Sometimes I write a blog entry just for the sake of getting a funny title out there. This is one of those times, thanks to this report: Nigerian pupils browse porn on donated laptops.
(With apologies to the fine people at the One Laptop Per Child project)
Jason Kottke wrote that Facebook was the new AOL. Dave McClure disagreed and said that it’s the new Visual Basic, Brandon Paddock disagrees with both of them and says that it’s the new Windows.
According to a Google search for the phrase “Facebook is the new”, Facebook is the new…
According to a Google search for the phrase “Facebook is the next”, Facebook is the next…
Tucows will be at HostingCon 2007, which takes place next week in Chicago from Monday, July 23rd to Wednesday, July 25th at Navy Pier. HostingCon bills itself as “the largest gathering of hosted services professionals in the world” and for more details about the conference, check our their conference program.
We’ll be making our presence known there — I won’t be there, but my coworkers Kim, Leona, Adam and Hasdeep will. Be sure to keep an eye out for squishy cows and…
We’ll have a booth in the exhibitors’ hall — booth 817, which is right beside the networking lounge. Feel free to come chat with us about our new Email Service, Premium Domains and other upcoming things from Tucows.
You can look for booth 817 on the official HostingCon map or use our slightly customized one below to find us:
On Wednesday, July 25th, from 3:30 – 4:15 p.m. in room 109, Product Manager for Domains Adam Eisner will be making his presentation, Rethinking Domain Name Search.
Here’s the description of his presentation:
With the rise of the domain name aftermarket, many expired names never return to the public for repurchase. This, combined with the fact most web hosting companies don’t provide an effective domain name search feature on their website, results in many lost sales opportunities for domain names, web hosting, email and more.
This session will show web hosts how to “re-think” their website’s domain name search strategy in response to market developments like better name suggestion technology, fewer available names, and the rise of the domain name aftermarket. The strategies outlined and demonstrated will help web hosts obtain tangible improvements in their domain name and web hosting sales.
Topics covered will include:
- How to improve sales by improving your existing domain name search process (using tangible examples)
- Maximizing the number of relevant results provided using name suggestion technology
- Using domain name aftermarket to ensure customers receive the most relevant domain name availability results possible
Come on out and say hello!
Here’s something I found amusing and entertaining: an explanation of the ins, outs and benefits of old-school letterpress typography, done in a 1950’s black-and-white newsreel/documentary style: Typography School. The video features David Dabner, who teaches letterpress typography at the London College of Printing and thinks that computer-based typography has made students lazy and sloppy.
[Found via Transbuddha, who found it via Fresh Signals]
According to The Register, today is the 15th birthday of the Thinkpad, the laptop originally made by IBM and now Lenovo. Aside from re-establishing IBM’s reputation as a computer hardware manufacturer and becoming an icon for businessperson on the go, the ThinkPad is also notable for popularizing the TrackPoint controller.
Image borrowed from Coding Horror — it’s from the Touchpad vs. Trackpoint article.
My co-worker at OpenCola, Helen Waters, told me this story.
Helen was our tech person was OpenCola (this was back in the late ’90’s), making sure that people got the machines they needed, that their software got installed and so on. One day, she had presented a woman at the office with her new company-assigned ThinkPad whose pointing device, naturally enough, was a TrackPoint.
The woman, who’d used only mice and touchpads before, had no idea how to mouse around with the TrackPoint and began tapping on it as if it were a button — first a couple of tentative taps, and then taps in rapid succession — with predictable results.
Helen stepped in and quickly demonstrated the TrackPoint principle. She reached in and with her finger, pointed the TrackPad the way it was meant to be used — like a tiny joystick.
“It figures,” said the woman, “It was obviously designed by a man.”
First, I was reminded that you never know what’s going to connect with people. I wasn’t expecting this article to gain any more attention than the usual number of pageviews and maybe a comment or two. After all, most of the laws, rules and axioms in the list have been around for a while and chances are (especially if your line of work is programming, engineering or tech) that you’ve seen at least a few of them on a web page, poster, t-shirt or mug.
Second: Sometimes all you need is a single link from a site with high readership. This is hardly a revelation; if you’ve read The Tipping Point or books of that ilk or heard the saying that goes “It isn’t what you know, it’s whom you know,” you’ve already internalized this fact. But it’s always good to have an example that you can point to. My thanks to my friend Cory Doctorow for linking to the article and saying such nice things about this site on BoingBoing.
Years ago, I read Paul Fussell’s book BAD or, The Dumbing of America, a critique of that the American tendency to glorify the cheap, schlocky and superficially good and ignore genuinely good things.
One passage that stands out for me is in the chapter about the outright BADness of modern American poetry. At the end, he encouraged people that rather than writing more bad poetry, they should compile tables of easily-observable data, such as the weather every day over several years; that information would certainly be of more use to more people than painful poesy.
I’m going to ignore the cultural snobbery in Fussell’s statement and focus on the idea of compiling easily-observable data into tables because I think there’s a gem in that thought: Take stuff people want and put it a single place that’s easy to understand and navigate.
As with the second insight, as a reader of this blog (I’m assuming most readers either work in tech or follow tech news) chances are that you already knew this, deep down. But it’s such a simple and basic idea that sometimes, like the air we breathe or the high-speed connections that we didn’t have even a mere 10 years ago, we forget about it.
Consider the Laws of Software Development article. I cribbed most of the laws from Phil Haack’s article, 19 Eponymous Laws Of Software Development. My additions were:
The article merely had readily-available information, compiled into an easy-to-read format, with convenient links to additional information. And despite not being rocket science, it got a lot of eyeballs and the most comments of any article ever posted here on Global Nerdy.
Allow me to repeat the insight: Take stuff people want and put it a single place that’s easy to understand and navigate.
I’m repeating it at least partially for myself, because it’s a lesson I keep forgetting, even though I keep seeing examples all the frickin’ time:
If you’re trying to come up with a useful and possibly profitable application — hey, I am — and you’re banging your head screaming: “I can’t come up with a new technology!”, remember the insight: Take stuff people want and put it a single place that’s easy to understand and navigate.
I know I will.