Richard Filing

From Jens Meiert
Excerpt: Website maintenance and quality assurance mean the backbone of high quality offers of information, and they represent the difference between an amateurish or professional approach to web design and development. Consequently, guidelines for quality web design define maintenance and quality assurance as important process ingredients which have to be applied continuously. But let’s see what this really means for our work.
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Great story in INC Mag’s March issue about Blogger.com and Twitter founder Evan Williams
Excerpt: Eventually, Williams sends me an apologetic text message–we resolve to push back the meeting slightly–and then he does something else: He uses Twitter to send a text message to, oh, a few thousand people: “Late for my first meeting of the year and in need of a shave.”
Read the entire story here

A little off topic but such a great post that I can’t help pass it on …. Kevin Kelly’s ‘Better than Free’ posting is right on the money. Here’s an excerpt:

From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free.

In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free. Eight uncopyable values.  I call them “generatives.” A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.

Read the entire post here

Excerpt: … But the pain is not just a MySpace problem. It seems to be an industry-wide issue. The total audience of U.S. social networks seems to be stuck at a low-to-mid-single digit growth rate, while the engagment metrics are falling for just about everyone. Time spent on Bebo.com has been sliced in half over the last four months, while Friendster’s time spent has plummeted nearly 75% in the same time period. Overall, minutes spent per site fell 5% in December 2007 compared to the year-ago period. Read full article here

From Steve Eisner’s The Social Life blog (ageing unfortunately):
Except: There are two remaining solutions to the tag mess, assuming you’re sticking with standard methods of tag browsing: 1) re-tagging content later based on observed usage, and 2) tag equivalence (or at least tag migration.) #1 isn’t going to happen, so let’s focus on the more practical #2. What this means is that users can tag items with some original term, but if another term becomes more popular, the first term can somehow be declared equivalent to the new term, so searchers will find the intended content. Whether automatically applied or added manually, this equivalence can greatly increase the network benefit of a bookmarking application. 
Read the full post here

From Tom Fishburne

Excerpt: In America a phenomenon might claim to have entered mainstream culture only after it has been satirised on “The Simpsons”. Google has had that honour, and in a telling way. Marge Simpson types her name into Google’s search engine and is amazed to get 629,000 results. (“And all this time I thought ‘googling yourself’ meant the other thing.”) She then looks up her house on Google Maps, goes to “satellite view” and zooms in. To her horror, she sees Homer lying naked in a hammock outside. “Everyone can see you; get inside,” she yells out of the window, and the fumbling proceeds from there.
Economist.com 30/08/07

Get ready for the rise of the digital free agents: talented employees, well connected with technical gizmos, but with compelling lives outside of work.
The term, which describes people who use technology to manage the blending of their two lives, has been coined by research firm Gartner in an attempt to help chief information officers (CIOs) prepare for the increasing demands on their networks.
Fiona Smith AFR
http://newsletter.mycareer.com.au/general/jun07/job-update/section/fionasmith.aspx?s_rid=smh%3Amycareersmhage&s_cid=595605