September 2009
40 posts
Countries' self-image: National pride
via economist.com This is a poll of 33 nations by the Reputation Institute. People were asked to “rate their trust, admiration, respect and pride in their country.” I’m not surprised Singapore and India are ranked high. I thought Americans would rank their country higher. There are 12 countries surveyed that are not on the chart. I can’t find the full survey report...
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Why Developing a Native Twitter Client is a Good...
A recent blog post at CrackBerry.com reports that RIM is working on a native Twitter client. A couple of days later, Mashable reblogs this story on their site. Judging by the reactions on the internet, most people are welcoming RIM’s attempt to complete with UberTwitter and SocialScope. But user satisfaction is not the main reason why RIM is jumping in to this space. Blackberry has...
“The nature of human beings is to eat meat and fruits and vegetables, and...”
– In which our Sarah Ball finds the philosophical side of Le Bernardin’s Eric Ripert (via newsweek)
A Fascinating Insight into the Ups and Downs of...
via thenextweb.com It’s pretty cool to look at Google stock price superimposed with news events. But if you think news announcements are a good indicator for stock price, then you would be wrong. In the chart, the bottom of the price is labeled “52-week low; analyst initiates coverage with SELL.” Good traders know that when the magazine/TV analysts recommend something, you...
Life-streaming vs. Blogging -- It applies to...
There has been a lot of discussions about the shift away from blogging to life-streaming. Instead of writing long and thoughtful blog posts, many bloggers now spend the majority of their time tweeting, sharing links and writing shorter (but more frequent) posts. It’s like skipping meals to have more snacks.
I realized today that this shift in behavior applies to my reading consumption...
Nebraska at Virginia Tech
When this game happened, I was in Jakarta where my only option for game coverage was internet radio. It was the day of Idul Fitri where we always go to mass prayer in the morning. With about 2 minutes left in the game, Virginia Tech was down by 5 points and just failed to convert on a 4th down. Nebraska was moving the ball far better than Virginia Tech that day, and even if we get the ball...
Nothing is Original in Social Media, So Stop...
An article from Mashable earlier this week reports that YouTube has incorporated Trending Topics — a feature popularized by Twitter. Also earlier this week is an announcement from Tumblr that they too are incorporating their own version of Trending Topics. Recently we also saw Facebook adopting Twitter’s tagging mechanism, which created a reaction from the Twitter community that...
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How To Calculate Tumblarity (Updated)
I call it a good day when this blog gets 10 visits a day, so I’m quite amused when Google thinks this blog is the authority on calculating Tumblarity. By my own observation, the Tumblarity formula that I proposed in my original post (written on May 27th, 2009) is still pretty accurate today. Additionally, I discovered a few other things since I wrote that post.
Here is the updated formula...
Jakarta Fails To Put Out Smoking On Buses --... →
markellison:
dregar:
If only Jakarta had put the same effort in stopping public smoking as it did in cracking down on beggars, then maybe it would be a much healthier city. The article pointed out:
Smoking is continuing on nearly 90 percent of public transportation vehicles in the city, despite a four-year-old bylaw banning lighting up in public places, the Indonesian Consumers Foundation...
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Jakarta Fails To Put Out Smoking On Buses →
If only Jakarta had put the same effort in stopping public smoking as it did in cracking down on beggars, then maybe it would be a much healthier city. The article pointed out:
Smoking is continuing on nearly 90 percent of public transportation vehicles in the city, despite a four-year-old bylaw banning lighting up in public places, the Indonesian Consumers Foundation said on Thursday.
This is...
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How Twitter Might Send Far More Traffic Than You... →
I sometimes share links using a URL-shortener service like Bit.ly. Bit.ly comes with its own analytics that tells you how many “clicks” the URL gets. I was wondering whether those “clicks” are from actual human or otherwise, so I emailed my question to Bit.ly and I received the following response:
What you’re seeing are total decodes, as opposed to total...
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Help! My Boss Wants To Be My Friend On Facebook →
This is a very good post by Jeremiah Owyang on how to best integrate our online/personal life with the real/professional life — something we face more and more these days. The comments section is equally valuable.
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Making Geeks Cool Could Reform Education →
Very interesting theory. By making it cool to be geeky, students put a larger emphasis on good grades and education.
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Thoughts on Beggars Crackdown in Jakarta
Every year come Ramadhan time, thousands of poor people from around Indonesia come to Jakarta to beg for money. There are two reasons: Jakarta is the economic capital of Indonesia where the per-capita-income is highest in the nation. Second, Ramadhan is a time where all Muslims are encouraged to think about the less fortunate.
The increase of beggars around this time is quite noticeable. You...
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Two Underrated Features That Should Be In Every...
My Twitter client of choice is Seesmic Desktop which I find to be the best out there right now. But even Seesmic Desktop lacks these two features:
Mute button. This functionality blocks selected users temporarily. There are plenty of reasons why you want to do this. Maybe they are live-tweeting something you don’t care about. Or maybe some of your friends are tweeting back-and-forth in...
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TumblUpon
I don’t think I’ve ever “Liked” anything suggested by TumblUpon. And I’ve “Liked” a lot of items from my Tumblr Dashboard before. There is something seriously wrong about its recommendation engine.
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When moving in with your parents can land you a... →
Having to move back home at the age of 28 almost universally signals defeat. Images of an unemployed, not-so-well-adjusted George Costanza character from “Seinfeld” might spring to mind.
In Justin Halpern’s case, moving from Los Angeles to his parents’ house in San Diego planted the seeds for a Twitter page that’s quickly growing into an Internet phenomenon,...
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“Flurry saw a 300% increase in the number of people reading on their...”
– iPhone readers QUADRUPLED from April to July (via feedly)
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How to beat Amazon's Kindle →
I’d counsel Amazon’s competitors to embrace openness even more. In particular, they’d be wise to let people trade eBooks. They could do this even while maintaining copy protection—you could authorize your friend to read your copy of The Da Vinci Code for three weeks, and while he’s got it, your copy would be rendered unusable. (I’d prefer if eBooks came with no copy...