If you post a pin to Pinterest, and it links to an ecommerce site that happens to have an affiliate program, Pinterest modifies the link to add their own affiliate tracking code. If someone clicks through the picture from Pinterest and makes a purchase, Pinterest gets paid. They don’t have any disclosure of this link modification on their site, and so far, while it has been written about, no major news outlet has picked up on the practice or its implications.

Now you know.

I don’t believe this is a bad or unethical business model – I simply think it should be disclosed. The same way we expect Twitter to disclose what a Promoted Tweet is or Google to disclose what the Ads are on the top of our search results. News like this should spread in order to put just the right amount of pressure on the Pinterest team to make this more apparent.

Jason Santa Maria stated something on Twitter yesterday that I think fits here too:

If I like the things you create, nothing makes me happier than giving you money to keep doing it.

I don’t use Pinterest (perhaps I will one day) but people seem to like the service. If they like the service they’ll likely want it to stick around. Maybe they’d be willing to pay for it. Or maybe they’d be willing to accept the fact that Pinterest is generating revenue using affiliate links. Either way, let the people decide.

[figure] out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.

Not a week ago Google shot a few projects directly between the eyes and the rest they are going to give to the world via open source. Is Page listening to Jobs?

Today Apple updated iBooks to version 2 which can now display much more interactive books than it did previously. While iBooks has been a terrific reading experience (I use it as my primary way to read books and PDFs) this new version can display textbooks created by Apple’s latest Mac app – iBooks Author.

iBooks Author, which is somehow completely free, is a Mac app that makes it simple to build interactive textbooks for iPad and iBooks 2. Not only does it work a lot like Pages for laying out a page of text, images and other elements, it also includes other interactive features like quizes, slideshows, videos, and more. It even makes it simple to add a glossary to a book. I imagine that iBooks Author has just become the worlds best book publishing application.

The iTunes U application gives teachers and students a way to interact together as well as with the iTunes U content available on the App Store. I don’t have much of an opinion about this application yet but it looks like a useful tool and it is also being offered for free.

These are amazing tools. Now lets see what the world chooses to do with them.

I may drive a Jeep because I’m a Colorado boy at heart, and I may own a charcoal grill because I like things “pure”, and I may own Apple gadgets because I have an affinity for fine software. So yes, you can tell a lot about me by the things I own. But they are just that — things. They can be stolen, broken, taken, and lost. They should never become distractions to the things that matter most, nor should I ever allow them to define my character, my relationships, and my beliefs.

Knowingly or not his statement rings very true with something Jesus said at Luke 12:15 that a man’s life does not result from the things he possesses. It’s Just Stuff.

I’m going to change that.

This article by Kirk McElhearn at Macworld on How to use services in Mac OS X has pushed me over the edge. What are services? McElhearn explains them this way “Simply put, OS X services let you borrow features from other programs.”

/via John “I don’t know” Gruber.

He seems a bit miffed at people mistaking an incubator for an accelerator.

The best argument I could use was that real incubators invest  in people and businesses that will build long term value while the accelerators invested in short term financial opportunities.  Real incubators also don’t have the luxury on focusing only on things described as “mobile/social/sales…whatever”.  We focus on sustainable companies in life sciences, electronics, advanced materials and more.  These companies require a more sustained effort and can’t be built in 3 months.

I love this part he said earlier (which is the whole reason I started real words).”I’m formally registering a complaint to the people in charge of word usage”. Me too Wayne, me too.

We never tire of the drama of sunset. I go forth each afternoon and look into the west a quarter of an hour before sunset, with fresh curiosity, to see what new picture will be painted there, what new panorama exhibited, what new dissolving views. [...] Every day a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half and hour, in such lights as the Great Artist chooses, and then withdrawn, and the curtain falls.

Everyone loves a good sunset.

At the end of his piece he says “Who would you pick?” This may sound like a really, really odd choice but I’d choose Jon Rubinstein to lead Microsoft. He may have not done a great job with running Palm as a business but I think he’d bring a level of taste to Microsoft that has simply never been there above C-level.

Microsoft knows how to run a business. They’ve got that down. What they need is a clear direction to build amazing products instead of just announcing them. So bring on someone who demands good taste. Rubinstein fits that.

That artisan style bread recipe I published the other day has spurred on a few people to make their own. It really is very, very easy to make this style of bread. It is rewarding and delicious to boot!

So, if you’re reading this and you sorta kinda wanted to try to make your own bread – get on it.

3. The theater experience. Moviegoers above 30 are weary of noisy fanboys and girls. The annoyance of talkers has been joined by the plague of cell-phone users, whose bright screens are a distraction. Worse, some texting addicts get mad when told they can’t use their cell phones. A theater is reportedly opening which will allow and even bless cell phone usage, although that may be an apocryphal story.

I agree with all of his reasons and I’ll add one of my own. Actually, it is sort of an addition to one of Ebert’s reasons. He says that ticket price is a problem. Ticket price wouldn’t be a problem if the movies (and the theater experience) was really, really good. When I see a movie trailer I usually ask myself – “Is that worth driving to the theatre and spending $30 to see?”

The answer to that question could be “No” for several reasons. The movie may not warrant “the big screen experience”. The movie may look funny or entertaining but I’d just as soon watch it in the comfort of my home, on my couch, in my PJs, on Bluray. Or, the movie is in 3D or XD or EXTREMELY OVERRATED ACRONYM – which means I’ll likely not care to see it at all.

I don’t think the theater-going movie industry has a chance to remain as large as it has been in recent past. I think it will see a slow and steady decline and level out right where they should be. People will still watch “larger” movies in theaters or on first dates and will see “smaller” movies at home where they are most comfortable. And that should be OK. The industry simply needs to adapt.

The lack of classical German industries means it is a city with fewer jobs than other parts of Germany. It also means the city has lower wages compared to the rest of Germany and much of Europe. The sprawling nature of the city means that Berlin has lots of real estate. And that means low rents – catnip for artists, musicians and yes, the start-up community.

According to his report the tech start-up scene in Berlin is already doing great things, is poised to do even bigger and better things with a little help, and that we should all be watching.

I’m watching Om.

I recommend reading every word of Om’s report on Berlin but, as a matter of convenience, here are some of the companies he mentions; MyGuidie, 6Wunderkinder (who make the excellent Wunderlist), Amen, Gidsy, Pipe, Uberblic Labs, Upcload, Aupeo, Young Internet, SoundCloud, Txtr.

I’ve seen the pilot for Alcatraz already (shh, don’t tell anyone) and I can say that the show looks like it is going to be really great.

Subscribed.

This problem isn’t limited just to Irish restaurants as I’ve also noticed similar complaints emerging from English tweeters. Understandably, restaurants are annoyed at these no-shows and late cancellations and the Restaurants Association of Ireland started a press campaign to highlight this issue. Many venues are considering implementing a deposit scheme at the time of booking, which will be refunded against the cost of the meal.

The message is simple – if you can’t make your reservation, please get in touch with the venue to cancel, preferably giving as much notice as possible. It’s just manners after all.

You’d never know it unless these restaurants spoke up but this is a big problem. Some of the restaurants that Joanne cites show around half of their reservations end up in no-shows. Not cancelled. Not postponed. They simply do not show up. Why are people doing this?

I don’t know why but this reminds me of this. Opposite problem.

So, please, if you make a reservation, keep your reservation.

Thank you, Internet.

I’m starting to believe that if and when Apple TV is updated the hardware price will be surprisingly low.

As you may very well know Eliza and I use our Apple TV a lot. We don’t use all of the features but we use it daily. For $99 (its current price) I think it a steal. I can’t imagine what would happen if, say, a new Apple TV was priced at $29 (my guess at what “surprisingly low” could be).

This, of course, is besides the notion that Apple will, at some point in the future, debut a brand-new television-related product. Perhaps a TV of their own. Or, perhaps, a really inexpensive Apple TV in addition to a TV of their own. Who knows?

But I can say this… I highly, highly recommend anyone with an iPhone, iPod, iPad or Macintosh to consider the Apple TV a must-have accessory. A must-have accessory. And if a new one is priced lower than today’s models than my recommendation would only be stronger.

So if birds from the city can’t flirt with birds from the country anymore, “those birds are actually going to be less likely to mate with each other,” he says. “I mean, literally they’re going to stop being able to speak the same language.”

I hope that doesn’t happen. Keep tweeting birds!

/via Jason Fried on Twitter.

“That’s not 62 million active users, though — a point that everyone covering these numbers seems to have missed. It’s just the number of total users. And specifically, it’s the number of new surnames that Allen’s team has tracked being created on the service.

Because Google has aggressively integrated G+ into many other properties, including its top navigation bar and the OneBox, one would expect a certain baseline amount of sign-ups from among the hundreds of millions of people using other Google products.

The real question is how many people are returning after creating their accounts, which Allen doesn’t try to answer.”

Precisely. I have absolutely no doubt that Google can get people to sign up to just about anything. They’ve marketed Google+ on all of their existing products, through commercials, by actually replacing features in existing products, etc. These are all ways to market Google+ that a competing service or startup would never be able to leverage.

Getting profiles isn’t Google+’s “problem”. It is keeping active users.

Robert Scoble (on Quora) and Chris Brogan (on Google+) seem to challenge the theory that Google+ is dead by showing that they’ve grown their “number of people who have them in their Circles number” faster than they were able to grow their networks on, say, Twitter or Facebook.  While it took X number of months to get to Y number of followers on Twitter it took far less time on Google+ to do the same or better. I don’t think that is a very good metric to determine whether or not Google+ is successful in retaining an active community. It is simply a metric to determine how many profiles they have. When you first sign up to Google+ you’re taken through a wizard of sorts to add people to your Circles. Brogan is on the suggested user list (or was). Scoble isn’t, by choice, but arguably you’d have to be on Mars to miss Robert’s posts.

Google+ is still very new. It will inevitably cut out its own user base. And I hope it is successful for Google because I think it is a pretty great product. It could be extremely valuable to some uses. But so far I don’t see it sticking for many people as their daily go-to way of sharing. In my Circles Twitter is still winning. And this is coming from someone who likes Google+.

I’m cataloging these in hopes of one day buying Eliza a new Kindle and I inherit her old one. Shh, don’t tell her.

“Much of the sales were generated by the news sites and blogs covering the story. This works great once, but is hard to repeat it. Other comedians, even established ones aren’t going to get as lucky. The publicity was a black swan event. We can’t draw any conclusions from it about how it will play out in the future.”

I agree with this. We’ve all seen it before – in different ways – that when someone is doing something “all new” there is a bunch of news about how they are taking a risk and doing something differently. Notice how most of the news regarding Louis’s video was about how it is new, how it is different, and how much money it made. The news wasn’t about how funny the special was.

I’m not saying the special wasn’t funny. Louis is consistently hilarious anytime I’ve seen him in just about anything. But his act wasn’t what made waves with the media over the last few weeks. It was because he spun this in a way that made everyone believe he was doing something different. And that is, as Mayne pointed out, impossible to repeat.

BTW, what Louis did was nothing different or new. It was new and a bit different for a relatively well established comedian to pay for and distribute their own special via the web – all without charging the customers too much, without putting undue restrictions on the use of the product, and without spamming the people that bought it with email. But this model has worked pretty well for a lot of media on the web including music. (think, Nine-Inch-Nails) But that doesn’t matter. It was new for someone like him to do something like that and he deserves credit for taking the chance that it would have flopped.

I’m fairly certain that Louis is popular enough that, if he should do another special like this, that he’ll sell enough copies to cover his costs within the first few days like he did this time. But it won’t be because the way he’s distributing it is new. It will because people love Louis. It will be because its great and well worth the cost. And those are very good reasons.

So, on the whole, we learned from this experiment something we’ve always known; new, novel ideas that are well executed, inexpensive, of decent quality, and put the customer’s interests first will generally do very well.

“Experian Hitwise has released its yearly search term statistics and once again, Facebook and YouTube top the list. The remainder of the top 10 includes three more Facebook-related terms, a couple of Yahoo! variants, craigslist, eBay, and MapQuest. Of course it’s highly unlikely that all the millions of people putting those terms in the top 10 are actually looking for information or the latest news about them; they just want a quick way to the site without having to clumsily type dots and slashes.”

The fact that people do this boggles my mind. I remember the first time I saw it – when I was doing support for a local ISP as one of my first jobs in IT – someone searched for Google.com using the Yahoo search field. I nearly fell to the ground. I asked them why they searched for Google.com instead of just typing it into the location bar. They said “What’s the difference?”

I agree with Parish that people aren’t searching for information about Facebook, Youtube, etc. They are, in fact, using search as the location bar. But I disagree that people are doing it as a way to get away from the confusing “dots and slashes”. I’ve seen people type in “.com”. They simply do not know the difference between the search field and the location field.

Think about it. Most modern-day web browsers combine the location and search fields. Safari doesn’t but it only maintains a small marketshare. Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox combine the search and location fields into one field that you can type just about anything in and the browser will figure out what you are looking for. So, are they searching for information about Facebook when they type in Facebook? Or are they simply hitting ‘Enter’ too quickly and they really want to navigate to that URL?

I’m sure extensive user testing would be needed to determine the plethora of habits of people; novice and expert alike. One thing is sure, the browsers should be doing a much better job of taking people to web pages instead of search results in different situations. But, why would they? They make their money on searches too.

Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET.

/via CNet.

I want to change that.

I’m going to start featuring well-designed, still in-use Dashboard widgets from time-to-time here on the blog. My personal blog is relatively obscure in today’s tech web but – hopefully – one or two people will find these posts about these widgets. If you’ve run across, or built, any Dashboard widgets you think should get some attention – feel free to email them in.

So lets start out with GAget – a well-designed Google Analytics Dashboard widget by Zoltan Hosszu. (Side note: Zoltan is an awesome name.)

I don’t know about you but logging into any Google Account or any Google product has been troublesome over the last few years. I’ve got personal accounts, Google Apps accounts, work accounts, etc. I get sick of switching. GAget allows me to quickly take a look at any of my site’s statistics by simply swiping (with three-fingers on Lion) over to my Dashboard.

GAget’s HUD shows you exactly what you need to see at a glance; number of visitors today, the trend over the last week, two weeks, or month, the bounce rate, time-on-site, and how many hits were new visitors. Very, very good information if you’re striving to bring up the overall audience for your site.

If you happen to need more information, perhaps for advertising purposes, you can always log into Google Analytics and drill down further.

I have two feature requests: a way to see the top 10 search keywords that people are finding the site with, and the top 10 URLs on the site (besides the homepage). But overall this widget does just enough to keep the stat addict in you well fed.

Oh, and you saw the teaser trailer, right?

/via Coudal Partners.

Tap and hold on an Avatar to quickly Follow, Direct Message, Mute, Add to a List or Report for Spam. #TweetbotTip

— Tweetbot for iPhone (@tweetbot) December 17, 2011

So, to recap, you can now subscribe to cdevroe.com in the following ways; RSS feed, @cdevroecom on Twitter, Facebook page, Google+ page, and carrier pigeon (coming soon).

Oh, I’ve got a personal account on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ too.

Then, today, he’d have been a guest on Ellen. Then, tomorrow, he would have booked a few interviews and performances on a bunch of local TV and radio stations. Then, in a month or two, would have been featured in a commercial for a company that is trying to re-brand itself as cool among today’s youth by using YouTube stars in their marketing. Then, a few months later, he’d produce a few more viral videos – perhaps even including some traditional celebrities that contacted him on Twitter – earning him a fair monthly sum in advertising revenue for a few months.

Then, about a year or year and a half after he made this first video, he’d have spent all of his earnings from his “overnight” success, gone back to work at the local saw mill, and we’d never hear from him again.

I’m glad Fred lived when he lived.

This video about Teroforma’s whiskey stones by Galen Summer is great. I hope my whiskey stones came from this guy.

/via Coudal Partners.

While the Apple TV Netflix UI is still better this version for iOS is vastly improved.

“Sometimes there’s nothing quite like pizza. And it’s at its absolute best when it’s a homemade pizza – thin and crispy with your own favourite combinations.”

Precisely.

“Cambridge University Library holds the largest and most important collection of the scientific works of Isaac Newton (1642-1727). We present here an initial selection of Newton’s manuscripts, concentrating on his mathematical work in the 1660s. Over the next few months we will be adding further works until the majority of our Newton Papers are available on this site.”

Well, there goes the weekend.

“someone that loves to get the job done instead of working on their machine”

When I began my switch to the Macintosh nearly a decade ago my single biggest reason that I trumpeted to friends was that I could focus on my work rather than wasting countless hours maintaining my computer. I remember spending far too much time reinstalling my operating system, defragmenting my hard drive, installing virus and malware protection software, and other such tasks. Since switching to the Macintosh I have not had to spend a single minute on any of those things. The Mac lets me do work and get back to life. And I’m a huge fan of life.

/via Marco “Please don’t email me” Arment.

“What would happen if, say, tomorrow Twitter decided that all Twitter clients (third-party and official) had to show some fairly obtrusive ads or you’d need to pay a few dollars per month to use the service?”

It turns out Twitter did change the next day. (I knew nothing of #letsfly at the time, I promise.) Marco Arment, today, whilst linking to John Gruber’s thoughts on the matter.

“I’d wager that all third-party clients will be forced to display the trends and ads within a year, and what we know as Twitter today — or at least what we knew until yesterday morning — will be a distant, quaint memory: Remember when it was just people you followed?”

So, it is happening. Twitter has changed. In the blink of an eye its most loyal users are second-guessing its future. It pulled a Facebook. And I’m guessing that Marco isn’t too far off in his estimate. Twitter will never be the 140-character simple messaging system that we all fell in love with in 2006.

/via Shawn Blanc.

I think it is a good thing for the official applications to all feel and work very much the same. However, for obvious reasons long-time users of Twitter may feel the changes are a bit jarring. John Gruber rips into Twitter for iPhone by comparing it to Tweetie (which is what the application started out as). Mike Rundle rips into the app on its own merits.

Some TweetDeck users seem to like the update since prior to this latest version the application was a horrible Adobe AIR application that (at least in my experience) was slow, poorly designed, and bloated. This latest version seems better.

I don’t use Twitter for iPhone or TweetDeck and I only use the Twitter.com website on rare occasions. I’m very, very happy with Tweetbot.

/via John “I cut in line once” Gruber.