alfabytes
Apr 23
Political Party or Startup?
There’s a lot of similarities in founding startup companies and political parties in Indonesia.
Both require committed founders, lots of money, solid product, and aggressive member or user acquisition. Their eventual options are either to be one of the larger parties or they sell to one of the larger parties.
In political parties, the products are the legislative candidates carrying the belief and the idea that the party will make a difference and bring positive change to the people they meant to represent. Parties send candidates or evangelists who promise to bring about such change to gain voters and get these candidates to the parliaments to supposedly do what they say.
If user or voter acquisition efforts fail to deliver on time, the co-founders along with the board may decide to sell the entity and bring its users/voters to the acquiring entity in the hope that they don’t get too pissed off. The top executives may also decide to join the flock to ease concerns that the idealism would go away once the old entity disappears. Of course, having been built with various levels of differences in ideologies, implementations, and executions, there will always be friction and the post merger/acquisition results depend on how these are handled by the new team.
Regardless of the outcome, I’ve found the entire end to end process in both cases extremely similar in its core. Similar principles apply to both situations and similar theories also work in practice to solve the issues that they face. – Read on Path.
Apr 19
Coming clean, maybe: The Dan Lyons story
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allupright:
Dan Lyons reveals the dirty truth of today’s media and the people who work in the industry:
I’ve… spent the past few years writing “articles” that were less and less interesting — they were basically just SEO chum thrown out onto the internet in hopes of catching traffic.
“Articles” is another way of saying “Everything I ever wrote about Apple before being able to escape to a corporate gig.” Why? Because Lyons was only able to generate traffic to websites when he published weird, misleading columns about the company.
Bashing Apple was the only way Lyons could make it in the publishing world. Can you recall anything he’s written that didn’t involved Apple? Me neither.
Now that he’s no longer in that industry, Lyons can tell us what he was actually doing — writing for traffic, not truth.
Bad on Lyons for pumping out not-sincere perspectives on Apple all those years. Good for Lyons, realizing that his previous career sucked, and that he’s in a position to do something else. And yet…
Well, here’s the next thing he’s pursuing:
But in the last year or so, many have started finding work as journalists inside companies. That new appetite for “corporate journalism” makes it easier than ever for journalists to leave their posts. Intel, IBM, GE, Oracle, and countless others have hired reporters. Some companies have a blogger or two; others are building full-fledged news organizations.
He goes on to write:
The result is that these days a lot of good journalism is being committed outside the walls of traditional media companies. As my friend Kevin Maney, a longtime tech columnist at USA Today who bailed out of mainstream media a few years ago, has written, “Traditional media is increasingly a bad place for a good journalist to work.”
Note that, unlike Lyons, Kevin Maney is not saying he’s a journalist. Which means Lyons is either confused as to what his job really is, or he is — once again — misleading readers.
“Corporate journalism” isn’t journalism: It’s public relations (telling the world what you’d like it to believe) or corporate communications (telling your workforce what’s what, rah rah).
Corporations hire former journalists — and have for years, this isn’t a new phenomenon — because they know how to communicate: Planning, composing, propagating messages. It’s a skill that is under-appreciated by most, but necessary as it becomes clear that executives and their support staffs aren’t masters of written English.
And, of course, journalists take these jobs because they need real wages and benefits. Amen.
But do not believe someone who tells you that he or she is a “corporate journalist.” He or she will be implying that he or she is something he or she is not. He or she will always be a mouthpiece of a company which ultimately is trying to sell you something.
They’re not evil. But they are marketers. Understand that, question it, and you’ll be fine… especially if you end up reading Lyon’s work in the future.
“they’re not sure whether they wanna make the app “serious” or “fun”. “fun” meaning they’ll be shit like profile pictures, background banners, rubber ducky, rope, chains, lubes, nuts & bolts, SBY.”
— UI designer with a two week deadline for an app
Apr 18
[video]
Apr 17
Well that came true
The Verge has a good run through of the new features in Facebook 6 for iOS which includes chat heads and stickers. Watch the video if you can’t be bothered to read the post.
Apr 16
minimalmac:
Yep. Pretty much sums it up.
(via W&CIE)
Apr 05
topherchris:
This update to the Bible, which was just released by God and Jesus, clarifies several controversial positions. Update recommended.
Apr 04
[video]
Apr 03
thedailywhat:
You Saw This Coming of the Day: Game of Thrones Premiere Downloaded Over 1M Times
With more than 4.2 million downloads per episode, Game of Thrones was the most pirated television show of 2012. However, less than 24 hours after the HBO epic fantasy show’s third season premiere, TorrentFreak reported the episode had already been downloaded more than a million times, with one torrent having more than 160,000 simultaneous connections. No torrent has had that many connections since September 23rd, 2008, when more than 144,000 people downloaded the third season premiere of Heroes at once.
TorrentFreak also broke down the locations of the pirates, finding that Australia had the highest piracy rate while London had the highest concentration of pirates amongst major cities. Despite the massive amounts of downloads, the television premiere saw 6.7 million US viewers, despite airing against The Walking Dead’s season finale.
Mar 30
Problem with Tumblr
For all the updates and improvements made to the Tumblr app, they removed any and all abilities to share existing posts elsewhere. You can’t grab a link to a post from the app unless you’re accessing the dashboard from a browser. That sucks.
This behavior contrasts with the latest update to Vine which now lets you share other people’s Vine videos from the app to Twitter or Facebook and even grab the direct links as well as the embed codes.
Of course, Vine doesn’t yet have 100 million active accounts and has far more to gain by expanding the reach of its videos to other places so more people know about it and hopefully adapt the service. Tumblr, well, it doesn’t need that sort of strategy actively implemented any longer.
I wonder why some online services and networks, like Facebook and Google+, become silos once they reach a particular threshold. – Read on Path.
