Jeffrey McManus

The New Thing

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Entries Tagged as 'Web/Tech'

BART Departures on Facebook

March 5th, 2009 · 2 Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, Facebook, Web/Tech, Work

Late last night we released a new Facebook app, BART Departures.
You can use this app to see when the next BART train is leaving from the station of your choice. Once you’ve found the train you plan to take, you can click on the “I’m taking this train!” link and we’ll post a little note [...]

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Battle Plans for Newspapers

February 10th, 2009 · No Comments · News, Web/Tech

Excellent piece on the NY Times debate blog today on the future of journalism. I’m seeing a lot of these discussions both on newspaper sites and on sites that cover the future of journalism like the Nieman Foundation. It’s great that these things are getting discussed, although as I’ve mentioned before it seems like there [...]

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Advertisers Face Hurdles on Social Networking Sites

January 2nd, 2009 · No Comments · Business, Collaboration, Content, Community, Web/Tech

Link: Advertisers Face Hurdles on Social Networking Sites
And when they try to take advantage of new “social advertising,” extending their commercial message to a member’s friends, their ads will be noticed, all right, but not necessarily favorably. Members are understandably reluctant to become shills. IDC, the technology research firm, published a study last month that [...]

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Free Advice: How to Save Journalism

December 9th, 2008 · 4 Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, Deep Thoughts, News, Web/Tech

On Twitter this morning I was getting cranky at an organization that desperately needs to retain me as a consultant but won’t for whatever reason. I approached the point where I was about to dispense free advice (which violates rule #2 of consulting).
Amy thought that I was putting out a general call for free advice, [...]

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New Platform Consulting Products: Amazon and Facebook

October 1st, 2008 · 1 Comment · Amazon, Business, Collaboration, Content, Community, Facebook, Virtualization, Web/Tech, Work

Just posted three new categories of consulting practices over on the consulting web site:

Facebook (application strategy, corporate presence and application development)
Amazon Web Services (focusing on their S3 storage and EC2 hosting products)

The Facebook and Amazon practices actually aren’t new, but we’ve packaged them up in the form of consulting practices and put them on the [...]

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ASP.NET Ajax Will Incorporate JQuery

September 28th, 2008 · 1 Comment · .NET, Web/Tech

From the most excellent blog of the most excellent Scott Guthrie comes news that Microsoft will incorporate and ship the outstanding JQuery Javascript/AJAX library in a future version of ASP.NET Ajax.
This is a tremendous win for JQuery, which already has the momentum of a runaway freight train in a space that has been profoundly fragmented [...]

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What’s In It For Doogie Howser?

July 21st, 2008 · 53 Comments · Film, Movies, TV, Web/Tech

Writer/director Joss Whedon released a fun little project that he worked up during the actor’s writers’ strike. “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” is a terrific story that I watched several times, shared with the wife and kid, etc. As I watched it for the second time, I got to thinking about the business behind this, since [...]

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How Not To Steal User Preferences

June 4th, 2008 · No Comments · Adobe, Web/Tech

Dear Adobe,
Software is only allowed to display a dialog box like this once:

If you insist on displaying this dialog every single time your software launches, your software is officially “stupid”. Eventually I will want to stop using it. Consider placing a “Don’t show this again” check box at the bottom there, please.
Love,
Jeffrey
Update: Hey, it looks [...]

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DialIdol Predicts Call-In Vote Winners

May 22nd, 2008 · No Comments · TV, Web/Tech

Link: DialIdol.com – Measuring the busy signal
DialIdol is a piece of software you can install on your computer that uses a modem to auto-dial call-in numbers for contest shows like American Idol. The interesting twist is that the software records whether it receives a busy signal each time it calls in to vote. The software [...]

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Capitalism > Piracy

May 16th, 2008 · 1 Comment · Web/Tech

Link: Frustrating the Pirates
Capitalism, properly applied, will beat the rebels every time.

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