Rocketboom. Is this funny? Is this a digital culture version of the Onion? Do you even understand this humor? Or is this a good primer for digital understanding? You be the judge. I’m just dumping my bookmarks. : 0
At the very least, it was worth it to understand the genius behind Regretsy (interview at ROFLcon), wasn’t it?
Well, okay, so maybe you won’t save the world, but you may at least contribute to doing a little good in the world. Cause World is sort of like FourSquare or Gowalla but instead of checking into bars to try to some day become Mayor! and maybe, (just maybe) get a free appetizer, you check-in as you visit participating retailers. And for every check-in the retailers log Karma Credits on your behalf. The Karma Credits from all the users who have checked into that store get bundled together and the retailers does some good deed such as offset carbon emissions or contribute to disaster relief efforts in Haiti.
The dark side (and we know there’s always a dark side….) is that über Evil Empire retailers such as P&G, Citi and Kraft Foods will likely be fed all your personal information and you will probably be marketed to until the day you die. And if you scan products (one of the “features” of the app) as you go, they will then have intimate knowledge of your product preferences (but you’ll log double Karma Credits!). It’s all so direct-marketing yucky that it’s hard for me to even tell you about this app. But no one ever said saving the world would be easy, folks.
The upside is that even if you sell your soul to the people who made vibrating razors with 5 (or is it 6 now) blades, it’s still a better use of your time than just checking into FourSquare. Honestly, is there a bigger waste of time than that? Oh, right. There’s Twitter.
So, what do you think? Would you share your every move and product preferences in order to contribute a teeny, tiny bit of credit toward a cause they would probably already support just for the tax write-off anyway? Hey, it’s your personal information. You decide.
Readability is a tool that enables you to read an article online naked. No, you don’t have to be naked (and if you are, I don’t want to know anything about it). This simple tool makes any web page naked, stripping all the junk and reformatting the page to the way it should have been in the first place: no ads, not junk, no mess. Just text formatted to be easy on the eyes. Some sites, like the New York Times, for instance, endeavor to put content in an easily digestible format. Most of the rest as we all know, not so much.
Readability is an easy install. Add it to your browser toolbar and then voila any article/page you choose will be stripped, simplified and made easier to read.
This becomes this…
Client: “…It’s our social media strategy. It’s fucked…But we are so dumb that we don’t realize that using social media is as easy as pissing on a rock. And free too. Please save us from our worthless selves. We will pay whatever you say…”
Social Media Guru: “…Show me to your computer. I’ll hook your Twitter to your Facebook and plug your blog feed into my reader. Then, only if you’re good, I’ll ask my friends to follow you and be nice to you and maybe event comment your posts until I tell them to stop or they get bored of your endless meandering crap…”
I attended SXSW 2010 (see my earlier parody post) and without boring you with all the gory details, I thought it sort of sucked. I just wasn’t inspired. There were very few “big ideas” and it was a lot of the same old, same old: FourSquare this… Twitter that… I felt there was just very little quality and tt seemed like no one had really reviewed the proposed sessions before accepting them. It was my first SXSW experience and prior to going I had been told:
“SXSW isn’t about the conference sessions, it’s about the hallway conversations.”
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