Web & Technology

iOS9: Ads, Content-Blockers, and the Mobile Web Economy

That sound you hear is the collective woof of expelled air as tens of thousands of Internet advertisers and publishers took a hard punch to the solar plexus. Game on.

Your Careers Site Sucks (Somebody had to tell you.)

If your company is to flourish and grow you need to be able to recruit great talent. How are you going to do that with a careers site that turns off your candidates?

Honor Relics, Embrace Change

I’m now in my 20th year of being a career Internet technologist. And, in the spirit of embracing change, I’m available for hire.

Is Reddit, the Internet’s Biggest Ball of Twine, Beginning to Unravel?

Last week Reddit went dark as mods reacted to the dismissal of a popular admin and a key conduit between mods and Reddit staffers.

You’re Never Too Young for a Sonic Screwdriver

Makers don’t only dream, they also learn, discover, invent, fabricate, and — often with great enthusiasm — share not only what they’ve built but what they’ve learned along the way.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Twitter

Don’t look now but Twitter is having a crisis, struggling to discover its identity. Welcome, Twitter, to Middle School, where you’re not the coolest kid in homeroom anymore.

A Final Twenty-four Hours of Public Comment on Net Neutrality

Your cable company, your phone company and your wireless phone company are arguing that Net Neutrality provisions would impact their investment in new broadband capacity (and investment in their companies on Wall Street, and presumably the American way of life). This argument is false on its face. More, it gets the cause and the effect reversed: it’s not service providers that create the impetus or demand for increased speed or capacity, but innovative new applications that do.

Will Your Next Wearable Come from Google, Apple, or a Middle Schooler?

In 1990 I bought a Nintendo Power Glove. I wasn’t exactly Mattel’s target demographic: I was twenty-four years old, and I didn’t have a Nintendo game system. I bought the glove for one reason alone: to hack it, hook it up to a personal computer and control the machine by gesture, alone.

A Contagion of Negativity: Why Facebook Made Us Sad

So it turns out that, yes, we are impacted emotionally by the streams of social information we consume. Happy stories make us happy. Sad stories? Spoiler alert: they make us sad. But it’s Facebook’s manipulation of our news feeds that makes us very angry, indeed.

It’s a Consumer Appliance. It’s a Digital Media Consumption Device. Oh, and it takes calls.

Jeff Bezos this week trumpeted Amazon’s Fire Phone, an all-new smartphone-cum-shopping-appliance species with a fork of Android OS at its core and cameras perched on most every available conceivable surface, most of which unblinkingly observe the user. (Selfie fans take note.)

What’s That in Your Shopping Cart, Marissa Mayer?

I was hoping nobody would win PowerBall this week so I could take the $1.2B I was planning to win next week and buy Tumblr, but Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer beat me to it.

Just What Do You Do With A Gigabit Of Bandwidth, Anyway? Paradoxically, You Wait.

So, just what do you do with a gigabit of bandwidth, anyway? Slate technology columnist Farhad Manjoo recently traveled to Kansas City, home of Google’s über-fast fiber optic Internet service — Google Fiber — to get a first hand look.

Et Tu, Best Buy? Why Are Captains Of Technology Scuttling Their Own Ships?

There’ve been interesting developments since Chief Yahoo Marissa Mayer put the kabosh on work-at-homers in late February. Did I say interesting? I meant disturbing.

“Sprinkling the Internet on a bad business model does not magically make it a good business model. It merely means that the people who are pursuing a bad business model are hoping you are credulous enough to believe that being electronic is space-age zoomy and awesome and there is no possible way this brilliant business plan could ever fail. Or even worse, that they believe that being electronic means all these things, which means they are credulous. Which is not a very good thing to have as the basis of one’s business model.”

— John Scalzi

Just a Sprinkle of Internet…

John Scalzi on e-publishing imprints bamboozling a new crop of fresh-faced and too-trusting authors.

Time Warner CFO’s Gigabit Remarks Not Short-Sighted, But Protectionist; Still Dumb

While the remarks of the leaders of IBM, Digital, and Microsoft may have resulted from a lack of vision, or of imagination, or just fundamentally misunderestimating the aspirations of their consumers, the same cannot be said of Time Warner.

We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. Now we have Wikipedia. Suddenly big things can be done for love.