Posts

Leading on from the Gary V. post on doing great stuff and not being a simple “me too” social mediarati (and something I meant to blog a lot earlier), let’s face it, it’s not that it’s easy to do. A lot of organizations and companies are finding themselves in the position of building communities from scratch, or possibly harder, having to try and wrangle existing communities of users (some of them passionate, some of them aware but ambivalent, some of them pissed off) and engaging them. Tricky.

Great animation on the “we know that we don’t know” dangers of global warming. Really well done.

You can hear more about this campaign from Leo Murray on the site.

I like this. From mattf’s shinily resurfaced blog .

1. Go to google docs, click new spread sheet
2. Click form, create your form with title, description, severity (1 minor .. 5 epic fail), who’s responsible in a dropdown and reported by.
3. Save your form
4. Add conditional colouring in spreadsheet on severity
5. Add a completed/status column
6. Embed form onto a page/email form to bug hunters

Love the simplicity of this.

The only thing I’d add is that you should go into the resulting spreadsheet, go to Share | Set Notification rules and have it email you whenever anyone submits a form right away.

From Ethan Zuckerman’s My Heart’s in Accra blog from a talk he did at ETech :

Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers. Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.

It goes on to suggest that any sufficiently useful tool will be used by activists (and that that is an excellent gauge of how well your tool works for all you startup moguls out there). It’s also got some fantastic sorts of examples of people using tools in repressive regimes that I have to admit I wasn’t aware of (my favourite being Tunisia and airliners.net which is a site my father uses), so there are some great examples here if you want to see how activists are doing it for themselves when they don’t have a top 10 advertising (or now, “digital”) agency at their disposal.

Kutiman took a bunch of public domain YouTube videos and remixed them into something pretty damn spectacular (an album practically).

Most of the chatter on the web about this has mostly been about whether this sort of remixing is the future of entertainment and what precisely record execs may do about it (and even if they have any relevance as an industry any longer), but in the meantime, you can watch and wonder…

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Warren Buffet as a businessman (even though I’m not personally thrilled at a lot of the companies or industries he invests in). Besides coining my favourite quote about the entire sub-prime Wall Street fiasco, I think his shareholder letters are a study in clear, concise communication to people with honesty, integrity and directness.

His latest shareholder annual shareholder letter is a study in how to plainly deliver bad financial news and still find a silver lining (like the others they’ve been writing).

OK, yeah… I know it’s slightly sexist and overly obvious (and shilling ice cream), but have to admit I really like the visual style, direction and music on this thing. Anyone know how they do the film effects on this? (my guess is they just film at a super high frame rate).

Trying to think what it reminds me of as well…

I have to admit I am pretty impressed at the number of educational videos that have been created to explain to people what actually happened with the mortgage-backed securities crisis and how it affects everyone.

And Part II of the video .

If you happen to be looking at key-value stores and document databases for whatever little dev problem you have that might need to be looking at these, you’re probably like me and thinking you probably need to have a version of CouchDB on your trusty macbook to kick the tires on.

So, thank plok’s CouchDBX revival for sorting you out. Nice implementation, you can even run it independently of an already existing macports installation on your system.

While a title like Is the Relational Database Doomed? is obviously link-bait, this Read-Write Web article on the differences between relational databases and the current rapid rise of key-value pair data stores (particularly for distributed, rapidly scalable, multi-tenant web applications) is excellent.

Obviously, relational databases (like MySQL, Oracle, DB2 etc.) aren’t going anywhere soon, but the use of key-value pair stores, as well as their recent resurgence with things like Amazon’s SimpleDB , Google’s Big Table , CouchDB and a host of others, and understanding where it might be a good idea to use them, makes this article a great primer if you’ve been wondering.