Category Archives: Media & Resources

Robert Scoble vs Facebook (or Freedom of Information vs. Commercial Silo-ing)

Posted on by
2

The Robert Scoble vs. Facebook saga is me thinks a taste of some of what is to come in the year and even years ahead. Its the old silo-race rearing its ugly little head again. Basically Facebook is saying you’re allowed to use ‘your’ accounts information as long as you do so manually, thus their de-activation of Mr Scoble’s account after he used a bit of software to scrape his friends’ contact details. In the end they own the data and are a little bit jealous of it and there is the matter of the Facebook Terms and Conditions.

(The irony is that there are a few useful little odds and ends floating around that can do a whole lot more than get names and email addies from facebook, the last one I gave a test-drive did all of that plus mine out images and other media and went way beyond mining just facebook :-) the hard part is actually figuring out something useful and worth-the-effort to do with such data)

So of course there is a group to go join – Continue reading →

kiss online radio goodbye, courtesy the Royalty Rates Crisis

Posted on by
Reply

Pandora, that piece of Internet magic that you can could ‘train’ to feed you new music is allready no-longer available in South Africa. They’ve also had to cut their streaming to Canada. I see you can still log into Pandora Backstage to browse and research artists and albums, but… it is terribly mute.

Dunno if you noticed the comment by Tim Westergren – the founder of Pandora – on my previous post on this topic. (Sadest ego boost I’ve experienced in a long time). It’s hectic.

Continue reading →

Some Ends and Odds of SEO

Posted on by
1

SEO Grand PrixITWEB’s new publication ByteSize, inaugural edition (March 2007) features a nice short and sweet introduction to SEO on page 98, geared like the rest of the publications smartly at the SME context. It closes with a url for a Forrester report based on interviews with 20 companies, including Avenue A | Razorfish.

(ByteSize is a pretty decent piece of work, love the cover which is one of the most successful uses of spot varnishing I’ve seen in a while. It features a goldfish leaping out of its bowl, lime green title-typography on a rich blue background. Excellent job, even with the typo in the article on IPV6 on page 146 :-))

One look at that Forester report will make most mere mortals mouth that mystical magic word involuntarily – ‘OUTSOURCE…’, Continue reading →

Awards are flawed. (Updated)

Posted on by
1

Do they reflect quality or popularity, neither or both?

The truth about awards is that they, like all other forms of competition, are expressions of the dynamics of power, of the politics and principles of the environments they inhabit. They are often about a quick buck, profanely biased and resemble nothing more than the average microbial parasite. They usually reward those that need their glory the least.

That said I believe they have their place in our cultural and industrial constructs. They can facilitate a bit of magic that might otherwise be all but consumed by the hum-drum required to produce the stuff they celebrate. On occasion they can do amazing things for new-comers to any field, remarkably sometimes even for deserving newcomers.

But let’s not forget that they are dinosaurs. Continue reading →

Contempo about design, art and society

Posted on by
Reply

Contempo arts culture design magazineContempo, (nice site styling, but all flash is a bit last century in internet years, especially for a purveyor of things contemporary) the new and refreshingly convergent publication presenting homegrown creative style and cultural sophistication is posing an open question around the relationship of art and design. Imposing a 200 word limit is me thinks a good thing. So my unedited initial response to the question goes:

Isn’t design and art simply sides of the same coin. Is there really any interesting or important Continue reading →