March 2010
2 posts
Why Foursquare Exists
Twitter used to prompt people with “What are you doing?” For some people, the answer was always “Drinking.” Foursquare exists to answer the next question: “Okay, fine. But where, and with whom?”
“Edith Wharton reports bringing her first effort at story writing to her mother....”
– “Snobbery,” by Joseph Epstein
January 2010
2 posts
Ampersands: The Definitive Guide
Good:
Penn & Teller
Probably bad:
Bullshit!
Penn & Teller expose lies, laziness, and misunderstandings
Almost certainly bad:
Bullshit!
Penn and Teller expose lies, laziness, & misunderstandings
Extremely bad:
Bullshit!
Penn and Teller expose lies, laziness, and misunderstandings
In tonight’s episode of Bullshit!, Penn and his partner Teller take on the...
1 tag
formspring.me
Ask me anything http://formspring.me/byrne
November 2009
1 post
“NOW… AT LAST…THE NEW AMAZING
Gem of genius slowly blazing.
The...”
– Draper Daniels (yes, Mad Men borrowed the name, but not the character).
August 2009
4 posts
“Now, straight from the “you couldn’t make this up if you tried” department comes...”
– Get it straight! Is it something I couldn’t imagine or is it what I would have guessed?
(via)
July 2009
1 post
“Born the son of Baptist Preacher in Virginia, he briefly attended The University...”
– Wikipedia: Rosser Reaves
June 2009
4 posts
Blogs I Read
Copyblogger: Presenting three rehashed tips from The Elements of Style, plus a couple polished turds from our private collection.
Mashable: Check out our top 10 reasons to retweet our list of the top 70 most retweeted Mashable articles of all time! (Please RT!)
Seth Godin: Find your passion. My passion is raiding Dan Rather’s secret collection of weird analogies.It might be a virgin...
Icons Plus Nuance
Election violence in Iran is a symptom of democracy in Iran. I’m not sure there’s a good Twitter icon to represent that thought, though.
$134 Billion: The Worst Thing in the World to...
So, two Japanese nationals got caught with $134 billion in US Treasury bonds, and nobody knows if they’re real or not. Imagine, for a second, that you own the bonds, and they’re real.
If you sell them at face value, that’s a massive bet on your own honesty.
If you try to sell them at less than face value, you’re admitting you could be a crook. Who wants to bet billions...
So, a couple minutes ago, I had a great idea. I read HARO religiously, and forward pitches that friends might find interesting. Lots of people know what HARO is, but don’t have the time to read fifty “People who have had spoken to the ghost of a beloved pet” requests to get at one that’s relevant to what they do.
There’s an opportunity! I could just create a site...
May 2009
7 posts
Bringing "serendipitous social discovery" back to...
A few days ago, Twitter tweaked the way @replies work, which turned into a Giant Internet Crisis when the 3% of Twitter users affected all flipped out.
The problem is, the Twitter guys are right that it’s a bad feature: seeing half the conversation is like sitting next to someone on a cell phone: hearing half the conversation gives you about a tenth of the content.
The Twitter blog...
“The widow Mrs. Howard T. Cassan came to the circus in her flimsy brown dress and...”
– The Circus of Doctor Lao, via Lupo Le Boucher.
Zero to Forbes in Under a Week?
This is proof that SEO has a long way to go. Apparently you can start a fake business, use it to market another fake business, sprinkle in some completely dishonest hype, and do some black-hat link building — the net result is attention from Techcrunch, the Washington Post, and possibly Forbes.
The bad news is that this was all unethical stuff meant to pump up a barely legitimate business....
3 tags
Disney, Hulu, and the Death of the Soviet...
In 1965, 69.6 million people saw a single movie: Operation Y. I’ve seen Operation Y, and it’s not very good. It had its moments, but overall it’s nothing special.
What is special is the scope. It was the biggest-budget movie in Russia, and their cinema system was not exactly designed to accommodate lots of independent studios pushing edgy new stuff. So Operation Y, a not...
April 2009
4 posts
Darren Slatten Is Right About Twitter For The...
Over at SEOMoz, Darren Slatten has a hilarious takedown of the twitter-search hype.
Here’s what he’s missing: he’s exaggerating the importance of Twitter, but Pagerank is gradually giving way to Participationrank: how much interaction and attention a person gets, rather than how many links a page gets.
Yes, it’s easy to overstate Twitter’s role in this. But can...
“Let’s put it this way. Over the years, we have created and sustained many...”
– The Name Game
The Problem With Wrong Tomorrow
I love everything about Wrong Tomorrow, except for the nasty philosophical flaw that makes it worse than useless.
The first time I visited the site, I didn’t notice this, but the founder wrote an admirably honest explanation of what he wanted out of this site:
At the start of March, an economist named Robert Barro gazed deep into historical data and announced in a Wall Street Journal...
March 2009
11 posts
“USG is simply an senescent state. It is so vast, ancient and sclerotic that it...”
– Mencius Moldbug: The Geithner plan, slightly demystified
Oh, speaking of....
… having an idea someone else actually implemented:
March 19th, 8 AM.
March 19th, 2 AM
Coincidence? Yes, actually: I didn’t hear about this until someone made a desktop wallpaper about it.
An Idea So Weird The Nearest Competitor is a...
There are about two hundred million involuntary oil traders in the US right now: everyone who owns a car has a long-term liability, denominated in oil. For no particular reason, the two hundred million car owners, with no interest whatsoever in oil prices, hold on to the liability.
There is a better way. Every time someone takes on a long-term liability — a heating bill, a tank to fill, an...
Watch“Would you like a cigarette? Here, this is a particularly rational brand.”
Billionaire Anthropologists
The Internet as a distribution medium makes people less civilized. You don’t have to sit down at 7 PM for a show that airs at 7; you don’t have to pay for an album you don’t feel like paying for; and you don’t have to worry about what someone will think of you if you hide behind a nom de net.
If there’s such a thing as a noble savage, you’ll find it on 4chan....
A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come (Again)
After “The economy, stupid!” won him the election, Bill Clinton wanted to do something about irresponsible executives who overpaid themselves while laying off workers. Clinton had an idea: why not end the tax deductibility of salaries over $1 million? Result: If your CEO has a lifestyle that requires a minimum of $2 million per year, you can’t pay him a flat salary — you...
Union Square Subway Ninja
Every day when I go home from work, I walk to the Union Square subway stop. And every day when I go home from work, I see a Subway Ninja. He claims to be Raising Awareness about Tibet (I think), but you look at the guy, and you can tell: he’s a ninja. Dressed in all black, always one layer of long-sleeved clothes no matter what the weather. And he’s always within ten steps of a subway...
Why Tumblr + Twitter is the new way to Blog
I’m sorry, Disqus. The conversation you want to host is already happening, and it’s happening on Twitter.
For a long time, I thought LiveJournal was what blogging was meant to be: you had your friends; you had a customized RSS feed that told you what they were up to, and you had a commenting system that encouraged a community to form. LiveJournal is cozier than other publishing...
“When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because...”
– Clay Shirky, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
SEO as an Art Form
Advertising eventually turns into art. People upload TV commercials to Youtube, post billboards on Flickr, and quote product slogans in their Facebook profiles. Ads don’t start out as art — they start out as a way to convince people to buy stuff. But eventually, they evolve: ads turn into a way to get a message to someone, mediated by some external, irrelevant force.
Examples:
...
Wikipedia Made You a Design Snob
Ten years ago, when you wanted to know about the history of Blood Sausage, or who was prime minister of Britain in 1899, you searched for it (you didn’t Google it). You found a couple pages talking about roughly what you were discussing, and you read them pretty carefully — blue comic sans on a yellow background, hosted by Geocities, could be the best source.
Now, you Google what...
February 2009
2 posts
Atlas over Audacity →
Ramen Profitable
A startup is ‘Ramen Profitable’ is it makes enough money for the founders to pay rent and eat Ramen every night. In other words, profitable enough to last forever.
There should be a term for the opposite state: Sushi Funded. When a Ramen Profitable company raises enough money to blow it all on pointless extravagance.