Getting enough data to make local recommendations has proved tough. A restaurant reviewer writing for a local newspaper might write a hundred or so reviews a year. Zagat might cover several thousand in its printed books. Yelp provides near universal coverage in the United States, but it still doesn’t have enough information to provide useful recommendations.
Lucius Fox
Chief Executive Officer of Wayne Enterprises
Tumblr’s first EIC on the blog platform becoming more of a publishing hub
The chances are, you have a Facebook profile yourself: by July, a billion people will have one. But have you thought about what it’s doing to real life? Robert Lane Greene reports, starting with a visit to Facebook’s offices…
Reblogged from theatlantic|214 notes
Who, Where, How We Work: The Intersection of Culture, Workplace, and Social Media
Definitely worth a read.
(via wanderingwanderingstar)
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Collaboration is overrated. At least the word is.
What people want is “community,” engagement and highly effective opportunities to work with highly effective people who can get things done. And if those highly effective people are kind of cool and kind of smart they will become your “work friends.”
Then they will become your Facebook friends and you will have Thanksgiving Dinner with them because it’s way more fun and much less stressful than hanging with your own family. And you will be happier at work, and therefore stay longer and then that big nameless, faceless, well-branded corporate entity that signs your paycheck will continue to prosper and thrive, making bazillions of dollars, and then it can hire a phenomenal design firm to build a “campus” for its happy workers, who will stay longer and work more but won’t mind as much because they have a dry cleaner, fitness center and their best friends all within 10 feet of their desk. See how this works?
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London’s Made By Many sought to look past the legacy of articles and pages in its redesign of ITV News.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., tells Politico that he’s drafting a law that would ban companies and government agencies from seeking access to the private Facebook accounts of potential employees. He says social-network screening of that type ought to be outlawed just like polygraph tests for job applicants. When the Associated Press earlier this week reported that some hiring processes now involve asking job-seekers for a peek inside their private social networks, there were plenty of questions raised about the legality of such practices. After all, it’s one thing for recruiters and other HR types to check out a public LinkedIn profile, it’s another for them to ask people for their logins and passwords and be able to look for incriminating photos or political musings shared with some friends. A law professor interviewed by the AP likened to “requiring someone’s house keys”; an employment lawyer told the Los Angeles Times she “would argue that it’s an invasion of privacy and violation of anti-discrimination law”; and an ACLU lawyer notes: “You’d be appalled if your employer insisted on opening up your postal mail to see if there was anything of interest inside.” Illinois and Maryland are also considering legislation to outlaw the practice.
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I am very deeply troubled by the practices that seem to be spreading voraciously around the country.
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In last week’s SEC filing, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg poked a huge hornet’s nest when he referenced “The Hacker Way.”
Some of the pioneers of the hacker ethos and culture have previously defined hacking as having strong connections to tinkering, “playing” with code and systems, and most importantly, absolute freedom.
The kind of freedom those earlier hackers talk about is the freedom to inspect, to look under the hood, to break, to tamper, to share, to fix, to modify, to copy, and to redistribute.
Reblogged from curiositycounts|95 notes
Facebook by numbers – currently bigger than the U.S., smaller than India in “population.”
Well there go the markets.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., doesn’t pull punches in expressing reservations about the Netflix-backed push to amend the Video Privacy Protection Act. The VPPA prohibits sharing of consumers’ video-rental information without explicit consent, something that has kept Netflix from taking advantage of its ties with Facebook — where, for better or for worse, many users share what music they’re listening to, what news articles they’re reading and much more. CEO Reed Hastings last year cited the 1980s-era law when he announced streaming integration on Facebook in every other country Netflix is available except the United States. (See Tech’s quotable week…) The sticking point Tuesday during the hearing on Capitol Hill before the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law (the House passed the amendment in December): The amendment would allow Netflix and others to use a blanket opt-in system. Privacy advocates and skeptical senators asked why Netflix couldn’t allow people to share their viewing habits on a title-by-title basis. Said EPIC’s Marc Rotenberg, who testified Tuesday, according to the Hillicon Valley blog: “Consumers likely do not plan movie choices months in advance, and likely will not recall that their consent to share their innocuous children’s movie selection will also apply to their more provocative selections.” The Electronic Privacy Protection Center is recommending, among other things, that the law be updated to allow consumers to see the video-rental information being collected about them, and that companies be required to encrypt that data.
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I worry about a loss of privacy because of the claimed benefit of ‘simplicity.’ This claim strikes me like the claim we often hear in large corporate merger proposals about so-called ‘efficiencies.’ Netflix announced a simpler billing practice a few months ago regarding its various services, and its customers rebelled.
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