Tag: web
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Cory Doctorow’s Experiment: Does Free Work?
For his next collection of short stories to be published, titled With a Little Help, author and blogger-extraordinaire Cory Doctorow will be running an experiment so that he can see whether his strategy of offering his work for free is working. With prices to range from $0.00 to $10,000 for various packages, Doctorow is to track his…
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Online Dating Statistics: Ideal First Messages
After looking at race and religion, the online dating site OkCupid turns its statistical eye toward the actual content of the messages sent between participants. It’s worth noting that the average response/reply rate is 32%. First up, what to say in a first message: Be literate. Netspeak, bad grammar, and bad spelling are huge turn-offs. The worst…
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Online Dating Statistics: Religion and Race
The online dating website OkCupid has a rather fascinating blog, OkTrends, written by two of the four mathematics majors who founded the site. Still in it’s infancy the blog has a few fascinating posts studying data gleamed from their expansive user base. Starting out with a brief look at their matching algorithm and the control group…
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Online Dating and OkCupid
OkCupid, one of the biggest online dating websites around, has had a bit of an up and down history. Originally called SparkMatch, itself a by-product of the once popular TheSpark, the site was one of the first completely free dating websites that now abound online. Inc. Magazine looks at the history of OkCupid—it’s struggles and…
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Blogs as Public Billboards
First seen over at Raul Gutierrez’ Heading East, this Tim Berners-Lee quote on the role of the home page from 1996 or so seems to come from an interview with Rohit Khare and DC Denison: With all respect, the personal home page is not a private expression; it’s a public billboard that people work on…
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Reporting and the Internet
It seems you can’t spend five minutes on the Internet without coming across an opinion piece on the end of traditional media or an article riffing on the age of the blog. I’ve so far refrained from noting (m)any of these articles, mainly because the argument is becoming stale and the articles are so widespread.…
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The Principles of Edward Tufte
The problem: “presenting large amounts of information in a way that is compact, accurate, adequate for the purpose, and easy to understand”. The solution: Edward Tufte (actually, the solution is “to develop a consistent approach to the display of graphics which enhances its dissemination, accuracy, and ease of comprehension”… but that’s not as catchy). Yes,…
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Tests On Language and Click-Through Rates
By varying the language used in a sentence at the end of his articles, Dustin Curtis increased click-through rates to his Twitter profile by 173%. Dustin describes his multivariate (‘split’) testing of different call to action sentences, revealing the most persuasive, in a visually excellent article. This puts me in mind of how both Tim…
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On Passwords (Usability and Security)
Passwords have barely evolved since the early days of computing and are taken for granted in our daily online-lives. It’s time for change, says usability expert Jakob Nielsen, who believes password masking goes against basic usability principles and should be stopped (via Kottke). Providing feedback and visualizing the system’s status have always been among the…