Wednesday, August 01, 2007

I Had a Wii Old time

I was over at my good friend Greg’s house for a game of poker last Saturday night. After that was over I finally got to play with Greg’s new Wii set which he got for his birthday (and which I got him a bunch of accessories and games for!).

I had read a lot about the wii of course, but like a lot of groundbreaking products you’ve just got to use them...and the Wii did not disappoint. Like the original iPod interface it takes something that has done before and gives it a whole new spin. The way you can use the controller to point and navigate to the screen completely caught me by surprise. And it wasn’t hard to do.

In many way I think the Wii and the iPod are similar. Both focus on doing one thing very well, without trying to do everything. In the Wii’s case high resolution is not a concern, an innovative way to interact with the game is. On the iPod and innovative interface and ease-of-use with iTunes was the winner, no having an FM-radio.

Good stuff. Although I did have Wii arm and shoulder the next day.

Posted by Hadley Stern on 08/01 at 07:11 PM
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Sunday, July 29, 2007

Facebook vs. Linkedin

Because I am a working professional out of school for a decade now LinkedIn has been my social networking tool of choice up until now. Facebook was a closed network for the longest time, targeted first at Harvard students, then at other schools, and now to the whole world.

I joined facebook a few weeks ago and have already caught up with some old college and high-school friends. Facebook has more of a folksy, friendly feel to it. I’ve never had a myspace page, or even dabbled with it much, but I imagine Facebook as something between the strict professionalism of LinkedIn, and the anarchy of myspace.

That said the overlapping of the Facebook and LinkedIn is a little frustrating to me. Not that this hasn’t happened before. I still have profiles on Friendster, orkut, and I think O’Reilly tried something in this space too. But with Facebook and LinkedIn the overlap seems that much more glaring. After all collegues, in the loose definition of the word “friend”, often become Friends. And friends often become Collegues. Indeed Robert Scoble recently covered facebook in a way that gives it an entirely work-based, networking bias.

I’m not sure which one should subsume to which. Whether faceBook should just have a LinkedIn module, or whether LinkedIn should have a more faceBook like feel. Either way, for now, it looks like I’ll stick with both.

Posted by Hadley Stern on 07/29 at 06:47 PM
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Blogging Here Again

So, it’s been a while. But the itch is there again. No promises on how long this will last! But I’m going to blog here again about things I see across the web, and maybe, even, outside of the internets. We’ll see!

Posted by Hadley Stern on 07/29 at 08:44 AM
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Saturday, March 18, 2006

The Great Comment Count

Jason Kottke has a piece about stories that get record numbers of comments. In my experience writing and running Apple Matters there is a great thrill in seeing stories take off with a ton of comments. Indeed, the thrill is so good I sometimes found myself thinking about it while writing. I could also tell that some of the other writers on Apple Matters were doing the same thing. This is dangerous. Trying to write for commenters leads to stories that aren’t genuine.

So I decided to set a policy for the site and make it clear to everything. As a publisher I would much rather have a well-written piece on Apple Matters that doesn’t get a lot (or any) comments than a story that is just inflammatory.

That said, the site is as much about the readers (and commenters) as much as it is about the writers. Building community is important, and if stories aren’t getting any comments (with the occasional exception) I feel like we aren’t engaging our reader base.

Not sure though, care to comment!

Posted by Hadley Stern on 03/18 at 07:30 AM
applematters • Blogging • community • (2) Comments • (1) Trackbacks • Permalink

Friday, March 10, 2006

What is your EQ?

A great piece on Guy Kawasaki’s site about entrepreneurial quotient. I got most of them right. Give it a spin! It would be great to see a follow-up quiz that focussed on questions for the lone entrepreneur who is starting out at a smaller level.

Posted by Hadley Stern on 03/10 at 09:24 AM
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New Ways of Searching

Buzzwords aside sometimes examples are the best way to describe what Web 2.0 is about. A great example is search.

In the old days (which aren’t, really that old, they are still present and with us!) the best place to find something was a search engine. For example, if I wanted to research the Avian flu virus I could go to Google or Yahoo and type in Avian Flu Virus. The search results that I am given are provided by a proprietary algorithm that the search engine sites have worked thousands of hours to tweak, tune, and twiddle.

In the Web 2.0 model I can go a couple of different places to find information about the Avian flu virus. A great example is Technorati. Technorati indexes the real live web by checking the RSS feeds of the blogosphere (as well as the traditional press) constantly. Unlike Google which goes out and spiders sites on an un-real-time basis Technorait is the real time web. Let’s take a look at the same search on Technorati. The latest story is about the Avian flu virus is 11 minutes old, and the rest are all within the hour. Must more timely than Google. This is all powered by the ubiquity of RSS.

Another great example of Web 2.0 is searching through tag sites, the best known being delicious.com (recently acquired by Yahoo). Here websites are tagged as interesting by the larger delicious community. This is human-rendered search on a large scale. Real time search is not the result here, but filtered links are. Look at our same search on delicious. We don’t have the 100’s of pages of results that Google provides, but we do have a filtered list by the community.

Both these examples (and there are many more!) are examples of typical use cases being disrupted and enhanced by Web 2.0 technologies and phenomena. In this case RSS and community. Have any other examples?

Posted by Hadley Stern on 03/10 at 09:20 AM
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Friday, March 03, 2006

Newsvine Launches

I had a peek at this before it launched and was very intrigued. Newsvine is up and running. What is interesting about Newsvine is that they have taken the model that Digg and Delicious are well known for, community-based tagging of information, and taken it to the next level. You can participate in Newsvine by just tagging, but you can also create your own Newsvine page where your links will appear, and, you can also use it as your own blog. What is interesting is that Newsvine is planning on sharing any ad revenue from your Newsvine page (90 percent, which is a nice cut!) with you.

This model of allowing people to not only tag content, but create unique pages out of it and add their own content could either be the next evolution in tagging, or simply just too much. At the very list the model of taking Digg to the next level and not only showing stories based on how many vote they get, but exposing the first few sentence of the stories content is a step in the right direction.

Posted by Hadley Stern on 03/03 at 11:49 AM
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Saturday, February 25, 2006

The Power of Digg

Recently Apple Matters got digged, slashdotted and cneted (is that the word?). What is interesting is that the so-called slashdot affect is no longer what it once was. Don’t get me wrong, I love being slashdotted! But Digg has really taken off, and getting on page 1 of Digg can be greater than getting slashdotted. In fact in January Apple Matters reached Digg Page 1 three times, and each time the server came down. This finally prompted me to do something I should have done a long time ago, which is move to a dedicated server.

Servers aside what I think the tremendous growth of Digg shows is the power of community. Slashdot and it’s ilk (including Apple Matters) are like the Web 1.0 version of community. Digg allows people to submit stories and comments, like Slashdot, but it puts the community front and center. Indeed all Digg is is a platform for community. This makes me think of the next evolution of Apple Matters. Right now we have a great ever-growing community but should I be thinking of taking a Digg like model and becoming more of a platform the Apple community.

Posted by Hadley Stern on 02/25 at 08:18 PM
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