Their past titles have been champions of what I call the "Airport Books" genre: The elite class of business titles that I see sold in airport newsstands next to the magazines and crappy romance novels. (I might have unknowingly stolen "airport books" from someone else, but I can't find a citation.)
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July 3rd, 2009 — News
Online advertising's biggest players to government: Please stay out of our business.
Google, AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft, along with a host of other advertising, agency and marketer associations, took another step in pressing their case that the government doesn't need to regulate the collecting of data for ad-targeting purposes by search engines, websites, advertisers and ad networks. They've crafted their own set of rules in the hope of heading off potential regulation in Congress.
For months, a wide-ranging group of marketers, portals, publishers and ad networks represented by industry groups -- such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Direct Marketing Association and the Association of National Advertisers -- have been working on "self-regulatory principles," which were released today. They require sites to provide prominent disclosure of who is collecting information and the ability to opt out, inform consumers of any change to a site's privacy policy, and offer special protections for sensitive data connected to health and financial issues or children, among other things.
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July 3rd, 2009 — Technology, copyright, design, government20, opendata, twitter, visualization
- OECD Factbook -- Flash-built impressive data explorer from OECD. Go to Indicators > Load and, in the words of Ben Goldacre, "prepare for nerdgasm". (via bengoldacre on Twitter)
- James Boyle is on Twitter -- author of the book The Public Domain.
- Sewers and Startups (Pete Warden) -- designing to last, reminds me of Saul Griffith's heirloom design riff. When I joined Apple back in 2003, the central build farm for all projects had both PowerPC and x86 Darwin boxes, and our code had to compile on both. Steve was playing a long game, years before the Intel switch he was obviously planning for it, (though I only caught the significance in retrospect).
- Open Data Makes Garbage Collection Sexier, Easier, and Cheaper -- pragmatic use for open government data. For more on the author of this post, see Hello World for Open Data by Tim Bray.
July 3rd, 2009 — News
- Justice Depart officially begins investigation into Google Books [PaidContent]
- New York thieves target iPhone owners more [Reuters]
- Analyst says Apple's app store revenues are"a few hundred million dollars at best" [WSJ]
- Yahoo is "a place where people make and manage the important connections they have," says CTO [BoomTown]
- The top 25 Facebook games [ISG]
- Facebook grows by 700,000 users a day [Inside Facebook]
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July 3rd, 2009 — Technology, twitterapprovalmatrix
Last month I posted the first Twitter Approval Matrix with data that spanned the month of May and different sources such as Hashtag.org, scraping archives, and observations. This month I received some help from Joe Fernandez the CEO of Klout.net and Dan Zarrella the Social & Viral Marketing Scientist for danzarella.com. They provided some great 'hard' data that allowed me to better place more items on the grid this month.
A quick refresher, the matrix shows four quadrants used to describe trends found on Twitter, or related sites such as hashtag.org, tweestats.com, etc. The Y-axis is partly analytical and shows popularity (mostly through scraped numbers) or perceived popularity (in the future nominated by you). The other part of the grid is more curated and subjective. The X-axis has been plotted based on my personal opinion. You may agree or disagree with my placements and that's all good to me. After all, it is about taste. The matrix and plots do not represent a thorough analytical treatment, but rather a view of the trends that could be found in data sources allowing me to plot with some sense of relevance.
For this post, I've limited the data and activity to the month of June. Again, I'll continue with this project as long as I get enough feedback/help. So, if you are interested in contributing, you can comment here, or read the original post to figure out the best way for you to submit your plots.
I hope you enjoy this and see it as a potentially useful tool to monitor trends that your fellow readers are tracking.
July 2nd, 2009 — GOOG, News
In his piece on the origins of Google advertising, Wired's Steven Levy writes that Larry Page and Sergey Brin's main requirement for all Google search ads is that they "should be useful and welcome—not annoying intrusions."
Given Google's (GOOG) massive $20 billion plus annual revenues, one might think this requirement has been well-met.
Not so, say respondents in a survey from AdWeekMedia and Harris Interactive. In fact, 37% of those respondents find the most "helpful" form of advertising is TV advertising, while only 14% credit Internet search ads for their purchases.
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