Those Mysterious Boxes in StumbleUpon

Ever wonder what those little boxes are in StumbleUpon next to the profile names? The blue boxes indicate how many fans a stumbler has. If a box is empty, it means that that they don’t have any fans. The boxes progressively fill up with blue as they get more fans. Once they have about 35 […]

Technorati Favorites Button for Google Toolbar

All of this talk of Technorati favorites due to the Dosh Dosh experiment got me searching for a Google Toolbar button so that I could easily search my Technorati favorites and add new sites to Technorati from the Google Toolbar. Since I couldn’t find one, I rolled my own.

Good, clean fun with Technorati Favorites

Maki over at the wonderful blog Dosh Dosh has been running an experiment that has to do with the Technorati bookmarking system. In a nutshell, Technorati tracks popular blogs in two ways: “Most linked to”, and “Most favorited”. While it can be extremely difficult to rank in the “Most linked to” list, the “Most favorited […]

Google is organizing the world’s conversation

I don’t want to make this blog about all Google, all the time, but I’m pretty confident in saying that it is going to be mostly about Google in the not too distant future. The reason for this is that I’m convinced that Google is putting the pieces in place not just to build a […]

Oh my, how badly Google wants your cookies

I haven’t had the time in the past couple days to really digest the attempted acquisition of DoubleClick by Google. Now it is sinking in. Google wants your cookies so that they can piece together as much of your browsing history as possible. DoubleClick is the leading advertising company online, managing the display of advertising […]

Living in the Google Biosphere: The dreaded paid link

A biosphere is a closed ecosystem, within which everything is interdependent. The Earth is probably the best example of a biosphere. An action in one part of the biosphere often creates completely unintended reactions. The growth and development of the Internet makes a lot of sense when it is thought of as a biosphere. Sure […]

Tim O’Reilly’s response to Code of Conduct criticism

It looks like Tim O’Reilly mostly agrees with me that a Creative Commons style approach is a good idea. Hopefully something productive can come out of the whole mess. Still I’m not sure if he really gets the impact of this…

Storytelling: Second Life, puppies in a blender and more

It’s interesting to follow the growth of the virtual world Second Life and some of the early attempts by real world entities to market to its inhabitants. IBM, Coldwell Banker, and H&R Block have all setup shop recently. According to a recent survey, marketing is not being very well received, with over 70% of SL’s […]

Setting boundaries for behavior in Social Media

Why Tim O’Reilly’s Code of Conduct Won’t Work Tim O’Reilly has put forth a draft of a recommended Blogging Code of Conduct for bloggers that are interested in maintaining civil discourse in the comments on their blogs. He’s done so in response to a recent incident of cyber-bullying in the blogosphere that has troubled him, […]

Firefox’s “The Coop”: Is Web 3.0 starting to hatch?

Mozilla Labs recently announced “The Coop”, an experiment aimed at adding social tools to the Firefox browser. The overall concept of “The Coop” is to add a panel to Firefox where a virtual chicken coop of a user’s friends’ avatars would be located. This would make it easy to share links with these users and […]