Disqus - Latest Comments for benjaminclemens

Re: http://arstype.tumblr.com/post/2326002093

benjaminclemens — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 00:04:39 -0000

does this mean Maquette can be licensed for font-face use?

Re: Treat Newspapers Like Cable TV - Ideas Special Report - The Atlantic

benjaminclemens — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 23:47:11 -0000

I like this idea! I wrote something similar awhile back: http://www.practicalist.com... "

It seems like there is a fairly straightforward deal possible to save the business of putting out newspapers (the news is fine, doesn't need to change!). Make it a much cheaper version of the cable business, where subscribers buy into a much-enhanced version of something they get a basic version of for free. Major ISPs like AT&T, Comcast, etc. could create a open news consortium that users could buy into by adding $2 to their monthly bill (this has nothing to do with network neutrality, by the way, just creating the same mechanism that supports free pop music radio).

Assuming that only 5% of broadband customers of the top 5 U.S. ISPs agree to that, that's $120 million each year. If even just newspapers banded together for this, ISPs would have a strong business incentive to offer the surcharge to their subscribers. Any content provider with a certain level of traffic could offer their content only to subscribers of the consortium, splitting that dollar 50/50. This money would be paid out to content providers on a strict traffic basis. Providing content this way would be much more efficient than via paper, and the writers, editors, and photographers would be responsible to their audiences first, as it should be (with advertising revenue on top of that). And they could continue to provide news summaries and headlines to news aggregators like Google News.

It wouldn't be the 40% margin of years-ago, but it would be a going concern. All that it would require would be placing the needs of the business as a whole above the fantasy that there is something basically wrong with journalism, Web sites, any particular newspaper, or an attachment to paper as media. And also the willingness to take action instead of letting things slide further towards... nothing."

Re: leaving flickr

benjaminclemens — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 01:20:50 -0000

I like http://www.23hq.com/ -- seems pretty good...

Re: Republican House Districts Emit 39% More Carbon per Capita

benjaminclemens — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 13:34:10 -0000

For sure, neither party has much to be proud about :)

Re: Generation M: an Unmanifesto

benjaminclemens — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:34:20 -0000

thank you!

Re: Why We Should Not Use '<' And '>' As Microsyntax

benjaminclemens — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:55:07 -0000

Why not go ahead and ban any char as microsyntax that would cause an xml parser to fail: ampersand, apostrophe, double-quote, along with lesser-than and greater-than? http://www.xml.com/pub/a/20...

Re: sharable media design convergence

benjaminclemens — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:14:18 -0000

Agreed about the right column; one of the major change-rollbacks on Facebook was re-introducing some of the notifications that they took out of this area though, so somebody must have been paying attention to that area...

Re: Micropsychographics: Twitter Types And Retweeting

benjaminclemens — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:17:10 -0000

yeah, guess so. cue the "Ride of the Valkyries" music!

Re: Micropsychographics: Twitter Types And Retweeting

benjaminclemens — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:15:42 -0000

Sounds like the kind of a/b/c testing I used to do with email marketing a few years ago, and I'd imagine it's inevitable. In my experience our opted-in email campaigns had extremely low response/action rates, on the order of 0.5% (though that is much higher for some businesses, like personals and social networks of course). It would be a shame if that's what twitter became for marketing communication. I have no idea if it holds water, but I hope something like John Battelle's marketing-as-conversation works out instead. Otherwise, more marketing messages will have very quickly diminishing returns (spitter? twam?).

Re: Let's turn those iTouch devices into first class content creators please!

benjaminclemens — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:29:44 -0000

i saw this myself, I tried to get my 4 year-old interested in making words and letters with a an old laptop, and she got tired of the keyboard/mouse/trackpad quickly. But she took to making letters, drawing, and moving things around with Brushes on iPhone with no trouble!

Re: Marissa Mayer is a gigantic success, but she does not know anything about design

benjaminclemens — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 01:22:32 -0000

word!

Re: snark: too big to fail?

benjaminclemens — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 01:02:29 -0000

I suppose in my case it "took one to know one" :)

Re: in praise of assholes

benjaminclemens — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 14:24:13 -0000

I don't know where I am!! Aaaahhh!

Re: The need for iPhone app folders and search is quickly approaching

benjaminclemens — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:43:36 -0000

I don't mind the idea of new interfaces, etc., but I can't really imagine that you (or anyone) uses 148 applications all the time. That's more than are installed on my computer. Is it really true?

Re: 10 Dirty Little Web Development Tricks › Yongfook | Web Producer and Consultant based in Tokyo

benjaminclemens — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:30:01 -0000

#7 made me slap my head. i will never get the time I spent dealing with that back...

Re: twiphlo: another fake startup!

benjaminclemens — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 03:22:39 -0000

Wow, weird, I am working on that right this moment... you must have CONTROL OF MY MIND.

Re: HOWTO: Make a Mac development environment with Eclipse, Subversion, Apache, MySQL+phpmyadmin, and PHP5

benjaminclemens — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:17:08 -0000

Indeed, I tried that and a version called MAMP which has an even snazzier control panel. But for whatever reason, they did not work with the simple virtual host setup I wanted to make (MAMP even has a control panel to do just that, but it didn't work when pointing to a dir outside the htdocs). Maybe it was some sort of port issue, as XAMPP/MAMP like to use 8888 out of the box? I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than me could fix that (maybe you know?), but I only had one hiccup with 3-6, so I never tried to troubleshoot XAMPP/MAMP.

Re: random($foo): Getting Started w/ Python

benjaminclemens — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:08:05 -0000

many thanks :)

Re: random($foo): Getting Started w/ Python

benjaminclemens — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:53:30 -0000

any pointers for even more basic resources, for someone who is still wrestling with whitespace issues? :)