If you read tech news or startup news, you are probably numb to it.

“Here is a new startup that will revolutionize our daily lives.”
“This site promises to forever change the way we communicate.”
“This one is a new twist on local deals.”
“You can watch videos or listen to music—but with your friends.”

This list keeps going. But that’s why we’ve built jitterbunk. We did away with all the fluff of new social sites and created a site where you can simply bunk your friends.

Read more about the founding of jitterbunk here.

If you like jitterbunk, you’ll definitely like raunk.

Check out the cs181 final project that we just made. It’s a text based adventure game, with a little console in the browser where you can explore some history and cases relating to press freedom for bloggers.

Play the Game Here

project by me, Eric Conner, and Zach Galant.

Browse the code on github

If you’ve been on the internet in the last couple years, you may have stumbled up FMyLife, or My Life is Average, or Damn You Autocorrect, or any number of sites in this genre.

The genre is sites that let you post little bits of content around a certain theme, and they are usually similarly formatted. People can like comments, or dislike them with different clever words. Some let you upload photos. But all of these sites do basically this.

Now, these types of sites have become so popular, that you just see really random ones popping up on the internet. But let’s say you don’t know how to make one of these sites, but have a really silly idea for a community that would like to post short joke stories. That’s what Popular Site Template is for.

Here is a screen shot from a site made with Popular Site Template called My Life is Indie.

This is the most recent site I made with Google App Engine. For those interested in seeing how it works, code is available at github.

This is another one of those things on the internet that has gotten popular in the last year. It’s big brands trying to be funny like they are your friend. And it has become a really popular marketing strategy. It’s not being funny in a ‘let’s make funny commercials’ kind of way, although to me it seems to be an offshoot of this. It’s just being funny and having this positive association with their company.

Two quick examples that come to mind are Groupon and JetBlue. A large part of Groupon is having very funny and goofy descriptions of products and website text. They also set up a new “dating site” called Grouspawn to help send Groupon babies to college. It sounds like a joke, and it is a joke. The fact that it is real does not mean it’s not a joke.

If you meet Andrew Mason, you will see that he is a full out goof. But he runs a company which uses comedy as a major tool in cultivating a positive image.

Be on the lookout for comedy as a marketing tool, and let me know if you have any good examples.

Knowing about new tech companies is like knowing about indie music. There is this sort of template conversation you hear over and over again and you can literally replace band with startup and it makes complete sense. When people talk about indie music, it’s cool to know about obscure bands. For many people, the more obscure the better. And there are an unlimited number of obscure bands for you to know. Knowledge of these obscure bands gives you a sort of street cred in the subject.

Just like it’s good to know the band, who is in it, and what other bands they’ve been in, it’s good to know the startup, its founders, and where they’ve worked before.

Tech startups are the same. If you follow tech news, you will read every day about a new startup with a silly name, the newer and sillier and more unknown they are, the more cred you have. And if you can name obscure database systems, and strange web frameworks, and antiquated programming languages, that makes you even cooler. It’s weird.

“Ah have you heard of Klout? Or YouCalc, or Zynga, TripTrace, AirBnB? What about RockYou, Square or Groupon?” This mishmash of names is only the smallest slice of startup jargon.

“Ah have you heard of the Late BP Helium? Or The Antlers? Los Campesinos or Frightened Rabbit? What about Magnetic Fields, Badly Drawn Boy and Drive Like Jehu?”

It may be just me, but these conversations sound very similar.

and watch the commercial!

well-defined
ambiguous
These two go together. Well-defined and ambiguos usually refer to descriptions of problems, but cs people can really use them for anything. “I’m not sure if my wants and needs are well-defined.” “The solution to your girl problems is ambiguos.”

What other words do cs people use too much?

As I sat down to write a new article for the Flipside, I went to do my so-called “research.”

Today, I decided, the perfect topic to write about was this so-called “Balloon Boy.” When balloon boy came up in our meeting and we brainstormed ideas about it, I realized this was just an unbelievable topic to satirize. Mainly–when things that happen in the real world seem fake, you know the opportunity is ripe for irony and satire.

Let me explain a little more.

I went to go read more about what happened with this balloon boy so I could come up with some sort of coherent viewpoint and a set of ideas and a perspective for my writing. I searched Google for balloon boy and started to read some articles, and while doing so, realized how this event is extremely meta.

My one sentence take: The balloon boy incident is really about how a hoax fooled the media, and then fooled the rest of us, and in doing so, succeeded in its publicity stunt.

So why was reading the news on this meta? Well, the news is exactly what caused and blew up the problem in the first place. I was reading these reports which were the source of all the fuss initially.

So where to look for credible information? I think the answer to this very important question is not where to look, but how to look. We look when someone points, that is kind of a given of human behavior. But I think the thing we can control and the thing we should work on is to look carefully. Look slowly and think over the timing, the source, and the motivation of the information.

At the end of this, I am still unsure what to make fun of about balloon boy, but it is a very interesting topic to think about how the media can lead us astray. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no… it’s Balloon boy!

See my research paper on critical reading here
See an article with similar ideas from the wall street journal here