New research suggests that social media is a bubble – how long before it bursts? These are heady days for social media interests. Facebook and Twitter run rampant, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vine and Instagram are booming, Ello is all kinds of interesting, and somehow or another Google+ and StumbleUpon are still hanging in there. While there isn’t literally a new social net rolling
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What a fucking day. Item: Congress has tentatively agreed on a bill that will keep the government from shutting down. Now, there’s a lot wrong with it, starting with the fact that the Republicans are insisting on a huge payoff to Wall Street, basically holding the best interests of the people hostage to the best interests of the insanely rich. The smart money
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There’s been some back and forth here in the last couple of weeks about Ello, the new social network. If you’re on Ello, or are thinking of joining, here are some people you might want to investigate and possibly follow. Let’s start with the S&R folks. @docdenny is, as you know, god of macro photography, and lately he’s been experimenting with
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In the last week or so I have seen an amazing amount of energy devoted to burying Ello. Mind you, it hasn’t launched yet. Still in beta. These folks are trying to kill it before the doors officially open. What’s weird is the range of attacks I’m seeing. Business insiders patting it on the head and ‘splaining why, noble as
Read moreA friend of mine has been using Facebook to solicit contributions for his son’s school fundraiser. He’s not alone – I’ve seen more and more of this lately, and perhaps you have, too. Last night he exploded – apparently despite all his pleas, he got no response. As in, zero. He went off on his FB friends in ways that
Read moreA month ago most of you had probably never heard of Ello. By now a lot of you have. And at the pace the news has been getting around in the past few days, this time next week even hermits will know about it. The short version is that Ello is the brainchild of a team of designers and developers
Read moreThe public interest is what the public is interested in, bitches. Thanks to Facebook, we all see new memes every day. Some of them are funny, some insightful, and a lot are of the preaching to the choir variety, which even though they’re right as rain, they occasionally get tiresome. Like a lot of us, frustrated as hell with the
Read moreThe best way to honor our fallen heroes is to make sure there aren’t any more of them. Today I honor our war dead, but I’m mad as hell that our leaders, corrupt and sociopathic as they so often are, have killed so many without cause. I’m enraged that some of these deaths are regarded by our society as less worthy of
Read moreWhere there’s smoke, there’s a troll with a smoke machine.
Read moreChildless in Seattle? Not for long. Jim, let’s meet those bachelorettes. If you were to review my OK Cupid profile, you’d find this: And, just to be clear, this: So today, OK Cupid e-mailed me this:
Read moreIt was 20 years ago today in Boulder, CO. Do you remember where you were on April 1, 1994? I do. I was sitting at a computer in an apartment at the corner of Colorado and Foothills in Boulder, launching this really new thing called a “Web site.” Today there are over 932 million of them (and counting) in the
Read moreIABC Communicator of the Year has a pattern of bad behavior. I’m not sure “I’m sorry” is enough. We all screw up. When we do, it’s our responsibility to acknowledge it and apologize to those our mistake in someway damaged, hurt, disadvantaged or inconvenienced. Hopefully we learn and move on, never repeating the mistake. But sometimes … sometimes apologies are
Read moreWomen – and men – in online dating communities are acting like goddamned sociopaths. This needs to stop. Okay, not all of you. But some of you. Men, too – I’m guessing this isn’t just women. See if you recognize yourselves below. On multiple occasions I’ve been talking to women I met through OK Cupid. Things going great, we really
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The nation gives thanks … for what? I was never a William Burroughs fan, but I nonetheless find myself thinking about his 1986 “Thanksgiving Prayer,” surely one of the most caustic (and insightful) takes on our great American holiday. I’m in this sort of mood for a reason. Or two, or three. First off, you may have noticed all the
Read moreIn order for an online dating service to work, it has to reliably move people past the merely physical and help them perceive their match’s real attractiveness. In a post a couple weeks ago I mused about how the online dating world is plagued by what I guess we’ll call the “physical attraction problem.” I touched of a bit of controversy, both
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lullaby pit 