Three companies unveiling Eee clones Acer, MSI and Asus are following up on the Eee’s success (yes, Asus is one-upping itself). Intel’s Atom to be the basis of many devices.
PC users fooled by progress bars Show people a fake indicator that doesn’t correlate to the actual progress of a task, and they’ll rely on it, because it’s all they have.
To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You Why Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo, and why Google is declining. Google’s ads catch the underpaid overclicker, and Yahoo’s ads capture demographic information and allow targetted responses. In short, Google may have always been hype in the ad biz.
The information transmitted might include the person’s ZIP code, a search for anything from vacation information to celebrity gossip, or a purchase of prescription drugs or other intimate items. Some types of data, like search queries, tends to be more valuable than others.
Yahoo came out with the most data collection points in a month on its own sites — about 110 billion collections, or 811 for the average user. In addition, Yahoo has about 1,700 other opportunities to collect data about the average person on partner sites like eBay, where Yahoo sells the ads.
How Microsoft Is Fighting a War on Three Fronts Insightful analysis into which groups Microsoft is trying to lure into its fold: consumers, developers and enterprise managers. I think “fronts” would better describe SaaS, advertising, consumer/SOHO desktop real estate, and interop development, but these audiences are also part of the picture.
Owning a Cat Cuts Heart Attack Risk by One Third Amazing how it is that learning to love something and make it happy makes you think outside of your self alone, and so you see some beauty in life, and are less likely to self-destruct.
The Internet Should be Communitarian Borrowing a piece of logic from Aristotle, expert Jonathan Zittrain argues that the net must be retaken from the masses, the governments, and corporations, and returned to the small, expert-driven communities that allowed it to thrive in the first place.
JZ’s taxonomy of organisational forms.
Polyarchical/top-down
is where the market lives. Polyarchical in that competition means that there are many ways of achieving almost identical ends. Top-Down in that the control structure within the firm is pretty centrally directed …it is also the space of federalism, where may equal units of government, each of them moderately centralised, come together to coordinate joint problems.
Hierarchical Top-Down
Is the space of most our politics–representative democracies establish a single structure of control, with, in reality, little choice between them
Polyarchical//Bottom-up
is where the techno-libertarians and anarchists live: each individual–or at most small ad hoc groups–pursues projects and purposes frequently exercising the right (and real option) to secede and fragment. Pirates, and some parts of FOSS live these lives.
Hierarchical/Bottom-up
is the home of the communitarians. Communities coalesce around projects–like Wikipedia–and follow strict rules that establish hierarchies and distinctions amongst participants. The difference between the top-down and the bottom-up hierarchies is that the top-down ones make a claim to the total organisation of affairs. The bottom-up hierarchies emerge as ad hoc, purposive, but not totalizing. Wikipedia is only an encyclopedia, not a way of life …The Hierarchical/Bottom-up is often monopolistic–there is just one Wikipedia–and often competes with all the other quadrants. Wikipedia runs up against Britannica, it poaches energy from the cyber-anarchists who might become contributors and it provides the sense of meaning and belonging–or a part of it–that is the most powerful offering of the top-down hierarchies.
There Is No Such Thing as Intuitive Technology One of the more important essays on interface design to come out recently.
Revenge of the Experts “The individual user has been king on the Internet, but the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals.” About time: another wisdom of crowds site populated by badly rephrased plagiarized information mixed with pop culture memes and I’ll vomit
No shortage of IT and science workers“‘No one who has come to the question with an open mind has been able to find any objective data suggesting general ’shortages’ of scientists and engineers,’ said Dr. Michael Teitelbaum, vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, in testimony to Congress last fall.” They’re there, but they’re more expensive than imports.
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