davidbnewquist

If the author ever writes a vol. 2, and if karma correlates with startup success, then it looks like you have a good chance to be featured in it:)

Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace by Michele Slatalla

Story is circa 1990.

Respectfully, you're too quick to dismiss saturation. Unless you have a color very close to either white or black, decreasing saturation makes the color more gray, and increasing saturation makes the hue more vibrant/noticeable.

In our example, balancing the saturation of the left colors makes a meaningful perceptual difference (again, I'm not saying anything about aesthetics).

Here is a side-by-side comparision with saturation values shown for each color. http://peoplesign.com/content/colorSaturationHN2.png

Nice observation (and diagram) about the greater value contrast on the right side.

Note also there is greater saturation contrast on the left side. (I'm not sure how this effects aesthetics.) You've inspired me to create a corresponding diagram:)

http://peoplesign.com/content/colorSaturationHN.png

Despite seeming a little jargon heavy, I was able to distill out few useful ideas.

For example, say you're considering a cool new CAPTCHA for your registration page. The article would advise doing an "A/B split test" before phasing out the old CAPTCHA.

Such a test would involve creating an alternate registration page with the new CAPTCHA, and randomly directing x% of users to the alternate page. You could then obtain registration completion % from both groups, which would drive your decision to switch to fully switch to the new CAPTCHA.

I signed up to become an expert using my twitter account: nice seemless integration.

Next I added some profile info and hit the save button. The save registered, but I was left on the edit profile page. It felt like I was left hanging: what do I do now? You should funnel the user back (or at least show a prominent link) to another area of the site.

I like how you now have a simplified, functional launchpad/landing page, along with a quick link to the "how it works" page.

Overall, the pages are less cluttered: you've cleaned it up and it shows. Nice work.

In addition to TinEye, they another image search for more loosely similar pics: very, very cool.

http://labs.ideeinc.com/visual/

On this page, you have to select the query image from a set they provide.

On the page linked below, you can upload your own.

http://labs.ideeinc.com/upload/

Thanks for responding. Based on the lack of follow up press, I had suspected less than hoped for results. Jens and Cheri were courageous for volunteering, and hopefully their data can be used to someday improve the technology.

After listing useful advice he's received over the years, the author appropriately offers some critial meta-advice: write down (and analyze) advice that you find interesting in order to put it into practice.

The "visual tongue radar" (allows psuedo vision via an electrical impulse grid on the tongue) interface is intriguing. The reporter describes:

"Thinking back on it, I don't remember the feeling of the electrodes on my tongue at all during my walkabout. What I remember are pictures: high-contrast images of cubicle walls and office doors, as though I'd seen them with my eyes."

This article reminds me of a 2003 story (that made the cover of Wired) about a prototype brain implant artificial vision system and its hopeful Canadian patient, Jens Naumann. Here's a link: http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/sight/story3.html.

Does anyone know the eventual outcome of Jen's story? I can't find any follow-up stories about him.

The tongue interface seems like a less invasive alternative to Jen's system; although, you probably can't speak while it's active.

Looks good, but I also experienced unbearable sluggishness on Linux/Firefox when scrolling.

Specifically, Xorg and firefox processes use nearly all my CPU when I scroll.

It's unusable in its current form (at least on this system). Hopefully you can tune your code; this is a neat effect.

In hindsight, the tone of my comment seems condescending to business and marketing types. This was not intended, and I apologize if any offense was taken.

Those are just as important to economic progress as the engineer type. Assuming there is a real global shortage of a given type of skill and an excess of others, we all benefit if appropriate reallocation is inspired.

True; although, both have a place in the conversation.

Dale Carnegie = Marketeer

-He authored the bestseller: "How to Win Friends and Influence People". The book continues to sell today even though it was first published in 1934. I'd recommend it even to non-Marketeers.

Andrew Carnegie = Business Guy

-He's remembered as a Business guy for doing titanic mergers and acquisitions in the Steel industry. However he did not come from a wealthy family and started his first steel company from the ground up.

The "Make your mistakes visible" advice seems to have merit based on the offered axion: "Telling the truth even when you don’t have to is good evidence that you’re trustworthy."

But I can't think of any marketeers that have taken this advice. I wonder how effective it would be if Microsoft ran a campaign saying: "although we enabled user account control by default to increase security, we admit that it came across as 'chatty and annoying' for most users."

Such a strategy may be especially useful to reduce impact of a competitor using a mistake in negative marketing.

You're absolutely right, but I think rabidsnail was trying to say there's currently a glut of business and marketing types.

Amen! Unfortunately, it seems popular "Western" culture is inspiring lots more Carnegies and Barnums than Franklins. But how can a shift in culture be brought about?

"Change the world" is only part of the equation. But what drives the hacker entrepreneur day to day? It's the adrenaline and focus supplied by the promised emotional payoff of a completed mission. Any veteran of a website launch knows what I'm talking about. This is why we're entrepreneurs, and it's the subject of this humorous video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgNyoxpENXc

And no, it doesn't ask you to shell out any $$.

7 of the top 25 are about unhumans: zombies, vampires or demi-gods.

5 out of the the top 25 are self-help books on the topic of eating less.

4 of those 5 are targeted to women, 2 have the word 'girl' in the title.

3 of those 5 occupy spots in the top 4.

I'm a little sick of the Mac/PC geek stereotypes.

Here's another promo that features a radically different geek type.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgNyoxpENXc

"Currently BBC iPlayer TV programmes are available to play in the UK only".

Sighs that my quine is so 1999...

#!/usr/bin/perl

$x = <<'LOL';

#Meaningless chart/data is meaningless

$x =~ s/\x67less/\x67ful/g;

$x =~ s/((7less)|(7ful))(.+?)((7ful)|(7less))/$5$4$1/g;

print "#!/usr/bin/perl\n\n\$x = <<'LOL';\n${x}LOL\n";

print $x;

LOL

#Meaningless chart/data is meaningless

$x =~ s/\x67less/\x67ful/g;

$x =~ s/((7less)|(7ful))(.+?)((7ful)|(7less))/$5$4$1/g;

print "#!/usr/bin/perl\n\n\$x = <<'LOL';\n${x}LOL\n";

print $x;

To obtain a laugh from the following perl code: 1)run 2)obtain output 3)run output 4)repeat 2-4

The site does imply (and this may not be true) that someone always gets a commission on every purchase through the site. So if I want to buy a new camcorder, maybe I could ask a friend to be an "expert" and we could split the commision? That may be a strong initial incentive--effectively its a discount over a direct buy amazon.com.

This would seem to be an exploit, but it may still be a win-win-win for the friends, amazon.com and browseology.com.

Later down the road, established experts may be able to create real value for potential shoppers. I like the concept of being able to "shop" for my salesperson. Often time I go into Bes..err.."a big electronics retailer", hoping to get expert advice on a product but get stuck with a sales staff that can't answer my questions.

I would actually feel good about awarding a commission to a sufficiently knowledgeable salesperson.

If I want to buy a specific new camcorder, can I sign up as an expert and take my own recommendation?:)

I like your "big elephant leads little elephant" logo: it's inviting and representative of your biz.

It's possible that the article itself may be a counterexample: NYT is running ads alongside this story. So NYT is at least trying to be profitable from online ads.

The author laments: "Web advertising will never be profitable enough to support ambitious news gathering."

Really?