“[ iPhones and Blackberrys] are built to take you away from where you are and put you somewhere else.” – Dave Slusher. “Cyberspace is the ‘place’ where a telephone conversation appears to occur” – Bruce Sterling, Introduction to The Hacker Crackdown
Monthly Archives: August 2009
Culld.Us – URL Shortening Reimagined
We don’t shorten URLs just to shorten them. We shorten them for the same reason big box retailers sell flat-pack furniture – greater confidence during transport. With that in mind, I’ve completely rebuilt Cullect’s URL Shortener1 – http://culld.us It’s still custom brand-able. In a way I’m much happier with than in the previous version – …
A CraigsList Re-Design Challenge
Many in the web design community re-designing CraigsList.org since it launched [1, 2]. Each one of these efforts feels like missing the part that makes CraigsList special to me – it’s the simplest thing that could possibly work. Anything more – while perhaps adding value – absolutely adds overhead. If only in the number of …
Rails Cookie Settings for Cross-Subdomain Sessions
For the past day, I’ve been tracking down a hair-pulling-ly frustrating bug in Rails ( with Authlogic on Passenger). My sessions weren’t sticking in production Cross-domain or otherwise (doubly frustrating because a) Authlogic has been so rock solid for me otherwise, b) worked as expected in development). Turns out, I wasn’t setting the session domain …
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Countdown to Dow 10k
Yesterday, I was asked if I’m still holding my Dow 10k by Labor Day prediction – considering it now means at least a 60 point gain for the next 11 trading days. Yes, for 2 reasons. First, my original prediction factored in a 75-point daily shift. Second, Conference Board’s Aug 20 Leading Economic Indicator report …
Kernest as an MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
“We Make Shitty Software… With Bugs!…We know our software sucks. But it’s shipping! Next time we’ll do better, but even then it will be shitty. The only software that’s perfect is one you’re dreaming about. ” – Dave Winer Kernest, my web fonts service, has been publicly available for just under a month. In that …
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Dow 10K By Labor Day
Over on the Twitter I’ve been predicting the Dow will hit 10K by Labor Day, with the deadline approaching, I thought I’d show you where my prediction comes from. The light blue is the DJIA from August 2008 – March 2009 (left to right). The dark blue is March 2009 – Today (right to left). …
Talking Short URLs with Zack from Nieman Lab
Zack Seward from Harvard’s Neiman Journalism Lab and I talked about URL shorteners yesterday – and the responsibility of publishers to shorten themselves… “The really, really big benefit in that case is that it’s no longer a redirect…” …and the additional opportunity for a focused, curated, short URL service…. “he raised an idea that’s been …
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Shortly Over
“No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.” I appreciate tr.im’s honesty. From what I understand, tr.im’s business model was similar to bit.ly’s and – what increasingly feels like – Twitter’s business model: aggregate and sell statistics on how information is being shared on real-time basis. Measuring word-of-mouse if you …
The Rise of the Overextended Class
” I delegate, work all the time, hardly sleep, totally ignore politics, sports and pop culture, neglect my family too much and probably don’t do any of my jobs as well as I could. But these are exciting days, and if ever these was a time to be overextended this is it.” – Chris Anderson, …