living without a major publisher contract, especially one paying advances at a level to be a livable wage. Nowadays, especially due to the markeplace enabled by the Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader et al, that's a different equation.

Joe Konrath's post about the money he makes from the Kindle store shows a really clear pattern that he summarizes with:

My five Hyperion ebooks (the sixth one came out in July so no royalties yet) each earn an average of $803 per year on Kindle.

My four self-pubbed Kindle novels each earn an average of $3430 per year.

If I had the rights to all six of my Hyperion books, and sold them on Kindle for $1.99, I'd be making $20,580 per year off of them, total, rather than $4818 a year off of them, total.

So, in other words, because Hyperion has my ebook rights, I'm losing $15,762 per year.

For a writer with an engaged audience, like JA Konrath has and like JC Hutchins has, there may well be more money in their books self-published primarily through the Kindle and other ebook stores. An interesting bit from the Konrath numbers above, that's from making 35% of the sales price for his direct books. When it changes to 70%, he'll be making twice as much per book as he posted above for the self-published ones.

Let me say it again: for a writer who is engaged with their audience and reasonably prolific (because you need new books to keep this engine turning), we may be at the turning point where a better living is available through self-publishing than a big New York publisher book deal.

There are certainly authors that this model will not work for. During my preparation for last year's Podcasting for Working Writers panel at Dragon*Con I talked to both James Patrick Kelly and Kelley Eskridge on this topic and they both raised the point that for a number of old school writers, the idea of engaging at the level of podcasting and doing large parts of their own publicity is anathema. A reasonable chunk of authors don't want to get out in the limelight and picked this career specifically so they don't have to engage. They write their books, maybe do a few conventions a year, do some bookstore events and that's it. Back to the keyboard where the serious work happens. That's fair enough and those writers will always need a publisher to do the parts of this business that would make them unhappy to pursue.

I think of the classic big publisher and big record label model as basically serving the function of the bank or maybe as VC. The manufacturing and distribution of the creative work was too capital intensive for an individual so this company would lend that money to the process, make the books or records show up in the store, do some publicity and keep most of the money. They insulate the creator from the process and from the retailers and fans. What publicity efforts exist, the big media company acts as a semi-permeable membrane to let a little of the public through, but not a lot. Ultimately in this model, the relationship with the fans of the buying public is owned mostly by the retailer and the publisher or label, very little by the writer or musician. For the author that doesn't want to feed and water that relationship, that's perfect.

For the other kind of author, a JC Hutchins or Mur Lafferty or Scott Sigler, going with a major publisher outsources to a third party a relationship with their fans that these writers are really really good at maintaining. When Hutch is paying his own money to publicize his books and his his own direct line into his own fanbase, what can the big publishers do for him? They could give him large enough advances to keep his bills paid while future books are written, but obviously they aren't willing to do that because sales aren't high enough. JC's books earn money, but not enough money to keep him in that system. For me, the real question is Did St. Martins Press do 9 times the work than JC did to get the work promoted? If not, what did they do to deserve a 90/10 split?

Last November for NaNoWriMo I began a novel that I have literally been thinking about since 1991 when I was 23. While I came nowhere near finishing it that month and am nowhere near finished now, I have a goal to finish this novel in 2010. I've already been thinking about what happens when I finish the book. Do I try to find an agent and then try to have them place it with a major publisher? Since I don't have any plans beyond that one book and thus don't necessarily have a writing career in mind, how does that affect my decision making? At the moment I'm leaning towards not bothering to place the book with any publisher at all. I'll pay Nicola and Kelley at Sterling Editing to work with me to get it publishable and hire a book designer and/or artist to hone the final product and then publish it to the Kindle store, Smashwords, the Nook store and whatever else seems reasonable at the time. I'll probably release it via Podiobooks.com at the the same time, do my publicity via that and the other usual online suspects and let it ride. The key point to me is that the energy I could spend in placing my book at a big publisher could be spent selling the book to readers and I'll probably make more money that way in the long run. This isn't the way things worked for the 19th and 20th century and it may not be the way it works in the future, but March 2010 it is the way it looks to me now. The validation of having a major publisher decide I'm their sort of writer doesn't do anything for me. I don't need the book contract to pay my living, I'd end up doing mostly my own publicity anyway so what the hell does the publisher have to offer me anymore? Rather than have them put out a $15 Kindle book that I see a buck or two from and no one buys with a print version that is on and off the shelves in head-swimming time on a death march to the warehouse remainder store, I'd rather put out a $5.99 ebook version that I see $4 from each one and more people buy. I have a whole rant on how the true function of ebook platforms is to enable impulse buys, but this current post is already too long. That must come later.

When I interviewed Cory Doctorow in 2006, one of the things he said is that the generation coming of age now is the first one to arise without a stigma attached to self-publication. Since I've been paying attention to the world of science fiction and writers in general, a giant shift has happened. When I joined GEnie in 1992, the notion of self-publishing your work meant that it was unreadable tripe and the very thought of it was risible to any serious author. Nowadays, it might well be the most rational economic choice available. If you aren't already in the system and earning livable wages from advances on your books, and you are the sort of writer and person with that drive a JC Hutchins, a Scott Sigler, a Tee Morris, a Mur Lafferty, an Alec Longstreth, someone willing to do more than thrown the manuscript over the wall and wait for finished copies to return it might be time to take the reins yourself and just do this. The costs are low which means the cost of failing is low. The traditional publishers aren't paying that much anyway so the opportunity costs are low. Just do it. Lynne Abbey, CJ Cherryh and Jane Fancher did. The writers at Book View Cafe did. I will. Don't pin your hopes on a big publisher with economic drivers that are different than yours. Just do it yourself, work the people yourself and keep as much of the money as you can.

Tags: akismet, amazon, ebooks, jakonrath, jchutchins, kindle, macmillan, publishing, sterlingediting, stmartinspress

[The "Wolf vs Sheep" print. One of my favorites...]

I'm working on a new series of cartoons; earlier today I made a list of the desired adjectives to describe it:

Smart. Bright. Explosive. Witty. Acerbic. Colorful. Aspirational. Inspirational. Spiritual. Entrepreneurial. Fun.

i.e. Not too unlike the Wolf vs Sheep print. Or We Need To Talk.

I think spending all this time in the sunny West Texas desert has had an effect on me. I'm not sure all this dark, Northern doom & gloom I spent articulating rather well in my early London and New York days, is as interesting to me as it once was. Things change.

Expect to see a new direction happening over the next few months. I can already feel it growing inside me.

No going back

[N.B. As of January, 2010, I am no longer publishing new cartoons on gapingvoid. From now on, "Hugh's Daily Frickin' Cartoon" is the place to see them, Thanks!]

SFWeekly Web Editor Alexia Tsotsis (not pictured left) spent some time early this morning trying out Chatroulette, a website that connects random strangers for a video chat. The results are unlikely to surprise you. Unless you are new to this whole Internet thing. Screen shots of some of her more entertaining chats are below the post.

Harkening back to the days of A/S/L, the random vidchat service Chatroulette is one of those online arenas where not being a white male looking to get off puts you in a definite minority. Founded by a 17 year-old Russian high school student named Andrew Ternovskiy, the service is a more successful Omegle, combining elements of the MTV show Next with vidchat capabilities.

Aspiring chatees click to play and as an escape latch you or your partner can hit Next anytime if you get bored, scared, or have to get back to work. The Report video as inappropriate button also seems to provide some comfort, but by judging by the nsfw fare served to me last night, doesn't provide much of a threat.

I pressed play last night at around 3:00 am PST and after about 45 clicks on Next encountered 5 straight up penis shots, a lot of camera disabled chats, two women who automatically clicked Next once they figured out that I too was a female, and a lot of very grateful looking guys, including a Chinese fan of Google and a French guy in indoor sunglasses, who asked me whether I was a more dominate lady or submissive woman in the hope that I would be the former.

Out of the 10,920 of my fellow Chatroulette participants, my Roulettees were a good cross section of Internet humanity. And while I did not encounter the suicide hanging videos alluded to in many of the chats, things like did you hear the one about the guy who shot himself in the bath tub, were brought up in conversation quite a few times, as examples of just how crazy Chatroulette can get.

Anywhere you get a mass of people communicating uncensored (and yes much like 4chan.org, China has not yet blocked Chatroulette) will be subject to typical groupthink behavior like urban myths and requests for interaction better left to the casual encounters section of Craigslist. Nonetheless, the service's potential for more substantial acts of communication is formidable.

Chatroulette is what you'd expect it to be, micro-interactive reality TV with a large heaping of cybersex. While most people are (whether they admit it or not) voyeurs the fact that Chatroulette lets the both participants see each other limits the site's potential user base to the weirdos and despite piquing VC Fred Wilson's interest it doesn't seem like there's currently enough weirdos to turn the humble startup into something mainstream.

One Roulettee, when asked what he thought the service was most useful for, responded, connecting with people around the world. Yeah, and asking them to show you their boobs.

Facebook users in the American West appear to move around a lot, and often have friends throughout the country, while users from Minnesota to Manhattan have connections much closer to home.

And in areas in and around Texas, on the edge of what's generally thought of as the Bible Belt, the Dallas Cowboys rank higher overall on users' fan pages than God.

These are just some of the interesting findings about Facebook users recently discovered by Pete Warden, a Colorado-based, British-born ex-Apple engineer who has spent the last six months gathering and analyzing data from more than 215 million public Facebook profile pages.

What he's discovered just might shed more light on the culture of connected America than the 2010 census.

"If you actually look at [Facebook user data] in the aggregate, it's like a painting," Warden told TechNewsDaily. "Each individual data point isn't interesting, but when you step back and look at the trends in millions of profiles, you start to see some pretty interesting pictures emerging."

Warden says he's been overwhelmed by the response he's gotten from this project, after working on similar projects in obscurity for years.

Among Warden's less surprising findings: Fox News host Glen Beck gets the number one spot on Facebook fan pages from users in Eastern Idaho. And the "Twilight" books, penned by Mormon author Stephenie Meyer, rank high in the heavily Mormon communities in and around Utah.

Facebook mining

These and other observations that Warden mined from the massive amount of Facebook data were posted on his blog last week, along with maps that break down the U.S. into seven regions based on Facebook user trends.

Now, after gathering the data from Facebook's site using software he designed and honed in the process, and making a first round of enticing observations, he wants to turn the raw data he's culled over to academia for further analysis. But he also hopes to steer investors and customers to his own software and services for further data gathering and aggregation.

"I'm much better at building the pipeline for processing the data than I am at doing really rigorous stuff with the results that come out at the end," Warden said in a telephone interview. "The patterns that I've blogged about in the U.S. data are very qualitative."

Indeed, much of the conclusions that Warden has drawn are open to interpretation, and his given names for America's regional social connection groups "Stayathomia" (the Northeast), "Socalistan" (Souther California), and "Mormonia" (the predominantly Mormon towns in Utah and Eastern Idaho) among them are playfully clever, but not very scientific.

Serious about privacy

But Warden is serious when it comes to people's privacy concerns, even though all the data being gathered is publicly available on Facebook's site, and can be found via Google. He says he wants to make the data useful for large-scale data analysis, but not for tracking down individuals.

"We want to make sure we don't help scammers, we don't help spammers, and we respect people's privacy," Warden said, "but also allow some sort of new insight to come out of this."

To that end, Warden has delayed releasing the data for the time being (he initially intended to release it yesterday, Feb. 9), after someone from Facebook contacted him, asking for some time to check the privacy implications.

Once Facebook clears the data for release to the academic world, Warden says he's ready to pass the task of interpreting all this data on to others and feature their conclusions on his blog more often than his own.

Meanwhile, Warden has some problems to patch in his data pipe, problems that have been helpfully pointed out by readers of his blog.

"One of the great things about getting this out there is having thousands of pairs of eyes to look over this stuff, like the fact that [the data shows] the top name in Alexandria, Louisiana is Mohamed," Warden said.

"When somebody pointed out that some of the profiles seemed to be coming from Alexandria, Egypt, that was a head-slapping moment."

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Now picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. That's what a Ramen-eating, ex-Apple engineer named Pete Warden is about to release to the public this week.

Sponsor

This Wednesday, Warden will make Friend, Fan page and name data from hundreds of millions of Facebook users available to the academic research community. It's a move that Facebook has to have seen coming, a move that many in the data-centric community have been calling on the company itself to do for years, and an event that's been complicated by Facebook's recent privacy policy changes, which have muddied the waters of right and wrong but rendered even more data available for outside analysis.

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. It's a very exciting future, and Warden is about to fire one of the earliest big shots in that direction.

Nerds in Space: Social Graph Analysis For Solving Large-Group Problems

Warden studied Computer Vision in college in the U.K., then got into game development. After moving to L.A., he spent six years building graphics drivers for the original Playstation and the XBox. Then he started his own independent business, where, thankfully, he open-sourced much of his work (something he's still doing today).

When he found out that starting his own business wasn't going to work with his immigration status, he was very fortunate to have also caught Apple's eye with the software he had been releasing to the public. Apple bought his company in order to bring him on board. The proceeds of that small sale are now sustaining his next project after going independent again.

After spending five years at Apple struggling to navigate the maze of people and connections and types of expertise in order to get the information he needed, Warden decided to go independent and build a company that solved exactly that kind of problem. "I can't think of a better big company to work for, but it was still a big company," he says. "It was hard to find the right people to talk to, whether for particular expertise or for contacts at external companies." And so Warden left Apple to build a company that would use social graph analysis to solve problems like that. He called the company Mailana, a play on "mail analysis" since he was initially focused on email social graph analysis.

We've written here a number of times about Mailana's tool that analyzes the social graph of any Twitter user. Enter the username of someone on Twitter and Mailana will show you which 20 other people the user has exchanged the largest number of reciprocal public @ replies with. Find someone interesting or important? Mailana's Twitter analyzer will tell you who they most regularly interact with. See, for example, The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Rockstars on Twitter.

Pulling Down the Facebook Social Graph

Now Warden is about to unveil a much larger project along the same vein. For the past six months he's been crawling public profile pages on Facebook. He now has more than 215 million of them indexed and updated about once a month. When he began he was using the Web crawling service 80legs, but over time he had to build his own crawling infrastructure.

When I talked to him this afternoon, he had already begun uploading 100 GB of user data onto his server to make it available for academic research starting on Wednesday. Warden says he's removed identifying profile URLs but kept names, locations, Fan page lists and partial Friends lists. All those fields of data are just waiting to be analyzed and cross referenced. That's one very rich resource.

Yesterday Warden posted some of his own initial observations from the data on his personal blog. Those included:

• In almost every state in the Southern U.S., God is number one most popular Fan page among Facebook users. Among people in the L.A., San Francisco and Nevada regions? "God hardly makes an appearance on the fan pages, but sports aren't that popular either," Warden writes. "Michael Jackson is a particular favorite, and San Francisco puts Barack Obama in the top spot." In the Oregon and Idaho region? Starbucks is number one.
• In the Mormon-influenced areas of Utah and Eastern Idaho, the most popular Fan pages are The Book of Mormon, Glen Beck and the vampire book Twilight, which was authored by a Mormon.
• The bulk of Warden's posted analysis yesterday was about location networks. People in the western U.S. tend to have Facebook friends all over the country; people in the southern U.S. tend to mostly be friends with people who have remained in the same area.

Taking a Deeper Look

These observations are interesting, but they are only the beginning of what's possible. Name, location, friends and interests are great data points to analyze. Warden has written a program that will estimate gender as well, based on names. All these data points can be cross-referenced with outside data, too. Members of Facebook's own staff did this kind of analysis when they compared user last names to U.S. Census data, which allowed them to estimate changes in Facebook's racial composition over time based on the likelihood of people with particular last names to report a particular racial backgrounds.

"I'm mostly thinking 'What do I try first?'," Warden says. "There's so many interesting ways to slice the data - especially as I'm starting to get changes over time. I'm also trying to map out political networks in aggregate; how polarized the fans of particular politicians are - so how likely a Sarah Palin fan is to have any friends who are fans of Obama, and how that varies with location too. One of my favorite results is that Texans are more likely to be fans of the Dallas Cowboys than God."

Warden says he hasn't talked to anyone from Facebook since he started crawling the site, but he did get an email from someone on the security team asking him to take down instructions he'd posted that exposed a security hole that made harvesting peoples' email addresses easy. So the company is paying attention. "I'd love to see them put me out of business by putting decent data out there," Warden says. He says his Amazon Web Services bill was over $5,000 last month.

Why is he indexing all this content and why is he going to hand it over to the academic world later this week? "I am fascinated by how we can build tools to understand our world and connect people based on all the data we're just littering the Internet with," Warden says.

"Nobody thinks about how much valuable information they're generating just by friending people and fanning pages. It's like we're constantly voting in a hundred different ways every day. And I'm a starry-eyed believer that we'll be able to change the world for the better using that neglected information. It's like an x-ray for the whole country - we can see all sorts of hidden details of who we're friends with, where we live, what we like."

For a great example of the kind of social impact that data analysis can make, Warden points to some of the fascinating ways that GIS data is illuminating the intersection of race and public services. Data has shed light on social injustices for decades, and measurable information about the interactions of hundreds of millions of people every day on Facebook offers opportunities to discover both good and bad news about the contemporary human condition.

Warden says he's not yet been able to interest any investors in his ideas for businesses based on this data, so his girlfriend Liz Baumann, a former insurance actuary, stepped in to help and is now running much of the crawling. He says he's now focused on "working on ways of presenting all this information in a form that answers questions for people willing to pay." His first experiment along those lines is the very interesting FanPageAnalytics.com.

What does Pete Warden hope for from this week's public release of all this Facebook data? "Hopefully I'll get to see a bunch of interesting [academic research] papers come out of it, worst case. And I'd like to be the guy people turn to when they need stuff like this."

Already well-respected among a fringe group of bleeding-edge geeks, we hope that Warden's work on social graph analysis will end up impacting a far larger number of people than may ever know his name.

Credit card usage is slowing. Revolving credit largely made up of credit card debt fell by nearly 20% in November, the largest drop on record, according to the Federal Reserve, reflecting less borrowing by consumers and banks' tighter lending standards. Through October, the number of new credit card accounts was down 46% from the same period in 2008, according to Equifax.

But abandoning credit cards is a much more radical step than using them less. Consumers who don't own a credit card often have a hard time renting a car. Some hotels won't book rooms to travelers who want to pay with a debit card or cash. Those that accept debit cards may place a hold on several hundred dollars in the customer's bank account, which could cause checks to bounce. And many consumer experts say that responsible use of credit cards is one of the most effective ways to build a good credit record.

It will be interesting to see what the long term implications of this will be, because I sense a lot of people now run with the baseline perception that banks and credit card companies exist only to screw their customers.

What a time we're living in. You can't even make fun of your competitors at your own company meeting without your words leaking out to the internet.

Apparently, this has happened to Steve Jobs, who lashed out at Google and Adobe at Apple's Town Hall company meeting held at their One Infinite Loop headquarters. Speaking to Apple employees, Steve Jobs voiced his expression with buggy Flash, lazy Adobe, and Google's fakery in the don't be evil department.

Although these words have not been (and will never be) officially confirmed, multiple anonymous people from the audience confirmed their authenticity to Wired.

Here's a couple of Steve's (inexact) quotes from the meeting: Adobe is lazy. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it's because of Flash. No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.

When it comes to Google, Jobs is mad at them for trying to kill the iPhone. We did not enter the search business, he said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake: they want to kill the iPhone. We won't let them.

Finally, his most interesting quote is about Google's don't be evil mantra. According to Daring Fireball, Jobs simply said: it's a load of crap.

Yes, I think we can safely say we were right when we said that a) the iPad and the iPhone aren't getting full Flash support anytime soon, and b) Google is now Apple's greatest enemy.

Tags: adobe, apple, Flash, Google, steve jobs, trending

Gatis Kurzemnieks is an up-and-coming Latvian illustrator, graphic designer, painter and sculptor. Here we have a interesting piece he created and dubbed Noodles.' Displaying a buoyant-bellied man, enjoying the noodles from his bowl, Noodles is a humorous mixed-media piece made by layering Sculpey on top of a metallic column that is set on a wooden base. We love the glossy skin with its human-like rolls and creases that make this piece so lively and interesting

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^*the final peecol for the month has arrived. and he's a killa.

though i am hearing from la cruzz that he might go toe to toe with killa in a peecol battle royale.

could be interesting. if it happens, i'll have the pics.

Yesterday, Apple got all of the geeks glued to their screens waiting for the "Jesus Tablet," iPad. An hour later, they were twittering that it did not come. Or maybe it just wasn't their Jesus?

It turns out it was his Mom's.

It's been a long time since most of us have used our computers to do anything approaching "computing," but the iPad explicitly leaves the baggage behind, leaps the conceptual gulf, and becomes something else entirely. Something consumery, media'ish, and not in the least bit intimidating.

The automobile went through a similar evolution. From eminently hackable to hood essentially sealed shut. When the automobile was new, you HAD to be a mechanic to own one. Later, being a mechanic gave you the option of tinkering and adapting it to your specific interests. In fact, that's how most people up until about 1985 learned to be mechanics. The big changes came with the catalytic converter and electronic ignition (and warranty language to match). Now the automobile has reached the point in its development where you don't even have to know whether it has a motor or an engine to use it, but to tinker at all requires highly specialized skills.

So, in some ways this evolution of the computer to the iPrius seems completely natural. I don't care all that much if the iPad is hermetically sealed, but I wonder uncomfortably if in a few years the MacBook and the PC will be too. Or, more likely, we'll just wake up one day to a world without MacBooks or PC's. As we continue our shift en mass to the mobile device ecosystem and the laptop as we know it goes the way of the desktop, banished to special purpose niches.

In mobile land, closed carrier heritage combined with Apple's product vectors may leave us with only closed options. A confluence of interests - commercial (get your pure non-pirated content only from me!), governmental (cyber defense!), and user (I want to be safe!) - will find that outcome attractive. Our generative and hacker-friendly world will be replaced by a sterile world of sealed aluminum.

No doubt the iPad will be hacked by someone to prove it is still possible. They'll run linux on it within a week of launch, but that's not where they will have learned those skills. They learned them on the highly generative PC they probably bought for something else. Slight differences in approachability and "ease of mastery" (as Zittrain puts it) make a big difference. The curves are steep. And tomorrow the people that buy iPad's descendants will be less likely to develop those skills. Who's going to buy a developer's license just to screw around?

For your phone Apple could make a strong argument that this kind of control was necessary. They needed to make sure it was a reliable first and foremost as a phone (rather than reliable as a snooping device or wouldn't just crash every time you really needed to make a call). The argument is being extended to the iPad more because of Apple's culture than real need, and if I was Steve Jobs looking at iTunes receipts I would do the same thing. But... directionally this is a vector toward compuserve, not away from it. The iPad is Steve's Minitel terminal.

Just for the heck of it, imagine for a minute that the MacBookPro was locked up like the iPad. The apps that run on the iPhone have been mostly trivial. One person for a few weeks is probably the average effort. Eugene Lin may be willing to build apps on spec and hope for the best after they are submitted, but will Adobe? Imagine when Adobe invests $X millions building Lightroom for a year only to have it rejected because Apple launches Aperture the same week.

Today, the other key part of the equation has just gone live in the App Store, the PAYware Mobile app. This free application, when paired with the hardware, allows you to use your iPhone to easily accept credit card payments, just as Square does. Still, as Dorsey noted in the original video we took with him (second video below), Square is being aimed at a broader market of people who may not have merchant accounts but still wish to be able to accept payments. Also, while VeriFone's hardware is clearly better designed for use with the actual iPhone, Square's method of using the headphone jack is so that it will be able to be used with other mobile devices eventually (Square is currently working on an Android app, for example). VeriFone promises support for other platforms as well, but this particular hardware unit will only work with an iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS.

VeriFone also clearly believes its solution is the safer bet for merchants thanks to its secure payment gateway. Truth be told, running transactions on this device does feel a bit safer than Square's, but there are also a range of confusing options. And setting the thing up is kind of a pain. You're also paying for this extra security. VeriFone's solution has a $49 activation fee, along with a monthly fee of $15 on top of the 17 cents you're paying on each transaction. Square gives its hardware and accounts away for free, but plans to take a small percentage of each transaction. This will be an interesting battle to watch.

Watch a quick demo of VeriFone PAYware Mobile in the video below. You can order the hardware here. And you can find the app in the App Store here.

With that in mind, I decided to filter the barrage of iPad coverage through a publishing lens. What follows are intriguing ideas culled from all sorts of sources. Most revolve around content applications the iPad may provide.

There's no way I'll catch all the good stuff -- there's just too much out there -- so please use the comments area to post links and commentary that grab your attention, publishing-related and otherwise.

Ebook pricing could get interesting

The iPad's release portends a price-point battle between Apple and Amazon. That's ebook pricing, not hardware.

The Wall Street Journal says Apple is pushing book publishers to set two ebook price points, $12.99 and $14.99, with Apple taking its customary 30 percent cut from any sales. They key word in all this is "set." The big kahuna of ebooks, Amazon, controls its pricing. Most bestsellers are parked at $9.99, which is below what Amazon pays a publisher for a title. Amazon is subsidizing its low price point.

But that's the present. The future is a different matter. The thought is that Amazon is taking a short-term loss on ebooks so it can solidify its position as the dominant channel. Once it owns the ebook market, Amazon can ditch the subsidy and force publishers to renegotiate pricing.

That's the fear, and Apple appears to be playing to it by giving publishers an option: get a measure of pricing control through Apple, or make more with Amazon but pray they don't rewrite the rules later. (Apple could always rewrite rules, too ...)

What's really interesting about this -- and kind of bizarre -- is that the binary Apple-or-Amazon thinking obscures an important point: mobile devices already offer publishers plenty of pricing options.

What about e-reader applications?

Steve Jobs famously quipped a couple of years ago that "people don't read anymore." Well, I guess Apple changed its stance on that one. The new iBooks app -- and accompanying store -- is a big ol' cannonball in the ebook pool.

Early discussion on a back-channel publishing list I follow has focused on how Apple will treat its new ebook competitors. Will established applications, like Stanza and the Kindle app, be removed? Kirk Biglione, co-founder of Medialoper, thinks competitors will remain in Apple's universe. Just don't count on sharing titles across apps:

Look for books to be added as a new media type in the device media library. The other reading apps may be able to co-exist as long as they don't access books stored in that library. So, for example, you probably won't be able to use Stanza to read iBooks. [Note: Kirk gave me permission to post his comments.]

One thing to consider here: Past inquiries from the Federal Communications Commission may soften Apple's competitive instincts. At least for a while.

Of course, FCC heat doesn't preclude Apple from a little friendly rivalry. Digital Trends picked up on the backhanded compliment Jobs gave Amazon during the iPad presentation:

... [Jobs] basically told the online retailer that we'll take it from here.

The reading/viewing experience

Apple has already shown what it's capable of on the music and video front, so I'm curious to see how it handles the book experience. Early word is positive from folks who've had a chance to demo the iPad. Here's Gizmodo's take:

It's an optical illusion, but just seeing the depth of pages makes the iBook app feel more like a book than a Kindle ever did for me. The text is sharp, and while the screen is bright, it doesn't seem to strains the eyesbut time will tell on that.

The iPad is backwards compatible with existing iPhone applications. That seems useful on first blush, but Joshua Topolsky of Engadget called out a big issue with "old" apps:

It's kind of silly looking. A lone app in the center of a black screen.

More to come

I'll be adding to this post in the coming days as more analysis bubbles up. Again, please use the comments to point out interesting or informative links you come across as well.

At the end of a failed 15-year experiment in giving away its product, the press (newspapers and magazines) has begun to renounce free. It's slow in starting, because of the inertia of this decade and a half, but the New York Times announced recently that it would begin charging for its Website, and others are sure to follow.... But payment for Websites alone won't be enough to change newspapers' and magazines' bottom lines from red to black. Apple's tablet, however, will.

It's time for free to end. Newspapers and magazines made the mistake, in the early days of the Web, of giving away their content for free, in exchange for revenue from Web advertising.

In the past few years, tens of thousands of jobs have been lost, and newspapers and magazines are cutting back and folding all across the U.S.... Yet we need the press: the fourth estate is a necessary check for our government and business. As long as free thrives, the press can't do its job correctly. Free may be good for freeloaders, but it's bad for society. Those who want things to be free forget that there are still people doing the work they get for nothing, and those people need to be paid. As the old saw goes, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

What news agencies can't do is the added-value reporting, the analysis, opinion and in-depth reporting that we want to read to better understand, and that we need for society to thrive. It may be a coincidence, but in recent years, investigative journalism was severely lacking at a time when it was needed the most. Only when people pay for news can we have quality reporting.

To those who protest that "no one will pay for a newspaper on the Web", consider some very successful experiments in paid online content. The Wall Street Journal charges around $100 a year for full access to its Website, and plenty of businesspeople pay for this. This is because the Journal provides the kind of news that is not plentiful; people pay for the quality of the business news and analysis that they can't find elsewhere, as well as its timeliness.

I'm betting that Apple will get it right, as far as features, interface and usability are concerned. It will also be an excellent tool for reading the news. Newspapers and magazines will be able to package their content in multimedia bundles (either as apps or something similar to the iTunes LP) that will be designed for reading on a portable screen; this won't simply be web pages viewed on a smaller screen.

The key to hardware being successful is the software that supports it. One of the main advantages to Apple's tablet, as far as the press is concerned, is the iTunes Store. Since Apple already has this platform to sell and deliver that content, even on a subscription basis, readers will be able to easily buy their favorite newspapers and magazines and get them delivered instantly. They'll be cheaper than the print versions, and they'll be a lot greener too. And the iTunes Store will be able to provide a better selection than readers can find by going to individual Websites. Whether by subscription or by single issue, it'll be extremely simple to buy newspapers and magazines to read on the Apple tablet.

I will do a more comprehensive year in review for Cyberlaw generally, but I thought it would be fun to take a close look at how 47 USC 230 fared in 2009. This is the first full calendar year following the Ninth Circuit's en banc Roommates.com opinion, and many of us initially feared that the case would create a huge hole in 230's otherwise solid immunity. As it turns out, those concerns have not come to pass. If anything, 2009 shows us just how strong the immunity remains.

I blogged on a total of 22 cases issued in 2009 that discussed the statute. (I blog on every case I see that substantively discusses 47 USC 230). I blogged on other cases in 2009 that were decided before 2009, such as the Woodhull v. Meinel case from October 2008 and DC v. Harvard-Westlake, a 2007 arbitrator's dismissal that came to light in 2009.

Of the 22 calendar year 2009 cases, I would classify 14 of them (63%) as easy defense wins, frequently on a 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss or state law equivalent. Even many of the remaining 8 cases contained good news for defendants. For example, in Shiamili, the defense inexplicably lost at the district court level but got an easy reversal on appeal. The Stayart court granted Yahoo an easy defense win, although co-defendant Various didn't get the 230 ruling. Similarly, the Barnes case granted the defense an easy 230 win on one theory (negligent undertaking) but denied 230 for a different one (promissory estoppel). The Certain Approval Process case said 230 did not prevent the plaintiff from amending the complaint to add a cause of action, but once added, the court instantly zapped the claim on other grounds.

This leaves four unambiguous 230 defense losses in 2009. The leading 230 defense loss was the Tenth Circuit FTC v. Accusearch case, which held a retailer liable for reselling illicit phone records. The other major 230 defense loss was the NPS v. StubHub case, which held that 230 may not apply to a lawsuit over the alleged illegal ticket scalping by StubHub's sellers. Both of these cases involve the retailing of illegal items, suggesting that 230's boundaries may not reach that far.

The other two defense losses are less consequential. The Project Playlist held that 230 does not preempt state IP law claims, a conclusion that deserves note only because the Ninth Circuit held otherwise in the 2007 ccBill case. I believe that no other courts will follow the Ninth Circuit's rule that 230 preempts state IP laws, making the Project Playlist ruling unsurprising.

In People v. Gourlay, a web host was denied a 230 defense to a criminal prosecution for child molestation- and child pornography-related claims. This case turns mostly on the web host's active role creating the child pornography (as well as the host's molestation of the child actor); with that context, this case may have little influence on other cases. Indeed, the court made clear that web hosts providing standard web hosting services could fully qualify for 230 protection against a state criminal prosecution of child pornography dissemination.

In reverse chronological order, a brief overview of the 230 cases from 2009:

Nemet Chevrolet v. ConsumerAffairs.com (4th Cir. Dec. 29, 2009). One of three federal appellate court 230(c)(1) rulings in 2009 (Barnes and Accusearch are the others). A solid defense win for a consumer review website. The plaintiff's claims that the website contributed to the reviews' development and fabricated reviews were tossed on a 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss.

Shiamili v. Real Estate Group (N.Y. App. Div. Dec. 17, 2009). In an unpublicized January 2009 decision, the trial court denied a website's 230 dismissal request for claims based on user-supplied comments. In December, this error was fixed on appeal despite allegations that the website chooses and administers the user content.

Dart v. Craigslist (N.D. Ill. Oct. 20, 2009). Craigslist got a big win in its ongoing battles with various government agencies over prostitution ads on Craigslist when the court held it wasn't liable for those ads.

Riggs v. MySpace (C.D. Cal. Sept. 17, 2009). A goofy case. The court holds that MySpace's deletion of Riggs' account was protected by 230(c)(1) on the apparent theory that Riggs (the plaintiff) was the third party supplier of the deleted content. This case would make more sense as a 230(c)(2) case.

Finkel v. Facebook (N.Y. Sup. Ct. Sept. 15, 2009). Facebook wasn't liable for the contents of a user's private group even though Facebook placed a copyright notice on the page.

Intellect Art v. Milewski (N.Y. Sup. Ct. Sept. 15, 2009). Ripoff Report wins again.

Stayart v. Yahoo (E.D. Wis. Aug. 28, 2009). An convoluted, and possibly confused, ruling that Yahoo wasn't liable for search results snippets. However, Various was denied 230 because it may have originated the content in question.

Cornelius v. DeLuca (E.D. Mo. Aug. 18, 2009). An online retailer wasn't liable for user-supplied comments despite a conspiracy allegation.

Goddard v. Google (N.D. Cal. July 30, 2009). This is a follow-on ruling to an important December 2008 ruling in this case, which dismissed the plaintiff's complaints but gave the plaintiffs another chance. The December 2008 ruling is one of the most interesting and important decisions interpreting Roommates.com. In the July ruling, the judge again found that 230 insulates Google from liability due to allegedly fraudulent ads run through its network and granted a final dismissal.

Doe II v. MySpace (Cal. App. Ct. June 30, 2009). MySpace isn't liable for users' sexual assaults on other users.

FTC v. Accusearch (10th Cir. June 29, 2009). The second of three federal appellate court rulings on 230(c)(1). The defendant was an online retailer of illegal phone records. The retailer claimed that the phone records came from third party suppliers and therefore 230 immunized the retailer from liability associated with the records. The court echoed the Ninth Circuit's Roommates.com decision, effectively extending that case to the Tenth Circuit, and said that the retailer was responsible for selling the illicit phone records despite 230.

Zango v. Kaspersky (9th Cir. June 25, 2009). This is the only 2009 ruling addressing 47 USC 230(c)(2), the overshadowed and frequently overlooked sibling of 230(c)(1). Despite the rarity of 230(c)(2) cases, this case could be fairly influential. The Ninth Circuit held that 230(c)(2) protected an anti-spyware software vendor's decision to classify software as a threat. If you missed it, you might want to take a look at my presentation slides on 230(c)(2), which distill my deep look at 230(c)(2) this summer.

Gibson v. Craigslist (S.D.N.Y. June 15, 2009). Craigslist isn't liable for physical injury caused by a gun purchased via a Craigslist ad.

Doe IX v. MySpace (E.D. Tex. May 22, 2009). MySpace isn't liable for users' sexual assaults on other users.

Barnes v. Yahoo (9th Cir. May 7, 2009; amended opinion June 22, 2009). The third of three federal appellate court opinions on 230(c)(1). The Ninth Circuit held that 230 preempted a claim against a service provider for negligently delaying the removal of user content (essentially, Zeran redux), but 230 did not preempt a promissory estoppel claim based on promises the service provider made to the person requesting takedown. The initial Ninth Circuit opinion had two other unfortunate digressions: (1) it said that 230 was an affirmative defense that did not support a 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss, and (2) the opinion had ambiguous language implying that 230 preempted only state claims, not federal claims. The amended opinion helpfully eliminated both digressions.

Atlantic Records v. Project Playlist (S.D.N.Y. March 25, 2009). 230 does not preempt a state IP claimin this case, a violation of state copyright law for pre-1972 sound recordings.

Joyner v. Lazzareschi (Cal. App. Ct. March 18, 2009). A message board operator wasn't liable for user posts.

Raggi v. Las Vegas Police (D. Nev. March 10, 2009). A union wasn't liable for messages that union members posted on the union-operated message board.

Certain Approval Programs v. Xcentric Ventures (D. Ariz. March 9, 2009). 230 did not bar amending a complaint to add a new cause of action when the plaintiff also adequately alleged that the Ripoff Report contributed to the creation and development of the content at issue.

People v. Gourlay (Mich. App. Ct. March 3, 2009). This case involves the prosecution of a pornographic web host who also molested the child actor. The web host asserted a 230 defense in trying to overturn the conviction for the charges related to pornography dissemination. Although 230 can preempt state criminal prosecutions, and web hosts are protected by 230 for their ordinary web hosting activities, this web host actively participated in the site's development and therefore lost 230's protection.

NPS v. StubHub (Mass. Super. Ct. Jan. 26, 2009). In a long-running battle between the New England Patriots and season ticketholders who want to resell their tickets via StubHub, StubHub was denied summary judgment on 230 grounds. The court cites Roommates.com in saying that StubHub may have contributed to illegal ticket scalping sufficient to potentially disqualify it for 230 protection.

GW Equity v. Xcentric Ventures (N.D. Tex. Jan. 9, 2009). Ripoff Report is protected by 230 even though it offers pull-down menus and manipulates user-submitted reports.

One of the side effects of being bipolar is that many of your senses are heightened. For example, there are times when I will smell gas on fire, when there is none, or a knock at the door when no one is there. As a kid, seeing flashes of people out of the corner of my eye made me believe my house was haunted (and kept me scared of the dark for most of my life). Even feeling hands on my leg or as if someone was in the bed with me freaked me out.

Of course, being me, I swore I had super powers. I knew I could see, hear, smell and feel better than anyone. (Taste was one I never spent much time with, dunno why) I remember things in images. When I used to take tests, I could see the specific page the answer was on, and I would imagine myself reading that page. Even now, I can remember weird facts and places, even as I forget the most mundane things (I have no idea where my keys are).

I know I had super powers.

I spent time looking in the mirror at each millimeter of my face and body. When I see people in photos I will absorb the photo, memorizing the crease under the right eye, or the slight dimple that only appears when the person is half-smiling. I note the curve of the forehead and the shape of the nose. The nape of the neck. The slope of the shoulder.

Its not just people.

I will notice the smallest spot on my dogs snout, where hair doesnt seem to grow, or the change in her skin tone depending on her level of activity. When I go to movies I spend time looking at the entire screen, trying to understand where the characters were coming from, why the set was built in the way it was. Where the story was going. Could I see the monster before it jumped out of the tree?

Over the years its has become not just visual. I try to observe emotion and body language where I can. Sighed just a little too long? IM responses are really short? Perhaps you are talking excitedly, but your eyes are tired.

Often I mis cues (especially in terms of relationships and romantic interest. Man, do I miss that stuff), but many times I am right. Which in many ways, is awesome.

But there is the opposite side. I see all my negatives. I see all the negatives of people around me. Friends will tell me how a particular woman that I am hanging out with is super hot, and I will see the white hairs and the standoffishness. People will show me what they are working on, and I can see the holes, and why something cant work before I spend time worrying about if it can.

Growing up, I used to joke that if I brought home a report card full of A's with a single A minus, the conversation at home would be about the A minus. My parents spent more time discussing the things I could improve on, than the things I doing well.

In my first couple of positions, and certainly at my company, that was the standard. You are expected to do a great job. Not a good job. Because you are expected to excel, lets spend our time on correcting the errors. Ive never much believed in bonuses or commission plans, after all your motivation should be perfection, not hitting some (semi)arbitrary numbers or goals.

In the past year or so, I have started to change how I look at things. I still see everything. I try to use that to understand the holes and the positive directions we are moving in. I have stopped spending time in the mirror looking at me (although, on occasion, I still do it), and when I do, I try and force myself to look at the positives. At work, I have started to do the same. In all situations, there are positive elements and negative elements and spending time on any specific element is not holistic. It is not a complete approach. It is a failure waiting to happen.

Now as a bit of a tangent (I promise to come back to center), each year, it seems that I am inspired in a large way by a single individual. In 2008 it was Jeffrey Kalmikoff, and in this past year (as a whole), as I think about, it kinda surprised me, but it was Michael Galpert. Neither of these guys said or did anything specific TO me, it was more how they conducted their lives, the struggles they dealt with, etc. In fact, I have a pretty good idea who might be my inspiration/muse for 2010, but I will wait a year to see if I am right.

Last year, one of the things that MSG did that I really liked is that he recorded his interactions with the world. Either a quick video or a photo.

I dont do that. I see nothing but negative in photos of me. There is a reason that about 15 pictures of me exist in the world. (BTW, I used to say that one day I would be rich and famous, so less pictures meant they would be more valuable. Always squeezing a dollar out of 15 cents)

So, as I start to try and see myself holistically, I am going to start recording my interactions (and allowing others to record my interactions) with the world. I am going to try this coming year to take a photo of myself every day. I have started to play with DailyBooth, which is wonderful (except I want an RSS feed of my own photos *AHEM*).

I might spend a bit more time in front of the video camera. After all, I do have a lot of things to talk about with the launch of a new company, and other cool stuff that I will talk about later (that, my friends, is an admission that I have nothing else interesting to talk about. Yet.)

Its all about absorbing life holistically. Let the absorption begin.

To learn how to design and deliver better presentations, we need to pull from many educational sources. Books are good, but which ones? I don't usually suggest PowerPoint or Keynote "how-to" books, but instead recommend reading books from various design and communication fields to stretch your knowledge and perspective. Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte is great, of course, and there are many others that I've suggested over the years. Below are ten additional books I can highly recommend; three of them I have recommended before.

PRESENTATIONS & SPEAKING

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience by Carmine Gallo.
Since I began this website in 2005, I've talked about the presentation style of Steve Jobs ad nauseam (for example: here, here, here, here, here, and many more). Carmine Gallo does a great job of summarizing all the many good things that Jobs does in his famous Apple keynotes, and he provides concrete takeaways. The point is not to present like Steve Jobs each case after all is very different but there are many lessons to be learned by careful observation of the Steve Jobs keynote. A very nice read that just may change the way you present. (Amazon link.)

Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun.
I met Scott Berkun in Sweden this year and spent some time with him in Denmark discussing public speaking and what it takes to be an effective presenter. Scott, a former Microsoft manager, is a great guy and he's a very experienced presenter. If you do a lot of public speaking, you'll get a kick out of Scott's stories. And if you are thinking about starting a speaking career, Scott provides a lot of interesting tips and lessons. Teachers who speak in front of people every day may also find the book useful. (Amazon link.)


PHOTOGRAPHY

Scott Kelby's Digital Photography Boxed Set (Volumes 1, 2, and 3) by Scott Kelby.
I have almost all of Scott Kelby's photography books. He writes in a very informal, engaging style and there's a reason he's the #1 computer book author for five straight years: his books help people learn. I love Scott's work so much, I asked him to contribute tips for the Presentation Zen Design book (he offers 10 tips for taking better photos). These Digital Photography books are colorful, instructive, and aimed at the novice photographer who wants to get a lot better. I found them very useful (especially for the price). You can buy the books individually or as a set. (Amazon link.)

VISUALIZATION OF DATA

Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis by Stephen Few.
I have all of Stephen Few's books he's the Zen Master of presenting data as far as I am concerned. I saw Stephen present in Seattle this summer at the Tableau Conference and we had a chance to spend some time together before the event. He's a fantastic presenter on stage and he's a very down-to-earth guy who knows how to visualize data and how to help others get better at displaying quantitative information more clearly. This is a big hardcover book with some really good lessons. (Amazon link.)

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Visual Language for Designers: Principles for Creating Graphics that People Understand by Connie Malamed.
This is a really large book that begins with a section on how we process visual information and then goes on to introduce principles and techniques that help you understand how to organize for perception, how to direct the eye, clarify complexity, and simplify visuals. This hardcover book has many excellent examples. Beginners will benefit tremendously from the book, but I think many designers will also find the book a good addition to their library. Connie Malamed's website. (Amazon link.)

Before & After: How to Design Cool Stuff by John McWade.
John McWade known to many as "the world's first desktop publisher" is the founder and creative director of Before & After and the author of numerous books on graphic design (this is his latest). John was kind enough to contribute his tips for making better slides for the PZD book. I've been a big fan of John's for a long time and this latest book is his best one yet. Loads of simple, practical, visual lessons. Check out the Before & After website. (Amazon link.)

Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual by Timothy Samara.
This is a really good book that I have mentioned before which both beginners and experienced designers may enjoy. The book does an excellent job at covering the fundamentals but also goes into some depth with many good examples. I like how Samara starts out the book by discussing just what graphic design is and what designers do. I especially like his "20 Basic Rules of Good Design." (Amazon link.)

A Field Guide to Digital Color by Maureen Stone.
There are many books on color, but this one focuses on digital color and provides a great deal of depth. This is not really a book for novices, but it's an excellent book for designers of all types. I met Maureen Stone in Seattle this summer and saw one of her presentations. She's an excellent presenter and teacher. Maureen spent twenty years working at Xerox PARC on color printing, digital color, interactive computer graphics, illustration and design systems. She knows her stuff. (She was also kind enough to contribute a nice callout section for the color chapter in the PZD book.) This is an excellent book. (Amazon link.)

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (2nd Edition) by Steve Krug.
You might think a book on web usability design has little to do with presentations, but the lessons in this simple book have applications beyond the web. If you have even just a small interest in how to design websites that minimizes cognitive strain and make information clearer, you may find this book helpful. This classic is only about 200 pages and is a quick read with many good lessons that will make you a better judge of what works and what doesn't in a website. Steve Krug's website. (Amazon link.)

CREATIVITY

If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit by Breda Ueland.
I have mentioned this book before, but it's a must-read. This is not only a book about writing. In fact, it's much more a book about the imagination, spirit, and creativity. We need more art and creativity in our personal and professional lives; this book gets you thinking. A lot of people, including myself, have found this simple book to be quite inspirational. It was first published in 1938 and it's still a very relevant book today. (Amazon link.)

Are you the sum of your thoughts? It's a hard question to answer, right? I'm trying to sort this out and would like your help.

The dissonance between the physical and ethereal nature of disembodied communication like the internet is a minefield for human interaction. Primarily because we rely heavily on physical cues and environmental variables to base our levels of connection with a person. We rely on their actions, not just words.

My assertion is that social networks exacerbate this inability to fully understand the people we are linked with in these networks due to experiencing their random thoughts.

Sure it is interesting to read what someone is doing throughout their day, but the only value is what the reader places on that thought to make it a reality in their own mind. Maybe that is the nature of connection?

What I am really trying to understand is that if a person can create real bonds simply through sharing their thoughts in social media?

I've personally been at what turned into social media for over 7 years. I've become many things to many people based on the types of content that I was producing. Much of that content was dependent on what I was interested in or experiencing at that time. Like this piece.

The sum of interactions in social media are related to those fleeting thoughts. When shared repeatedly with networks of people a notion of who that individual is are created. This give us the ability to create baselines for who we think a person is. A baseline for example being, they're nice or they are a jerk.

Again, we are only dealing with thoughts to create these notions. They are assumptions as to the true nature of a person that most have yet to meet. I would posit that what happens in social media and across social networks is the connecting of thoughts. If you like someone, you like their thoughts. If you dislike someone, you dislike their thoughts. Any judgments are based on these and most likely very little on physical actions. So, if you met them in the real world you would need to attempt to ascertain all over again who that individual in front of you is.

Maybe we're connecting thoughts first and then people with social media?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Is Social Media Worth Your Time? (blogs.harvardbusiness.org)
• The value of silence (smartblogs.com)
• My twitter Ethics (socialmediatoday.com)
• When authenticity isn't a choice (smartblogs.com)

Social Media: Connecting Thoughts Not People is a post from: TechStartups.com

In one day less than two months I have managed to write 200 blog posts.

This one, being the 200th.

I know this because after writing about 50 posts I thought to myself, What else am I going to write about?

Turns out, at this many, right now, you write about writing and how to build blog traffic.

So how did I get to this magic number in roughly two months of blogging?

It's my job. My number one duty is to write 5 posts a day.

If being senior editor of this blog were not my job I wouldn't have written 99% of these posts. The remaining 1% I would have posted on my personal blog.

If I were starting a blog today on my own I would follow this pattern of writing posts. I might find it harder to find topics to write about now but writing itself is much easier to do.

Why post so much?

Traffic, traffic, traffic. With my posts and the posts of John and Boonsri we've increased unique visitors, indexed pages, page views and keywords over 1500%. We've got a long way to go with this blog but by producing regular content that has interesting angles on technology we're growing steadily.

Where do we go from here?

We keep on cranking out the posts on the topics that keep you coming here or subscribed. You can expect to see a fresh new design in the New Year, more video, more local startup news and other fun stuff we're keeping under wraps.

Thank you guys for sticking around and helping us to grow Tech Startups! And thanks to the Network Media Holdings honchos for having us!

How to Build Blog Traffic In 60 Days is a post from: TechStartups.com

The week before Thanksgiving, I attended an unusual symposium sponsored by the University of Denver Law Review entitled Cyber Civil Rights: New Challenges for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in our Networked Age. The symposium covered standard Cyberlaw topics, but the raison d'tre was University of Maryland law professor Danielle Citron's two recent articles on online harassment of women: "Law's Expressive Value in Combating Cyber Gender Harassment" (Michigan Law Review) and "Cyber Civil Rights" (Boston University Law Review). It is unusual for a law school to celebrate another school's professor and her research, especially when the professor is fairly junior. Nevertheless, Danielle's participation brought together academics from both the Cyberlaw and civil rights communities, which provided a rare and interesting mix of folks..

First Panel

Danielle Citron started off by recapping her two papers. Online participation, such as blogging, is essential to professional standing, and employers are reviewing online profiles of prospective employees as part of their hiring considerations. However, women are being targeted for abuse online. These attacks are harming women by changing their online and offline activities, reducing their job opportunities, and causing women to change their gender representations online. Further, folks are trivializing these problems. Women are underreporting the attacks, and law enforcement only intervenes when there are offline harms. New laws can serve an expressive function to communicate that online attacks against women are socially unacceptable. The new laws can validate women's feelings that they have been harmed and encourage law enforcement to pursue more cases.

Commenting on the papers, Robert Kaczorowski of Fordham Law (and Danielle's stepdad) made an extended analogy between the Ku Klux Klan and cybermobs.

Wendy Seltzer asked if we could deemphasize the effect of words rather than prohibit them. Danielle responded that we don't know how seriously to take any particular threat.

An audience member asked if is there a difference between mobs and individual actors who are just taking advantage of being anonymous. Danielle answered that groups can become more extreme online. I think this point deserves more exploration: a series of uncoordinated individual decisions to pile on to an attack can look like a coordinated attack to the victim. This is part of why I thought the KKK references were puzzlingKKK activities are clearly coordinated, while online attacks against women can succeed without any coordination or ongoing connection between the attackers.

Paul Ohm argued that that legal solutions are better for cyber civil rights problems than technological solutions. Paul discussed what he labeled Felten's Third Law. (He doesn't know of two earlier laws named for Ed Felten; he just assumes they exist given Ed's impressive and influential oeuvre). As articulated by Paul, Felten's Third Law is that in Cyberlaw conflicts, lawyers love technical solutions and technologists love legal solutions. In other words, we love the solution we don't know because we assume it has to be better than the one we do. As both a law professor and technologist, Paul picks law over technology for these problems.

Paul categorically rejects any technical solution that would create a fully identified Internet. For example, we should not mandate server log retention because we know the logs will be co-opted to regulate other forms of unwanted content, not just online harassment.

Wendy Seltzer discussed the unintended consequences of legal intervention. For example, mandatory Internet filtering in school libraries hasn't stopped kids from bypassing the filters, but it has facilitated a marketplace for improving filtering technologies that has benefited repressive regimes. Another example: anti-circumvention technology fails to restrict copying but has reduced innovation around DRMed content. Wendy also noted how norms can help curb abuses. For example, while there are online cesspools, she praised Wikipedia's evolving guidelines for living people's biographies.

In response, Danielle admitted that her solutions need to be more surgical. She said she might consider moving from a notice-and-takedown model to a notice-and-preserve model for intermediaries.

Second Panel

This panel was composed of three women academics from the civil rights community, so it was a noticeable shift from the typical Cyberlaw academic discussion.

Mary Anne Franks is a University of Chicago Bigelow Fellow and soon-to-be full-time law professor. She expresses our collective disappointment that cyberspace isn't a utopia that allows people to escape offline discrimination and harassment. She laments that women can lose control of their identities online, such as when someone creates a fake online profile in their names.

She then addressed how cyberspace is unique/special/different with respect to gender harassment. Many commentators try to duck cyberspace exceptionalism, so it was refreshing to see her tackle the issue squarely. Existing offline discrimination/harassment laws assume interactions between repeat players at work and school; online harassment can be divorced totally from any existing social networks. However, because the online activities still harm targeted individuals at work and school, we should treat the harms the same. Offline, there are switching costs to changing jobs or school; online, search engines' consolidation of results for search on a person's name creates a different type of switching cost. In terms of supervisory power, she thinks web operators have analogous control to employers or school administrators. Thus, when web operators receive notice of online harassment, they should have a duty to do something about it. Offline, employers can develop a variety of responses and policies to combat workplace harassment. Web operators should have similar latitude; for example, they can delete offending posts or suspend/ban accounts.

Helen Norton, a University of Colorado law professor, did not share Danielle's optimism (expressed in her first article) that existing discrimination laws can curb online harassment. Instead, Helen thinks a new civil rights statute is needed, but she might limit its remedies to exclude money damages. Helen is pessimistic that there will be regulation any time soon, noting that it can take years to enact civil rights legislation. Helen would also like to see more precise definitions of the exact harms that women are experiencing only online.

Nancy Ehrenreich, a Denver University law professor, began her talk by saying that we should not overstate the Internet's benefits. She then clarified that we should not assume that disadvantaged folks can overcome barriers online. For example, we impose cultural categories on people in every interaction, so even if people try to mask their identity online, they can't really escape. She wondered why we aren't talking about an anti-discrimination law for the web. Her concern is that discrimination denies individuals access to the Internet.

In Q&A, Paul Ohm observed that civil rights scholars often invoke free speech as the countervailing concern to their desired regulations, but Cyberlaw scholars are often more interested in other generative effects of the Internet, such as new business models, new labor models and new modes of production.

Panel 3

James Grimmelmann (see his slides) started with the Skanks in NYC case. In that case, the defendant criticized someone else in her social network on a blog, calling the plaintiff (among other unflattering things) a skank. The plaintiff sued to obtain the blogger's identity. After a successful unmasking, the plaintiff dropped the lawsuit, having successfully publicly shamed the blogger.

James hypothesized that this unmasking and shaming was an appropriate remedythe blogger got shamed (like an eye for an eye), and unmasking is a better outcome than other legal remedies like damage suits. James then posited a thought exercise that provided plaintiffs with an expedited unmasking procedure if they drop any damages claim. This would have a number of benefits. Unmasking curbs online harassment is especially effective at busting online mobs. Also, an unmasking remedy avoids messy debates over the First Amendment's scope, and it may be more desirable than trying to hold online providers liable.

Having advanced his own strawman, James then cut it down. In some cases, defamation remedies may be more desirable, and plaintiffs may not know that until they learn the putative wrongdoer's identity. In other cases, plaintiffs who just want unmasking would appreciate a lower legal hurdle. Also, we provide legal protection for anonymity for good reasons.

James' lessons from the thought exercise: we should consider ways to decouple an unmasking remedy from litigation. At the same time, we need to protect defendants from pretextual unmasking; in some cases, retaliation is a big concern, and we should incorporate this concern into the unmasking decision.

From Chris Wolf's talk (see his full remarks), the most interesting thing I learned is that 18 states have laws banning wearing masks in public, enacted to suppress KKK activities. This was the second speaker's KKK reference of the day, and it made me wonder if we were experiencing some variation of Godwin's Law.

Panel 4

Viva Moffat observed that secondary liability issues generate the most heat in online harassment discussions. She expressed concern that imposing legal duties on third parties may not help law's norm-shaping effect, and it's not appropriate to impose liability just because the provider has deeper pockets or the direct actor can't be found. She also suggested that imposing liability on third parties creates a greater risk of collateral damage than direct liability. [Note: I would like to know more about this last assertion. I suspect we cannot make a utilitarian calculation a priori]. As a result, she favors focusing more efforts on sharpening direct liability.

Ed Felten talked about identifying and anonymizing online activity. He explained the usual sequence of events in chasing bad online content:

log file => IP address => identity => justice

But the IP address => identity step breaks down when users use an anonymizing proxy or the user's network uses network address translation (used by home wireless routers or in coffee shops) and all connected devices' requests share a single IP address. He said that a majority of Internet connections use NAT.

Because IP address tracebacks can dead-end at the intermediary, an IP address can reveal too little information. However, even when users aren't investigatory targets, IP addresses can reveal too much information, such as geolocation. This paradoxIP addresses simultaneously reveal both too much and too little informationreflects that the IP address system was built for routing, not identification. So could we design a better authenticating technology?

He then conducted a semi-realistic thought experiment of a new technological tag that could be used instead of IP addresses. This tag could have the following attributes:

* can be placed by any intermediary
* conveys no information about the sender unless unwrapped by the intermediary (presumably for good legal cause)
* unwrapping the tag yields the best identity information the intermediary has
* the tag's use is voluntary as a technical matter
* the tag is removable as a technical matter

I then batted clean-up. A summary of my remarks:

Today's conversation has revisited long-standing Cyberlaw issues, such as:

* anonymity v. accountability, and who should be responsible for online content and actions
* cyberspace as a physical place. See, e.g., Noah v. AOL (an online discrimination case), National Federation of the Blind v. Target (also an online discrimination case) and Estavillo v. Sony
* cyberspace exceptionalism and cyberspace utopianism (on the latter point, see my article on search engine utopianism)
* when is the optimal time to regulate rapidly evolving technology? Early, when the technology is still in its infancy, or later, when market forces and new technological evolutions may have cured the early problems?

Danielle's articles convinced me that women are experiencing serious harms online that menincluding mecould easily trivialize. Danielle's articles also convinced me that online harassment has strong parallels to the 1970s legal evolution of workplace harassment doctrines, where a big part of the battle was to get people to take the harms seriously.

While I find a lot of descriptive value in Danielle's work, the normative implications are not as clear. As usual with attempts to regulate rapidly evolving technology, there are many important but overwhelmingly hard definitional challenges, such as who is an intermediary, what are online mobs and what constitutes online harassment. For example, I do not think the Skanks in NYC incident is an online harassment case or an attack, but James Grimmelmann's talk assumed those characterizations.

While we can debate what should be the right level of regulatory intervention, we should not overlook that Congress already enacted a law squarely governing intermediary liability for online harassment: 47 USC 230. The angst that prompted this conferencebad behavior onlineis the logical consequences of 230's broad immunity. The statute enables websites to adopt policies that they will not police user content or retain server logs of user activity. These choices aren't a surprise or a per se abuse of the immunity; instead, they are the unavoidable implications of Congress' action.

We might question Congress' wisdom in adopting 230, but we should not diminish its potential importance to the Internet as we know it. [In Q&A, Chris Wolf asked about the comparative experience in countries that don't have such broad immunity. In those countries, we know that websites take down user content much more freely, and I believe that the most interesting UGC innovations are all taking place here in the US, not countries with more restrictive UGC liability.] I can, at most, only prove correlation and not causation, but I believe 230 is one of the main causal reasons why the Internet has succeeded so well.

When I speak around the country about 230, I often encounter folks who generally accept 230's immunity scope but want just one new exception, i.e., their pet topic. If everyone got their just one exception, the law would be eviscerated. (I said it would be Swiss-cheesed to death; maybe I should have said it would be overcome by a thousand duck bites). I'm not rejecting new exceptions categorically (they should be each considered on their own merits), but in aggregate 230's immunization benefits are actually quite precarious. I believe 230 works precisely because of its strength and simplicity, so adding more exceptions could significantly reduce its efficacy.

I concluded my remarks by observing that online harassment is a subspecies of bullying and incivil behavior in our society. While we can and should work to curb online harassment, I am more interested in addressing bullying and incivility in all its forms, wherever it takes place.

In this regard, I have been impressed by how my son's school is proactively addressing bullying. See more about this effort, called Project Cornerstone. The school is teaching kids not to bully or to tolerate being bullied, and the project gives bullied kids tools to go on the offensive against bullies. There's no guarantee that anti-bullying programs will work in the short or long run, but I remain hopeful that online harassment today partially reflects that many current Internet users never got any anti-bullying education. Perhaps, then, online harassment issues will naturally abate (without any regulatory intervention) as new generation of Internet users, better educated about bullying, come onto the Internet.

Following my remarks, we had more Q&A.

Paul Ohm Q: Some cyber folks argue against secondary liability because they believe that a victim can pursue a direct action, but Ed's talk suggests that user anonymity will continue to be possible.

Mary Anne Franks: civil rights isn't about individual claims because victims have to bear too high a burden to pursue claims. Instead, civil rights are about changing large-scale social norms. The goal is to achieve anti-discrimination by any means necessary. Thus, civil rights scholars have already discussed and concluded that it's appropriate to impose liability on intermediaries like employers and schools.

Danielle: intermediaries are the lowest cost avoiders.

James Grimmelmann: no, the harassers are the lowest cost avoiders. Civil rights folks would get more support from the Cyberlaw crowd if they focused their regulatory desires towards intermediaries who are in active concert with the bad actors.

Danielle's Wrap-Up

We all agree that:

* education can make a big difference
* online communities need to self-police
* there are numerous limits to using the law as a solution, including that lawsuits don't make sense and 230's immunity.

We don't agree on what to do next. There are First Amendment limits, and technology doesn't offer any panaceas.

When developers get their hands on a social media platform, amazing things tend to happen. For example, Facebook transformed web apps when it launched the Facebook platform. The result has been everything from Facebook Connect to FarmVille. Twitter's an even better example when you start thinking of the countless Twitter apps for mobile phones and the desktop.

That magic is exactly what LinkedIn is hoping will happen with today's launch of the LinkedIn Platform, which opens up outside applications to use LinkedIn's data. Oh, and TweetDeck will be launching LinkedIn integration this week.

The company has been experimenting with a developer platform for a while. Most recently, LinkedIn announced integration with Microsoft Outlook 2010. However, until today only select developers could access LinkedIn APIs. Now any developer can work with the data, much like Facebook and Twitter.

You're about to see a whole new wave of LinkedIn web applications. When I spoke with LinkedIn, I learned that a little less than a dozen apps would be launching LinkedIn integrations this week, including TweetDeck, Twitter's most popular app (we'll have another post detailing the new features soon, along with screenshots).

This is an important but long overdue move for LinkedIn. We can understand why it took longer business users would have likely reacted badly to this a year ago, but with social media permeating the workplace, it's probably the right time now.

Tags: api, linkedin

The biggest secret to shooting personal stock photos perspective. Success in getting the shots that you can use in blog posts, digital design or in print is as simple as changing your perspective and taking advantage of opportunity. Typically, that opportunity is the space that you find yourself in, the events or structures around you. It's like throwing yourself a life preserver for a future project or campaign.

You don't always have to know what you are going to use the photos for but you must know that at some point they could become the invaluable component that saves you hours of work scouring for the right image. As the photographer you should be on the lookout to capture interesting lines in architecture, vibrant colors, harsh contrasting elements or unique human emotion.

Also of note is your ability to capture good light. That isn't just the time of day but also the environment that you find yourself in. Don't hesitate to ask people to move into a different location to avoid a shadow or catch better light from a window.

Your shots will rarely be as well lit as those that cost $100's but over all they will be more useful in your work since you took them. And hidden away in your brain is a reference to a photo, called a memory, that holds a photo in it for you. Your brain becomes your own stock photo catalog.

Framing these free stock photos is also very important. One thing that most great stock photos utilize is symmetry. These photographers use the individuals, props and set to create a balanced shot. This moves the viewers eye around the photo and helps to deliver the message of what the photo is about. A properly framed photo will present the same elements that make a graphic design good. Elements like focus, object placement and room for copy if necessary.

An easy way to improve framing photos is to use the LCD display as the finder and practice aligning shots. You might just find that every time you take a photo your hand(s) angle a certain way and that causes your shots to angle down, that you move at the last split second as habit and what you see on the LCD isn't what you wanted or a myriad of other issues.

There are two ways to measure success when you have passively integrated this into your technique: you begin using the photos in your other work or friends and family tell you that your photos from the vacations you take are weird' and artsy'. With either of these you are the winner!

By putting this into practice you'll have a personal stock photo library that you can draw from at anytime without worry of infringement, licensing or your stock photo life preserver not fitting.

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Free Stock Photos (See: Personal Stock Photos) is a post from: TechStartups.com

One of the great speakers, or swimmers, from the Audience Conference was Melanie Notkin. She is the founder of Savvy Auntie. A website dedicated to the cool aunts, great aunts, great mothers and all women who love kids, with a special focus on those that don't have children themselves.

Before this event I hadn't ever come across the site and it was missing from the conversations that I have those that needed a good shave. The niche that Notkin built her site for was the driven career woman that loves her neices and nephews but, like her core demo, she had no idea who Dora, Diego or Yo Gaba Gaba were. She was missing a connection with the little ones that she loved dearly. She decided to fix this, not only for herself but for all women.

The site that Melanie Notkin launched, Savvy Auntie, is more of a portal than a traditional informational website. It allows users to enter channels for general information, activities, shopping and social. Each channel delivering a similar experience to the next while allowing the users to find there way back to a central point to try another channel.

General Information

This channel has information regarding nutrition, books. learning, health and more. Two interesting components of this channel are the Auntipedia and the Q&A section called Dear Savvy Auntie. The Auntipedia is, well, pretty much what the name implies. It is a knowledge base that can actually get an aunt up and running in the areas most pertinent to being a prime caregiver to the little ones.

Activities

This channel provides a ton of useful and engaging activities that can keep you on the go with the kids. From crafts all the way to family reunion activities there is something here for every type of auntie. It is such a robust list, I'll be coming back to it on my own as a bearded one with two kids of my own. I'll also be recommending it to my friends with children and without.

Shopping

That is pretty straight forward. However, the Savvy Auntie has a hook that you can't deny. It is brilliant and creative marketing that most bloggers couldn't pull off Savvy Auntie 2009 Coolest Toy Awards. With great graphic design and a clean user interface it is easy to see toys that will make you cool with the tiny set. My only gripe with this area of the site is that many functions are tab related and triggered with JavaScript interactions that don't allow for direct linking within the site or to these specific sections.

Social

I've seen this quite a bit more lately on the sites that I review. Social is becoming a larger part of sites as they try to become a destination for their faithful. In the past it was forum or comment based. Today, sites like Savvy Auntie are working to create a community of like-minded individuals that want to share their experiences as Aunties by Relation or Aunties by Choice.

These social components can be a huge success for creating loyalty and brand evangelists. They often need constant grooming but can pay huge dividends. From what I can see on Savvy Auntie, not only is it an active community but there are new sections of it under work that grooming component.

What I would love to see on Savvy Auntie is Facebook integration like StyleCaster. Holy smokes. I was effusive in my praise of StyleCaster for doing this and thing that with the power of the biggest social network behind the Savvy community it would be major growth area. One key to this growth being Facebook integration and the other being the ability to still host it on SavvyAuntie.com.

If you are looking for some inspiration on how to get a startup off the ground you need to look no further than Notkin's Savvy Auntie. This is how execution of a great idea gets done.

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Savvy Auntie For The Holidays is a post from: TechStartups.com

Startups are increasingly responsible for how we view the interent. Both visually with design and user interface tools and with behind the scenes technology that shapes our world view. Simply put when you find information online it is increasingly chosen for you by technology, not a human. That technology in a broad stroke is a bot.

A bot is a group of computer language, code, that a programmer of team of programmers have written to perform a function. It serves as an automated way performing the mundane or an interesting task that might take a person 10 days to complete if done by hand.

Daniel Suarez has tackled bots in a way that is enlightening and both fear inducing. He's done this through his book Daemon, which made its way into my life thanks to a bot named Klau . . . I mean human filter named Rick Klau. Suarez writes about a programmer that upon his death and the subsequent posting of his obituary online that would put into motion a series of bots that cause great public harm.

The enlightening part of this is that it is something that maybe we wouldn't have thought of. The fear inducing part of this is that much of this could really happen. But that is not what I want to talk about. I want to use it as a baseline for understanding that what shapes our lives is information. And that information is ever increasingly generated for us by bots.

There are fewer humans in that information gathering, processing and filtering stew than ever before. Blind trust is put into these bots that they are in essence an oracle. That the decisions they make are a definitive guide to the way that we process the world around us. Below is a video a video from a presentation that Suarez gave last year (If you can't see the video click here):

The bot-mediated reality that he speaks of is now. Currently it is ubiquitous in simply forms like search engines, and as he calls it, narrow artificial intelligence. Something internet users interact with multiple times a day. And according to the Suarez they operate in the mortgage, insurance and medical industries. This is our reality.

Tech Startups find themselves having a major role in the development of bots. Often they are pushed in this direction simply as a part of innovation. Innovation is something that is based on efficiency and new ways of interacting with information. All of this in order to create a better world through experience. What Suarez has explored is a world in peril due to this innovation.

This story of bots is being written now by startups and coders around the globe. In this bot-mediated reality there it is important to put on your anthropologist hat and review the impact that developing technology has on a culture, a community. It isn't just the insidious that we should be on the lookout for, but working to ensure that the best effort is being made to create a human-like experience.

BTW, the video of the entire presentation is the only one that I have on my iPod. I watch it often to keep myself inspired about the technologies we are developing.

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Stewards Of A Bot-Mediated Reality is a post from: TechStartups.com

Uh, dinosaurs, silly!

I finally have a reason to blog about my most recent favorite movie, Land of the Lost, as scientists now debate if dinosaurs were ectothermic or endothermic. You know, cold blooded like a froggy in pond or warm blooded like Lassie.

So let's settle the debate and grow a pair of dinosaurs to find out. This is my new brilliant tech startup idea.

We've got to be getting close to having the technology and questionable enough ethics to hook up some cells in a petri and find a viable host. Seriously, to get this rolling I volunteer my body as the vessel to make this old life anew.

Okay, maybe I won't volunteer. But if there is an acceptable way of bringing dinosaurs back to life to settle the multitude of debates swirling about then it should be done. Debates that consume anthropologists about whether certain dinos were bipedal or down on all fours, if they could fly or were flightless and whether they were the missing link between species could all be put to rest with some synthetic growth hormone.

This newest hypothesis that T-rex was a warm blooded brute is just too much. Especially after watching Land of the Lost last night and witnessing Will Ferrell play a scientist that spewed his knowledge about dinosaurs endlessly to always be proven wrong early primates for that matter too.

I am teasing the scientists a bit on this because in a quest for definitive answers they build conventional theories that take root in texts and minds. Then one day when more information is gleaned from a long lost specimen and the computational power of the day expands just enough to run an outrageously expensive test a new answer arrives. Whether the T-rex was or wasn't hot, cold, upright or otherwise means nothing to me as I walk to catch the bus, subway or drink down this last bit of Sprite float that my daughter made me.

The bearing that these creatures had as evolutionary partners on this planet to our species in negligible. What is the answer really going to yield that is useful information for a modern human to use in their lives? I find solving puzzles as interesting as the next person but let's put this sucker to rest and grow us some dinosaurs if we want to know the answer!

Spark might put of the seed money for awesome dino raising startup. Bijan?

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Grow A Pair And Find Out is a post from: TechStartups.com

A piece ran this afternoon in the NY Times site about their hometown rival, The Wall Street Journal. The focus of this piece being that the WSJ is hiring roughly a dozen journalists to fill a local NYC bureau in a print media local build up.

The first engagements in what is becoming a fight for survival are happening in local markets. And in this battle of media titans, the WSJ and the NYT are set to square off over the streets of New York City.

The most intriguing element of this move by the WSJ isn't that they are broadening the scope of the news that they deliver to take on The Times but they are moving in a direction that local, independent bloggers have had their eyes on for some time.

It will be interesting to see what impact this has on the WSJ's circulation or web traffic. A mobile app for this new local channel could make this offering stronger.

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The Print Media Local Build Up is a post from: TechStartups.com

Startups are often in a position of being bootstrapped or strapped for cash when it comes to what is considered outside the core product roadmap.

Often in that category is the marketing of the product site online. The crew at Sitening as an ever maturing offering with Raven SEO Tools that won't hurt a startup budget and could prove a big return on a $79 monthly investment.

Raven SEO Tools is an internet marketing tool set. Designed to be a powerful tool for those in the know and accessible to newbies to manage site marketing, research SEO, monitor linking campaigns, reporting and integration with the Google Analytics API.

If there is one thing that Raven could do to improve upon this application it would be spin off components of the functionality into separate interfaces or other product offerings. Raven doesn't suffer from bloat, but it does put a lot of options for monitoring and reporting in front of a user.

Raven's interface is like opening a tool box to find the shiniest most sophisticated wrenches when you would settle for a rusty vice grip. After some time you can get to the rusty vice grip but you have to know where to find it.

The team at Sitening has begun to address with the addition of a Wizard for entering in a new site for monitoring and some social components. The social monitoring is a must for today's market in monitoring tools and a welcome addition for a startup to gauge the pulse of concerned users.

Beyond the Wizard integration there is something very interesting that Raven has that no other monitoring application I've reviewed has a content manager. Raven has a built in mini-CMS consisting of the essentials, title, keywords and body with a TinyMCE WYSIWYG wrapper that currently will connect with a WordPress blog.

The ability to blog from within a robust set of tools when a users mind is full of ideas, keywords, strategy and tactics is a powerful addition. It turns Raven into a hybrid monitoring SaaS that has the ability to help make your startup budget go further.

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Make Your Site Fly With Raven SEO Tools is a post from: TechStartups.com