While catching up on my feeds between diaper changes, I caught the news that NewsGator dropping the price of their client apps to $0. According to the announcement, it’s a ubiquity play. Be everywhere, while focusing revenue-generation efforts on the server side by incorporating (and selling?) “attention” or activity data1. Congrats to them to be …
Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
Cullect.com – Read, Write, and Get Out of the Way
Last night, I pulled the ‘secret knock’ off cullect.com. To me, that means it’s stable and reliable enough to use as a primary feed reader and I know a few people that have left their previous reader. “Cullect is one application that gets out of my way and lets me do what I came do, …
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Introducing Baby Waverly
Waverly, my new baby girl, was born in the wee hours of the morning on Dec 30. Everyone was home in time to ring in the new year. Couldn’t ask for more. Oh, the reason her eyes are closed in the photo: when open her eyes emit a light as blinding and entrancing as the …
RE: Starbucks Might Be Helping, Not Hurting, Independent Coffee Shops
“‘Anyone who complains about having a Starbucks put in next to you is crazy. You want to welcome the manager, give them flowers. It should be the best news that any local coffeehouse ever had.’” – Martin Diedrich, coffeehouse owner in Orange County, CA. Competition increases demand and you can succeed by outsourcing your marketing …
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The War That Wasn’t
In addition to the the BBC’s editorial policy promoting using terms more accurate and less loaded than ‘terrorist’ the UK government has declare the “War on Terror” non-existant.1 “‘The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers,’ Sir Ken Macdonald, Director of …
Drive Vague
There’s something appealing about removing complexity – and the costs to maintain that complexity – to more effectively improve the behavior of a complex system. “The assumption is that drivers are accustomed to owning the road and rarely pay attention to speed limits or caution signs anyway. Removing traffic lights and erasing lane markers, the …
Looking Up
“…the number of people in households that bring in more than $100,000 also rose from 12 percent to 24 percent. There was no increase in the percentage of people in households making less than $30,000. So the entire ‘decline’ of the middle class came from people moving up the income ladder. For married couples, median …
Sharing is Caring
Like yourself, I travel in a number of personal and professional circles; dad’s open gym night, neighbors, this project team, that project team, peers via podcasting, peers through information architecture, peers through visual design, etc. Each circle has different values and finds different things relevant. The chances of something I find interesting being relevant to …
A Christmas to Remember
I just finished shoveling the last couple inches of the light, fluffly snow that’s been steadily falling this past week. A perfect end to the best Christmas I’ve had in two decades. Some highlights: Having my immediate family all in the same room at the same time on Christmas day. This in itself made the …
Ask Not What Twitter Can Do For You
After playing around with Twitter for nearly a year, I’ve come to an understanding with it. The less Twitter does, the better. In reviewing Jeremiah Owyang’s Twitter Wish List, I only agree with #2, a white-labeled Twitter for workgroup/company use. If Twitter doesn’t want that market, that’s cool. I know of at least 1 company …