Oh the poor dears. First Harry is denied permission to offer himself for abduction in Iraq. And now his brother William (Wills to you) has to deal with a Facebook hoax.
More than 45 members of Wills’s inner-circle were hoodwinked, including former classmates at St Andrews University and Eton College. In the past month the trickster has posted photos and messages to many of William’s friends.
Daily Mirror, May 16, 2007
Shocking. Er, tut, tut.
You lose a tenth of your readers every paragraph. So if you have an 11-para story, you’ve lost them all.
Bob Satchwell, Director of the UK Society of Editors and a former newspaper editor.
Bob says this is received wisdom in the print business. Wonder if it also applies online? Jakob Neilsen thinks it does — he maintains that, for the most part, Web readers won’t scroll down.
Later… Quentin comments: “If you lose a tenth of your readers every paragraph, then perhaps at
the end of 10 paragraphs you still have a third of your readers left, because 0.9 ^ 10 = 0.35. Of course, if it’s a tenth of your initial readers, then you’re in trouble…”
Leadership makes change possible. Management makes change happen.
Karan Bilimoria, founder of Cobra Beer, overheard on TV by Chris Blackmore.
I followed a link to an interesting wiki aimed at cancer sufferers and their families and friends. The wiki hosting company has signed up for Google Adsense. Guess what kinds of ads the Google servers place on the page?
Forbes.com has an interesting series of essays on networks.
According to this presentation, over 2.7 billion searches are performed on Google every month.
Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.
John Milton: Areopagitica
The case for the blogosphere, in a nutshell.
I missed the news of his death. Larry Lessig has written a generous tribute.
Jon Crowcroft found this…
The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodernism Generator. To generate another essay, follow this link. If you liked this particular essay and would like to return to it, follow this link for a bookmarkable page.
I could have used one of these when I was an undergraduate.
Bill Thompson and I had a hilarious conversation the other morning with an incredulous former newspaper editor in which we tried to explain why Twitter might be interesting, even if it is currently just leading-edge uselessness. Afterwards I thought that perhaps a movie might help. So I made one.
Later… Martin Weller pointed me in the direction of Flickrvision, in which David Troy (creator of Twittervision) does the same thing for photographs.
Still later… Liz Lawley has some interesting thoughts about it, e.g.
What Twitter does, in a simple and brilliant way, is to merge a number of interesting trends in social software usage—personal blogging, lightweight presence indicators, and IM status messages—into a fascinating blend of ephemerality and permanence, public and private.
The big “P” word in technology these days is “participatory.” But I’m increasingly convinced that a more important “P” word is “presence.” In a world where we’re seldom able to spend significant amounts of time with the people we care about (due not only to geographic dispersion, but also the realities of daily work and school commitments), having a mobile, lightweight method for both keeping people updated on what you’re doing and staying aware of what others are doing is powerful…