Jan
28
2009
Ravit Lichtenberg at Read Write Web has a go at the coming evolution of social media.
Excerpt: Social media is morphing into a holistic experience that speaks to people’s social needs in new ways. If you are a CEO of a startup who is focusing on the next generation of social media, here are 10 areas you’ll need to take into consideration in the coming year:
1. It’s About People
2. Creating Meaning and Value
3. Enabling Convergence
4. Building a Truly Cross-Platform Experience
5. Creating Relevant Social Networks
6. Innovating in the Advertising Space
7. Helping People Organize Their “Old” Social Media Ecosystem
8. Connecting with the Rest of the US and the World
9. Preparing for New Social Media Jobs
10. Making Money
Read Ravit’s full post here
As someone always trying out these things with diminishing expectations, my take on this is that Friendfeed is very close to getting it as right as possible and some sort of cloud based integration with storage, reference, lifestreaming (such as Evernote) wouild cap the whole thing off. My big problem is the disappearance of community and personal knowledge in social media due to age rather than relevance.
Dec
02
2008
Via Russ at Maxdesign a short and sweet window into the minimalist doctype identifier from Dustin Diaz, a Google user interface engineer.
His words: At Google, we have this obsession with byte size. And by byte size, any “lack-therof” the better. Therefore the doctype you will find on most Google webpages while still triggering the browser into “standards mode” is as simple as you see below:
<!doctype html>
It’s only a short post so read it here.
Jan
17
2008
Google recently started to include a set of links below some results to pages within the site. These new links are called Sitelinks. Google displays Sitelinks if a web site is an authority site for the search term. Google Webmaster Help Centre
Nov
17
2007
Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:
- www.example.com
- example.com/
- www.example.com/index.html
- example.com/home.asp
But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.
Q: So how do I make sure that Google picks the url that I want?
A: One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://example.com/ and the other half go to http://www.example.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links.
Read the full article here
Sep
04
2007
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
