Category Archives: Ideas

Why does your website suck?

It’s the modern truism: technology changes quickly. Web self-publishing service Geocities – and its amazing variety of garish color schemes with HTML enhancements – doesn’t even exist as a service any more. The internet and seemingly omnipotent smartphones have fundamentally changed our way of life. We’ve become used to getting everything we want, when we [...]

If Twitter is a classroom, what are your followers learning from you?

“I could never get people to speak up,” Professor Chakravarty said. “Everybody’s intimidated.” “It’s clear to me,” he added, “that absent this kind of social media interaction, there are things students think about that normally they’d never say.” Twitter and other backchannel technologies have begun to take foot in the nation’s classrooms. One of the [...]

The Four Ways SEO Is Ruining the World, and Why Google Is Scared to Fix Them

In light of Google’s recent declaration of war against web-spam and content farms, bloggers are starting to suggest the era of “Black-Hat SEO” is over, signaling that from now on the subtle, sometimes morally dubious practices that site-owners use to increase their domain’s status in search results may no longer be effective. One’s instinct is [...]

Winning the Future by Starting Up America

In his plan for winning the future, President Obama called upon the private sector to help the American economy grow by “out-innovating, out-educating, and out-building our competitors.” The CEOs, university presidents, entrepreneurs, foundations, non-profits, and federal officials involved in the Startup America Partnership are trying to make that plan a reality. On Monday, the Obama [...]

A Rebuttal to Mashable’s New Years Prediction: The Dying Website-as-Community

Jennifer Van Grove of Mashable has a very well-written piece on what the start-up landscape will look like in 2011. One of her predictions is that there will be a website renaissance, in which website publishers will battle successfully to bring the community back to the site. There will continue to be rapid innovation around [...]