Author Archive

Tonight Profy will be playing host to a new podcast called Things You Can't Say About the Internet, with me, Steven Hodson of Mashable and WinExtra, and Duncan Riley of The Inquisitr.
We'll probably be discussing Twitter clones and FriendFeed zealotry as well as a number of things, so please join us tonight. With the parties involved, there may end up being a wee bit of "Not safe for work, kids, or polite company" language, so there's your last warning.
The show [...]

Tweetscan. Summize. Twellow. Twhirl.
Four application names that have sprung out of dozens, if not hundreds, of applications built on top of the application everyone loves to hate: Twitter.
Everyone knows the Fail Whale. Everyone threatens to jump ship, signing up for whatever new and shiny "Twitter killer" comes along. Yet there Twitter is, warts and all, up and down all day, and taking all the associated apps along with it, while users are doing no more than making empty threats.
I've wondered [...]

StartUpArabia alerted me to a cool tool called Feedoor, a feed management tool launched last year. Feedoor allows users to edit feeds, filter them, and create new feeds based on mash-ups of multiple feeds and filters.
Feedoor may be the ultimate in vanity tools if they can just get the filtering right. By creating a new feed, you can add any feeds you want and create one huge feed. Want everything under the Denton umbrella? Add Valleywag, Gawker, IO9, and the [...]

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.
SciFi fans, web content fans, and cult musical fans will all have something in common this summer: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog . No one but Joss Whedon could have cooked up something so completely bizarre, yet virtually guaranteed to take the Web by storm as well as push the envelope of online content.
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog will "air" online in three parts, with the first part premiering on 15 July, the second [...]

Ben Metcalfe wrote an incredible post today about the current state of the tech blogosphere. The entry, which carries the title Puppets, theatre and the conflation of 'successful' with 'popular,' notes that much of the posturing around the hallowed halls of Techmeme High is not so much an effort toward producing quality reporting and analysis, but rather, an effort to be the coolest kid on the block.
Even online, the tech blogosphere is still but a tiny corner of the world. [...]

I've made no secret of my unabashed enthusiasm for password manager PassPack. Of all the apps I've tried and reviewed, PassPack is probably the one that gets used most throughout the day, simply because of the enormous number of accounts I need to wrangle as part of this job.
One problem that I've had frequently, however, is the lack of either an offline or mobile version. There's been many a time when I'm sitting at a soccer game or at [...]

I hate your partial feed.
Yes, I've heard all the arguments for partial feeds: they prevent splogging; they ensure people visit the site and generate the precious ad revenue; they keep feed readers from stealing eyeballs.
Sploggers, however, scrape sites any which way they can. A full feed may make it a little easier, but a partial feed won't prevent it. I have one hilarious splog in my bookmarks that scrapes the content, translates it to another language, then translates it back [...]

Google, this is Amazon. I was wondering if you could show Amazon what an algorithm is and how to properly use one.
You see, Google, I've been an Amazon customer since 1996. I realize that due to my constant changing of ISPs in the late 90s, I lost my first account, but still, you'd think that 10 years of ordering history in this account would give Amazon an idea of what I might want to buy.
Instead, Amazon here is relying on [...]

I'm not talking about the tech blogosphere, who've shown a decided preference for infighting and attempting to eat their young. I'm talking about parents.
We exist in all forms online: in the tech blogosphere, in MMOs, on forums, and as mommy bloggers, but no matter what area we find ourselves spending most of our time in, we are a tightknit group of loosely connected people. Yes, if you make the mistake of mentioning something like circumcision or the decision to formula-feed, [...]