Blog Archives

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The Oatmeal is one of the top webcomics out there. Matthew talks about creating the site, his ideas and how he drove traffic to it. While sharing his favorite comic strips, he offers up some advice on how to create successful viral marketing campaigns.

(via How to Get 5 Million People to Read Your Website by Matthew Inman – youtube.com)

I think this mostly serves as an advert for The Oatmeal, which is very much against the spirit of Ignite. Still, there are some good tips in here.

(via @asittingduck)

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A while ago I asked if there were any good fractal generator apps for the Mac.

I’ve found Oxidizer so far, but it looks a little limited (although I haven’t actually tried it yet).

Well, I was wrong. It’s brilliant. I’m hoping to produce a series of images using it, and maybe even some animations. I’ve also installed Electric Sheep as my screensaver (multiplatform).

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Reddit has an interesting ask me anything thread running at the moment: I run ThatHigh.com and it pays my rent in San Francisco. AMA. Someone asked how the owner built up traffic and established the advertising, prompting a candid reply…

How to build a social entertainment website:

  1. Build site
  2. fake lots of user activity
  3. steal a tiny bit of content from all around the internet
  4. reddit ads ($20)
  5. stumbleupon ads ($5)
  6. put easily shareable links on each story side note: I put facebook “like” buttons on each story when they unveiled their opengraph stuff and facebook referrers skyrocketed, so that was awesome.

For advertisers, I literally email them out of the blue. I had a seed seller in the UK for awhile that didn’t pan out, so he quit. I’ve had lots of humor sites advertise, some hydroponics stuff, and while prop 19 was under the media’s eye, adsense was giving me TONS of high CPC ads. I made $3k during that time period in one month. It was nice.

I use Google Doubleclick for Publishers to manage ads, I use freshbooks (the free plan) to charge advertisers with my paypal and google checkout accounts. One time someone wired me money from the UK.

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These animations by the RSA are wonderful. I haven’t seen them all yet, but these two were also very interesting:

  • Smile or Die: Acclaimed journalist, author and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich explores the darker side of positive thinking.
  • Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us.

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I had already written multiple Twitter bots by this time so I decided to just use some of my existing code to poll Twitter’s search API. Essentially, the “documents” I mentioned above were actually tweets containing the terms “book” or “books.” Two and a half days later I had a working prototype that could generate a book recommendation from a given tweet. It was at this time that I added steps 5 and 6:

Tag URLs returned from Amazon’s ItemSearch with an affiliate ID; and Reply to the tweeting user with their new book suggestion

Four months later and I had generated over $7,000 in sales for Amazon with over $400 commission for myself.

(via How I Made Money Spamming Twitter with Contextual Book Suggestions – charleshooper.net)

Read this is you are determined to build a Twitter keyword spambot. The author throttled the amount of tweets, recorded usernames so he wouldn’t annoy the same person twice and generally did his best to build a relevant spambot with good etiquette.

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The Royal Pingdom blog has been measuring the downtime of five different blogging services. They are very sympathetic towards Tumblr’s position on this list, and the result will be of no surprise to anyone who uses the service. I hope they sort their problems out too.

The other standout on the list was Blogger, with no downtime over the two month testing period recorded at all!

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Top 10 overused buzzwords in LinkedIn Profiles in the USA – 2010

  1. Extensive experience
  2. Innovative
  3. Motivated
  4. Results-oriented
  5. Dynamic
  6. Proven track record
  7. Team player
  8. Fast-paced
  9. Problem solver
  10. Entrepreneurial

(via blog.linkedin.com)

I am a highly motivated team player with extensive experience producing innovative, dynamic, fast paced and results-oriented work. As an innovative problem solver with a proven track record and a dynamic entrepreneurial streak, you will soon discover that I am basically the all singing, all dancing crap of the world.

Job please!

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An interesting Time article about Shawn ‘Napster’ Fanning, DVD Jon, Justin ‘WinAmp’ Frankel, Bram ‘BitTorrent’ Cohen and the entertainment industry apocalypse that never happened.

It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy. Napster, Gnutella and BitTorrent never attained the user-friendliness that Apple products have, and nobody vets the content on file-sharing networks, so while the number of files on offer is enormous, the files are rotten with ads, porn, spyware and other garbage. When Jobs offered us the easy way out, we took it. Freedom is overrated, apparently — at least where digital media are concerned.

via The Men Who Stole the World – time.com

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Datamoshing is a form of glitch art which occurs when ‘the I-frames or key-frames of a temporally compressed video are removed, causing frames from different video sequences to bleed together‘.

HOW TO DATAMOSH (See also: PART 2: ENTER THE P-FRAME and PART 3: THE DATAMOSH ACTUALLY HAPPENS)

They guy behind these videos seems to have popularised the technique with a Chairlift music video for Evident Utensil, but Sony would rather you didn’t see it.

(Shh, it’s on Metacafe.)

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Very cool! Though I’d be reluctant to use one, because who knows what nasties could be on the stick?

I am pleased to preview ‘Dead Drops’ a new project which I started off as part of my ongoing EYEBEAM residency in NYC the last couple weeks. ‘Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. I am ‘injecting’ USB flash drives into walls, buildings and curbs accessable to anybody in public space. You are invited to go to these places (so far 5 in NYC) to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your files and date. Each dead drop contains a readme.txt file explaining the project. ‘Dead Drops’ is still in progress, to be continued here and in more cities. Full documentation, movie, map and ‘How to make your own dead drop’ manual coming soon! Stay tuned.

via “Dead Drops” preview – datenform.de

I wonder what it would take to make a wi-fi dead drop?

See also:

Dead drop (Wikipedia)

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Playbutton is a wonderful idea that would make music collectable again and give artists back the ability to sell an album experience instead of just letting people cherry-pick individual tracks. Music piracy would still be pretty straightforward, but this idea taps into the desire to own and display something that represents what you love. They could be pretty cheap too and – so long as the audio quality is good – be a huge hit.

Would be nice to see a design with an iPod shuffle-like clip instead of a pin.

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I just found out that Apple have a page on their site dedicated to technical drawings of their ‘iProduct’ range, including the iPhone 4. It’s for accessory makers, but would also be handy for creating 3D models, if you like that kind of thing. Which I do.

There’s a goldmine of resources I didn’t realise they had here, including hardware icons and Mac logo, as well as tons of developer stuff, which is really the point of the site.

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Web Seer is a fascinating tool that lets you explore what questions people are typing into Google, and compare it to other questions to see where they overlap. Admittedly, I can’t think of a real world use for this, but it’s fun to play with. If you find an interesting comparison, please leave a link in the comments!

More info on the Web Seer project page.

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Citing usage from 1949, the OED calls this mark the dog’s bollocks, which it defines as, “typogr. a colon followed by a dash, regarded as forming a shape resembling the male sexual organs.” This is why I love scrounging around the linguistic scrap heap that is the OED. I always come across a little gold. And by “gold,” I mean, “vulgar, 60-year-old emoticons.”

(via The Secret History of Typography in the Oxford English Dictionary – bygonebureau.com)

A great article for budding archetypists and palaeotypographists!

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Mark Shuttleworth has kicked up a bit of a storm by apparently saying that Linux was “hard to explain to girls”. There is an open letter post about this on the Geek Feminism Blog, followed by a hell of a lot of comments on the subject. It seems to boil down to ‘he didn’t really mean it like that‘, ‘it’s not okay to say that kind of thing, even if you didn’t mean it like that‘ and ‘has anyone seen this video or a transcript anyway?‘

Anyway, I’ve made a little graphic that Ubuntu could use for their 11.10 release if they wanted to tackle this issue. :)

(Please note this was produced with a high level of sarcasm and irony. If you are offended, please look up those words before commenting!)

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Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.