I recently posted about annoying Robocalls that I’ve received. In response to them, I’ve changed my phone setting so that no one who hides their phone number can call me. But that hasn’t stopped the robocallers. I just received my 40th or so “second notice” about my auto-warranty. This time, I […]
Here’s a provocative video. It received a warm reception at e-thePeople and nice discussion. Here’s how I described it on etp:
Where do you find the time to participate in e-thepeople? Clay Shirky suggests that e-thepeople, wikipedia and other participatory media find the time by tapping into the cognitive surplus, the 200 billion hours […]
This guy raised $100k in a couple of days for his campaign for state representative in Kansas with 3000 donations of $8.34 or more. It’s a big inside tech joke, but it’s working. I don’t think that this particular gimmick can work too many times, but the nationalization of fundraising for local elections […]
On both my home phone, and now on my cell, I’ve been receiving warnings that my auto warranty may have expired. In fact, each one of these warnings is “my second notice.” The new form of spam–robocalls–may be much worse than its email cousin. Like email spam, robocalls abuse cheap communication technology […]
Jawed Karim, a co-founder of YouTube and current Stanford student, gave an excellent talk about the lessons of youtube. (The talk is from 2006, but I just watched it today for the first time.) If you have ADD, skip to a little past 40 minutes and you can catch some video of despair after […]
I have always cursed Comcast for limiting my upstream bandwidth. It takes so long to to upload pictures to smugmug, VoIP can get garbled, etc. So, today I have AT&T installing u-verse into my house so that I increase my upstream bandwidth by a factor of 20x or more. Yeah!
But for even […]
Here’s the ultimate status symbol: a red glowing ball for your iphone that costs $999.99! Yup, that’s what you get (and nothing else) when you buy the ‘i am rich’ application for the iPhone. And 8 people bought it before Steve Jobs yanked it from the app store. Curiosity + one-click purchasing […]
Why you should work at meetup not google. Is there really a toilet with “Rear Cleansing, Front Cleansing, Dryer, and Oscillating options” at google? Apparently so. Scott Heiferman is truly a genius.
Everybody hates spam, which is often defined as “unsolicited email.” I’d argue, however, that spam ought to include the notion “unwanted” in it. If I get an email from an old high school buddy out of the blue, I hardly consider it spam!
I broach this subject because of an e-thePeople I am working […]
Oh, boy! Social networking continues to be white hot. I like these VCs, but they do seem a tad cocky in this video. David Sze says that “when they look back, they will say this is one of the cheapest things that those investors ever did.” Cheapest things–really? I hope, […]
Here’s a great site that computes the median sales price/monthly rental price by town or county and plots it on a map. As you can see in the screenshot below, my town of Menlo Park is an expensive place to buy: the ratio of sales/rent is over 20x compared. In contrast, Newark/Fremont in […]
Winner!
On weekends and evenings, I am helping to launch a start up social networking site called yasnap.com. It’s an interesting idea, I think, but a topic for another day. Today, I want to talk about our experience using 99Designs.com.
99Designs.com is a marketplace for web design. You post a proposal for the job […]
For almost 5 decades, newspaper readership has been on the decline. Recently, both newspaper and TV stations have been making substantial cuts to their newsroom staff. The result is less news content being created. This poses a challenge, according to the Knight Commission:
With “the thinning down of newspapers and local television in […]
I had overheard people talking about using Nintendo’s ‘Wii’ game controllers with their computer, but I had never seen it used before. This grad student at Carnegie Mellon is up to some really cool stuff, and it looks like something I might be able to do with home DVR. He has three projects […]
About
I am a grad student at Stanford University in the Communication Department and a founder of e-thePeople.org, a digital townhall. A longer, more self-indulgent bio.
Einstein Eightball
"Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity."
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Please send me email at mike (at) weiksner (dot) com
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