Ryan Block

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May 25, 2008
2 comments

Posts with category: Web

“Annoying habits” ad irony

You know, if you’re going to do a feature called “The 10 Most Annoying Habits of Technology Companies”, you’d do best to vet your own site first — especially the page dedicated to annoying advertising.
Although to be fair, they do disclaim being guilty of the same, and I’m sure the site’s editorial staff doesn’t approve [...]

May 22, 2008
13 comments

Does Twittering mean you blog less? The answer might surprise you.

The other Twitter-related post I’ve been wanting to write lately regards the correlation between the decline of “regular” blogging (which I’m now referring to as macroblogging), and microblogging (specifically, Twittering). Ask anyone with a blog that also spends time Twittering, and they’ll likely tell you that as their microblogging has gone up, their macroblogging has [...]

May 21, 2008
3 comments

Microblogging needs platform independence

Although I’m fairly ill-equipped to delve deep into burgeoning distributed social networking “standards”, there are some clear trends in play pointing toward the need for microblogging to become a platform independent activity. (The multiple Twitter outages over the last week are only the icing on this cake.)
Although blogging can trace its roots to zine / [...]

Apr 9, 2008
5 comments

Veronica is blowing up!

So everybody found out today that V’s heading to Revision3 to do Tekzilla — but that’s only one of her two new regular post-Mahalo gigs. But besides the other thing (which is equally if not more awesome) did I mention she also had a song written about her recently? And did an interview with RCRD [...]

Mar 31, 2008
3 comments

Culture + charts / graphs = new sites

Despite being a cat owner I’ve never really been super into LOLcats — but this whole culture + charts and graphs mashup thing? Yeah, I can get behind that. Prepare to see the jamphat meme perpetuated indefinitely through the newly launched culturegraph (done by my pal Jeremy, among others), as well as graphjam (by the [...]

Mar 30, 2008
0 comments

Creepy virtual Japanese lady takes over internet

I find it really interesting that all of a sudden the entire internet discovered and blew a gasget over cubo.cc (i.e. MotionPortrait), which has been floating around on various sites since August, 2007. Stranger still that MotionPortrait, Inc., who develops the eponymous Flash app, apparently hasn’t spent much time in the last six months or [...]

Mar 29, 2008
0 comments

Amusing Live Search result for Engadget

Certainly no one can ping Microsoft’s Live Search for weighting down anything fruit-related.

Mar 13, 2008
3 comments

The era of “all press is good press” is so very over

I’ve had innumerable conversations with friends and colleagues over the years who’ve somehow felt burned by name-your-publication; nowadays even non-celebrities can (and often do) live with a cloud over their head on the internet — and I think if there’s any one truism about the intersection of publicity and online media, it’s that the era [...]

Mar 12, 2008
13 comments

Engadget: now AOL’s largest iPhone magnet

We don’t usually get very granular about traffic stats (I find that conversation kind of trite and even a little gauche), but you can imagine my surprise when the following iPhone usage chart hit my inbox this week. (Okay, I admit, I wasn’t that surprised.) Throughout AOL’s extensive and heavily trafficked content network, Engadget has [...]

Jan 20, 2008
14 comments

Woke up this morning $20m richer

Ok, I totally missed this amidst CES, but apparently I made some random site’s Top 20 Internet Millionaires Under 30 list, which in turn made it on Digg. The only problem: not that I’d share my finances with some random site, but I’m definitely nowhere near a millionaire. Billionaire, yes. How dare they insult my [...]

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Ryan Block - smallI'm an editor and technology critic in the midst of founding a new web startup: gdgt. Also, I love gadgets. More about me here.

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