Links for 2007-02-14
February 14th, 2007-
(New Scientist)
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LOL funny video
Links for 2007-02-13
February 13th, 2007Links for 2007-02-12
February 12th, 2007-
WSJ article about social bookmarking sites and recommender sites (Reddit, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us)
Links for 2007-02-08
February 8th, 2007-
recipe for awesome pecan pie (I love my existing recipe, but wow, this was good)
Links for 2007-02-07
February 7th, 2007-
ETS report on the need to increase learning levels, increase reading and math skills and narrow the existing achievement gaps
Links for 2007-02-06
February 6th, 2007-
Make your own creations
Links for 2007-02-05
February 5th, 2007-
tool for figuring out BMI and heart concerns
Superbowl dance
February 4th, 2007Not interested in football, but still want to get into the Superbowl spirit? Check out Jeremy’s “The Boy Detective” dance choreographed for the occasion. Try at your own risk.
Requisite addendum from a Chicagolander: Go Bears!
Links for 2007-02-04
February 4th, 2007-
location tracker
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Dan Savage to Mary Chaney
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“Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names”
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funny cartoon about satisfying the boss’s nutty requests
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html codes with example codes and previews
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“contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics” – the page has interesting visual representations of various figures (hard to explain, check it out for yourself)
Links for 2007-02-02
February 2nd, 2007-
Web stats tool
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wide-spread teen rape
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Scientific American article considers some scientific evidence on the topic (including people’s tendency to lie in their profiles)
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– hard to describe it, best if you check it out (move the circles to move the particles)
Links for 2007-02-01
February 1st, 2007-
online flash cards
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quick whois lookup (do you think they register the ones that get looked up a lot?)
Links for 2007-01-31
January 31st, 2007-
tool to follow the price of products you’ve bought from 30-day-price-protection-guarantee retailers
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“The world’s largest online marketplace for freelance talent.”
Links for 2007-01-30
January 30th, 2007-
the art of photo retouching, yikes
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print it out and carry it with you
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a list of lesser-known search engines
Tech Talk at Google tomorrow
January 29th, 2007I will be presenting in the TechTalk series at Google tomorrow.
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Google TechTalks are designed to disseminate a wide spectrum of views on topics including Current Affairs, Science, Medicine, Engineering, Business, Humanities, Law, Entertainment, and the Arts.
Interesting list, where do I fit in?
The title of my talk is “Beyond Gigs of Log Data: The Social Aspects of Internet Use”. I will be talking about the importance of social science research in gaining a better understanding of how and why people use digital media. That is, while companies like Google may have unbelievable amounts of information about users based on their online actions, I argue that there are other factors difficult to capture in logs that are also important to understanding how and why people use various online services the way that they do.
From Google’s perspective, I think one puzzle concerns the following. Despite being a media darling and getting a ton of positive press coverage over the years, other than search and ads, the company hasn’t gained significant market share in any realm. Even in search, how is it that they are only used by about half of all searchers with the kind of attention they get? (I actually have answers to this, my point here is that some people don’t seem to take a sufficiently nuanced approach to how the company’s products are doing.) And of course, search and ads are very important areas, but if they thought that was enough, they wouldn’t be expanding to other realms. They are, however, but not very successfully.
Google Maps* and GMail** may be great products – I’ll be the first to admit it -, but again, the company’s market share is small compared to some of their big competitors. Sure, they are relatively recent entrants, but is there any evidence of significant diffusion to new users? Of course, if we really want to hit the bottom of the barrel, we can look at Google Checkout or the now defunct Google Answers.
My point is that simply having automated data about your own users’ actions isn’t going to tell you that much about why others are not your users, and why users of some of your services aren’t embracing others of your products. Hopefully Google understands this and works with people in this realm. I know for sure that they do some interesting work in user experience. But a bit more attention in this area than is apparent may be valuable.
* Based on some data I collected last year about a diverse group of college students’ Internet uses (N=1,336): Mapquest: 85% use it sometimes or often; Google Maps: 39% use it sometimes or often (an additional 33% have tried it, but don’t use it); Yahoo! Maps: 34% use it sometimes or often. This population is much more wired (more time online to explore things) than the general user population so figures here are likely to be higher than what one would find with a more representative sample.
** Based on some data I collected last year about a diverse group of college students’ Internet uses (N=1,336): Yahoo! Mail: 54%; Hotmail: 31%; AOL Mail: 19%; GMail: 12%. This population is much more wired (more time online to explore things) than the general user population so figures here are likely to be higher than what one would find with a more representative sample.
Links for 2007-01-29
January 29th, 2007-
“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
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why radio is still the most reliable way to broadcast emergency information.. assuming there are locals at the stations to get the message out
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tool for uploading photos to Flickr
Links for 2007-01-28
January 28th, 2007-
Virginia Postrel writes a nice review of Kieran’s great book
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interesting story
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whether true or not, some of these are definitely amusing
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took a couple of tries to get the point, but then it got fun
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dodge the cubes
Links for 2007-01-27
January 27th, 2007-
Middlebury History Dept profs ban students from citing Wikipedia in their papers (they can, however, use it as a source to find relevant references)
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search for music with your voice – interesting idea, but I cannot get it to work for me
Random thought: never send email to “all your contacts”
January 26th, 2007I just received an announcement of an event from someone whose name I didn’t recognize. I use special email addresses for special occasions so I can often tell where someone got my address. In this case, the person was emailing me using the address I had used to hire someone last Fall. I then did a search on her name and confirmed that the only time we’d been in touch was regarding the job application process.
It is never a good idea to send an email to everybody in your contact list no matter the email. This would be one example why. There are people on that list whom you don’t actually know. Just because you exchanged one email with someone months (if not years) ago does not mean that you are now buddies and should be exchanging messages.
Needless to say, the incredibly poor judgement to use cc instead of bcc in such a case is just the icing on the cake (or would that be the.. well, I’ll refrain from offering alternatives, you can use your imagination…).
Links for 2007-01-26
January 26th, 2007-
ouch
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artistan chese, bread & wine in Chicago
Links for 2007-01-24
January 24th, 2007-
I’m linking to this, because parodying the media’s hype about it is funny; parodying the site itself for “second life” being lame isn’t funny, but that’s not what I took away from it
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playing with colors