Droid isn't actually close enough to the iPhone in most important ways, but in marketing and customer perception, it doesn't matter. Apple can't win this fight on quality and overall experience because most of these customers have never owned iPhones. They don't know what they're missing. They just know what the Verizon marketing told them: Droid phones are pretty much like the iPhone. When they encounter all of Android's rough edges, they assume that all smartphones are like that, and grow to generally dislike using them. (Much like the computer market.)

via www.marco.org

The parallels between the phone market & OS market are pretty obvious, and it feels like we're approaching a crossroads. Android is Windows 3.1.

Marco also says: "If it isn't, I might need to start learning Java."

I recommend "The Java Sourcebook," by Ed Anuff.

Shared by Jeff
OMFG Luke Cage? That sucks... I really don't want to relive "Sweet Chris'mas" and "SHO NUFF" on the big screen :-/

• These will absolutely blow your mind. Mr.doob's Chrome experiments -- Ball Pool and Google Gravity.
• Here's a roundup of experiments from Ben Joffe, including a rudimentary 3D shooter, a 3D functions plotter, and an HTML5 color picker.
• Some of my personal favorites, KesieV's Akihabara game room. The Legend of Sadness is where it's at.
• Exploding, real-time video.
• WPilot -- a multiplayer shooter. Like Asteroids meets Quake.
• A giant, color-cycling canvas. Weirdly addictive to play with.
• 3D molecules. 'Nuff said.
• Mega Man intro. In HTML5.

HTML5: seriously, it's not just for video originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 May 2010 14:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Designer Marc Graells Ballv was sick of the standard padlocks and alarms that motor scooter owners typically use to protect their gear: He reckoned that thieves knew how to handle them by now. His response? Project 486, a red shell of armor which he says was inspired by millions of years [of] natural selection and displays next to a picture of an armadillo to hammer home the point.

Roll the shell over your scooter and lock it before you leave, and you're defended against thieves and weather alike.

Granted, it looks a tad bulky to haul around on your bike at all times, but it's undeniably cool aesthetically. We're assuming (?) that it's made of some lightweight plastic and not sweet, sweet red metal, which, as hardcore as it might be, would probably throw your scooter's center of gravity back a bit too far for comfort.

(TheMarcsWork via Gadget Lab and OhGizmo!)

I think Facebook's problem lately with its disliked like button (and Google's problem with the start of Buzz) is that they confuse the notion of the public spherethat is, all of uswith the idea of making a publicthat is, the small societies we create on Facebook or join on Twitter. Private v. public is not a binary decision; there is a vast middle inbetween that is about the control of our own publics. Allow me to explain.

Flickr: taberandrew

I've been trying to understand the vitriol I've seen in some quarters about Facebook's latest movesbecause I don't fully get it. Oh, I understand the confusion Facebook's privacy changes and settings causeas Business Insider said, Online privacy is the new programming a VCR. Read EFF's disquieting timeline of the mutation of Facebook's privacy policy and look at this brilliant visualization of how Facebook has made the private public. I understand the problem.

But why is the reaction to Facebook's latest movethe like buttonso swift and so fierce, so last-straw-on-the-camel's-back to some? Gizmodo dyspeptically listed 10 reasons to quit Facebook. Gizmodo and Engadget founding editor Peter Rojas quit Facebook, as did Google's Matt Cutts, and my This Week in Google boss Leo Laporte disabled his account for awhile. Three heavier heavyweights in our world it's hard to find and when they lose trustwhich is what happenedthat's a big deal, bigger than Facebook seems to realize.

Clearly, there's something more going on here, something fundamental. Facebook overstepped a line and so I want to try to find that line. I think it may lay here:

Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg seem to assume that once something is public, it's public. They confused sharing with publishing. They conflate the public sphere with the making of a public. That is, when I blog something, I am publishing it to the world for anyone and everyone to see: the more the better, is the assumption. But when I put something on Facebook my assumption had been that I was sharing it just with the public I created and control there. That public is private. Therein lies the confusion. Making that public public is what disturbs people. It robs them of their sense of controland their actual controlof what they were sharing and with whom (no matter how many preferences we can set). On top of that, collecting our actions elsewhere on the netour browsing and our likesand making that public, too, through Facebook, disturbed people even more. Where does it end?

Facebook has been playing this tension since its early days. Remember the hubbub over News Feed: When Facebook aggregated our updates into feeds, it freaked users, even though Mark Zuckerberg pointed out that all these updates were already visible to us among our friends on their pages. Zuckerberg's vision was right in the end; the News Feed is critical to Facebook's utility, value, and growth and it presaged the appeal of Twitter. But even in the public Twitter, even though we are publishing to the world, we still have a measure of control; we decide whom to followthat is, which publics to join.

So let me repeat: In Facebook, we get to create our publics. In Twitter, we decide which publics to join. But neither is the public sphere; neither entails publishing to everyone. Yet Facebook is pushing us more and more to publish to everyone and when it does, we lose control of our publics. That, I think, is the line it crossed.

The irony in all this is that I think Facebook has been profoundly redefining our notion of a public in ways thatjudging by its actionseven it does not fully grasp. I am listening to a fascinating radio series (and podcast) on the CBC based on the work of a project called Making Publics. This group of academics began five years ago with Jrgen Habermas' belief that the public spherethe counterweight to the state as heard through public discussion and opiniondid not emerge until the 19th century. They also agreed that prior to the Renaissance and the 16th century, public referred to people with public standing in the social hierarchythe eliterather than to all of us. But then the Making Public team saw that during the 16th and 17th centuries, the printing press, theater, artthat is, the means to publish and presentas well as markets enabled people to create and join their own publics.

I am struck with how similar that moment of change is to the internet's upheaval today. Gutenberg's pressand the arts of painting and theatre and the skill of map-makingenabled a still-small elite to create publics; indeed, their hold on the public stayed in place until only a decade ago. Today, the web enables all of us to publish and thus to make publics and also to join new publics (and destroy the old, elite definition and control of the public). The three key inventions of the early-modern era that enabled this change were the compass, gunpowder, and the press. Our equivalents arewhat?the net, the web, and blogs. Berners-Lee is our Gutenberg. Or is it Ev?

Facebook refined the gross sense of publicness that blogs put in the hands of us all: everyone publishing to everyone. Its social network gave us the tools to create and join our own publics and gain control over what we make public and who can join it. That was a powerful gift that shifted the basis of interaction online from flaming to friendship, built on real identity and real relationships. Facebook helped civilize the internet. Yet I don't think Facebook understands the value of that control because it continues to try to make us entirely public.

See once more Matt McKeon's visualization of Facebook's public evolution. Hear, too, Zuckerberg's Law: I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.

People accuse Zuckerberg of killing privacy and of wanting it dead. I think that's likely unfair. I think instead he does see a profound cultural shift, one that existed before him but one that he took advantage of and then served and refined: We connect by sharing. In his view, I'll bet, he's not killing privacy; we are. He's fine with that. And to an extent, so am I, as I argue the value of publicness. But both of us miss this subtle but profound distinction between the public and a public at our peril. That's the lesson I'm trying to learn here as I start to write a book about publicness (more on that later).

I will argue that we face choices today about keeping something private or sharing it with our public or with the public at large and that we need to see the benefits of sharingthe benefits of publicnessas we make that calculation. I will argue that if we default to private, we risk losing the value of the connections we can make today. I will argue that we need institutionscompanies and governmentsto default to public. And I will argue that the more we live in public, the more we share, the more we create collective wisdom and value. I will defend publicness. But I will also defend privacythat is, control over this decision.

I would not be surprised to hear that Zuckerberg shares this gospel. I think he's sincere when he says he sees Facebook as a tool to enable us all to change our world through connections. I think that's why he's pushing us to be public; it's more than just a cynical commercial motive. Yet I think he gets in trouble when he doesn't see these distinctions, which I'm trying to discern in our new definitions of private, public, publics, and identity. And so he risks blowing it. But I still think it's not too late.

I don't believe Facebook has gone evilor gone rogue, as Wired insists. The problem for Facebook is more likely that it never defined evilas in don't be evil. Google is aware of its line, which is about losing value if it loses trust. Facebook seems almost unaware of its line and perhaps that's because its is harder to find. I suggest they study 16th century history and the origins of the public as they reinvent the public.

Flickr: Matthew Burpee

The admirable Diaspora Project is trying to build an open and distributed version of Facebook to let us publish, aggregate, and control our own stuff to make up our own identities. That's great, but I think that, too, conflates the ideas of a public and the public; it does what Zuckerberg is doing by having us publish everything to all, except it gives us ownership of that. I'm not criticizing the effort at all; I think it's great. I'm just saying that this isn't a substitute for Facebook; it's something different, something more public.

Having captured what it thinks is our identities online, Facebook now wants to be the enabler and controller of our identities. But because we don't want our stuff on Facebook to be completely public, Facebook cannot be that hub of public identity. The Diaspora Project can. But I wonder whether the Diaspora Projectlike ClaimID and OpenIDcan succeed because I wonder what our motivation is to keep our identities updated. I have a reason to update Facebook for my friends there or this blog for you all or LinkedIn for my professional contacts or Twitter for my instant ego gratification. But I haven't had a reason to keep ClaimID (on this page) up to date. That's the trap the Diaspora Project needs to avoid.

And this is where I think that Leo Laporte and Gina Trapani collaboratively stumbled on a big idea related to identity on the latest This Week in Google. Gina talked about our motive to update Facebook and Leo said the equivalent for identity would come if Google put our profile pages on the top of the search results for our names. If the first result for Leo Laporte in search were Leo Laporte's profile page, he'd be motivated to keep it up to date, to make it the canonical Leo page. Brilliant, I think. Google, are you listening? Facebook?

Other notes. The problem with the launch of Google's Buzz was related but not so subtle: By mixing our email with its Twitteresque platform, Buzz, Google mixed our private and public. It not only mixed our email connections with the idea of publishing to the world, it also robbed us of the chance to create and control our own publics. In another of its Snuffaluffagus moments, I imagine that Google thought it was doing us a favor by making a public for us: our readymade society. But that was precisely the wrong move, for we want to make and join publics on our own. That is the essence of controlling our worlds.

Shared by Tim
My prayers are with you and your family. I know what it's like to lose your father.

Happy Dogs Wearing Coats, Nuff Said on Dogatar

I no sees nuffin like dis on Grey's Atanomee.

but ai wach so much!

Picture by: dunno source Caption by: auntie50 via Advanced Lol Builder

Recaption This!

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John Yoo ventures onto The Daily Show. 'Nuff said.

Keeping up with the increasing fountain of information is a challenge for anyone. It's especially challenging for me because I'm always adding new sources to my existing flow. If it weren't for Google Reader (a web-based RSS reader) and NetNewsWire (its companion program that syncs to Google Reader), I'd be lost. But the truth is, I really gravitate towards a few basic sources. And so, as my New Years resolution to share more information, I thought I'd pass along my really key sources.

First, let me say that RSS is an amazing technology and I wish more people would make use of it. In fact, if you want to use an RSS reader and simply want to subscribe to everything I read (you can delete what you don't want) then download this OPML file and import it into your RSS reader.

Everyone laments the downfall (or, at least, serious downgrade) of newspapers. I don't waste time lamenting things that are inevitable. Newspapers (or any daily paper-based publication) face the harsh reality that printing every day, coupled with every day physical delivery, is an frighteningly expensive way to deliver information. And, if the reason you're printing every day is to cover 'breaking news,' then you're basically trying to defy gravity. Twitter is fast, free and scaling virally. So good luck to the newspapers. I predict that in ten years there will only be 5 national papers, and a smattering of local ones.

What will we do then? Sad as it may seem to you, you'll be on our own. You'll have to sift through the mass of information and latch on to the good stuff. Wouldn't it be cool if you could subscribe to the best online feed for each topic that you were interested in? You can. RIght now. The future, my friends,"is here but just not evenly distributed." So, tap into the future now, and let the newspapers arrange their funerals on their own.

So, if I were building my own personal newspaper from online sources here are the feeds I'd subscribe to.

Security: Bruce Schneier

After 9/11 our lives became filled with paranoia and misinformation. People who want to gain more power are happy to exploit this mindset. If we don't educate ourselves about what kind of security is practical and important (as opposed to stupid and reactionary) we'll wind up with a world where the government has more control than they really need. The mainstream media is hopelessly unable to understand or explain these issues.

Bruce Schneier, however, is able to explain security. He is a serious technowizard, who has written a couple of books on the subject. I read Secrets & Lies back when it first came out and was shocked at how balanced he was in his outlook, and how thorough and reasonable his explanations of security issues was. Let's face it, security can be complex if you want it to be (which most 'experts' and demagogues want it to be). His blog is one of my go-to, everyday reads. He's on top of almost every widely discussed security issue of the day. If you want common sense security analysis (and you should) then he's the guy.

Marketing: Seth Godin

Why would you care about marketing? If you read Seth Godin you probably would. Why? Because he knows a lot about how it operates in everyday life. You've been bombarded with advertising and marketing campaigns since before you learned to speak. Understanding these forces might be useful, if you want to understand how people make friends and how businesses make money. Dale Carnegie's famous book has been read by many people who weren't in sales, you know.

Seth Godin's ideas are powerful, mostly because he takes into account this wacky new thing called the Internet. Most conventional marketing people either don't understand the scope of the Internet, or can't explain it. The best way to get Seth is by daily email. He writes one thought-provoking post per day, sometimes two. His books are freakishly awesome too.

Presentation: Garr Reynolds

It's not enough to just 'know things.' There are plenty of lawyers who 'know the law' and simply can't explain it. This makes them ineffective advocates, to say the least. Once you've gathered information it helps if you know how to present it. Today, that usually involves visual information in the form of PowerPoint slides. Unfortunately, most PowerPoints are abominable.

Garr Reynolds has written two excellent books (the second one just came out, and I'm in the process of digesting it). But above all, his weblog is the best source of information on how to create inspiring, and visually appealing presentations. His web page on presentation tips should be required reading for every business student, law student, or basically anyone who conveys information for a living (check out 'delivery tips'). Ditto for his 'sample slides.' I'm not saying I incorporate all of this into my presentations. Just that I aspire to. Garr Reynolds is my North Star for all things related to design and presentation.

In addition to his observations on presentations and design, he also will recommend books from time to time. I have found that I pretty much buy (and thoroughly enjoy) every single book he recommends. He was the one who turned me on to Brain Rules. 'Nuff said.

Photography: Scott Kelby

Everyone has a camera it seems, and everyone would like to make beautiful images of the things they cherish. Digital photography has made it easier to create those images, but you still have to know what to do. If you want to to make portraits more intimate, and landscapes more breath-taking then you should buy Scott Kelby's books (especially The Digital Photography Books 1 through 3).

Scott also has a blog, and it's a steady stream of insights and tips and reminders of how easy it is to get great pictures if you focus on some key principles. The more you learn the more you want to know, and Kelby can walk you through the whole process. He also has a keen sense of design (he was a designer before becoming a photographer), so he's a great compliment to Garr Reynolds. And if you follow Scott you'll probably wind up following Joe McNally and that would be a good thing.

Curiosity: Scott Adams

More than just creating Dilbert, Scott Adams is smart and extremely curious about the world. He is willing to share his thoughts as they are being formed (which is remarkable in itself). And often he's not so much making a point, as asking a question without preconceptions about what the answer might be. His open-mindedness invariably draws fire from commenters who feel that he's taking a position against some entrenched view. Apparently, many of us have lost the ability to detect a question because we think only in declarative sentences. We need more people like Scott Adams, who teach us that it's more about being curious than about having our hands on the buzzer.

Social Trivia: Jason Kottke

A web-designer in New York, Jason Kottke has been paying attention to the information economy for quite awhile. He comes at it from the web, but most of his tidbits are about analog stuff. I get the sense he wants to remind us there's a lot of interesting stuff outside of an LED screen. His observations are a soothing river of eclectic serendipity. You should read him everyday. Trust me, or I should say 'trust Al' since he's the one who turned me on to Jason Kottke. Which brings me to...

Filter Friend: Al Robert

Everyone should have a friend who's good at finding out lots of interesting stuff. Since they're your friend, they know what you'd be interested in. My 'filter friend' is Al Robert. I met him because he started this website while in law school. He doesn't keep it up anymore, but I still use it as a way to find Louisiana statutes since his interface is more user-friendly than the official site. I'm sorry he doesn't but he does keep posting things to his delicious account.

If you read this blog frequently and wonder where I get my information the answer would be Al Robert. If you keep up with his delicious page you'll notice that a lot of my stuff will appear shortly after he posts it. Everyone should have a 'filter friend' like Al. And in Al's case he's more than just a filter friend; he's an awesome guy and really down to earth. If you're really lucky you have a good friend like Al.

Oh, and he just asked me in an email if I read Techmeme. I don't, but since Al thinks it's good I will no doubt start reading it tomorrow.

Shared by Tim
Nuff said.

As in, why'd you wait so long, Elmo? And hey, Cookie Monster, why is this a subscription model? Oh, and Count, why are you only releasing 100 out of the 5,000 books in your catalog?

Sesame Workshop, the drab corporate body behind the warm, suneshiney smile that is Sesame Street, has always been a little late to the digital party. This time they're nipping at the heels of Disney, which opened up its own Digital Books site in September. Well, better late than never.

Sesame Street books available digitally? Terrific. What's not so hot is how they're handling it, along with their publishing partner Impelsys. They'll start tomorrow by offering five free e-books at sesamestreet.org/ebooks, but those titles can only be read on your monitor, not downloaded. They'll introduce more titles sometime next spring, but will still leave about 98% of their back catalog to be rolled out at an indeterminate pace for an indeterminate subscription price (Disney charges around $80 a year). So let's see: a long wait for a few books that I can't download? Might have to pass on this one.

That's not even to mention the biggest inherent problem, which is that most e-readers currently available on the market aren't built for kids, and can't handle color. At least not yet they can't. And until they can, e-books for toddlers make about as much sense as Snuffleuphagus's taxonomy report. [Impelsys via WSJ]

Twitter is of course in the process of rolling out a new retweet feature. The feature adds a retweet button to each tweet on your timeline, much like the "reply" button that has always been there. However, one distinct difference between these two buttons is that where the reply button fills out your form with the proper information ("@username"), the retweet button sends the initial tweet to your followers' timelines without giving you your own tweet.

In other words, you don't get to add anything to it, you're just duplicating a tweet that came to you and sending it to your followers. You're forwarding it.



There are things to like about the feature. For one it's more convenient if you just want to pass on an interesting tweet. If you're the one being retweeted, it puts you in the spotlight in other people's streams rather than the person who retweeted you. It kind of feels like you're getting more credit for your tweets, although if you are just tweeting a link to someone else's blog post that might not necessarily come off as a positive. Twitter CEO Evan Williams put up an interesting blog post last week defending the feature before it even had much of a chance to get torn apart by users. He knew it would be controversial, and he even acknowledged that fact.

As happens when any heavily-used site makes changes, some people get upset about it. Lisa Barone at outSpoken Media made a list of "things that suck" about the new retweet feature, and she brings up a number of good points, but her biggest peeve seems to be that of the avatars of people she doesn't know showing up in her stream.

"Showing the unfamiliar avatar does not give me 'more context' for the tweet. It gives me less because I don't know this individual," she says. "If I were to see Rae's avatar, I'd know to trust the content. I'd know it already passed the snuff test. When I see someone else's avatar, I'm thrown off and confused. Will I get used to it? No, I'll simply learn to ignore things from people I don't know."

She has a valid point in that seeing unfamiliar faces can be a bit off-putting, but aren't the retweets still passing the "snuff test" since they are still being retweeted by people you follow? It's not like these "strangers" are actually coming in and spamming us. It's just a visually different way of presenting them. Whether or not we like that is one thing, but it's a retweet from someone we're following just as it was before in this regard. A great many Twitter users probably don't even recognize half of the people they follow anyway.

That said, there are a number of other issues with the feature, as Barone points out. Some of the ones she touches on are:

- Can't add own commentary (what if you don't agree with what you're retweeting?)

- Plays down user's visibility in own network

- Changes the definition of retweeting (makes it more like a Facebook "like")

The feature is still in limited beta testing, so regardless of what you feel about the feature, there is a possibility it will change. Even still, if you don't like the feature, you don't have to use it. You can still use the classic "RT" method just as you have always done. You just have a new option now. Depending on how many of the people you follow use the new feature, your Twitter experience can be affected more or less by it.

Are you getting the new retweet feature yet? What is your opinion? What do you like about it? What do you dislike about it. Tell WebProNews readers what you think about it.

Related Articles:

> An Equation for Getting More Traffic from Twitter

> Wonder What Percentage of Tweets are Retweets?

> More to Retweeting Than Meets the Eye for Businesses?

(Thanks, Ed Reading)

Shared by Zach
this actually clears up a lot

On Tuesday, Sesame Street will celebrate its 40th anniversary with the usual array of songs and life lessons about numbers and nutrition and a special guest, the first lady, Michelle Obama, on hand to help out.

Meanwhile, Caroll Spinney, the puppeteer behind Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch and Carol-Lynn Parente, executive producer, are answering questions from Times readers this week.

Mr. Spinney has embodied both the yin and the yang of Sesame Street since the show's debut. Below, in the guise of everyone's favorite Giant Golden Condor (who knew?), he responds to queries about Big Bird's weight, about his dreams and about the existential nature of Mr. Snuffleupagus.

Dear Big Bird,
I love you. How many brothers and sisters do you have?
Jessica

None.

Is Big Bird a boy or a girl?
Alanna

Boy.

Hey Big Bird! How much do you weigh?
Ashley

I'm light as a feather!

Dear Mr. Bird,
Do you know of any bigger birds? If not, what's the next biggest?
Parker

An ostrich.

Hi Big Bird! What species of bird are you?
Danielle

A Giant Golden Condor but I'm really a lark.

Hi Big Bird!!! I'm a huge fan. My question: Why are you yellow??
Eike H.

Because my mother and father were yellow.

Are you naturally blond? In one photo, I thought I spotted a few dark feather-roots.
MaineGrammy

Of course I'm a natural blond!

Dear Big Bird,
Why is the Mexican Big Bird green? Are you related to him?
Andr

Yes, Abelardo is a parrot and he is my cousin!

Hi Big Bird! What is your favorite letter and why?
Annie F

B!

Dear Big Bird: Do you sleep on a tree and what do you dream about at night?
Gwen, age 3

I sleep in a nest and I dream about other birds.

Hey Big Bird! What's your favorite book and why?
Victoria L

The Audubon Book of Birds.

Big Bird, do you have a favorite song?
Rick

LA, LA, LA.

My kids insist that Cookie Monster has been transformed into Veggie Monster for the sake of political correctness in our overweight world. Please say it isn't so!
Aaron

It isn't so! Cookie Monster still loves to eat cookies. But now he also likes to eat healthy foods like carrots, and knows it's alright to eat foods like cookies sometimes.

Snuffy was always a figment of your imagination. After revisiting the show during a wave of nostalgia, I noticed everyone is now friends with Snuffy. How did the change come about?
Janis Haddock

Snuffy's my best friend, he was never imaginary! It was just a matter of poor timing. Sometimes I would ask Snuffy to wait for me in one spot, then while I was away he would leave to go put on a tie or brush his teeth. And then when I came back he would be gone! But then one day he finally stuck around, and everyone could see that my friend Snuffy was real after all. I was so glad that day, because then I knew that my grown-up friends on Sesame Street would always believe me when I told them something that unusual but still true.

In 2005, British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver convinced London's Greenwich borough to let him remake their school-lunch system. Armed with some publicity, some private funding and some ideas about how school lunches should look, he began remaking the kitchens and training the cafeteria workers. Neat stunt, right? Tim Harford picks up the story:

What caught the attention of Michele Belot and Jonathan James, though, was the way Oliver's project had been implemented. Belot and James economists at Nuffield College, Oxford, and at the University of Essex respectively noted that the campaign had created a near-perfect experiment. The chef had convinced Greenwich's council and schools to change menus to fit his scheme; he mobilised resources, provided equipment and trained dinner ladies. Other London boroughs with similar demographics received none of these advantages and indeed, because the programme wasn't broadcast until after the project was well under way, probably knew little about it. The result was a credible pilot project. It wasn't quite up to the gold standard of a randomised trial, but it wasn't far off.

Thanks to the UK's exhaustive school testing regime, Belot and James were able to track pupils' performance in some detail. They concentrated on primary schools, figuring that secondary school pupils could (and probably would) avoid eating school lunches that were too worthy. (This is surely correct. My own habitual sixth-form lunch was four bars of chocolate a pound a day well spent.)

Their answer a provisional one, since they are still refining the research is that feeding primary school kids less fat, sugar and salt, and more fruit and vegetables, has a surprisingly large effect. Authorised absences, the best available proxy for illness, fell by 15 per cent in Greenwich, relative to schools in similar London boroughs. And relative to other boroughs, the proportion of children reaching Level Four in English rose by four and a half percentage points (more than six per cent), while the proportion of children achieving Level Five in Science rose by six points, or almost 20 per cent.

"What astonishes me," writes Harford, "is that it took a television company and a celebrity chef to carry out a proper policy experiment." And what astonishes me is that it's not being replicated. Those are huge results. It's just one project, but the way you find out if the numbers hold is by re-creating the experiment. If something as cheap as good food can deliver something as important as better school performance, it's time to fund some serious pilot projects.

Photo credit: By Rick Nederstigt/Getty Images

So Google does "social" search. Wow. Yipitee-doo.

You know how I feel about that? Tell you how I feel about that; it's an old company trying to be hip and cool by adding a "feature" I don't need. It's a real estate company adding Tweet This buttons to their listing. It ain't hip and it ain't happening.

by aye_shamus

Google Doesn't Get Social

Google never actually got it.

By lockergnomeMaybe it is because Google is run by nerds while nerds tend to be socially stupid.

They had one of the first, huge, desirable social networks and you know what they did? They made it invite only. That's not smart. It's what socially inept geeks would do. "Wanna join my secret invite only club?"

Weirdo

Then micro-blogging happened.

By factoryjoe

Google decided to come late to that game (see: Google buys Jaiku instead of Twitter) and then missed the boat (see: Google buys Jaiku instead of Twitter #idiots).

And it's painful to do this, bordering on being cruel but does anyone remember Google Shared Stuff which didn't even have a place where you could go to see what was shared? 'Nuff said Move along folks Nothing to see here literally.

Then, while Facebook needs to keep up with its growing rate by virtually importing beings from other planets, Google decides to go even more social by integrating all kinds of (social!!) features to Google Reader.

By lambdachialpha

geek-driven social ineptitudeThat's geek-driven social ineptitude. You can't get more marginal. Almost 90% of the online population doesn't even know what RSS is, let alone uses it.

And you know what? People don't care about RSS either; 4 in 5 non-users say "no thanks, I'm not interested". So, that is what Google decides to build its social network activity on.

Oh, and lest we forget the killer social Search Wiki.

Or the ever popular SideWiki.

Maybe the tremendously popular Google Profiles, anyone?

No, Google never ever actually seems to get social.

What Social Wants

"Social" wants to:

• Have its own profile page on a clearly labeled, findable, accessible network.
• Share anything at any time at a clearly labeled, findable, accessible network page.
• Read what others they are interested in are doing or sharing and read that at a clearly labeled, findable, accessible network page,
• Comment on what others they are interested in are doing or sharing. Where? On the same page those items are on. On a clearly labeled, findable, accessible network page.
• Search what they and those they are interested in posted.
• Hang out with the crowd.

What Social Doesn't Want

we don't
need
status updates
blended randomly into
our Word documents"Social" doesn't want?

• We don't want yet another dead, algorithm-driven social aggregator where nothing happens because everything you see actually happens somewhere else where, you know, people care.
• And we certainly don't want status updates or Flickr photos blended randomly into their Word documents or search results.

Google Gets Search Maybe

It's cute that Google wants to be a social rockstar but maybe they should try to improve their core product. No, not Adwords, silly! I mean search.

They innovated search. Brought us from the dark lands of trawling through tens of pages to the green pastures of quickly scanning the top 3 results.

Now it's time to innovate again by solving other problems we have in search.

To the best of my knowledge that problem isn't a lack of status updates or Flickr photos added to the bottom of my search results.

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

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Google: The Kenny Loggins of "Social"

I spent yesterday marking the dangers around Sidewiki. Today, I'll say what I think Google should do with it: close the toolbar app, open it up to the entire conversation, and turn it purely into an API. And probably buy Technorati.

I read a great deal of the discussion about Sidewiki yesterday: much of it in the comments on my blog post, much found through search in Technorati and Google News, much through trackbacks, much on Twitter, much through links on sites I read, and a tiny bit on Sidewiki itself (sorry, can't find a URL to link to that).

Some of the comments said the conversation is already fractured and my trail would seem to prove the point. That was the common word fractured. But I'd quibble with the choice and argue that the conversation isn't broken; that it is occurring just where it should be: in the cloud, where it is controlled by no one.

I did complain about bifurcating the conversation on my own site and that's because Google presents a second opportunity to comment from a site with comments and I do not see how that adds value there; it separates people. We should be doing the opposite.

I also complained about losing control of the comments and some folks, not surprisingly, thought they had me in a gotcha moment: Hey, Jarvis, you tell newspapers to get over it and give up control but when it comes to you heh, heh, heh. OK. I, too, chose the wrong word. I should have complained instead that Sidewiki robs sites of the responsibility for comments. Many of the people who joined in my crusade yesterday said they work hard on the conversations on their sites to make sure they retain civility and quality as good sites do but now they can't exercise that responsibility with Sidwiki comments that will appear essentially on their sites. Google promises an algorithm. Algorithms may be good at killing spam albeit with syncopated delays but they will not be good at policing the subtleties of trolls, prejudice, unfair competition, grudges, pettiness, and hate; those are human sins and it takes humans (and perhaps God) to see them.

The Guardian spends a great deal of resource on Comment is Free doing just that and when the conversation is about the Mideast, it knows from sour experience that it has to add extra precautions. There were no open comments on its Blogging the Koran. But now, with Sidewiki, there will be. Let's say the Guardian gets too restrictive. Then there's always the cloud. You can go to one of its competitors or create your own site and complain about what's said on CiF and no one except your hosts there can stop you. That's the essence of free speech on the internet.

It's perhaps inconvenient that the conversation is distributed but wherever there's such a problem, the wise see opportunities. Technorati saw that years ago and tried to bring the conversation together not by creating the ultimate conversation site but by adding organization and thus value to the conversation across the blogosphere. That was very Googley.

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it accessible not take it over and centralize it. That's what so many fear about Google book search: that is it not just linking to books but serving and thus controlling them (I still believe the settlement can cope with that). That is what I fear about Sidewiki: that it is not adding value to the conversation by organizing it but instead trying to hijack it. I'm surprised how tonedead [a happy typo I'm holding onto] Google is in this case. David Sleight called Sidewiki a failure of empathy. Or as a father says to a little kid: What were you thinking? One more metaphor: Google thinks its Snuffleupagus big but cuddly and good and just doesn't realize that some people see it as a potential bully and so it has to act accordingly. With size comes responsibility.

So I think Google saw a problem where there wasn't one: The conversation is not broken and doesn't need fixing. It saw an opportunity to enable people to comment on sites that do not have comments and to gain more beloved metadata from us about those sites but it bigfooted the entire conversation trying to solve that; it went for a fly but put its fist through the wall. It wasn't Googley.

Now I suggest that Google stand back and have that don't-be-evil conversation about its mission and how it can add value to the conversation and to our collected knowledge about sites and entities without trying to take it over. Start by following Dave Winer into the cloud.

Google could try to organize but not hijack the entire conversation; no one has really done that yet. It could analyze comments on sites and understand them better and perhaps even try to find quality in them and their authors. It could use Friend Connect and Facebook's APIs, as it has started to do, to enable those authors to establish and collect on their own, via APIs and burnish their identities across the web. It could bring together conversation about sites, whether those are blogs or companies', as Technorati has done with blogs (that's why I think buying it and putting it out of its strategic and technology misery would be the neighborly thing to do). It could then release an API (as it has done for Sidewiki) that doesn't draw the conversation into one place but enables anyone to put up the conversation. So rather than starting another conversation, Google organizes it.

So I could finally put the broader conversation about the ideas in Buzzmachine on Buzzmachine, adding functionality that let my readers follow links and authors. So I could create a consumer site tracking what people are saying, good and bad, about, say, computer makers. So I could use apps to track conversations about topics that mattered to me. So I could track authors and what they comment about across the web.

Google would add value to the conversation as I firmly believe it adds value to news without competing with its creators. That is what I argue to news creators: that Google doesn't want to become one of them but instead wants to succeed by helping them succeed. It's a great argument, so long as it stays true. Books bring the same opportunity and challenge for Google.

In a sense, Google thought too big, bigfooting the conversation everywhere. But the real problem, ironically, is that it thought way too small, creating a new conversation instead of trying to organize the conversation that is the internet itself. That would have been so much Googlier, don't you think?

: LATER: I neglected to cover the question of the toolbar app itself. If Google doesn't create a separate conversation, then there would be no means to add comments via the toolbar. I'd suggest that a toolbar app could display content about a site or its topics; there's nothing to stop Google or any toolbar or browser plug-in maker from doing that. This still means that malicious content could be associated with a site but Google wouldn't be in the position of enabling and hosting it, only displaying it. I would suggest, however, that anyone who thinks they can use this to display advertising associated with a site atop that site should look up the Gator link in my post below: danger and lawyers await.