I’ll admit it, I’m jealous: While Valleywag remains stuck with a logo that looks like an IBM monitor from 1982, io9, Gawker Media’s newly launched sci-fi site, has gotten a wickedly cool illustration. The future is coming, and it is diabetically adorable. I quizzed site editor Annalee Newitz on the origins of the logo.

Valleyfag: Let me guess at your instructions to the designer for the io9 illustration: “Think Hello Kitty meets the Borg Queen.”
t3chn0ptimist69: hahaha we just said, “give us a cute gender-neutral thing with a brain implant” Eliza Gauger, the illustrator, is a genius

Like I said: Hello Kitty meets the Borg Queen. A supremely effective exploitation of the visual resonances of two pop-culture memes. I can only applaud. And, in a nod to my futurist colleagues, coin a new word: “cynesthetic.”

Source:Valleywag

Facebook applications were supposed to provide advertisers with compelling new ways to mine for customers on the Web, but the results have not panned out. Sony attempted to capitalize on the Facebook buzz and the holiday season with a branded snowglobe application. Just the sort of useless eye candy popular on the social network, but the application garnered less than 500 installations and only 35 active users. Why?

One explanation is that it was simply a bad application, transparently created by advertisers rather than developers well-versed in the network’s mores; with no way to invite friends in on the fun, Sony’s trinkets didn’t take advantage of Facebook’s built-in marketing mechanisms. Building a Facebook application for the mere sake of having one is probably not the advertiser’s goal, but for the time being, ad agencies don’t seem to be able to come up with much more than these hamhanded attempts. Desperate to seem hip, advertisers will likely keep shelling out for more useless apps — until they start looking at the numbers, and grow some globes of their own.

Source:Valleywag

Yahoo has axed its Picks blog, which has highlighted a notable new site webevery day for the past 12 years. In an age of 24-hour blogs, a one-link-a-day site was antiquated. And Picks, at 12, was a Methuselah of the Web. But we owe so much to the long-neglected site that it deserves a better obituary than the one Yahoo afforded it.

Blogging, at its roots, is a simple act: Choosing a link and describing it as briefly as possible. Long before we had things called blogs, sites like Netscape’s What’s New, Cool Site of the Day, and Yahoo Picks performed this service. These proto-blogs inspired Suck.com, the daily fountainhead of Web snark, whose tone then informed many early blogs. We owe the Web’s relentless spirit of neophilia to pioneers like Yahoo Picks.

Yahoo can hardly be blamed for killing Picks; Yahoo’s Web directory, the engine of Yahoo’s early success, has long run out of steam. Yahoo doesn’t want to send users elsewhere; it wants to lure them into portals like My Yahoo and Yahoo Finance, and keep them as long as it can. No surprise that Yahoo is struggling with that strategy: If walled gardens are faring poorly, how much worse will the unwalled ones do?

The closure of Picks is an acknowledgement that the Yahoo of today is not the Yahoo of 12 years ago. It would be less sad to lose such a defining property if we had any idea what Yahoo stood for now.