Googling ‘poll software‘ or ‘blog poll’ is an exercise in futility, which has got to be frustrating for beginning bloggers who want to incorporate a poll into their blog. That’s because, quite frankly, most hosted polling solutions are terrible.

It’s not that there aren’t plenty of poll applications littering searches (and the accompanying adsense ads) — it’s just that they appear to have been built by people who didn’t test them on different browsers and don’t care about the aesthetics of something that will ultimately go on someone else’s site.

Read the rest of this post »»

One of the reasons that fudged statistics and even outright lies have a tendency to spread rapidly through the mainstream media is that the mainstream media does something that the blogosphere is only just waking up to: re-writing competitors’ stories without doing additional reporting.

In other words, one way to rapidly and cheaply generate content is to copy other outlets’ facts, narratives, even conclusions, and re-write them as if they were your own. Crazy? Unethical? Then why do so many respected blogs — and even Google News — get away with it?

Read the rest of this post »»

With more and more mainstream outlets launching blogs and taking down the paywalls around their news, what’s a blogger to do?

As this trend accelerates, and these sites get wise to the traffic and revenue generating potential of service journalism (which is all a blog like Engadget really is, anyway) there is a very real potential that they will start to climb the search engine ranks and siphon off some of the traffic that the small fry have been relying on for their revenue.

Read the rest of this post »»

Moore’s law is at it again, and the latest sacred cow to be slaughtered by this force of nature is the notion that a laptop need weigh about 8 pounds and do everything that a desktop can do.

OK, so the notion of an ultra-portable PC isn’t exactly new–hardware manufacturers have been chipping away at it for decades, with mixed success. In an era when smart phones can read word documents and even my Nintendo DS can browse the web, do we really need a teeny-tiny computer-ish thing that’s missing some critical features but not others?

Read the rest of this post »»

It’s rare for Google to invest in a company–usually they just buy them outright–but Meraki is a rather exceptional company.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with the CEO of Meraki a couple months back when he paid a visit to the New York offices of Scientific American, where I work. Prior to this particular press junket, Meraki hadn’t bothered to advertise–which, incredibly, hadn’t stopped their technology from metastasizing into 1,000 installs on every continent on Earth (yes, even Antarctica) solely by word of mouth.

What Sanjit Biswas, CEO of Meraki, described to me that afternoon is, I’ve come to believe, potentially revolutionary in its simplicity.

Read the rest of this post »»