Brewster Kahle: the guy behind archive.org

by Dave Underwood on March 8, 2010


Source: TED

After watching this video I still don’t completely understand how the Internet Archive funds itself.

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Afterthoughts: Webstock 2010

by Dave Underwood on March 5, 2010

I posted my takeaways from this year’s Webstock on the First Rate blog so I’m just going to repost the critical part of it here. Duplicate content FTW!

Here’s what I learnt online businesses need to be doing this year:

  • Iterate. Listen to your customers, watch your analytics, learn what needs improving and optimise like a crazy person. The website that is most agile will win.
  • Don’t be late to the mobile party, be early. How does your online audience want to engage your business via mobile? Does that exist? Is there a business case for it?
  • Be wary of “gut feel” or “I just know” interpretations of data by your staff or your third-party providers. Expect empirical evidence that backs up that gut feel.
  • “If you review the first version of your site & don’t feel embarrassed, you spent too long on it” – Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn.com
    For Barack Obama’s US presidential campaign, his online team were tracking how dollars spent on online ads were turning into dollars received via fundraising. If a campaign that complex can achieve it, no-one has an excuse for not knowing their ROI from online spend.
  • Jeff Attwood’s description of social software was very good: “tiny slices of frictionless effort, spread across an online community”. A good reminder that to leverage user-generated content you need your users to want to contribute and make it super-easy to do so.
  • I thought Daniel Burka’s recommendation that “subtraction is iteration too” was a good reminder. Don’t be afraid to subtract.

Source: Things I learnt at Webstock 2010

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Google Image Search: Specifying an image’s license

by Dave Underwood on January 25, 2010

Looks pretty simple.


Source: YouTube

Read more about RDFa.

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Webstock 2010

December 7, 2009

Kevin Rose! Khoi Vinh! And another adventure with @DB! Most excellent.

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Tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change – Seth Godin

September 14, 2009

Source: TED.com

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Data Portability Project

September 11, 2009

Source: Vimeo

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Google News Search – Article Ranking Factors

September 5, 2009

Source: YouTube

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The surprising science of motivation – Dan Pink

August 29, 2009

Source: TED.com

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Andrew Dubber’s Great Blend speech, 21st Feb 2009

July 2, 2009

Source: Vimeo

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Kiwi redux: Google Trends for Websites

June 20, 2009

In June 2008, roughly around the time when Google made Trends for Websites available, I wrote a post about some sites & their trends. Mainly just trends I found interesting. It’s now June 2009 so I thought it would be fun to revisit the same graphs.
This time I’ve limited the graphs to ‘last 12 months’ [...]

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