Caterpillar Cowboy

"For example, among 18- to 34-year-olds 24 percent have taken unpaid internships for work experience..."

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 08:06:56 -0500

“For example, among 18- to 34-year-olds 24 percent have taken unpaid internships for work experience and 35 percent go back to school to get a job. This all translates to 24 percent of Americans in that age bracket moving back in with their parents — a stat which jumps to 34 percent for the narrower group of 25- to 29-year-olds.”

- 34% of 25- to 29-Year-Olds Moved Back Home - National - The Atlantic Wire (via infoneer-pulse)

"My favorite personalities stopped speaking to each other and started speaking to a faceless mass…the..."

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:22:00 -0500

“My favorite personalities stopped speaking to each other and started speaking to a faceless mass…the concept of an audience replaced the faces in the community….twitter became a microphone instead of a public walkytalky…”

- One day I woke up and twitter sucked « Jordan Cooper’s Blog: startups, venture capital, Hyperpublic (via msg)
I stopped using Twitter in 2010 for exactly this reason. Tumblr, Techmeme, Facebook, and NYTimes.com are where I get news on current events and engage with people I care about.

What’s interesting is to consider why this happened and what Twitter could have done differently. How do you create a healthy culture for your social network? A community manager role? Maybe Twitter was doomed to evolve to this point inevitably, given how much narcissism and ego drive Twitter content creation.

taylorlorenz: Battlestar Galactica - Portlandia on IFC My...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 22:31:32 -0500

taylorlorenz:

Battlestar Galactica - Portlandia on IFC

My favorite show referencing my other favorite show, too real.

Guilty. So guilty.

gsiener: Impressive story. Original weekend project mvp link on...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 22:16:14 -0500

gsiener:

Impressive story.

Original weekend project mvp link on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614

(via Gumroad Gets $1.1 Million From Chris Sacca, Max Levchin And Others To Turn Any Link Into A Payment System | TechCrunch)

Holy shit this is brilliant. Wow. Changes everything.

infoneer-pulse: Google paying users to track 100% of their Web...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:31:23 -0500

infoneer-pulse:

Google paying users to track 100% of their Web usage via little black box

Google is working to collect information about Internet users that it can’t get from just monitoring its own browser, services, and Android devices. The company has set up a new program called Screenwise, which offers money to users who install a black box on their home network to “measure Internet use.” A smaller amount of money will go to those who install a browser extension on their computers that will do the same thing.

Google quietly started up the Screenwise data collection program Tuesday night, taking the e-mail addresses of people who are interested in “add[ing] a browser extension that will share with Google the sites you visit and how you use them.” For their participation, Google offers the extension users a $5 Amazon gift card for signing up and another $5 gift card for every three months they stay with the program. Less publicly, Google also started looking for people who would install a piece of hardware on their network to do more extensive monitoring.

» via ars technica

What’s your privacy worth?

georgecocksman: This is what it might look like if guys and...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:47:00 -0500

georgecocksman:

This is what it might look like if guys and girls switched roles.

“Tacofest”

photojojo: There’s something about caffeine and high-speed...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:25:46 -0500

photojojo:

There’s something about caffeine and high-speed photography that just meshes well.

(Photos by Jack Long)

High-Speed Photos of Coffee Splashes

via Mudwerks

How Tumblr Should Do Promoted Posts

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:45:23 -0500

Thoughts expressed in this post are derived from conversations with Julie Fredrickson and Greg Battle.

As you all have seen, Tumblr recently began playing with the idea of publishers paying $1 to highlight posts in the stream. As I said then, I’m glad Tumblr is experimenting, and every time a community-based site makes changes, it always runs the risk of backlash, so kudos to them for having the fortitude to try new things.

With that said, who is it for? Regular users who tumble for fun about cats and last night’s dinner? Brands like Newsweek and Vogue? The $1 price points to “it’s for everyone” but the nature of announcements & promotions is dominated by organizations with an agenda. Given the desire of the latter group, I’d make them the focus.

If we were to start from scratch and think about how organizations could best promote their posts while maintaining the integrity of the Tumblr eco-system, I think we should take a page from Facebook’s Sponsored Stories. In the right rail of the dashboard, underneath (or instead of) the Radar, Tumblr should show a post by someone you already follow if they’ve paid to have their post featured there. The purpose is to reinforce the message of the post in case you missed it or forgot about it. Advertisers can pay more for more impressions, which is exactly what they want. Users don’t feel like they are being spammed, because they only see posts by people they already choose to follow. And Tumblr finally gets to monetize what they have in abundance - dashboard page views (hundreds of millions every day).

"Pinterest already is driving buyers to some websites. In the last six months, the retail deal site..."

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:13:28 -0500

“Pinterest already is driving buyers to some websites. In the last six months, the retail deal site ideeli.com has seen a 446 percent increase in web traffic from Pinterest and sales resulting from those visits have increased five-fold.”

- How Pinterest Is Becoming the Next Big Thing in Social Media for Business — Entrepreneur.com (via courtenaybird)

Wish they posted some absolute numbers here. Pinterest’s growth has been so fast that 446% increase sounds silly because it is silly (it was still tiny 6 months ago). But kudos to Pinterest and hopefully more articles like this will make sites like Tumblr / Facebook / Twitter to realize that the future of e-commerce lies with them.

parislemon: Path, Not Pathological

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:10:26 -0500

parislemon: Path, Not Pathological:

parislemon:

As an iOS lover and Path champion, a number of folks have asked for my take on the Path address book situation of yesterday and today. I’ve avoided weighing in for two reasons: first, I wanted to talk to some other actual developers about the situation. Second, the fact that CrunchFund is…

Actually, it does call into question Path’s company culture with respect to privacy. Any engineer worth their salt knows to never store passwords in plaintext. Instead, you store a hash of the password. Then, when you validate if the supplied password from a login page is correct, you hash the proposed password and check it with the hash you have stored and see if they match.

In Path’s case, they probably do that with passwords but don’t with other personal data. Why? Because they don’t see it as deserving the same level of privacy. Should they? Clearly some think so.

Personally, I’m not upset and think the public reaction here is typical of Internet nerd libertarians who are way too sensitive about whether or not their “rights” are being infringed upon. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. Anyway, just pointing out that thoughtful product design requires total immersion in the mind of the user, including how they think about privacy / integrity / relationships / trust / etc.

section9: discoverynews: Daredevil to Plunge From Outer...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:37:04 -0500

section9:

discoverynews:

Daredevil to Plunge From Outer Space

After some minor speed bumps, Daredevil adventurer Felix Baumgartner’s plans to plunge 23 miles from the edge of space back to Earth — a Red Bull-sponsored stunt that would be the world’s highest freefall — is finally coming to fruition, the team announced.

Read More

I would do this in a heartbeat.

There is no amount of money you could pay me to do this. #youcancallmechickenshit #Idontcare

Free ice cream @GA today, I think leftover from a @food52 event....

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:14:49 -0500

Free ice cream @GA today, I think leftover from a @food52 event. Red velvet, maple walnut, and mission fig were the flavors I grabbed. (Taken with Instagram at General Assembly)

Blip is Hiring!

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:00:27 -0500

evangotlib:

I’m looking for an Account Director for my New York sales team. Apply here or contact me on Tumblr.

jryu: (via Thousands of Butterfingers Sent to Copley Square to...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:36:33 -0500

jryu:

(via Thousands of Butterfingers Sent to Copley Square to Mock Wes Welker [PHOTOS] | BostInno)

New Yorkers are such assholes. In this case, I’m all for it.

What a T cell, the immune system’s most precise and efficient...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:58:55 -0500

What a T cell, the immune system’s most precise and efficient killers, actually looks like when attacking a cancer cell. (via)

This one’s for MDF.

"There’s no denying that Pinterest is fun, looks great, and a lot of people love playing with it...."

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:55:19 -0500

“There’s no denying that Pinterest is fun, looks great, and a lot of people love playing with it. That is also true of kittens but no one’s rushing to include them in their 2012 marketing plans.”

- Pinterest is over-hyped — Forrester Blogs (via courtenaybird)

Wake up Barnes & Noble!

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:54:26 -0500

likesandlaunch:

Growing up, my parents often took us to Barnes and Noble. Whether it was Friday evening after dinner or a rainy Sunday afternoon, trips to the bookstore were a rare occasion that fed the curiosities of everyone in my family — something they believed should be practiced often.

These trips to B&N planted seeds to learn something new. My sister would head over to the fashion section; my father to the business or new releases, my brother often to the video game magazines and my mother to the travel section or novels. Although we found ourselves browsing different areas, there were always new conversations at home that led to us understanding each other’s interests and goals better than before.

Since I grew up going to Barnes & Noble, the recent New York Times article, “The Bookstore’s Last Stand,” frustrated me even more. In it, B&N spells out their plan to focus solely on selling the Nook and digital content to save the fledging company.

Sound familiar? It should: it’s an uninspired “me-too” strategy following in the footsteps of Amazon. But here’s the difference — if B&N continues down this path, they’ll be transforming a brick-and-mortar book browsing asset into a device retailer that more closely resembles Best Buy or Radio Shack.

Stores are an asset
I’m a self-professed Amazon fangirl and admire what they’re doing with the publishing industry. They’re taking an inefficient and unreasonable economic model and turning it upside-down, democratizing a platform that has been inaccessible to thousands of would-be writers. In the end, writers, readers and trees win.

Rightly so, B&N, as well as the publishing industry, is terrified of Amazon. But in the quest to drive more e-book sales, B&N risks overlooking one of its largest competitive advantages: its stores. Despite the profession that “our stores are going nowhere,” CEO William Lynch is focusing on the wrong areas of his retail spaces:

Back in New York, Mr. Lynch has been working to revamp the look of Barnes & Noble stores. Last year, the company expanded sections for toys and games and added shiny new display space for its Nook devices. In another sign of the digital revolution, Mr. Lynch expects to eliminate the dedicated sections for music and DVD’s within two years — while still selling some of them elsewhere in the stores. He also plans to experiment with slightly smaller stores.

I’m astounded by the shortsightedness. If these moves are taken to be true, Lynch will be ignoring the core tenets of the bookstore, cited elsewhere in the same article:

What publishers count on from bookstores is the browsing effect. Surveys indicate that only a third of the people who step into a bookstore and walk out with a book actually arrived with the specific desire to buy one.

B&N doesn’t need to rethink the book — they need to rethink the store. Expanding the size of toys & games doesn’t cut it. People go there to learn something new, be entertained, or find information.

So how do you rethink the retail experience and take advantage of 703 stores in 50 states? Pull an Apple. Even better, it’s an area where Amazon will be hard-pressed to compete.

Barnes and Noble 2.0: Creating Experiences
What large bookstores have always been successful at is their ability to provide access to thousands of topics in a single place. B&N should embrace this promise by dedicating 15-30% of floorspace to a theater/classroom. The Prince Street Apple store in New York City comes to mind — offering a comfortable auditorium where ideas can be shared or classes taught.

Want to learn to cook? Interested in WWII history? Taking a trip to Thailand? All of these answers sit on the bookshelves of B&N. Harnessing all of the knowledge in the space to get more people into the store is only the beginning. Providing a third place in a community where people can spend time learning is the bigger vision.

Educational content at scale
Providing in-depth classes, teachers and a curriculum is a huge undertaking but thankfully there is a growing trend in a new educational model. Instead of recruiting teachers for a strict curriculum, content will be driven by the community. SkillShare and Dabble, startups that allows anyone to teach or take a class, have proven there is demand for learning from our peers. “Teachers” (people with passion about a topic) offer their courses for a set price, attendees purchase tickets online and classes are taught in person. The company takes a portion of ticket sales.

Whether B&N would build the same technology or license/buy an existing company is up to them. They already have the advantage of an massive distribution system: email, retail, loyalty customers. This could see an additional revenue stream from their retail spaces and would match well to selling books that match the topic taught in each class.

Publishers need a new perspective
A seemingly misguided publishing president said, ”the biggest challenge is to give people a reason to step into Barnes & Noble stores in the first place. ‘They have figured out how to use the store to sell e-books,” she said of the company. “Now, hopefully, we can figure out how to make that go full circle and see how the e-books can sell the print books.’”

This overlooks two major opportunities for publishers. First, publishers, just like music executives a few years ago, have to realize that making money off of the content alone is a dying business. Packaging the paperbook as a limited edition, adding media or access to the author will become more common as ebooks drive down the price of books. B&N doesn’t have to just be a sales channel for paperbooks, it can be a personal plaform to sell the book, author and extra experiences.

Second, the key to a successful book is attracting an audience. Good writing is essential, but customers are key to making money. The publisher’s role is to distribute, promote and market the story to find the audience. Cutting through the noise of thousands of books on a bookshelf is no small feat, but there is a huge opportunity to reach the thousands of people walking into physical stores to make them part of that audience. Publishers should focus on how to grow the audience more than just the medium in which content sold.

How could book stores help with that? Imagine if media, video and voice recordings from the author came with the book. They could distribute the ideas of the author, her true voice and vision into rich experiences across the country. People would show up to be entertained and may leave as new readers. We’ve seen movies made from books drive more book sales, why not let every author have that chance using new media? Even a simple video of the author reading a passage is a low cost way to spread the message. If B&N can provide the audience and the instant gratification of retail, it seems like a win-win.

Bigger vision, bigger mission
In a country where unemployment borders double-digits and higher education is showing the signs of a bubble, there is a huge opportunity to create a third place to learn new skills and feed curiosity for new opportunities. Barnes & Noble already has an existing advantage of presence in communities across the country, so instead of being concerned about being disrupted by an online retailer, it should instead focus on disrupting another industry entirely: education.

Barnes and Noble shouldn’t just be thinking about reinventing the book, but rather, the bookstore. And perhaps in the future, my family will travel to Barnes and Noble on a Friday evening to spend an hour learning together — and, who knows — we might even buy a book.

I’ve made a habit to write when I have ideas about different industries. I’m going to start sharing them instead of keeping them in a folder. Comments, thoughts and advice on better writing are welcome! @br_ttany

Loving this post by Brittany! You can’t beat Amazon on price or selection when it comes to books & media, sorry. Physical spaces ruin that for you. So instead, double down on what physical spaces buy you - convenience, easy returns, events, a place to hide in the rain, meeting place for friends. What can B&N learn from Starbucks, Third Ward, and Apple if they cleared their entire floorspace and started over?

I’d love to be able to walk into a B&N, sign out a Nook, and wander around looking for something interesting. When I find an intriguing book or magazine, I scan the QR code on the book with the Nook and it instantly loads on screen for me to begin reading. If I like it, maybe I buy the book and read it on my Nook at home. Or, I walk out with the Nook that’s already in my hands, the price of the Nook charged to my credit card on file.

"And this community wasn’t imported from another network like a facebook’s graph. It was built..."

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:45:46 -0500

“And this community wasn’t imported from another network like a facebook’s graph. It was built purposefully for the Tumblr experience.”

- This answers the One Network To Rule Them All question for me. I’ve always said that I like keeping my “graphs” separated (SoundCloud, Instagram Tumblr, Twitter, Foursquare, etc) and for that reason I find myself participating in a variety of other networks, ten times more than I do on Facebook.

Tumblr has enabled me build my own personal community. I’ve found more value in seeing strangers become friends rather than adding people I last saw 15 years ago in school as friends.

Bijan Sabet: 6k posts later

(via david-noel)

Bijan’s point about curation is the key here. Curators are the gems of the internet. I would trade a million BuzzFeed readers for 1,000 great curators any day.

disoriented: 037 - Morning view On a clear morning I often have...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:37:36 -0500

disoriented:

037 - Morning view

On a clear morning I often have a wonderful view of the Olympic Mountains as I walk to the bus stop. This morning I actually took the opportunity to capture it - something I’ve been saying to myself for a long time now.

I miss this view so hard.

IAmA Former FullTime Zynga Engineer => quit 6 months ago. Not a contractor, (Z treats em like shit). : IAmA

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:14:29 -0500

IAmA Former FullTime Zynga Engineer => quit 6 months ago. Not a contractor, (Z treats em like shit). : IAmA:

Zynga sounds like the Monsanto of the web. Jesus.