How to reduce information overload for IT news

If you are used to read IT news, in time you start suffering from information overload. You add sources on Facebook, Twitter, RSS reader and the information keeps coming. And then comes a moment when you start thinking that you need to make a clean up. But you have no idea where to start.

Well here a pro tip on how to clean up your sources and be more efficient:

When a source has articles that contain phrases like:

This is an Apple [InsertProductName] killer
The new Apple [InsertProductName] is a large disappointment
Apple stock is doomed
Sell your Apple stock now
Apple [InsertProductName]‘s hardware is behind competition
Android has Flash
etc

Drop it! Delete without remorse. Not only that you are not loosing anything but in time you will see that you will have a better view on the IT field. There are only 2 situations in which the above statements are possible:

1. Stupidity: The author is an idiot that has no freaking idea what is he talking about. More than that, who pays for those articles is a bigger idiot that most likely employs only idiots

2. Greed: The author and who pays him know that the above statements are not true but they use the momentum for link baiting. A legit business model but not a reliable source of information

Stupid arguments: I own the comments

In the never ending debate of WordPress comments vs. Facebook comments one of the most idiotic arguments is: But I own the comments and I don’t want to give them to Facebook or any other entity.

Really? Do YOU own the comments made by OTHER people on your website? By proxy, does your hosting company own the blog posts you create?

Breaking news to you social media blogger expert: the comment creator is the most likely person to own the comments he makes. And FB comments are the easiest way to put the owner in control of his content.

Romanians are search engine spammers…

…or at least this seems to be result of a marketing campaign.

The idea was simple: When you search in Google for “Romanians are…”(in english, romanian and other languages), the suggestions were not so flattering (in fact they are not for most countries which in itself is a mirror of the racism that’s on all of us). In order to change that, an advertising agency created a campaign to motivate people to mass search for more positive terms.

The results:

This can be considered a harmless and moral cause, but the same were many other Google Bombs that were removed by Google.

Is it fair to game (in public) the autosuggestion results?

What if KFC tried to game his autosuggestion from “KFC is bad” to “KFC is healthy”?

On the other side, the autosuggestions, in many cases of “natural search” (questions/affirmations), are simply idiotic.

Most likely this is because only idiotic people use natural language searches.

The tech world is broken by design

The tech world is broken by design will be a series of posts that cover different aspects of the tech world (hardware/software) that are obviously broken.

But what broken means in this context. Broken means that there is a huge difference between intention and implementation and this reflects on the user satisfaction, company’s revenue and progress. There are multiple levels unfortunately and all summed lead to a not so bright future:

User experience: what the user wants and what the user gets
Product development: the development cycle from the idea to the end product
Organizational culture: how companies function in order to transform an idea into a product
Marketing: what are the marketing department doing to get the product into the user’s home and the money from the user’s pocket to shareholder’s bank accounts

This series is inspired 99% by comparing how Apples does things and how the others do it. I started with this introduction to kill procrastination and have a start

Startup mistakes: Etacts

A few days ago I’ve received a newsletter from the Etacts team regarding an update of their product. Today I wanted it to give it a try but surprise surprise is not compatible with the Firefox 4 beta. This is one of the most basic mistakes done by startups.

The idea is: when you have a young product targeted to early adopters, you make sure that you blend well in their environment. Otherwise, like in the case of Etacts, you are going to loose the momentum and all your PR and development efforts are going to be less efficient