May 2012
1 post
A reading workflow that works
It’s hard not to fall prey to information overload these days. There is quite literally an always-on, never-ending stream of it being fed into our lives, and staying on top of it all and sifting out what might actually be useful can be incredibly difficult. Personally, I’ve come up with a system that works for me, and am quite structured about it. Being the kind person I am, I decided...
April 2012
2 posts
This is not another post about Instagram
Well, not entirely, at least. Instead, it is a post about how an industry has lost it’s way.
I have a huge deal of respect for Kevin Systrom and the team of guys he has built up around him. And I love and use the product they have built, and appreciate the approach they took in building it in the first place. In short, I think they deserve every bit of success that comes their way....
March 2012
2 posts
The (hypothetical) way to access Rdio from South...
Rdio is an awesome application. The UI is fantastic, the music experience is fantastic, and I think they could give Spotify a serious run for their money. There is only one problem. As with many other streaming applications, you cannot use it from South Africa. Unless you follow these instructions, which I have (of course) neither tried or attempted to.
Get yourself a cloud server, or borrow one...
February 2012
3 posts
The Mac apps I couldn't live without
While I’ve been using a Mac for the past 2 years, just a couple of weeks ago I changed over to using one as my primary machine. The experience of using one as my main machine - for work and personal use - has been a slightly different one. For anyone making the change-over, I thought i’d put a bit of a list together of the apps that run my life.
Dropbox.
Evernote.
Skype.
iTunes.
...
4 tags
The Hacker Way - by Mark Zuckerberg
The Hacker Way
As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.
The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers....
“Holy shit! [any fact from Facebook’s S1 filing]”
January 2012
13 posts
rel=nofollow and how 'experts' are getting it... →
I suppose this acts as a bit of a followup to my post on Search+ yesterday, in which I defended Google in their move to include social context in search. In it, I stated that the reason Google+ features so prominently is because its what they are able to index. And yet, endless tech experts have gone after Google for not including links shared on Twitter. Luigi Montanez, quite rightly, calls them...
5 tags
In defense of Google. And, more importantly, the...
MG is pretty angry. And I understand why. Google’s Search+ (or “Search plus Your World”, apparently) seems to be a blatant attempt to push a product that would otherwise have very little traction, by leveraging an industry in which they have almost a monopoly; web search. The truth is, though, that the functionality is awesome. We all know very well that social context is the...
9 tags
Microsoft may not be very cool. But their products...
Microsoft just made a point of telling everyone at CES that they are still very much cool. In fact, you know you might be trying a bit too hard when you pay Ryan Seacrest to walk out onto the stage with your CEO. And they’ve already lost that battle. Microsoft will never be a “cool” company in the same way that Apple or Google is; a consequence of corporate culture and branding...
“Since rejoining the Company in 1997, Mr. Jobs had not sold any of his shares of...”
– Apple’s 2012 Proxy Statement
In a world where the likes of Steve Ballmer and many others routinely sell huge portions of their shares, Jobs kept all of his. $2,319,515,000 worth, as Dustin Curtis points out.
That’s dedication and loyalty. That’s putting your money where your mouth is.
(via...
The state of online video →
the penetration of online video is already about half of the overall TV-watching population.
The online video industry is at a strange crossroads right now. While penetration is at an all-time high, the time spent watching video is still at just 1.4% of that of traditional television. But the lines between the two are increasingly blurring. With television and cable internet access bundled in...
15 minutes with the iPhone 4S
So I’ve just got my iPhone 4S up-and-running, and I thought I’d put together some initial thoughts, having spent 15 minutes with Apple’s latest flagship phone.
The phone is as beautiful as ever. There’s no better than Apple when it comes to unboxing a product and being struck with quite how well-designed it is. I honestly think that the iPhone 4(S), despite lacking the...
Facebook Actions about to be launched →
This really is the next big move from Facebook, allowing for what is best described as ‘frictionless sharing’. Essentially, it will see actions taken all over the web being pushed back into Facebook (assuming you give Facebook permission, of course) for all your friends to see. The ‘shares’ appear in the Ticker, and summaries of actions taken by a user appear in their...
Sticking the Web Together →
So chuffed to see the news that IFTTT has raised a seed round of $1.5M from some top-notch investors, including Betaworks, SV Angel, Founder Collective, CrunchFund and David Tisch.
I was lucky enough to be pointed to the service by Womers some months ago, and have since been using it to automate a load of useful tasks, including archiving photos to Dropbox and sending liked articles on...
4 tags
Clay Shirky: Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users →
Clay Shirky has, once again, tackled the issues around the commercialization of the print media industry online; an industry that has been continuously erroded financially since the precedent for free online news was set in the early days of the Internet.
He points to a principle problem - that there is, as yet, no tried and tested revenue model. The traditional print business model allows...
Why am I moving to Tumblr?
I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. But finally - today - I decided to make the move over to Tumblr as my primary blog platform. While I’m far from 100% certain about this, there are a few motivations behind my decision:
It takes away the issue of worrying about servers. On two separate occassions, my self-hosted Wordpress install has been knocked over by far too much traffic...