I came across this article by David Goodman in my Technorati search feed for Instapaper, where he discusses his feed addiction, the “continuous partial attention” it fosters, and his transition to consuming longer content:
Regularly following the feeds of over 60 websites was leaving me in a twitchy state of continuous partial attention.
Thanks for the great article, David. I faced many of the same issues as you with obsessive RSS unread-clearing, and I realized I was spending more time skimming short content and headlines than truly reading anything.
The nature of the feed reader, especially when loaded with many high-volume feeds such as Engadget or Digg, encourages you to keep going and skimming and clicking endlessly to “keep up”. When I’d come across a... Read more
I’m seeing a disturbing trend in the App Store: many independent developers are reacting to the dysfunctional price-commenters by significantly dropping the prices of their non-free apps.
Many popular apps that launched at $10 are now $5-7. Some have been cut down to $3.
The iPhone is a big market, but we’re talking total sales for a... Read more
Amazon S3 was down for 8 hours today. (So was SQS, but nobody seemed to care. I guess there aren’t a lot of loud, public-facing SQS users.)
This should make a lot of companies rethink their reliance on Amazon Web Services or any significant architectural requirement that they can’t control. Some things to think about:
You ought to be careful what you say these days. If you ask some of the louder conservatives, they will explain that a careless word will trigger the descent of the infamous P.C. police who have made careers out of being offended. Free speech is under assault, they will say, and good-intentioned people who slip and say something dumb are vilified... Read more
It is, at last, finished. At least, most people understand that after a long, hard-fought race, Barack Obama has won the Democratic nomination. Most of the holdouts should come around when Hillary formally concedes on Saturday. Unfortunately, there are still a few rumors and loose ends that should be sorted out so nobody goes into the general... Read more
I’ve been following politics pretty closely the past few months, and I’ve come to some conclusions about the media: there is not enough information on the Internet, blogs are too filtered, and instant communication hurts the distribution of information. This may surprise a few people.
My parents, knowing I’ve been something of a political... Read more
It’s very likely that an iPhone update is imminent. But while nearly everyone has agreed on that, nobody knows anything definite about the specifics: when will the update happen, and what will it change?
I disabled comments on Marco.org tonight. It might be permanent — I haven’t decided yet.
Marco.org has had 263 articles published since 2003. Comments were enabled in March 2006, and we received 2,216 approved comments.
Most comments were idiotic. Many spewed ignorance, hate, sexism, and racism. Others were from confused people mistaking... Read more
Jonathan Tran wrote Stand on the Shoulders of Giants, an article arguing that software developers, and specifically web developers, should avoid replicating features available elsewhere. His argument is that we should build our applications on top of third-party services by the “giants” (e.g. Google, Yahoo) via their APIs instead of wasting... Read more
After the filly Eight Belles suffered a fatal breakdown following her strong second-place finish in the Kentucky Derby, there are plenty of questions floating around. Since when do racehorses break down after the race? (Never before, in anyone’s memory, by the way.) Could something have prevented this? Some folks are just asking themselves why... Read more
These bother me.
The jobs that full-time students can get during the school year are usually low-paying, part-time retail or food-service positions. Many colleges are in small towns where nothing else is available even if students did have time to devote to them — but they don’t. And many students don’t work paying jobs at all during the school... Read more
Third-party applications created with the iPhone SDK will be available for sale in June. Apple has created an incredible platform here — how much will these applications cost?
From a developer’s point of view, let’s see how much potential the market holds. This will determine what a developer needs to charge to make the effort worthwhile.
As of... Read more
Politicians can be myopic. Under current party rules, my state’s delegation will not be seated at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. All of Michigan is disenfranchised. Prominent Democrats are franticly searching for a way to seat these delegates in a way that doesn’t appear to compromise the ongoing primary process. They worry that... Read more
I just read that Hillary Clinton might be winning in “the only count that matters.” Really? And what innovative accounting method is this? Apparently, Hillary would be ahead if we were counting the electoral votes in states she has won. This winner-take-all system is now the system that “makes sense” and Hillary should be winning. Let’s do... Read more
We all know that climate change is a problem. We know it is caused in large part by greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere and trapping heat. If we can’t find a solution to global warming, we’re in all sorts of trouble. That solution will involve cutting carbon dioxide emissions. So far, most of us are in... Read more
