Ernesto on August 31st, 2008

Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research and the Customer Experience Matters blog, shares from a recent report he did on the usability of the McCain and Obama Web sites.  MCain's site failed on three out of five of thee Forrester criteria, Obama, four out five.  Neither site passed on the privacy and security policies criteria.

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Here's a piece from Timothy Lee at Techdirt on NBC's Web video Olympics coverage — he points out it left a lot to be desired.  I wondered if it was just me that thought so — most of the events I wanted to watch were not available for streaming, the site was difficult to navigate [...]

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Seems counter to current conventional wisdom, but according to Tech Crunch, citing a new study by Attributor, McCain is leading in mainstream news coverage, and catching up on blogs.  Interesting piece breaking down factors in generating buzz in the blogosphere and in mainstream media Web outlets.

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Ernesto on August 26th, 2008

In an Online Spin column ("More On: Is Google Making Marketers Stupid") Joe Marchese writes: "…the Internet ecosystem breaks down because the metrics that marketers demand from Internet publishers are not a true measure of value and can be manufactured to a point, such as clicks and impressions."  Clicks and impressions are of course valid [...]

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Ernesto on August 24th, 2008

There was a standing ovation at the 9:30 a.m. Mass today at Ste. Marie Parish for Olympic race-walker Joanne Dow, who has just returned from Bejing, where she competed and finished 31 in the 20K race walk.  She didn’t expect to win (the New York Times quoted her as saying, “there’s not a chance I’m [...]

Continue reading about Woman from our parish returns from the Olympics

Today I ran my second 22-mile training run en route to the Oct. 5 Maine Marathon in Portland.  A few interesting things to note – the first and most striking of which is that I felt really good, all the way through and afterward.  As recommended by various training programs, I ran it about one-minute-per-mile [...]

Continue reading about Second 22-miler goes down easier than the first; thanks lasagna! And Olympic Marathon is tonight…

I was happy to see that this study of kids' Internet usage shows that at least up to 11, kids aren't heavy users.  They still play with traditional toys and read plenty of books.  I know that in our household, despite the fact that I work on the Web and that Kris and I both [...]

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Ernesto on August 17th, 2008

Just finished Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Murakami is a Japanese novelist and distance runner who weaves the two interests together in this plainspoken book on how these two activities feed each other, compliment each other, and seem to appeal to a certain personality type.  Feeling much in common [...]

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Ernesto on August 13th, 2008

Philip Rosedale, the founder of the virtual world Second Life is stepping down as CEO. He explains why in this interview at Fast Company. He also talks about how many companies are using Second Life for business meetings, and why. A business meeting in Second Life could go something like this, he says: [...]

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Ernesto on August 13th, 2008

With marathon training at the center of my workout activities this year, I've joked once in a while about outrunning upcoming birthdays… but given a recent study from Stanford University, it's not entirely a joke (check out the BBC story here). The study, which tracked 500 older runners for 20 years, along with 500 similar [...]

Continue reading about Maybe I can outrun 40 after all; running slows aging