“I learned that the Internet is a very, very noisy place, and that just about everyone is selling something.”
– David Kazzie on his experience promoting his self-published thriller, “How Amazon’s KDP Select Saved My Book“
A word to the wise
Now even the SEO giant is warning publishers to get serious about social:
Social is the way in which people will get their news in the future; it already is for some.
– Richard Gingras, head of News Products for Google, to Knight Fellows at Stanford
What’s on your home screen?
I really liked this post from 37signals, in which its employees offered up screenshots of their iPhone/iPod screens. No commentary, except for what each person does in the company, but I thought the post served as a neat look into what was most important for each person. (Especially their docks.)
I switched this month from an iPod Touch/BlackBerry combination to an iPhone, and I wondered, how much has my home screen changed through the addition of Camera and Phone, etc. Turns out I have the answer, since I have screenshots of each device.
iPod Touch
iPhone
What apps lost in the transition:
– WeatherBug and Clock, both Siri casualties. The ability to check conditions and set alarms verbally is very nice. Not a killer feature, but definitely nice.
– NYTimes, which was moved in iOS 5.0 to a new app called Newsstand. I don’t like Newsstand — I think it’s ugly — and I buried it in a back screen. I read less NYT content as a result, which is a shame.
– Games and Dropbox. I use both fairly often, but not as often as, say, Pandora or PlainText. I’m still not sure if Reminders and Messages need to be on the home screen; I haven’t used either very much thus far, and if this doesn’t change, I will probably move them back and bring up Dropbox and, perhaps, Photos.
– Promodoro. This is a great app at getting focused on non-work activity, but I haven’t had a lot of non-work activity recently, so it got shuffled back.
Steve Jobs
After Apple announced Wednesday night that Steve Jobs had died, my Twitter feed became nothing but a long procession of Jobs eulogies, many of them touching.
This morning, I spent a little time reading some of the longer-form appreciations of Jobs (Neven Mrgan and Steven Frank’s are especially good.)
Then I sat back and wondered, when it’s Bill Gates’s turn to pass, will he receive the same sort of outpouring? What will be his eulogies say?
I don’t mean to get all Pirates of Silicon Valley here, but while Steve Jobs made a huge impact on our civilization, Bill Gates did more.
I’d call their first acts a draw, but while Jobs’s second act focused on transforming the wired world, Gates turned his attention to the unwired world, which needed him so much more. Without Gates’s involvement, problems such as sub-Saharan health and underperforming U.S. schools would be even farther off the radar than they are today. His is an awesome record of philanthropy that often gets taken for granted, and I wonder if it’ll be just ignored at Gates’s end.