Modern day troubadour Jonathan Coulton is the latest cult-of-personality on Ze Frank‘s GimmeSomeCandy micropayment platform. In related news – Amanda Congdon announced new projects with ABC News and HBO. Duckies, robots, and bananas for everyone!
Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
Blogging as Image Control
“Leonsis is what you might call a defensive blogger. His main goal isn’t to enter into a ‘conversation’ with the AOL ‘community,’ but just to gain more control over the results that show up when people google him.” – Nick Carr If you have blog and it isn’t the first thing that comes up in …
Computers and Cars: Differences and Similarities
Driving around this weekend with the family and the dome light in the car wouldn’t turn off. An irritation for sure, but not as serious an issue as the speedometer, tachometer, or odometer not functioning at all. Freaky. Scouring through the owners manual while still on the road, we came up with nothing. Not even …
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Studying Buggywhips
“‘Go forth and make media,’ I told the group. ‘You want to be a journalist, be one! There’s no badge that makes you one, no degree, no license (thank God and the founding fathers), no credentials and no special anointing from the New York Times. So just do it.’ This again drew a few moans …
The 5 Needs of Internet Tools
“So why did YouTube catch on? Simple — free storage.” – Dave Winer Exactly. In YouTube’s case, I’d also throw in format conversion. Converting video into a format that is small and viewable by anyone with a Flash player is a opaque and geeky process. The reason they clicked – they did the conversion and …
Building Communities is Building Commerce
Lots of conversations this weeks about building online communities: forums, weblog networks, mailing list, what have you. All with organizations having a vested, commercial interest in growing a community. While they expressed skepticism about a community gathering around their commercial interest, I wasn’t concerned. It’s already happening.A group of people somewhere are already talking about …
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A Per Post Ad Experiment – Now Taking Your Money
Via my WP-GotLucky plugin, I’ve been tracking the volume to a handful of real popular posts (really, there are some?) here at garrickvanburen.com just check out the ‘Most Popular Posts’ section to see the 10 mostest popularist. Inspired by Ze Frank’s gimmesomecandy-ducky experiment, I’m now taking money for 50 character messages on each and every …
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Europe v. US: Taxes v. GDP
We’ve got a European vacation in the works and by coincidence, the Marginal Revolution has a nice U.S. vs. Europe comparison thread running. “Further, a recent study has shown that Germans and Americans spend the same amount of time working, but the proportion of taxable market time vs. nontaxable home work time is different. In …
One Hell of a Bad Day
“The 9/11 reaction that sent us into Iraq was based on our need to kick the dog after a bad day at the office. The war never made any sense and the new Secretary of Defense always knew it. – brittb”
Mom’s Courtesy Smile
The last few weeks have been a roller coaster of family emotions and get-togethers – from the passing of Grandma Hannah to Cooper’s first birthday. Add to that, all the family photos and stories and trees (back to 1751) my dad sent down. So, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about yesterday, and those places …