Fire and Knowledge

Here is an excellent 20 minute presentation by Kevin Kelly about what he sees the next 5,000 days of the web looking like:

Amazon MP3′s daily deal twitter is fantastic. It’s a great use of twitter. Customers get deals, and Amazon gets permission to put themselves in front of users every day.

(via Gruber)

The other day I typed “why” on Google Suggest, and the first auto-suggestion was “why did i get married.”

At first I was surprised that the term was so popular and had over a million results. It seemed odd that humans, though admittedly a very strange mammal, could think Google could answer the question of why they got married.

But then I saw there was a movie by that name. A reasonable explanation after all!

There is a new phishing scam going around to executives. It is an email posing as a subpoena for the United States District Court in San Diego, but when the user clicks a link on the page it installs keystroke recording software to get sensitive information.

I’ve often thought the nightly news will die a slow death, so of course this caught my eye:

Network newscasts are a holding effort. They are a rearguard action. They are prisoners of demography and cultural shifts that are as irreversible as the physical laws of the universe. Namely: fewer Americans have the time or inclination to watch a half-hour TV newscast at 6:30 in the evening; those who do will ultimately die; those who do not presently are not—unlike the generations before them—developing the habit as they get older. (James Poniewozik, “Life After Katie“)

When you can get more information in 5 minutes scanning CNN.com, why sit in front of a TV for 30 minutes at a specific time? Why scan the channels for weather when you can have all the weather you want in 10 seconds on your cell phone or computer? It’s a dying model.

Seth Godin explains why Firefox is like getting into college. I found it interesting that even though only 25% of Squidoo’s visitors are Firefox users, 50% of page builders use Firefox.

For all you web developers, Luke Wroblewski’s “Sign Up Forms Must Die” is an excellent primer on getting people to use your service without a sign-in form hitting them first.

How in the world did wikipedia — a seemingly anarchic encyclopedia — become one of the top ten visited websites? “The Charms of Wikipedia” explains.