2010
You are browsing the archive for 2010.
PR quagmire: Oprah, Zach Anner, and the unpredictability of online polls
Oprah cheated a handicapped man out of a deserved win.
That’s the potential headline, anyway. After Oprah put up a show as the prize in a contest on her site, Reddit and other sites championed an unlikely candidate: A very funny guy with cerebral palsy named Zach Anner.
Anner, whose contest video included the quote, “No Atlantis is [...]
Building your web development team: Meet the warrior, rogue and mage.
In roleplaying games (RPGs), player classes can usually be boiled down to three basic roles: The warrior, the rogue, and the mage. In web development, we see the same three basic archetypes.
The Warrior
As the heavy hitter (he’s the guy with the big ax in the picture), the warrior ends up doing a lot of the [...]
Match Strike launches HootCourse
StrikePad has been a bit quiet lately. If you’re wondering why, it’s because we just launched our new project, HootCourse, into a public beta about two weeks ago. We’ve been working at a fevered pace since then to get everything just right and deploy a few fixes.
Now we’re looking for feedback and bugs. If you’re [...]
Introducing the iPan
Apple just sent over their latest product, the iPan, and I’ve gotten to spend a couple of days with it now. Here are my impressions.
It’s all about taste.
Ramen noodles are the lifeblood of my small startup. Their ease of preparation and low, low price make them ideal for bootstrapping. I had perfected my cooking technique [...]
HTML5’s missing piece: The disclosure tag
Imagine a worst case blogging scenario: The FTC have pegged you as a violator of their disclosure guidelines. You now face $11,000 in fines per sponsored post. Or, worse yet– you don’t live in the states, but your country has recently implemented a policy that makes the FTC fines seem like parking tickets.
Wouldn’t it be [...]
Rowfeeder might be the smartest tool yet for social media monitoring in public relations
I got a chance to meet up with the guys at Untitled Startup a few days ago. They were working on adding some cool stuff to their own site. What really caught my eye, though, was their app Rowfeeder.
Rowfeeder is like a lot of apps. It tracks keyword mentions on Twitter. The difference, however, is [...]
Facebook’s fountain of youth
Facebook is rolling out a new layout. If the story doesn’t sound familiar, it should.
You can guess the rest. Some people got it early. It has mixed reviews. There’s a facebook group with thousands of people unhappy with the changes. And the latest step: People groaning that it’s already happening again. (The irony of including this [...]
How Apple hides the iPad’s dirty little secret with an optical illusion.
Here’s the iPad as you (probably) haven’t seen it before:
Like many others, at one point I found myself asking, “Wait… it’s a 4:3 screen?” It wasn’t because I was disappointed in the new specs; this was hours after I had seen actual images of the device. “I could have sworn it was widescreen!”
I wasn’t quite [...]
Intentionally unprofessional: Design techniques that could backfire
One of the worst things about design is that you can put a lot of work into something that comes out looking like, well… nobody put a lot of work into it at all. Here are a few techniques that could make you look like an amateur, even if you know what you’re doing.
Blur
Blurring is [...]