April 2018

One Step Closer to Quantum Computing

20 qubits have been entangled together and put into one network. Huge… computing is about to get “spooky” as Einstein would have said. In high school physics, electrons bounce between two layers, like a car changing lanes. But in reality, electrons don’t exist in one place or one layer — they exist in many at …

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Millennials, Boomers, and Marketing

Interesting to note here as well: Millennials face a near-future of heavy automation and artificial intelligence that Boomers did not have to face as they moved into their 40’s and 50’s. Jobs, as we knew them thirty years ago, are becoming rarer. The divide between these two groups will only grow. Perhaps that’s another reason that …

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Computational Explosion

Sergey Brin, President of Alphabet (Google’s parent company), on the computational explosion over the last few years and near-future possibilities of quantum computing in the annual Founders Letter: The power and potential of computation to tackle important problems has never been greater. In the last few years, the cost of computation has continued to plummet. …

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Google’s Podcast Strategy

“Our team’s mission is to help double the amount of podcast listening in the world over the next couple years,” says Google Podcasts Product Manager Zack Reneau-Wedeen. Source: Exclusive: Inside The New Google Podcasts Strategy That Could Double Audiences Worldwide

Bible Domains

When the society — which lists several conservative Christian “founding partners” on the get.bible website — first applied for the rights to .bible, it pledged to provide wide access to “all qualified parties” interested in Bible issues. Soon after acquiring the domain name, though, ABS barred publication of material it defined as “antithetical to New Testament …

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What is Local SEO?

Here’s a good read on the thinking behind “local SEO” and how to implement some of the strategies on your website. We do this for a number of clients when we build or revise their sites, particularly churches and nonprofits (and small businesses) who really depend on local search traffic in fundraising or awareness campaigns. …

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“touch instead of keyboards”

I think people who grew up with keyboards and mice will never be changed, but I think kids born within the past few years, who are growing up using touchscreen phones and tablets, will probably be the first generation to model their computing usage around touch instead of keyboards. We older folks just assume that …

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“Why does church marketing fail?”

From Pew Forum’s Religious Landscape Study I recently had a question from a friend who attends a small church with a smaller budget but interested in marketing and outreach their congregation about the pitfalls of church marketing. “Sam, why does church marketing fail?” So with her permission, here’s my response… The reason most church marketing …

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Should I still advertise on Facebook?

Good read about what to do “now” with Facebook advertising… The Facebook privacy quake has already forced the Facebook to change the way they handle and collect consumer data. That’s changing their advertising platform. And there’s more to come. Source: Facebook Advertising: What’s Changing, What’s Not, & What To Do

Episode 146: And In the End

Dr. Thomas J. Whitley and The Rev. Sam Harrelson discuss things we pass down and the best way to sign off. Support Thinking Religion Links: Karas Kustoms

Facebook Alert Day

This is going to be quite the talking point for many Facebook users today… “All users will receive a link at the top of their News Feed outlining which apps they use and what information each app uses, Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer said in a statement. Users whose data may have been improperly …

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You should blog

Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. We could say goodbye to the creepy targeted ads and the algorithms, to the Nazis and bots and propagandists, to the harassers and the people selling hate. We could stop being spied-on for profit… Or we can make the moral …

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RSS in 2018

There’s so much wrong with this post, but I’ll point out my biggest gripe here… RSS (like podcasting) doesn’t need the metrics of behavior tracking for it to be a success. It’s distributed. It’s not commercialized. It’s not tracked with clicks based on eCPM’s or eCPC’s or brand quality engagement views. And that’s ok. It serves …

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Twitter’s Developer Problem

While Facebook continues to stumble through its public relations crisis over how it has handled developer access to user data, Twitter has been having its own issues with its developer base … just in a self-inflicted manner. Twitter’ developer problem goes back to its decision to pivot the service into an advertising mechanism back in …

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Moving beyond links

I’ve long argued that “links are dead” (going on a decade now). Some of that was hyperbolic to discuss the need for a better mechanism to derive value or information from one site to the next or from a marketing campaign. It looks like Google might be moving beyond links as well and towards more …

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Stripe now offers subscription billing

Good move here, particularly for small businesses… That’ll allow them to handle subscription recurring revenue, as well as invoicing, within the Stripe platform and get everything all in the same place. The goal was to replace a previously hand-built setup, whether using analog methods for invoicing or painstakingly putting together a set of subscription tools, …

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Facebook’s Growing PR Crisis

Facebook’s announcement Wednesday and others last week reflect a major shift in the company’s relationship with third-party apps. In the past, developers could get access to people’s relationship status, calendar events, private Facebook posts and much more data that was highly valuable to advertisers, including political campaigns. Now they will be required to go through …

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Democratized Engineering

Worth your time to read the whole piece, especially the Cathedral / Bazaar analogies… In fact, you could say that bad engineering, just like good engineering, has helped turn technology into the most powerful force for change in the 21st century. Engineering has been incredibly democratized and it’s been good for engineers. Today’s engineers are in …

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