“The adage that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ is truer than ever on the Internet”
Ask 37signals: How do you process credit cards?
“So, credit card processing and set up and all that stuff is a real pain in the ass. It’s definitely intimidating to get started. The industry just feels dirty. So many companies offering merchant accounts, so many companies providing gateway software and integration, so many deals and discounts and conditions and terms and acronyms. What do we need? Who can we trust? How does it all work?”
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Greg Storey on The Blog Council
“After six years big business still has no idea what to do with this blog thing.
The Blog Council, a professional community of top global brands dedicated to promoting best practices in corporate blogging, officially launched today. Founding members include the leading companies from a diverse range of business sectors: AccuQuote, Cisco Systems, The Coca-Cola Company, Dell, Gemstar-TV Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, and Wells Fargo.
Oh, that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Of course, these are the companies that should know right? I mean they’ve been using Trapper Keepers and Daytimers all their lives, so blogs are just like that right? A neat folder system for your mind-thoughts?”
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Information R/evolution
One of Michael Wesch’s new videos: “This video explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.”
Getting a startup right the second time
“The road to success is hard. We all know this, but still hope for the quick success of a Twitter instead of the starting and stopping of a flickr (started as a game). ImThere is a startup that started and stopped, and David Gorman documents their eventual success.”
On self-publishing
“Regrettably I don’t have as much time as I’d like to author this article in polished format, but I wanted to put my thoughts out there while they’re fresh. You’d think I’d have time to slow down now that the book is done, but with running a job site, preparing material for several presentations before the year is over (including a ginormous workshop), maintaining this site, oh and a family and full-time job, “busy” is a severe understatement… I could probably summarize my thoughts in one sentence: The process of self-publishing isn’t as glamorous as some (myself) thought it would be.
One evening shortly after the book was published, I recounted with Suzanne everything I had done over the last 10 months to go from an idea for a book to a finished, published book. Having already co-authored one book through a publisher, I compared the experience of self-publishing, and here’s roughly what I described…”
Yahoo! Design Innovation Team: I. you. he. she.
“This application example uses live questions from Yahoo! Answers to generate an overall, up-to-the-minute impression of people’s raw feelings and thoughts on the network. Typically such language visualization applications screen out common words, such as our Answers Cloud. When we look at such pronoun words and see how often they are used on Yahoo! Answers, an overall pattern of common meaning and usage emerges.”
Are Big Ad Agencies So Clueless That Corporations Should Avoid Them?
“I’ve been spending much time with ad agencies and focus groups lately and can only conclude that–with some exceptions–they are mostly clueless. Three years ago they had a traditional knowledge about consumers but didn’t know much about social networking and web 2.0 technology. Today, most of them don’t know about consumers and don’t know much about social networking and web 2.0 technology either. Mainstream ad agencies have one refrain–one message to their corporate clients–do social networking, do social networking, do social networking.”
What Excessive Pay Package?
“In 1970, The average CEO earned 28 times more than the average worker. Despite all the recent noise around reining in runaway CEO pay, the gap has widened drastically.”
Back to the Future of the Web
“10 years from now what will we look back on as important to the web? That’s what we asked 16 top designers, developers and entrepreneurs… We asked them all this question:”
What’s one thing about today’s web (company, technology, movement, etc.) that you think we’ll look back on in 10 years and say ‘that was important’ or ‘that was really a turning point in the history of the web’?
