December 2009
14 posts
“Bad news: Ominous problems loomed abroad as — among other difficulties...”
– Dave Barry on 2009
“One of the tragedies of the sale of the Journal is that it never aroused the...”
– The Day the Journal Died
draft toward an email etiquette guide
1) always ask people if it’s ok before introducing them to each other (double opt in)
2) after being introduced to someone, don’t cc the introducer more than once.
3) never, ever use bcc. for one thing it’s rude. for another, you can get caught with reply all. instead, forward after sending.
4) vacation auto responders are lame and for n00bs
5) keep emails short. five...
Text Laundering
Text laundering: The act of transforming text in order to confuse duplicate text detectors, for example those used by search engines like Google.
Here’s a recent Boing Boing post I picked at random:
If you’ve already made your Christmas gifts to Creative Commons and have a couple of bucks left over? How about buying a gift for the public domain!! Public.Resource.Org just ordered...
Reverse Lake Wobegon Effect
Bill Gates walks into a bar, suddenly the average wealth of people in the bar goes from thousands to millions. And also now everyone in the bar except Bill has below average wealth. Similarly, contributors to user generated websites like Wikipedia are almost all below average. There are a few people who contribute a ton, and a whole lot of people who contribute very little. This is why it is...
The New York Times is at least 4 different papers...
- commodity AP style news
- bad summary reports on tech, finance, other topics by people who don’t seem to understand what they are talking about.
- hit (krugman) or miss (dowd) Op-Ed
- incredible actual reporting, like today’s article on how obama decided on his plan in afganistan
Ever wonder how free conference call service make...
First, notice how all their area codes are in rural areas (e.g. one I have is area code 218 - rural northern Minnesota). The FCC allows rural telecoms (e.g. Northern Valley Telecom) to charge long distance companies (e.g. AT&T) higher interchange rates. This was originally intended to be a way subsidize rural telecoms that have lower volumes and higher costs. The local telecoms split the...