Why I didn't like riding the bus as a kid The Law of the Jungle The public school I attended had various rules: no yelling, no talking back to the teacher, no chewing gum in class, no defecating on the azaleas out front, and so on. These rules were enforced by faculty members and were generally obeyed. On the bus, however, there were no rules. I mean, they had rules, but there was no way of enforcing them. Suffice it to say, the bus was ruled by the law of the jungle: only the strongest and fastest survived. I grew up in a very small town in Northern Idaho called Hayden Lake. Here's a few pictures of the compound: Surprisingly, I actually didn't mind the Nazis who rode the bus. It wasn't until my oldest brother got in a fight with a few skinheads that the dynamic changed. After that incident, it was difficult to relax when any of the Nazis were around. The Mexican A few miles down the road from the Nazi bus stop we stopped at a house full of foster kids. The lesson here being that Mexicans are assholes. The Hierarchy The Viking
Is Sharing More Valuable for Publishers on Facebook or Twitter? [STATS] In the age of micropublishing, how many people are actually reading what you tweet or share on Facebook? And more importantly, how does the click-per-share ratio compare between the two very different social platforms that are utilized by millions of users every day for consuming and sharing content? These are questions that keep social media strategists awake at night (or maybe just me). So at Mashable, we decided to take a look at our own data and see how user behavior compares between Facebook and Twitter, the two social media sites that generate the most referral traffic to Mashable.com. After pulling three months worth of our social data and calculating the click-per-share (CPS), it appears that users on Twitter are more likely to share an article rather than read it, whereas users on Facebook click on more articles than they share. Calculating the Click-Per-Share Before we get into the why, I want to quickly explain the numbers and some potential discrepancies.
This is what my car needs All artwork and content on this site is Copyright © 2015 Matthew Inman. Please don't steal. TheOatmeal.com was lovingly built using CakePHP All artwork and content on this site is Copyright © 2015 Matthew Inman. TheOatmeal.com was lovingly built using CakePHP Backpack Tour Backpack makes it easy to keep all of your essential documents, information, schedules in one place all the time.Never lose the notes, files and data that you depend on. Always available and secure. Backpack works hand in hand with email. Watch a video overview of the Backpack Calendar Share a calendar with your co-workers (or just make one for yourself). Writeboards are text documents that save a new version each time you make a change. Thanksgiving as a kid VS Thanksgiving as an adult All artwork and content on this site is Copyright © 2014 Matthew Inman. Please don't steal. TheOatmeal.com was lovingly built using CakePHP All artwork and content on this site is Copyright © 2014 Matthew Inman. Please don't steal. TheOatmeal.com was lovingly built using CakePHP
Top Reasons Why Consumers Unsubscribe Via E-Mail, Facebook & Twitter Mashable | The Social Media Guide More than 90% of consumers unsubscribe, "unlike" or stop following brands because of too frequent, irrelevant or boring communications, according to a report by social media and e-mail marketing services company ExactTarget. Released Tuesday, "The Social Break-Up" is a study that surveyed more than 1,500 consumers, exploring changing online behaviors and top motivations for "unliking," unfollowing and unsubscribing from brand communications via Facebook, Twitter and e-mail. Here are a few key findings from the study: With 95% of U.S. online consumers using e-mail (and 93% of U.S. online consumers being subscribers to at least one opt-in e-mail per day), the e-mail findings are particularly important for marketers hoping to remain in good standing with their audiences via e-mail. But Facebook and Twitter are relevant as well, as 65% of U.S. online consumers are currently active on the platform (to the point of obsession, sometimes), and 9% of U.S. online consumers are active tweeters.
Vid.ly Serves Web Video to Multiple Devices Automagically [INVITES] Encoding.com launched a new, easy video-encoding service called Vid.ly in private beta Monday. Using Vid.ly, users can upload a video file and serve it to multiple devices and web browsers all from a single URL. Vid.ly simplifies and automates the process of not only transcoding video into multiple formats (WebM, H.264, Ogg, etc.) but also selectively serving that video to various device types.For content creators who don't want to use Vimeo or YouTube, finding a way to encode, transcode and serve video in multiple formats to multiple devices can be frustrating. Once largely concentrated around mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, these frustrations have extended to the desktop in recent weeks. HTML5 video (or to be more specific, H.264-encoded HTML5 video) was supposed to be our savior; instead it has just become another complication. With Vid.ly, Encoding.com hopes to help alleviate some of the pain. How it Works Pricing In its private beta, Vid.ly is offered as a free service.
HOW TO: Gamify Your Marketing Adam Kleinberg is co-founder and CEO at Traction, an interactive agency that aligns psychology with technology to create ideas that work. Look for Traction's LinkedIn page and free toolkit. Catch him tweeting at @adamkleinberg and blogging at tractionco.com/blog. The scale of the audience accessible through gaming is simply staggering. In terms of potential reach, it rivals television as a medium. Yet, according to Forrester, 84% of marketers have no plans to use games in their marketing efforts. Is this a giant missed opportunity just waiting to be seized? As with most shiny objects, the answer is “it depends.” Who Are Gamers? Throw your stereotype about "gamers" out the window. They are also spread evenly across generations, especially social gamers — 23% of whom are Boomers between ages 45 and 65. The What and Why of Gamification Of course, marketers are not playing games. Gamification can be leveraged to drive adoption, engagement, loyalty, sharing, even sales. What kind of concepts?
Why Marketing Threatens the True Promise of Social Media Douglas Rushkoff is the author of Life Inc: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How We Can Take It Back, out this week in paperback from RandomHouse, as well as Program or Be Programmed from ORBooks. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Social media is everywhere, and it is finally accepted as much as, well, as much as the Internet itself. I fought for so many years to convince people that the Net was a social medium in the first place. But thanks to Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, social media has arrived as a justifiable expense for businesses looking to do whatever it is that's intended to replace advertising. This isn’t about pointing fingers or laying blame. A Historic Opportunity The most disruptive feature of social media is that it allows us to connect with one another relatively directly. After the fall of the Roman Republic, Europeans spent close to a thousand years living under the awful oppression of feudalism. The Potential for True Peer-to-Peer Culture Conclusion
JavaScript Image Gallery Making an online gallery of pictures should be a quick process. The gap between snapping some pictures and publishing them on the web ought to be a short one. Here’s a quick and easy way of making a one-page gallery that uses JavaScript to load images and their captions on the fly. The mark-up#section1 Article Continues Below I’ve put together some photographs that I want to make into an online gallery. <ul><li><a href="images/bananas.jpg" title="A bunch of bananas on a table">some bananas</a></li><li><a href="images/condiments.jpg" title="Condiments in a Chinese restaurant">two bottles</a></li><li><a href="images/shells.jpg" title="Seashells on a table">some shells</a></li></ul> Right now, clicking on one of those links leads straight to the image. The JavaScript will dynamically update a placeholder image and description, creating a slideshow effect. I’m going to use a blank .gif for the placeholder image. The JavaScript function#section2 Now it’s time to write the JavaScript.
CSS Horizontal Align Dive Into HTML5