Today’s quiz meme
Posted on February 4th, 2007
Tags: blogging, funny, meta
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Spellbot
Posted on January 31st, 2007
As part of the day job I’ve had an index built that is fed from limited web crawling and blog pings. The point is to feed a data warehouse that is used for social media research and analysis, the sort of thing you might use Technorati to do manually until you realize just how big the blogosphere actually is.
We’ve had lots of ideas for how to use this infrastructure to do other things: some just silly, some promising, and a few that would be fun but just can’t be justified. In the latter category is tonight’s thought.
We’ve toyed with the idea of taking some of the fun out of QA’s life by pre-scanning content for spelling and punctuation errors. Perhaps that same code could be aimed at blog posts, automatically adding comments that offer corrections. We could then accuse people who use human-detection of being pansies that are afraid of spellcheck.
Obviously we’d never actually be so rude. Well, maybe to splogs. Spamming the spammers with “I think you ought to capitalize Viagra” comments could be fun.
Tags: blogging, funny, idea, language, web
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This blog is now Safely Ignored
Posted on January 29th, 2007
About a decade after putting up my personal website, I’ve finally come up with a name for it.
Wither “Safely Ignored”? Jason and I had just finished trying to introduce some clients to the 21st century and the whole Bubble 2.0 universe. This included the usual cluetrain rambling about conversing with your customers rather than shouting at them, and a lesson on long tail markets. All part of the usual attempt to shake marketers of their old “push the message to the golden consumer” habits.
Afterwards, we engaged in a bit of catharsis among ourselves. Sure, there is money in the long tail and it’s never wise to ignore any person with an important message, regardless of how obscure they seem.
But not everyone has something important to say. And the short tail of highly-influential people are still more likely to spread any given message. There are still a lot of people out there who have small audiences and nothing groundbreaking to add to the conversational market… witness most Usenet posts from aol.com, most pages on Geocities, most posts on MySpace, and most little personal sites like this one. We may be safely ignored.
Tags: blogging, marketing, meta, web
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First post!
Posted on March 14th, 2003
With this, I join the “blogging” phenomenon that is all the craze with the kids these days. Over time, I intend to fill in the past with entries from my long-running log for the sake of consistency. I’ll also be discussing (both “then” and in the future) my motivations for this monologue and integrating tools to grow it into a dialog.
Tags: blogging
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