Android and the 22 Immutable Laws : Scott Sykora: When people talk about Andoid’s fragmentation problem they’re usually thinking of issues developers face. The much bigger issue is Android’s and its many sub-brand’s marketing fragmentation. Most people don’t read gadget blogs and don’t care about clock speeds. They want a simple choice of Coke vs Pepsi when they’re thinking about a new phone. Android vs iPhone is not Coke vs Pepsi… Read the rest here
For Sale: Pile of Trash Lawnmower : Let’s kick off the weekend with a chuckle. Actual classified ad for a Craftsman 21” 5.5hp Mower: This lawnmower is no ordinary lawnmower. No. I had hoped to buy an ordinary lawnmower, but instead got this pile of trash…. This lawnmower has actually achieved Sainthood, when in 2002 it mowed a twenty foot strip of lawn without having the bag chute get clogged! This miracle, though it has never happened again, was witnessed by a 12 year old boy. I bet those of us mowing lawns have all had the pleasure of using a fine machine such as this at one point or another… Read the rest here
IE and HTML5 Testing, or “Apple’s Hilariously Disingenous ‘HTML5’ Showcase” : Bruce Lawson, Opera employee and member of The Web Standards Project : In the 18 months I’ve really focussed on HTML5, I’ve seen approximately 238 different HTML5 ‘testing’ sites appear. Most of them wildly pick and mix specs, checking for HTML5, related WHATWG-derived specifications such as Web Workers and then, drunk and giddy with buzzwords, throw in SVG, CORS, CSS Media Queries, and some Apple proprietary CSS extension before hyperventilating and going to bed for a lie down. He goes on to mention Apple’s HTML5 Showcase in support of his argument, while commending IE9’s HTML5 tests: Therefore, it’s particularly refreshing to see the new Microsoft IE9 HTML5 Testing Centre bringing some sanity to the party. None of the scope-creep for our friends in Microsoft. … Read the rest here
Yesterday’s post was decidedly about companies vying for talented individuals. What about individuals vying for work opportunities? Check out this job hunt success story , as Gizmodo explains it: Alec Brownstein wanted a job in advertising, so he made pages that showed up as the first result when several big New York creative directors Googled themselves. He got interviews with nearly all of them. Yeah, it’s pretty brilliant. Bryan Veloso , a “guy who doesn’t do much client work anymore, but is willing to,” admits spending money before the check even arrives… Read the rest here
We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint : There are so many quotable lines in this New York Times story I could very well copy and paste the entire thing here. Instead, a few gems, beginning with this one: ‘PowerPoint makes us stupid,’ Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. … Read the rest here
Library of Congress to House Your Tweets : Kent German, writing for CNET’s Crave Gadget Blog: The Library of Congress announced today —via Twitter, no less—that is acquiring the Twitter’s entire archive through donation…. Though the whole idea may sound bizarre, the Library already holds more than 167 terabytes of Web-based information, including legal blogs and Web sites for political candidates and current lawmakers. We all best write a little more carefully, I suppose. … Read the rest here
The malware attack(s) that my site suffered in recent weeks put into motion a series of changes which have been planned for some time now—some for a few months, some for a couple years. What follows is a detailed explanation of the changes. New Design Over Christmas Break in 2007, I started two redesigns: One for Authentic Jobs and another for this site. The premise for this realign encompassed a concept that wasn’t original, but one that I felt better suited my style of blogging. You see, I’ve always enjoyed posting links as much as I’ve enjoyed posting articles. … Read the rest here
The past These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy…in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. … Read the rest here
Hanlon’s razor entreats us to: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. While Clarke’s third law states that: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Mash them up and that leaves us with Clark’s law : Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. I have experienced a textbook case of extremely advanced incompetence. When I wrote about the shenanigans of Perfect Pitch , in which a DMCA claim was used to remove a perfectly innocuous discussion on The Session from Google’s search index, I pondered about whether malice could be ascribed: Could it be that the owner of perfectpitch.com sent a DMCA complaint to Google simply because another site was getting higher rankings for the phrase “perfect pitch”… Read the rest here
We were having a chat in the Clearleft office today about site stats and their relative uselessness; numbers about bounce rates are like eyetracking data—without knowing the context, they’re not going to tell you anything. Anyway, I was reminded that I have an account over at Google Webmaster Tools set up for three of my sites: adactio.com , huffduffer.com and thesession.org . I logged in today for the first time in ages and started poking around. I noticed that I had some unread messages. Who knew that Google Webmaster Tools has a messaging system… Read the rest here
Talk of South by Southwest seems to come around quicker each year. I’m already looking forward to heading back to Austin, not least of all because I may get the chance to be on a couple of great panels (please cast a thumbs up if you like the sound of the panels). First up is Is Your Website Heading for a Car-Wreck? with Alan Colville , Jon Tan and Giles Colborne . … Read the rest here
A compilation of resources, products, and inspiration spotted before, after, but not during knee surgery. Los Angeles Times gets a makeover A rather nice overhaul of the latimes.com site. (Here’s what it looked like in February 2008 .) Oliver Kavanagh A rather audacious, springboard-style home page that leaves me wanting to try something similar. DIY ring light with LEDs …and other DIY camera mods using LEDs. The 6 brand naming styles Josh Levine: The 6 naming styles add context so you can see the full landscape of choices… Read the rest here
A few weeks ago I received the following remarks from Jeff Lin, an Authentic Jobs customer and founder of Bust Out Solutions : Just wanted to let you know that I posted a job probably two years ago for a designer, got several responses, and ultimately found one guy who I tried to hire. It didn’t work out at the time, but we kept in touch, and I finally hired him a few months ago. It’s worked out great, and we recently launched Best Buy Idea X . I’m happy with the design, and in part thanks to Authentic Jobs for helping me find great talent! Employers continue to find talented web and creative professionals through Authentic Jobs , which has been filling full-time and freelance positions throughout the globe since 2005. … Read the rest here
Today, Opera launched it’s jewel in the Opera 10 crown: Unite . Around 3 years in the making, this service and it’s API s allow you to easily share content from your computer to the world at large or just a select group of friends. It’s an ad-hoc personal webserver where you just choose a service (Photos, Media, Files. etc) and tell it where that content is – Unite does the rest. Lawrence Eng’s post on labs.opera.com does a great job of explaining Unite further. I was a little nervous that the marketing talk (“Reinvent the web”, “servers belonging to strangers”) would distract from what is a great fun service and idea. … Read the rest here
Today, Opera launched it’s jewel in the Opera 10 crown: Unite . Around 3 years in the making, this service and it’s API s allow you to easily share content from your computer to the world at large or just a select group of friends. It’s an ad-hoc personal webserver where you just choose a service (Photos, Media, Files. etc) and tell it where that content is – Unite does the rest. Lawrence Eng’s post on labs.opera.com does a great job of explaining Unite further. I was a little nervous that the marketing talk (“Reinvent the web”, “servers belonging to strangers”) would distract from what is a great fun service and idea. … Read the rest here
I’m Irish (well, half-Irish anyway). Most of the time, that’s something I can be proud of. Lately though, I’m feeling downright ashamed of my country. ISP s in Ireland are facing legal threats by the recording industry trying to strong-arm them into cutting off internet access at their say-so …’cause, y’know, that worked out so well for New Zealand. Eircom have willingly rolled over . Other ISPs are resisting. … Read the rest here
This week, when I’m not battling the zombies of the linkrot apocalypse with a squirrel , I’m preparing my presentation for Bamboo Juice . I wasted far too much time this morning watching the ancillary material from the BBC’s The Speaker in the vain hope that it might help my upcoming public speaking engagement. My talk is going to be a long zoom presentation along the lines of Open Data and The Long Web . I should concentrate on technologies, standards and file formats but I find myself inevitably being drawn in to the issue of copyright and the current ludicrous state of things. If you feel like getting as riled up as I am, be sure to listen to James Boyle as he speaks at the RSA or is interviewed on CBC . … Read the rest here
Ah, blogging: the new long-form Tweet. This morning I said : retraining myself not to /> close img, input, and meta tags. It’s an uphill battle. Which received an instant string of responses asking, in a nutshell, “why?” So I clarified : because I’m done with XHTML is why. … Read the rest here
I don’t talk about personal stuff around these parts very often (for that, you can tune into my Twitter feed ) but the time has come again to share a little news — and for those that do follow me on Twitter, this will all be very familiar. As some of you may know, my wife and I have two children that have come to us through adoption. Both were adopted at birth. Both were adopted from the States. The first from Utah and the second from Kansas. Both have been incredible journeys and we’ve been incredibly blessed to have two rambunctious little boys in our lives… Read the rest here
I was reviewing analytics data for Authentic Jobs this morning, and some figures emerged that are remarkable, but also somewhat unsurprising: For the same monthly period one year ago, visits to the site have increased by 45.9% and average time on the site has increased by 22.9% . For the same annual period one year ago (technically two years ago), visits to the site have increased by 76.0% and average time on the site has decreased by 5.1% . I say somewhat unsurprising because given the current economic climate, one can assume traffic to online job boards has increased in the last 6-12 months. Indeed, a recent report from comScore confirms this assumption: Job search ranked as the fastest growing U.S. online category in 2008 . Had comScore’s study included other countries, the same trend would likely have emerged. … Read the rest here
