The Curation Problem

This is a great TED Talk my dad sent through to me earlier today. It deals with content curation in the digital world - who/what is deciding what we see (and don't see).

This is something that most people in the Internet, communications, or marketing industries would already be well aware of - however the speaker does a great job of presenting the issue with clarity in under 10 minutes.

For all the entrepreneurs out there


Watch live video from c3oorg on Justin.tv

This is Andrew Mason, the CEO of Groupon. I saw him speak at the GROW Conference in Vancouver a couple of months ago, and he has a self-depreciating, and easy going personality that I like. It's nice to see successful people be humble.

As he points out in this talk (and as I've mentioned before on this blog), being an entrepreneur is hard. And it's particularly hard to be a tech entrepreneur in a non-tech city. In this speech (which is for something called 'Startup School' in the Valley), Mason talks about previous failures that led to the current iteration of Groupon, the difficulties in starting in a 'shallow' tech market (Chicago), and what is keeping him going.

What I learned here: stay with it, learn when to move on when something isn't catching on the way you thought it would, focus on the smaller ideas, and even when you do all that it is still going to be really hard and you still need help (Mason concedes midway & again at the end that they were given a bunch of money to start & pay a team to keep going).

A heads-up: with the new TED Talks iPad app, I've gone on a bit of a conference/seminar/forum talk spree lately. They're great to have on in the background while you work or are trying to go to sleep, and I like listening to smart people. My blog is likely going to start reflecting that obsession for a while.

Calgary Mayoralty Debate Mashup

When one candidate doesn't want to participate in a mayoralty debate, leave it to the internet to make one up. It's actually a pretty great way to see where the candidates stand on various issues. It's funny to see how some candidates talk one way to an audience of developers and another to "regular folk".

Huge credit to Calgarian Gordon McDowell, who created the video but has also been posting a bunch of great election stuff on his blog.

Related: Barb Higgins is annoying.

What's going on with Chrome?

Those that know me, know that I'm a bit of an analytics junkie. Today I noticed that I was getting a lot more traffic from Chrome users recently. This is admittedly a small sample size, but I compared at the last four days of traffic to the four days before that. Usually my site skews away from IE users, and Firefox generally makes up about 60%, but suddenly Chrome has taken the lead.

As a percentage of site traffic, both Chrome and Safari have doubled and Firefox is down about a third. I looked at some of the other sites I manage which get more traffic than this one, and although not as dramatic, the upward trend in Chrome usage the last few days applied across the board.

I couldn't find anything obvious online that would account for the uptick, but did find an interesting, and somewhat related, article comparing browser speeds. I've tried and liked Chrome, but I found the performance that sets Chrome apart started seriously suffering as soon as I tried extensions & having multiple tabs open (the article seemed to support this) - I switched back to Firefox 3.6 as a result.

I'm still curious as to the increase in Chrome's use - wondering both if it will continue & what 's causing people to switch. I don't get a lot of comments on this blog, but if anyone feels compelled to tell me why you prefer Chrome, I'm all ears.

I turned on my computer and this was there.

I keep many tabs open in my web browser (sometimes 20+). When I scan my twitter feed, I usually go through and click on all the links that I think will be interesting or worthwhile, then go back and read them later. Sometimes the pages are too content heavy and I can't get through everything (or even start) before it's time for me to go back to work.

Anyways, I opened up my computer about 5 minutes ago and I was staring at this slideshare presentation about branding and social media. I've made it about halfway through and so far it is bang-on. I'm now passing it along to you, the reader. However I have no idea where it came from, and I'm not sure who to attribute it to, or thank... if it was you, then thanks. Otherwise, enjoy:
View more presentations from KickApps.