Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Fascinating article on Obama’s organization.

The technology sector seems a lot more ready for hard times this time round. Presentations, blogposts and stuff all around. It seems we really learnt. Here’s a video as an example.

The big Drupal.org redesign: “If we’re going to do it, let’s do it right the first time.”

I don’t have to point out the fallacy in that, do I? Apart from that, I can’t wait to see what they come up with.

Scapetoad looks like a friendly way to generate these maps.

Got some good answers on my question about making size-adjusted worldmaps. http://people.cas.sc.edu/hardistf/cartograms/ has a java tool (that I couldn’t get to work for some reason), http://www.santafe.edu/~mgastner/ has the really nice visualisations that I want, with a link to this guy http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/ who made the book “The Atlas of the real world”. And then, software!

I’ll post a post later if I get this stuff to work.

Finally a competitor for Google analytics: Yahoo web analytics. Slowly rolling out, no idea if it’ll be any good. They seem to want to be more customizable than Google analytics (you can drag and drop to create data filters), plus real time (Google analytics isn’t real time). Good, competition!

I want to be able to make reshaped worldmaps like this! Any tips?

Good article on Chinese censorship from the ground.

Using Adsense to get beta testers: “You can pay peanuts to have people come to your website. In a mature company with a mature product, the goal is to pay for lots of people to come to your website. But I think the genius of Google’s innovation is that it allows you to pay for just a few people. Think of it as micropayments for beta testers.”

Lou Rosenfeld: “An unfinished book is one huge, pointy Damocles’ Sword to have hanging over one’s head. In fact, I’m sure if he was around today, Damocles would be an author.”

Lou was writing the book together with Rich Wiggins, who has now left and Marko Hurst took his place. Writing a book together with someone else is hard!

So this is good news: we can hope to see Lou’s book on search analytics next year!

I’m still proud we did the Colombia migration video project :)