Disqus - Latest Comments for robisit

Re: How To Change The New iTunes 10 Icon With Free iTunes Icons

RobIsIT — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:45:09 -0000

Restart your computer! Everything should go back to normal.

Re: How To Change The New iTunes 10 Icon With Free iTunes Icons

RobIsIT — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 09:07:42 -0000

The easiest way to reset it is to restart your computer!

Re: How To Change The New iTunes 10 Icon With Free iTunes Icons

RobIsIT — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 07:19:34 -0000

You're welcome! I'm glad that this helped you.

Re: Why Don’t eCommerce Reward Programs Work?

RobIsIT — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 10:39:49 -0000

Technically, verifying or measuring social network activity is pretty easy. Klout, Empire Avenue, etc are all good examples of large sites that are doing this already. These services leverage the API's of each social network to obtain data. For sites that don't have public API's, code that regularly scrapes user data stores it in a local database would work well.

Re: Why Don’t eCommerce Reward Programs Work?

RobIsIT — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 10:36:56 -0000

I think that this is linked to the problems anonymity, identification and online authority. Huge companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc) are all working on these problems and we're getting close to solving them.

In short, in certain scenarios (product reviews for example), we need to know that a real person with real experience has contributed and weigh those contributions appropriately.

Specific to my solution above, "verification" becomes easy as long as we can uniquely identify each person.

Re: Private: Hiring via API

RobIsIT — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 15:38:49 -0000

This is really interesting, Matt and a great way to look at API's and the future of development.

What about value and reliability though?

Here's a scenario:

Lets say that my product has a robust API that has no limits on the way my core systems can be accessed and manipulated.

I identify a group of customers who are asking for my product to process information in a certain way and output a report. They're willing to pay for this functionality.

So, I contact a few developers and tell them that I have a group of people with money they want to give me. I tell the dev that I they will receive $1 for every query if they create a program that uses my API to process information and output the report.

In this scenario, someone else controls the code, hosting and even the support for this income generating process. Wouldn't this open things up to significant reliability problems?

Also, whenever I build a new system, I consider the real value it has to my company as a whole. While I would (presumably) be making more money by not hiring a developer full time to program the new functionality, but I wouldn't be adding a lot of value to my company. I wouldn't "own" that new process and at any time. Even if I was Twitter and there were 100's of services that completed the same function, the value would exist for them and not for me.

I'm interested to hear what thoughts you have about this because this is an interesting approach to project management that I've never really thought about.

Re: How To Change The New iTunes 10 Icon With Free iTunes Icons

RobIsIT — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 05:58:09 -0000

Hmm...

If you're not prompted for a password at all... are you entering the command in terminal properly?

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder

If you are entering the command correctly, browse the comments here - a couple of other people have left comments explaining how to avoid opening Terminal as root all together.

Re: How To Create a Short Google Plus URL

RobIsIT — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:56:03 -0000

I made a change in the way that the code folks need to copy-and-paste is displayed. I've tested it (and tested it and tested it)... copying-and-pasting should work great now!

I'm glad that you got it working and happy that you found this tutorial useful, David!

Re: How To Create a Short Google Plus URL

RobIsIT — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 15:36:21 -0000

After testing on a windows machine, it looks like the code wasn't being copied as shown. Windows was changing the quotation marks in the code above to a weird character without any warning. I've made a change to the code in the post and after testing, it appears to work without a problem.

Let me know if you have any problems with it after you try again! Thanks for the heads up!

Re: Jason Calacanis: \"Blogging Is Dead\" & Why \"Stupid People Shouldn't Write\"

RobIsIT — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 14:32:28 -0000

I carefully tracked Mahalo's course through Google's Panda update and created an in-depth summary from my perspective:

http://robisit.com/lj

From the article:
"To say that Mahalo’s failure is a result of the expertise of the writers
is completely wrong. Mahalo built systems that consciously rewarded
people for creating the largest volume of content with a baseline of
quality. This is a factual statement that has been true since the
inception of Mahalo."

Re: How To Change The New iTunes 10 Icon With Free iTunes Icons

RobIsIT — Sun, 15 May 2011 06:56:19 -0000

Nope, it's not a problem! Just restart your computer and everything will go back to the way it was!

Re: How To Change The New iTunes 10 Icon With Free iTunes Icons

RobIsIT — Mon, 09 May 2011 11:12:32 -0000

The password was set by you when you first bought your Mac and installed OS X. Usually, folks set this to an "easy" password such as a kids name, birthday or similar. Try a few times to see if you can guess it.

If guessing doesn't work, Lifehacker has a easy guide about how to reset your password:
http://lifehacker.com/software...

Re: How To Change The New iTunes 10 Icon With Free iTunes Icons

RobIsIT — Wed, 04 May 2011 19:06:16 -0000

Thanks for the comment! Sadly, when tested, this doesn't work for all versions of Mac OSX. I wrote this article to be as broad as possible so that the same instructions would work no matter which version you were using.

Re: How To Change The New iTunes 10 Icon With Free iTunes Icons

RobIsIT — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 06:29:38 -0000

I'm glad that I could help! Good luck writing your 3 papers!

Re: How To Change The New iTunes 10 Icon With Free iTunes Icons

RobIsIT — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 07:17:58 -0000

If you have dragged the iTunes icon from the Dock to the Desktop, it will have "disappeared". You need to drag the iTunes icon from the Applications folder back to the Dock. The program should still be in your Applications folder, but if you have removed it from there as well, find it again using Spotlight.

I hope that you found this tutorial helpful!

Re: How to write effective SEO copy - Making the most of descriptions, articles and text online

RobIsIT — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 07:05:58 -0000

I'm not sure which categories you're referring to, but generally, yes. Any content that is duplicated is a copy.

Re: Idea of the Day: Super Saturate The Groupon Model

RobIsIT — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 14:39:28 -0000

I'd offer a very fair percentage of earnings to key sales people. I'd likely start very high at something like 80% (keeping 20% for myself). This way, the sales rep would hopefully become truly invested while thinking that 20% is a fair trade for the infrastructure and services you're providing.

I would likely evolve compensation into something that was tiered based on the impact of each sales persons role. Something like 80%, 60%, 30% depending on sales volume and re-up's.

More than anything, I'd talk to the sales reps and find out what they wanted. Haivng a sales rep that is truly invested in the idea will go a lot further than any amount of money. At the end of the day, you're better to earn 2% from a heavy hitting multi-million dollar sales rep than 95% from someone who makes 1 sale.

Re: Is Product Itteration Always The Best Answer? A look at Mahalo 4

RobIsIT — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 19:53:12 -0000

I'll take the 65% amazing. That's not too bad, thanks.

As for the 35% complete fiction/incorrect:

When I commented on Mike Rhodes, Mark Jeffery, and programmers such as Ray Slakinski, I was referring to them as employees who have shaped Mahalo's product and have left. Mahalo has seen more than it's fair share of talented people come-and-go. Above, I wondered if this damage is one of the reasons that Mahalo's initial visions failed.

"Video and Q&A just happen to be the two best ways to deliver education."

Video is a great way to deliver education. It's also on the edge of content marketing. By leveraging YouTube and inclusion across any number of websites not only is Mahalo being spread further online than ever before, but they are diversifying and increasing the ways that they are making money. I would be hard pressed to believe that Mahalo doesn't consider revenue statements before altruistic endeavors such as educating the world one guitar cord at a time.

In a number of ways, Mahalo is revolutionary. I continue to be interested in how it evolves and takes shape as it grows. Using what I have learned from it has directly impacted my own view of the Internet. Thanks for that.

"This is a horrible work of fiction above with tons of inaccuracies. "

If there are any other inaccuracies, I really would like to know about them so that I can continue to learn. After understanding where I've made a mistake, I'll update this article quickly and my increased knowledge will impact my future view of Mahalo.

Re: Roll Camera! Jason Calacanis Makes a Video Push at Mahalo, and Wants You to Know About It

RobIsIT — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 12:57:48 -0000

Interesting, accurate recap of the event this morning. If you'd like some background information on Mahalo and are curious about what Mahalo did to get to version 4, I gave it some thought: http://robisit.com/mahalo-vers...

Re: How Not To Be Influential? Quora Spam On Mechanical Turk

RobIsIT — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 13:14:06 -0000

The volume of fake votes that this problem is capable of creating makes is difficult to solve. I understand why this is such an important issue to solve quickly.

Since votes are transparent, users can be part of the solution by being shown how to identify and report fake votes. Do users have a way of reporting illicit behavior and accounts? Is there a human community manager responsible for reviewing this queue quickly to take action? Involving the community in this issue will have a number of benefits - I truly believe that this problem both lives and dies in the community.

As part of a programmatic project, I think that it would be possible to identify spam accounts similar to the way that spam e-mail is identified: with a set of logic rules. Build a system to query and flag accounts based on a set of rules that are input. Sample rules: Does the user account have a valid twitter profile attached & does the user have at least 1 follower, etc, etc. This system could flag users for deletion after confirmation and review.

Backing up the community with a programmatic system should provide a way to eliminate a significant amount of this spam. By valuing and respecting the community enough to entrust it with this action and building a somewhat unambitious system that can identify users based on a ruleset, Quora could have a solution to this problem and problems like it in the future.

Re: How Not To Be Influential? Quora Spam On Mechanical Turk

RobIsIT — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 07:44:06 -0000

Votes should be transparent. Usernames of those who voted up or down should be exposed. Allow 1 vote per answer (up or down) per user. Ban accounts that are abusive.

When Mechanical Turk or any unnatural votes start to come in, users can tell. It's not natural to see a spike in votes. Give users an easy way to report this behavior when they see it and train a Community Manager to take immediate action when more than 2 reports are shown.

The solution needs to be in the community so that Quora can scale. Mechanical Turk is only one (of many) ways for someone to accomplish this sort of shady stuff. There will always be a new way to game the system and Quora needs to empower their community to take responsibility and help build a place where they "want to live". Very quickly, Quora's community management staff will see users start to encourage other users to report bad behavior and eventually, this mentality will become ingrained in the site.

Re: How Not To Be Influential? Quora Spam On Mechanical Turk

RobIsIT — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 07:18:49 -0000

The solution lies in community.

Quora must work hard to form a community that cares enough about the quality of the infrastructure to police this type of activity themselves.

In the face of the "explosive growth" Quora has received, the Community Management staff should be working hard to architect positive and negative limits. There is no other way to solve problems like this other than old fashioned community management.

Re: Why Quora Will Never Be as Big as Twitter

RobIsIT — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 17:02:52 -0000

Quora and Twitter are completely different services. One offers a time sensitive, short character length broadcast where the other asks engaging, complicated questions. Both can be informative and timely, but one is meant to engage through collaboration while the purpose of the other is at the interact with an audience.

Beyond Quora vs. Twitter: The problem with Facebook Questions is the community. Watching the updates scroll down my mostly professional circle of friends, even these conversations are filled with conjecture, humour, etc. There's nothing wrong with that when it's properly used in a Q&A format site, but it can easily derail a good system like it has done for Yahoo Answers.

Quora, Stack Overflow, etc have groups of targeted, engaged users that care about the community they participate in. There are reward systems built to elevate exceptional contributors and contributions in ways beyond what Facebook will ever be able to offer to their large, diverse userbase.

Re: How To Change The New iTunes 10 Icon With Free iTunes Icons

RobIsIT — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 23:32:27 -0000

I'm sorry - but I can't replicate the problem so I can't solve it for you. I'd try starting from scratch, at step 1 of these instructions. If that doesn't work, then I think you have a problem unrelated to changing the iTunes icon.

Re: LAUNCH - Blog - LAUNCH002: What I learned from Zuckerberg's Mistakes

RobIsIT — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 08:19:53 -0000

"Your company has to be in the right position to be able to use this strategy, and even then it has to be planned and executed right to be successful."

Exactly! When Facebook pushed Photos out, it was still pretty small and this was the "base" of what would become a core feature. Today, Facebook takes months to push (in contrast) simple features such as external messaging.

Who knows, maybe Mahalo is in that place. I don't think they are... but I've been wrong before and it'll be interesting to watch from a distance!