Posts filed under “tech”
Why the wait on Google+ for businesses? Ads.
So far, Google+ is for people only. Google has advised businesses, organizations, and brands — basically, any entity that isn’t an individual human being — to hold off on setting up a Google+ presence. Eventually though, Google will allow businesses to join. Over at VentureBeat, Jolie O’Dell quotes a nameless Google spokesperson: While Google is [...]
Ess Ess Dee
The first time I heard the virtues of solid-state drives extolled was on One Thing Well. Then, Gruber and Dan Benjamin kept mentioning them on The Talk Show. My pal Thomas started swearing by SSDs. And when Khoi Vinh blogged about his SSD experience, I finally broke down and ordered a Mercury Extreme Pro SSD [...]
Disruptive digital technologies don’t come from the incumbents
According to Barbara van Schewick, disruptive digital technologies don’t come from incumbents. As she said in a recent Berkman talk: Classifieds were revolutionized by Craigslist and eBay, not by the newspapers. Music distribution was revolutionized by Napster, Kazaa, Bittorrent, or iTunes, not by the music industry. The commercial potential of the World Wide Web was [...]
How to be smart about buying an ebook reader, digital camera, or HDTV
This week, my CBC Radio tech column focused on holiday gadget-buying. I looked at three gadget categories: ebook readers, digital cameras, and HDTVs. The focus wasn’t on what to buy, but rather, how to be smart about buying it. I do my columns eighteen times every Tuesday (on most CBC Radio One afternoon shows). Here’s [...]
Poking your eye out with a pencil
From WYNC’s On The Media, Bob Garfield on online advertising, behavioural targeting, and the danger of surveillance: The threat, while looming, is like poking your eye out with a pencil. Enabling conditions do not guarantee the worst outcome. Amen.
App stores jump out of your pocket, onto your desktop
Updated: Download MP3 or listen below. This week’s CBC Radio tech column is all about app stores. They’ve been incredibly successful on mobile devices, and now, both Apple and Google are set to launch app stores for desktop computers. It’s widely anticipated that the Google Chrome Web Store will launch today, and there are rumours [...]
Archiving GeoCities: my full interview with Jason Scott
About a year ago, Yahoo shut down GeoCities. Before the site was shuttered forever, a group called the Archive Team decided to grab as much GeoCities content as possible. They got almost a terabyte, and now plan to release it all as a torrent. My CBC Radio tech column this Tuesday will be about GeoCities, [...]
More on password security
An excellent hypothetical scenario that underscores just how important it is to use different strong passwords for everything: You have email account x@y.com, which is your main email. You have the password XYZ, which you use for everything. You register at paypal with your email address x@y.com and use your normal password. You then register [...]
Who owns a remix?
If you don’t know Auto-Tune the News, it’s a series of comedy remix videos by The Gregory Brothers. Most recently, they remixed this local news clip of Antoine Dodson, speaking out about his sister’s sexual assault: into the viral hit “Bed Intruder Song”: Now, they’re selling the song on iTunes, and it’s flying off the [...]
Why I don’t want you to tag me on Facebook Places
This morning, Facebook rolled out Places, their location-based service that lets users “check in” to places in the real world. Think Foursquare, Gowalla, et al, but on a much larger scale. Places is only available in the US right now, but still, that’s 131 million users. Here’s what I find particularly scary about this announcement: [...]