Web developer and designer at SeatGeek and student at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.
It's important for entrepreneurs to understand that their "Brand" is the collective emotional response to their product or service. A brand is not a logo, and it's certainly not a url. Those things are the stimulus, while the brand is the response. It's something out there, in the hearts and minds of the people you hope to sell to.
Farhad Manjoo for The Atlantic:
Still, I suspect Chen misses the point about Reddit-born activism. Reddit isn’t meant to inspire sustained political participation; the hive mind is frenetic, and I’m sure it will soon tire of SOPA and move on to something else. Reddit’s powers can sometimes be terribly misused, and sometimes it’s a force for good. Question its might at your peril.
According to Malaysian editorial, The New Straits Times Press, restaurants in Kuala Lumpur (the largest city in Malaysia) are now required to have Wi-Fi. Enforcement of the new law will begin in April of this year, and is now a “mandatory prerequisite for food operators when they apply for their licence to open a new restaurant or when existing operators renew their licence.”
This mandate has a pretty clear drawback, though. Coffee shops and restaurants with wireless Internet in the US are always packed with computer users who overstay their welcome, leading some to drop it altogether to ensure that space is available for paying customers. That, and the government is forcing an unnecessary expense on business owners in lieu of supporting the city's existing public network. It seems like this law was enacted for all the wrong reasons.
AdBlock Plus became the most popular piece of “add-on” software for the Firefox Web browser, in part, because it had a simple mission: see online ad, block online ad. The name said it all — and each day 10 million people or so surf the Internet with Adblock Plus installed, presumably never missing the advertising they were meant to see.
In December, however, Adblock Plus introduced a new concept, the “acceptable ad” — that is, an ad so inoffensive that it shouldn’t necessarily be blocked by the software. And nothing has been quite so simple since.
I appreciate that Palant is cognizant of the effects that AdBlock Plus has on the revenue streams of content producers, but what I like even more is the potential change in advertising that could result from this. In an effort to ensure that their messages are seen, advertisers will be less obnoxious. I, for one, look forward to an Internet free of distracting animated banner ads and popups. But until that day finally comes, I will continue to use an ad blocker.
First posts on new blogs are always the hardest, so I'll keep this short, and use it as more of an introduction for anyone who happens to stumble on this site. Anyway, I'm Chris Voll, a front-end web developer at SeatGeek and a student at Syracuse University. I've been a freelancer for a number of years, doing one-time gigs for a number of clients, including Dropbox, App of the Day, and countless others, which ultimately guided me to where I am now. I want to use this site as a way to begin to reach out to other designers and developers, so hopefully this will be the first of many more posts.
