David Lidsky's Blog, page 4559

Does Your Job Title Get the Job Done?

Nobody does a better job than The Economist at skewering the excesses and absurdities of organizational life. In a recent issue, the magazine's Schumpeter columnist took aim at the rampant inflation of job titles in companies and governments around the world.

The winner, by a mile, was North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, who, according to The Economist, has 1,200 official titles, "including roughly translated, guardian deity of the planet, ever-victorious general, and lodestar of the 21st...

Move Over Soundscan: Music's New Chart Could Measure Illegal Downloads, Too

Unveiled today at the New Music Seminar in New York City, the Ultimate Chart aims to update ancient methods still used to track the popularity of songs and artists. Rather than basing rankings primarily on, for example, physical album and single sales, the Ultimate Chart uses everything from Amazon downloads and Vevo views to Facebook fans and Twitter followers to provide the music industry a chart for the digital age.

"For the first time this is getting beyond but not leaving behind...

Revisiting Melville's "Moby Dick" in 2010: A Cautionary Tale for Yesterday and Today

I've spent the last week reading Herman Melville's Moby Dick. More accurately, rereading it. As a staple of literature curriculums, I had been forced through it during a ten week American novel binge at college. I remember not liking it at the time, but thoroughly enjoyed it this time. And like all great literature, what you see in it reflects who you are when you read it.

Twenty five years after college, I'm much more concerned with the world and my impact on it than I was as a college...

Microsoft Announces Kinect Price, Hopes to Boost 360 Sales Further

A full year after revealing plans to jump into the motion-controller game, Microsoft has finally announced the price for their hardware, a motion-sensor that sits atop the television. The add-on, which works with Xbox 360, will ship to stores in November of this year, cost $150, and come with one game, Kinect Adventures.

Microsoft and a handful of 3rd party publishers will have 15 games that work with the Kinect available at launch. Gamers can also purchase a bundle which includes...

How to Measure Brand Value: Likes, Followers, Influencers, Views? No, Social Currency

Do brands really create value? Will Old Spice's tornadic viral campaign and sudden "influence" improve Procter & Gamble's bottom line?

Actually a number of events and trends have conspired like a perfect storm over the last several years to put brands and their stewards on the hot seat. Recession has reduced marketing departments and dollars and undermined CMO confidence and stature. Toyota and Tiger have themselves punctured legendary brand infallibility and auras of trust. Famous Detroit...

Hear This: UK SoundMap Creates Audio Landscape

Back when Greg J. Smith and Max Ritts launched their Toronto Sound Ecology project, for which they hiked the city and recorded its sounds for an interactive map, we asked if anyone had heard of any other similar audio tours.

Turns out, Google had. Its Google Maps partly powers the UK SoundMap, a crowdsourced survey of the acoustic landscape of Britain. Users can register for free via AudioBoo (it's easiest to register with your Twitter account) then submit sound files to the UK SoundMap...

What Will Commercial Aircraft Look Like in 2050?

Boeing's 747-8 jumbo jet may represent the best of what engineers have to offer now, but Airbus has reached 40 years into future and come back with a design that barely resembles the aircraft of today. The Concept Plane, revealed this week at the U.K's Farnborough International Airshow, is a mash-up of future aerodynamics, materials, cabin design and engine technology.

Some of the Concept Plane's more intriguing features (courtesy of Wired): a u-shaped tail, engines wrapped up in...

An Open Letter to Sarah Palin, Politician, Mom, Innovatrix

Readers. Readers. We at FastCompany like to think of ourselves as the Information Booth at the top of Mount Idea, trumpeting the innovation of others to the world at large. And perhaps it is time to salute, the innovation used in the language of Sarah Palin.

When one of her tweets contained the neologism, refudiate, numerous attempts were made to sully her name. She tweeted back, "Hey, call me Shakespeare." So everyone did, using the hashtag #Shakespalin. Soon, the Twittersphere was filled...

Survey: Consumers Don't Trust Facebook, Can't Stay Mad at Facebook

Also, screw MySpace.

The American Consumer Satisfaction Index has been looking at how consumers react to social media websites, and ranked Facebook with such a low score that some analysts have labelled its trustworthiness as "abysmally low." 

ForSee Results is behind the study, and noted that while other social sites ranked pretty poorly in terms of consumer satisfaction, Facebook in particular ranked near the bottom of the list. While MySpace also ranked low, it ranked close to...

Google's Image Search Make-Over Borrows Ideas From Bing

Google's Image Search is getting an experimental user-interface revamp right now, and some of the ideas appear to come from Microsoft's Bing.

Google has adjusted the site's look so that where there was formerly whitespace, there are now images, the images are bigger, and Google has made descriptive text invisible except upon mouseover.

The page is also longer, with more thumbnails in once place. There's also more use of pop-over windows, and a kind of click-based interface that's similar to...