On 24 March, Google UK & Ireland (of all places) launched a website for a magazine it has produced called Think Quarterly. According to the website, Think Quarterly is a magazine which Google distributes to some of its business partners in order to ‘communicate’. Why Google would want to do this is not clear to [...]
The following tweet flashed across my twitterstream yesterday: The HuffPost wants you to write for free. The NYTimes wants you to pay up to $455/year to read online news. There’s got to be a better way. I immediately tweeted back: The NYT wants you pay (between $195 and) $455 to read the NYT. You’re welcome [...]
After the discussion in a previous blog post, I tried to create an alternative to the current New York Times Opinion page that dealt with the issues I had. (The image was mocked up very quickly and I didn’t bother properly lining things up, so apologies there.) Linklines I’ve dispensed with the headlines as I [...]
I hate clutter. I’m typing this while writing in a room that looks like a bomb hit it so allow me to be more specific. I hate information clutter. Really hate isn’t the right word because it’s not like I get worked up about it.1 I mean hate in the sense of can’t stand it [...]
Mandy Brown has a great post that concisely describes the dilemma of advertising and reading on the web. The disruption of the reading experience by advertising is an issue I feel incredibly strongly about and one that has prompted me to adopt a variety of strategies, from avoiding particular web sites altogether to using tools [...]
So I like Twitter. It’s a source of links, small nuggets of wisdom and also a place where you can vent to the world about whatever’s got your goat without needing to write it up all good and proper so it won’t look out of place on your otherwise tidy blog. (I expend literally hours [...]
So I was talking to Mike at work and he mentioned a site he uses for writing called DarkCopy. DarkCopy is one of those distraction-free word processing applications that you can only describe as ‘minimal’. DarkCopy does nothing except display the letters you’re typing on a black background. There’s no font faces, no tables, no [...]
So I was thinking about advertising on social networks yesterday. As one does. Obviously there’s a lot of interest in this space at the moment, what with the astronomical figures that are thrown around whenever a Facebook buyout comes up in conversation. Most of these figures are connected to the ridiculously huge number of ‘eyeballs’ [...]
As long-time readers of this blog might be aware I have something of a love-hate relationship with coComment. I want to like it. I even want to use their Firefox extension. When they make that all but impossible to use I’ll even resort to using their bookmarklet which requires me to manually activate it on [...]
Over the past six months a growing amount of my life has moved online. My email is online, my to do lists, my photos, my bookmarks and even the songs I’m listening to as I write this are online. And as all this data has moved onto other people’s computers I’ve started to feel a twinge of [...]