A novel use for a social media tool

Posted on April 1, 2007 Written by 6 Comments

CUPERTINO, California (AP) – An online tool to help you get pregnant? Surely, do not let the April 1 dateline fool you.

While dating and romance sites have helped bring couples together for years, there is now an online service that can actually help existing couples find the right time to conceive. Which is not at all what the creators had in mind.

Twitter.com is the breakout web community of 2007. Based on a simple premise, “What are you doing right now?”, hundreds of thousands of “Twitterers” have been sharing their most mundane thoughts and actions for the past several months. Earlier this year attendees at the influential South By Southwest Conference in Austin spurred the site to a new level, bringing together a massive community of users.

It was exactly the sort of data pool Dr. Phil Larkin needed to test his theory.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Communication Tagged: , , , , , ,

Tweet!

Posted on March 26, 2007 Written by 1 Comment

“I just know it is coming into the house,” she said.

“You know it will fly into the house and you won’t get it out,” she told me.

But I didn’t listen.

We’ve got a little bird, probably a swallow, that has decided to nest in the little potted palm tree just outside our front door. My wife tried warning me several times that I needed to move it. Did I listen? What do you think…? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Personal Tagged:

TiVO’s big 2009 Announcement

Posted on March 15, 2007 Written by Leave a Comment
TiVO logo

I previously spilled the beans about the 2008 rollout of the Apple iWife. Now, I’ve unearthed the top-secret details of a coming breakthrough in Digital Video Recorder technology.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged: ,

Consolidation

Posted on March 14, 2007 Written by 2 Comments

One of the downsides of media consolidation is the propensity of a small error to be magnified. Like this one, for example, from the Nashville Tennessean:

Plan for emergenies

Spring tornado season a good time to make sure you and your family know what to do

Don’t blame staff writer Vivi Hoang. Editors slap the headlines on the stories, and several sets of eyeballs passed over that typo. Unfortunately, because of media consolidation, no one at the Dickson Herald, Ashland City Times, nor Fairview Observer caught it either. Not that they could change it if they wanted to.

I blame Tennessee for being landlocked. They’re not used to have a C around.

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, journalism, Tennessean[/tags]

Filed Under: Communication, Quick thoughts Tagged: , ,

Learning a fruity little laugh

Posted on January 24, 2007 Written by 2 Comments
Ryan 1

Travel has downsides (unrelated to being stranded with bronchitis in a motel room in an unfamiliar town…)

My wife has informed me that my two-year-old son is now telling knock-knock jokes. I’m told that I am not missing anything yet, as the jokes do not in fact make sense, but there is a larger issue afoot about the role of syntax and learning abstractions. I’ve discovered that in my country abstract thinking, at its core, is fruity.
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Filed Under: Communication, Personal Tagged: ,

Lateral thinking

Posted on January 12, 2007 Written by 1 Comment
Hook and Lateral

Words are powerful little packages. We take them for granted, and don’t always consider all of the hidden meanings behind the words we choose. However, we too often look at the written word, and ignore the sounds of the same word as an utterance. Only then do you appreciate the rhymes, the meter, and the possibilities of mistaken pronunciations.

How much of what we call “lateral thinking” — the joining of previously non-adjacent concepts — is really the product of a pun or a bad translation? And how many words or concepts do we take for granted, even though they were steeped in mistake?

For my first example, I take you all the way back to the Fiesta Bowl, where Boise State knocked off the Oklahoma Sooners. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Communication, Personal Tagged: , , , ,

Apple’s big 2008 announcement

Posted on January 10, 2007 Written by 5 Comments

January 9, 2008 – Las Vegas, NV

(AP) First there was iPod, then iPhone, and now the latest addition to the iLife family.

The next phase of Apple’s plan to reinvent itself as a consumer electronics company was unveiled Tuesday at the 2008 CES by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and it received a warm reception from Wall Street. The touch-screen-controlled device answers the phone, babysits the kids, watches soap operas, shops for groceries, and has a unique killer app: a reminder function.

Jobs received a thunderous applause for the unveiling of iWife, the digital spouse for all of us. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Communication Tagged: ,
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