In Uncategorized on January 23, 2010 at 11:33 am
PR Maven Margie Newman just made an interesting blog post about the much-discussed announcement that the New York Times will begin charging for content. That led me to leave a very long comment, which I realized I should really just flesh out into a post of my own:
The interesting thing to me about information portals like this is that many people (myself included) assume that the business model should be one of two things: either pay for content or ad driven. Not both. I’d be fine with paying for something that is worth it if it means never having to see an ad on the site again (see: Pandora), and likewise don’t mind visiting a site with ads if it means I get good content for free. The interesting thing of course is that traditional dead-tree editions of the paper had both: pay for the paper, still has ads.
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In Cool Tech on December 18, 2009 at 11:31 pm
A few times lately I’ve run in to several old nemeses on the web. Irritating flaws in design or function, lack of expected capabilities, or other general lack of reading my mind on the part of developers. So, like any whiny geek, I’m blogging about it.
Here is my wish list of things that I thing Google and others should tackle to make my life easier (in no particular order). Hop to it!
1) Flickr/Facebook integration: I really wish Yahoo would go ahead and buy Facebook so they could integrated it with Flickr. Flickr finally got around to letting you tag people in photos (years after Facebook did), but it is still limited to your Flickr contacts (not even just other Flickr members) and so few of my friends and family are on Flickr that this amounts to very few people being available for tagging. Facebook on the other hand has a massive adoption rate and just about everyone I know is available for tagging. But Facebook’s photo service is just bad. Images are compressed and resized to horrible quality, you can’t tag photos on maps, group them, etc. If I could tag my Facebook friends on my Flickr photos…[sigh]. That’s a world I want to live in.
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In Cool Tech, Me on November 2, 2009 at 9:09 am
With the arrival of high-profile Android phones on so many new devices this holiday season, many of my friends are finally jumping on the Android bandwagon. First off: Welcome!
Second, many of you keep asking me (as someone who’s been using Android for almost a year already with my 1st gen G1) what apps you should install.
So, here is a list of the apps I currently use, in no particular order. I probably won’t keep this very up to date, though if something life-changing comes along I’ll try to remember to update the list. I’ll try to update the list occasionally.
APPS
- Advanced Task Manager – One of the few pay apps I run and worth every penny. Allows you to manage which apps are allowed to run and which ones aren’t, etc. One of Android’s biggest features is also one of its drawbacks: multitasking. Much like WinMo devices, it can run multiple apps at once but many of those apps don’t “quit” when you leave them. They simply go to the background. This costs you battery life and CPU cycles. Sometimes that’s a good thing, other times not so much. This app lets you kill apps that need killing and even lets you schedule regular termination to squash some pesky apps that auto-start periodically in the background. I got an immediate boost in battery life and performance with this relatively inexpensive app.
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