Author: JD Rucker

This is a topic that has been covered so many times that one might wonder how it keeps popping up. The reality (from a content perspective) is that Facebook posting best practices is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s frustrating to businesses and annoying to bloggers, but at the end of the day there’s one simple truth: whatever worked yesterday may not work today but may work again tomorrow. That’s Facebook. It’s social media in general from a business perspective. There are three dynamics at work and they rarely do more than lightly influence the other two: Facebook and other social media sites…

New gadgets. We love them. They bring excitement donin the days leading up to their launch and they give us reasons to walk up to strangers and ask them questions in hopes that they’ll let us give them a try. The same will hold true for Google Glass when it’s released. People will love on it. Eventually, it will fail. The idea is a strong one. Wearable tech is all the rage right now and this is the closest one can get to having bionic, Terminator-style eyes. It will be reviewed and many bloggers will call it a life-changing, pseudo-religious experience, something that any geek with true nerd cred needs…

Netflix has wanted to go social for a long time. They have been held back by an antiquated law that was rightfully removed late last year. Now, people will be able to share their movie and television show loves on social media. That’s great, and the video for that is below. Here, we’ll talk more about the warrantless email tapping that was attached to the bill. Here’s an excerpt: Now, as always, law enforcement does not need to supply a warrant to read your emails. They don’t need probably cause. They don’t even need to suspect that you have committed a crime. They only need to have “reasonable…

Television show reboots rarely go well. Even when the source material was stronger than the what the old television techniques could support, we are normally treated to 18 abysmal episodes of the 2008 Knight Rider reboot or something of similar quality. There have been a couple of notable sci-fi exceptions that give us hope that the reboot could work well in the genre closest to every geek’s heart. When it was announced that they would be rebooting Battlestar Galactica, many pointed out that the original wasn’t very good and that the storyline was limited. It couldn’t sustain a series and might…

There are two sad realities about online tracking. One reality is that the majority of people have their online activities tracked on nearly every website that they visit and these tracking protocols have very little oversight, nearly no rules associated with them, and can be stored indefinitely by anyone, even sites or companies that you’ve never visited. The other sad reality is that everyone has the ability to stop the tracking, but it would mean doing things that few are willing to do. These things include setting cookies to expire automatically when browsers are closed, ending the use of…

When it comes to advertising today, things have changed. In some ways it’s due to social media. Searching for “I Love Zappos” yields 2,000,000 results. Searching for “I Love Dow Chemical Company” yields 3, according to Bob Garfield and Doug Levy at the SXSW panel titled “Cant’ Buy Me Likes”. Thanks to their presentation, this number is sure to go way up as people discuss it (such as this blog). By contrast, searching for “I Love Satan” yields 293,000. It’s not a good thing to be loved less than the prince of darkness. What has happened? Why is it that billion dollar ad branding campaigns get usurped…

Given the options of sitting far, far away in the mezzanine or trying to sneak up to the front with the journalists, I opted to take a shot. You can’t blame me for trying. The result was that I got to hear the first 10 minutes of what sounded like an interesting beginning to Vice President Al Gore talking about “The Future”, the name of his new book. In it, he talks about technology and how the advancements as well as our actions will affect the climate and a bunch of other things. If it sounds ambiguous, it’s because less than ten minutes in, I got tapped on the shoulder and asked to leave the area set aside for…

The world of dating is going to get easier – and more complicated – thanks to Google glass. It’s already so easy to find out about various topics or to learn about a person in particular just by using our smartphones, but when Google Glass arrives, it will make it easier to go covert with the date-impressing research. Okay, so it won’t. So the video below is satirical and you can’t really get away with being on a date in the middle of a political discussion while watching football. It doesn’t matter. The funny nature of this video should be taken at face value but the real implications of what Google Glass,…

The technology that Microsoft has been envisioning for the future is astounding, realistic, and will give us the opportunity to be more productive. That much is true. What’s not true is that they say these technologies will help bring families together. Judging by the recent history of technological advances, that’s the exact opposite effect of the technologies they describe in their video, “Microsoft’s New Envisioning Center: Live, Work, Play.” Take smartphones, for example. They are technological wonders that allow multiple methods of communication from face-to-face video interaction…

Back in the days when Yahoo was fighting against Alta Vista, when Bing was still called Microsoft Live, and when Google was trying to get the big Y to buy them, onsite content and meta tags were search. It was a day of keyword stuff, of hidden text, and of content scraping that helped porn sites rank for the term “toys” while male enhancement drugs could be found on searches for “big fun”. Google emerged as the leader in part because of their pure design, but also because they started looking offsite for signals about search rankings. The days before Google’s innovation were the peak of onsite SEO. Google…