Know When To Say No

Cool SvN post on how to innovate by staying true to your ideas and not being bullied into being something you're not.

How opinionated companies get customers to live without floppy drives, assigned seats, credit cards, etc.

Examples from the story:

Southwest
"...in the case of Southwest Airlines, customers who value more of the amenities, policies, and procedures of the legacy carriers aren’t ever going to be passionate about Southwest. Customers who are passionate about Southwest don’t just value the low fares that open seating supports, but have come to expect and enjoy the organized chaos that the experience involves."

Apple
If you simply had to have a floppy drive, then that new iMac was no good for you.

ING
You want to open an account with a million dollars? Please find another bank. “Rich Americans are used to platinum cards, special services,” Kuhlmann told me. “The last thing we want in this bank is to have rich people making special demands. We treat everybody the same, which is how we keep things simple.”

It's not easy being Yahoo!

Interesting blurb of an article on Jerry Yang of Yahoo. Too short, but a good glimpse at his feelings on their history and future.

Yang: Being Yahoo CEO is a 'lonely job'

My favorite throwaway quote:

"Today I'm still not sure why we added the exclamation point."

!@#$

Swearing at work boosts team spirt, morale
Regular swearing at work can help boost team spirit among staff, allowing them to express better their feelings as well as develop social relationships, according to a study by researchers.

The pair said swearing in front of senior staff or customers should be seriously discouraged or banned, but in other circumstances it helped foster solidarity among employees and express frustration, stress or other feelings.

Best Google Design for SEO Traffic

Let's say that I want our blog to get traffic from people searching on how to get relevant SEO-optimized content that will show up on Google.

Well, I'd make sure to talk about Google and SEO plenty of times, and that we're the best at helping people get great SEO results.

I'd also provide an example of how the Google home page would look if it was SEO-optimized.

http://www.meangene.com/google/design_for_google.html

Of course, I would need to use some nifty AJAX call-out boxes to guide the user through the steps to creating a relevant, SEO-friendly home page that will get indexed by search engines like Google.

Now just wait several weeks and your site should be picked up by the Google spider and show up in search results when people are searching for "best google optimized SEO".


P.S. I should throw in the original pointer from Slashdot:

"Web developers increasingly grow weary of having to put so much effort into designing their sites according to the whims of the Google search engine. When the most important thing is 'getting indexed' it is increasingly difficult for web site designers to offer the simple, uncluttered user experience they'd like to. Reminiscent of the famed what if Microsoft designed the iPod box here is a humorous look at what would happen to that famed, clean, uncluttered look if Google had to design for the Google Search Engine."

At least they tried...

New beta version of MapQuest:

beta.mapquest.com

Unfortunately they still don't get it...

I know I've been a MapQuest hater forever, but it's always been with good reason. They were first, and they're the most popular, but they still just don't know how to do directions in a useful manner.

People want to redo a route easily with drag and drop. They want to start on a highway without having to fake it. They want simplified line drive directions. They want to find a pseudo neighborhood even when they don't really know what they're looking for. They want to easily skip streets they don't like, and be advised as to "why" something is the best route rather than fastest/quickest via a mathematical stairstepping calculation. They want the simplicity of a Line Drive visualization instead of every intricacy of a turn by turn. They want notes, landmarks, and street level views for visualization.

They want something better than MapQuest.

Google Maps is the best (true that double true.)

R&B

If Gary named iNetNow...

Research Bitch

Aside from the comedic value of the funny name, the voiceover pitch for the site is pretty interesting and not something I've seen before.

Banning the Bomb

Good idea in theory, but...

Experts doubt plan to block bomb recipes on Web

A European Union proposal to stop people from accessing bomb-making instructions online is fraught with technical difficulties, if not downright unworkable, Internet practitioners say.

"I do intend to carry out a clear exploring exercise with the private sector...on how it is possible to use technology to prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like 'bomb,' 'kill,' 'genocide' or 'terrorism,'" Frattini told Reuters in an interview earlier this month.

Rotten Neighbors

Stumbled onto this via Lifehacker and think it's an absolutely brilliant idea for a GMaps Mashup:

Rotten Neighbor

Not sure how accurately it's being used, but there's a grain of truth to every story, and a lot of these are hilarious.

If only LinkedIn had a similar feature for "reviewing" the unemployable...

Language Barrier At Risk

Interesting article on how the world's languages are fading away. Not sure if I'm more amazed at how many there are (were?), or how many are at risk. Both numbers are bigger than I expected.

Study finds languages quickly dying out

Half of the world's 7,000 languages are expected to disappear before the end of the century.

"We are seeing in front of our eyes the erosion of the human knowledge base."

Dial Directions

Dial Directions

Interesting new directions-by-phone service with a "why didn't I think of that" phone number.

Downsides are the fact that it's voice recognition and uses MapQuest for the actual directions, but reviews are positive and it uses some familiar tricks and tenants based on this WSJ review:

"It's smart enough to ask you if you know how to get to the highway, thus saving you from reading directions you already know."

"Symbols help to shorten the messages, like using "L @ Maryland Ave. SW" to tell a user to turn left at Maryland Avenue Southwest."

"While the mobile versions of these services are improving, the user interface of a cellphone isn't ideal for inputting addresses and extracting directions. Even smart phones with larger screens and full keyboards can be hampered by slow Internet speeds."

Visualizing Search Results

There's quite a few of these alternative search engines now ...quite a lot more than I imagined, actually.

This is an interesting collection of visually based search engines - The crystal one is particularly strange but ingenious somehow at the same time.

Heres a pic of a crystal visual search engine result.

25! :)

Happy Birthday, Smiley

Sept. 19, 1982
"I propose the following character for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways," Fahlman wrote. "Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-( "

And my favorite quote from the article:

"Good writers should have no need to explicitly label their humorous comments."

Steve's First Letter

Now we know where Steve Jobs learned his PR style:

Courtesy of www.geekculture.com

10!

Google, at age 10
On September 15, 1997 Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two 24 year-old Stanford University students, registered the domain name of "google.com."

WikiRage

Sort of a Google Zeitgeist for Wikipedia based on edit activity.

WikiRage

(via LifeHacker)

Google In The News

Google Founders’ Ultimate Perk: A NASA Runway
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/technology/13google.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
The famous founders seem to have acquired landing rights to a runway that NO other civilian planes can land at, and are only a few miles away from Google's headquarters. The articles says that NASA gets to run scientific missions on their planes, and thus the allowance. Hmmm, I want to see the results of those experiments.

In other Google news, it seems that some confidential Google plans to compete with FaceBook were leaked.

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/09/video-leak-goog.html

They're allying some of their platform around the Google Reader. I haven't used the reader yet, but I may have to. And some interesting learnings at the bottom of the article:

• Two thirds of all RSS feeds only have one subscriber
• Google prioritizes more popular feeds polling every hour for updates, while the two thirds mentioned above are polled every 3 hours.
• The Google Reader back-end stores a staggering 10 terebytes of data from 8 million feeds

And of course, there's the Moon Prize they announced. I was at the first prize, so I'll definitely try to be at this one, if someone enters.

Daylight!

Things that make me happy:

MTurk + GEarth = Search and Rescue

Amazon is using their Mechanical Turk service to assist in the search and rescue for missing aviator Steve Fossett.

Got this email from Amazon:


Details of the task to perform are available here:

Steve Fossett Missing: Help find him by searching satellite imagery

I hadn't heard of it before, but TechCrunch has a story on how Amazon did something similar when Jim Gray was lost at sea.

Very interesting and noble use of crowd sourcing.

Nowhere

Great article on the origins of Lost and the Hollywood saga of the original creator.

Cast Away
Every time ABC runs an episode of its hit TV series Lost, Evanston's Jeffrey Lieber gets an onscreen credit and his bank account gets a nice pop. But the twisting tale of his Hollywood triumph has left Lieber feeling a bit ... well, lost.

Apple Adwords Prank

Man buys Google Adwords ad for "iphone price drop" and a comedy of errors ensues.

DYH isn’t funny?

Also interesting in how it shows the lack of basic fact checking when blogs become common news sources.