The Lost Boys

"'This younger generation has a filter mechanism,' observes Jim Lentz, group VP of marketing at Toyota Motor Sales USA. Lentz has his own focus group at home: two sons, ages 17 and 21. 'They can be doing their homework, listening to music, watching TV, on the PC, and on the phone, all at the same time. It drives my wife crazy. You assume they're just screwing around - but they're not.' This ability to focus is governed by a complex neural network called the reticular activating system, which filters sensory input to keep the brain from being overwhelmed. When you grow up in an always-on world this system may adjust to cope. 'They have a total ability to block out anything they don't want to get through,' Lentz marvels. 'From an advertising standpoint, that's what makes this animal so scary.'"

Amazon Says No More To Anonymous Reviews

"However, Amazon has apparently had enough of authors reviewing their own books on the site and has put in a new system that will require a credit card as proof of identification before you can add a new review to the site. Might be interesting to see what kind of impact this has on reviews... and sales. "

Torrentocracy

"Torrentocracy (pronounced like the word democracy) is the combination of RSS, bit torrent, your television and your remote control. In effect, it is what gives any properly motivated person or entity the ability to have their own TV station. By running torrentocracy on a computer connected to your television, you not only become a viewer of any available content from the internet, but you also become a part of a vast grass roots media distribution network."

1 Million Free Songs for Download

"What's crazy, though, is that if you really don't want to bend any laws, there is a wealth of free music online -- and The Red Ferret Journal just set up a Wiki (a user-edited web page) to make it even easier. There are hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable songs on the websites listed (some of them are even not techno) and thousands more non-RIAA-backed labels selling songs, too -- so if you really want to fill up that iPod without 'stealing music,' you do have an option to do so."

Dinner With Bill Gates

"'I'm a technologist. My brain is wired to think about software and how it should work. It's kind of my one shot. I'm not a businessman and most times I don't even know what it means to be a businessman. If you've got this one thing you do that is your passion, that's really the only thing at which you have a shot of being world class.'"

How P2P Home Video will Challenge The Network News

"Blogs and TV mesh well because they are both so self-referential. Just as most blogging seems to be about blogging, most TV is about TV. TV is also a huge cut and paste engine that reuses the same material over and over -- just as blogs do "

All Ads, All the Time

"Yes, that's right, 24 hours a day of commercials, with no pesky programming to interrupt things. Of course, this would be just a crazy idea if some TV commercials weren't funny and entertaining. But commercials are getting better, because media trends are forcing them to: TiVo watchers who fast-forward past commercials; radio listeners who can now avoid ad-laden commercial radio by subscribing to satellite radio services or instead downloading music online and listening on their portable MP3 players. For broadcast advertising to avoid becoming irrelevant, it must become entertaining."

Newspaper Blogs and Making Money

"'The sales staff doesn't really understand blogs well enough to explain them, let alone sell them. Once we get the sales staff to understand the potential, we probably won't have any problems selling them. In fact, they seem to be selling themselves right now.' "

Search Engine Ad Space Is Running Out

"My point is this: I think that third-party sites offer at least as much, if not more, potential to advertisers and ad syndication services if that market was only handled smarter, with more input from the publishers regarding ad placement. That could vastly increase the amount of available ad space, and ease the pressure on search-engine ad space."

Supply shortage could drive up cost of clicks

"'Knowing demand is going to grow, it leads one to worry that we could be looking at an imbalance between supply and demand, which could lead to increases in price that would undermine the core return-on-investment argument of search advertising,' said Ken Cassar, strategic analysis director for Nielsen/NetRatings and author of the report."

Reputation systems academic paper

"The ultimate aim is to increase the level of collective wisdom through sharing our separate experience and expertise. This will enable a "division of experience" - instead of each of us personally suffering through scams, cheats, and mediocrity, we will be able to leverage each other's experiences. Collectively, aided by astutely networked reputation systems, we stand the best chance of overcoming our dark side and bringing out the best in us."

Messaging Tool Taps Social Nets

"If your friends and colleagues don't know the answer to a given question, they often know of a better person to ask. Several teams of researchers are looking to the fast, easy communication of the Internet in order to leverage these social networks."

Interesting Blogads survey of blog readers

"...As Henry Copeland, author of the report and CEO of Blogads, summed up: '86% say that blogs are either useful or extremely useful as sources of news or opinion. 80% say they read blogs for news they can't find elsewhere. 78% read because the perspective is better. 66% value the faster news. 61% say that blogs are more honest. Divided on so much else, blog readers appear united in their dissatisfaction with conventional media and their rabid love of blogs.'"

Brazilians outnumber Yanquis on Orkut 2-1

"(I'm reminded of a story that a product manager for Hotmail once told me -- 'Our growth curve was pretty steady, then one day someone sent an email to someone in India with 'Get a free email account at hotmail.com' in the footer and the next day we singed up half a million users')."

Open Source Journalism

"'The open source model offers us a new way to connect with readers, to better understand their worries and joys, and to enable them to share some of themselves with the world. It gives readers a personal and emotional stake in our products, and I believe that is critical to the future of our industry.'

The million monkeys at a million typewriters plugin

"I first got the idea when I was trying to think of ways to make Orkut or Friendster useful. If there was some API to those apps that let MT know if someone was a best friend or life partner-level connection, they could be granted temporary edit rights on my blog (maybe Flickr's API could let this work for people I designate as a friend and family member, which seems to be the closest form of relationship there). "

The Web Is a Job Machine

"Looking for a new job? You'll find yourself in good company. I just learned from the results of a recent survey that 85 percent of all employed Europeans already have visited a job board online. And about 29 percent of them are looking where they can work other than their current employer every day!"

Microsoft, Fiat team on car technology

"The companies said they will design telematics systems that let drivers access Web services and use a Bluetooth connection to tap into personal address books and contacts from a handset. They will also be able to listen to music stored in players via a USB connection in the dashboard. All of the systems will feature voice activation, the companies said."

Is The New York Times The Paper Of An Obsolete Record?

"Either way, it's a good point that the folks at the NY Times (and other newspapers) need to realize. Being online means being accessible. If you're not, then today's surfers aren't going to care. You may believe you can hang onto a small group and sell their demographic data to advertisers, but the data is dirty and the times are changing. People don't want to jump through hoops when there's a lot of other content out there, and if the command line of the internet is a search engine, these sites that block themselves off are simply making themselves obsolete. "

Blended

"The best websites (belonging to the best organizations) used to be designed by Razorfish or Organic or Scient. They were big and fancy and expensive and complex. Today, it's not surprising to find a successful business with a one-page site that cost $300 to build. Even more surprising are the sites filled with direct marketing copy that aren't scams... just effective tools to make sales."

Whose DVD? A Debate Over Copies

"Because a hammer can be used to break a window, and a burglar can use a hammer, outlaw the hammer, that's the philosophy," he said of Hollywood's position. "But historically we have never outlawed technology that was capable of legitimate use. If the technology has bad uses, then punish the people who use it wrongfully. Don't outlaw the technology."

Time For Newspapers To Embrace The Mobile Opportunity

"Most importantly, the report really seems to push the idea that the mobile world is different. Having newspapers move into the mobile world is about much more than a new delivery channel for the news. It makes the news process more of a two way street. It lets readers communicate back to the news organizations, it allows for customization (based on users, locations, and plenty of other variables) and it even gives advertisers a more targeted audience. Finally, it can cut down on distribution and workflow costs."

Patently unfair

"The solution, to which Amazon now holds the exclusive right in Europe for the next 20 years, is for Amazon to send the recipient an email asking for their address. That's it. The patent is not for the code, the look and feel of the site, or the work needed to integrate Amazon's databases and email servers, all of which are automatically covered by copyright. Rather, it covers the idea, the abstract solution to the problem of not knowing someone's address when you've been commissioned to send them something. They have the exclusive right to send an email to the recipient to ask them, and anyone wanting to build a system to do that must pay Amazon for the privilege. "

Jumping From Computer To Computer

"According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, this is the goal of Intel Research Pittsburgh's Internet Suspend/Resume (ISR) project, a project that may one day let your work jump from computer to computer without interruption by using the Internet, distributed file systems, and virtual machines. When the non-proprietary technology becomes available, a user will suspend a task on the computer he's working on, and resume this work using another computer in another part of a city or several thousands of miles away. The second system will look identical to the first one, with the same files and applications opened. This technology would also ease OS upgrades or eliminate the pain coming from a hard disk failure. The project has even a feature named Rollback which would permit to go back in time, eliminating these pesky viruses."

Building a Better Mozilla

"After installation, BugMeNot supplies an appropriate name and password from a database that seems to include registration info for the vast majority of websites that request registration. The BugMeNot developers note that most people enter false information on registration forms to protect their privacy, so BugMeNot actually cuts down on database pollution. The only problem is that The New York Times may wonder what happened to all those 86-year-old Albanian grandmothers who head up huge technology firms that used to sign up to read the NYT website. "

Technorati tracks 3M blogs!

"Of course, not all weblogs that are created are actively updated. Even though abandonment rates are high - our analyses show that about 45% of the weblogs we track have not had a post in over 3 months we are still tracking a significant population of people who are posting each day. The number of conversations are increasing. We're seeing over 275,000 individual posts every day. That means that on average, more than 3 blogs are updated every second."

Cracking the Code to Romance

"If a hottie fires up her AOL Instant Messenger client, Burton sees her login name and can send her an IM. 'I've gotten several first dates that way,' he says. 'Women think it's cute when I can make a message pop on their machine as if by magic. Now that so many women are online, it's our chance as geeks to start getting more dates.'"

The problem with search engine optimization

"SEOs are not a shortcut to success, at least not for 99% of the companies out there. You won't win by fooling Google into listing you first for a common search term. You will win once you figure out the simple mechanics of turning strangers into friends and friends into customers."

The problem with search engine optimization

"SEOs are not a shortcut to success, at least not for 99% of the companies out there. You won't win by fooling Google into listing you first for a common search term. You will win once you figure out the simple mechanics of turning strangers into friends and friends into customers."

The problem with search engine optimization

"SEOs are not a shortcut to success, at least not for 99% of the companies out there. You won't win by fooling Google into listing you first for a common search term. You will win once you figure out the simple mechanics of turning strangers into friends and friends into customers."

Newspapers Beware: Local Search Services Are Rolling Out

"Could local search be as much of a threat to newspapers -- and in some advertising categories, local TV -- as online classified services have been? I think it's certainly possible. Leaving out classifieds, a newspaper's business model revolves around connecting local buyers to local merchants."

The Technology of Personalized Pitches

"The second round of CRM and marketing-tech, though, is enjoying a much greater rate of success for a number of reasons. For starters, companies have downsized their ambitions. "What's totally different now is they purchase with a discreet goal in mind," says Mary Wardley, vice-president for enterprise-software research at tech consultancy IDC Corp. While earlier versions of these systems were mostly reserved for big companies, many of the latest offerings can be bought on a per-seat basis for a few thousand dollars a year or less."

The Open Source Paradigm Shift

"In short, if it is sufficiently robust an innovation to qualify as a new paradigm, the open source story is far from over, and its lessons far from completely understood. Rather than thinking of open source only as a set of software licenses and associated software development practices, we do better to think of it as a field of scientific and economic inquiry, one with many historical precedents, and part of a broader social and economic story. We must understand the impact of such factors as standards and their effect on commoditization, system architecture and network effects, and the development practices associated with software as a service. We must study these factors when they appear in proprietary software as well as when they appear in traditional open source projects."

MMO Sex please we're Avatars

"Sociolotron is rather different, it is a full on role play game with combat, crafting, points systems, oh and sex, lots of sex, especially BDSM with options for rape and consequences such as disease, death and pregnancy. It also has a strong political side with like the choice of democracy or tyranny being part of the game."

Computers Chase the Checkered Flag

"Technology, of course, is reshaping the preparation and tactics for many sports. But in Formula One racing, it is at the center of the sport, a test of the ability to perfect the synergy between man and machine. And the result has been to create a cyborg - a blend of man and machine in every sense of the word."

Giving It Away (for Fun and Profit)

"But what's really interesting is that as more and more artists use Creative Commons to tell the world that it's OK to copy, distribute, and build on their work, the first glimpses emerge of an economy based on the free exchange of digital content."