tdoggette

It could probably be implemented in an easier way to install with a browser extension.

I disagree. The name of your competitor is one that draws the eye of people that are interested in the niche that you and your competitor fill, and if you really are better than them (or at least have different flaws), then it's likely some of that traffic will stick.

EDIT: I don't mean to say that "COMPETITOR sucks, use this instead" is a great direction to come at writing ads from, but rather something more like "COMPANY provides SERVICE better than COMPETITOR" might be effective.

James Randi is a professional skeptic: he's the one behind the million dollar prize for anyone that can demonstrate the paranormal under reasonable conditions.

There's certainly legitimate causes to doubt AGW, but the Petition Project is not among them. Frankly, I'm shocked to see Randi engage in such a blatant appeal to authority, and an irrelevant authority (that is, scientists primarily not in the climate field) at that.

The objective here is to destroy the Earth, as specified in the article. Sure, there are lots of ways to kill everything on the planet, but it'll still be there when you're done.

This sounds interesting. It's too bad that I don't want to spend 15 minutes on it. Video takes ages compared to text, and you can't skim it, easily excerpt it, or copy it.

Three pages, no pictures.

The only pictures I can find are small and generic on their website. If no one's held it and written a review and taken pictures of it, it doesn't exist.

You've gotta know the syntax or you'll spend so much time looking things up that you'll never get anything done.

I just mean that I don't see a benefit of using Twitter as a delivery system.

An interface that weird had better be devastatingly well-implemented, or people will just be confused.

Remember the end goal here is to deliver content to the user that they want to spend time consuming. Why use Twitter for anything but another way to find content?

Nah, the only categorization that really needs to be done is by topic. It's easy to tell if something is, say, a tech article, or tech/programming, or tech/linux, based on source and keywords. If your algorithm did that once per item that's in anyone's feed, everything else is refinement. Ideally, a human won't need to touch it at all. Even if the machine gets it wrong, it could be corrected with a "this is in the wrong place" button. In any case, an article shouldn't rise too high in any category that it's not relevant for.

Here's another way to approach the user's end of it: have them log in to their Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al, and shove all of it into a single stream. Let them filter by source, topic, relevance, time, and anything else you can implement. Record their preferences by watching what items they click through or spend time on or interact with, and your relevance sort gets better. Add other users' data, and you have a fantastic recommendation engine without ever making anyone rate anything.

Another problem to solve with current news reading is duplication. Even if you do want to read about Tiger Woods, there's a lot of duplication in the echo chamber of the internet.

He correctly identifies a problem, but no amount of interdevice communication is going to tell me which 5 of boingboing's posts are most likely to be of personal interest.

Here's what'd help me with the bottleneck: a unified inbox with a wicked smart relevance algorithm. VR? Probably not.

You should give this post a useful title.

Also, what do you mean by "signage"?

The title is "On 99designs" and the article contains no swear words.

That's an excuse I'd accept for someone's everyday views: "eh, they probably never thought about it and just went with society's default."

When a philosopher sits down and writes about their perspective on a topic, it's a safe assumption that they thought about their conclusions before publishing them.

I use a Blackberry, and when I select news.yc from my history, it automatically puts http://www in front of it, and I have to remove it every time.

We're all on a site centered around the idea that we want to be them, but that's simply not the case everywhere. Sure, you may own stock in your company and be great pals with 'em, but what about normal people who work for large organizations that pay them by the hour and screw them over?

I predict that almost all of the reaction will be "oh, that's interesting, but I'd never use it." I also predict that CNN will at some point in the next week have this in their rotation of stories.

Maybe they've finally made javascript so fast that it distorts time itself.

www.anonib.com/BOOKCHAN/

How does it work?

As with almost all projects like this, I really really want to see the UI. Are there mockups somewhere?

Yes, but Pfizer isn't engaging in large-scale deception that costs billions of dollars and risks millions of lives when they show a car smashing through a billboard that says "Erectile Dysfunction" on it.

I'm a fan of the big magazine-layout blog posts that seem to be coming into fashion. It's very engaging and effective at communication, more so than an article would be on the same topic in the same medium.

The main reason is that almost all flash websites are a huge pain in the ass to use, you can't link within them, you (usually) can't copy text out of them, and they generally put whiz-bang visuals above the users' ability to, y'know, use them.

It is not often that one finds a particular discourse shot through with the sort of threads, intertwined silver filaments, that touch at once on so many personal interests and gather so many errant thoughts into a larger whole that the emotional aftermath is best characterized as the shock of a sort of theoretical unification.

What?

That looks very slick. I'll be trying it out for sure, but I had a different idea about how to organize something like that. I'm going to start sketching.