Andy Beaumont, regarding his Tab Closed; Didn’t Read website:

What we’re witnessing here is the first wave of the second world pop-up war. Those of us who lived through the first one can only describe the horrors to our disbelieving children. This time though, the pop-ups are winning because we don’t yet have the tools to fight back. The web has seemingly evolved into something that actively antagonises people — why would anyone in their right mind hide the content that visitors are there to see?

In short, maybe they’re not in their right mind. This is what happens when analytics make decisions for you.

Whole piece is simply brilliant.

Marco Arment:

And we lucked out with Reader — imagine how much worse it would be if website owners weren’t publishing open RSS feeds for anyone to fetch and process, but were instead posting each item to a proprietary Google API. We’d have almost no chance of building a successful alternative.

That’s Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. (Does the shutdown make more sense now?)

The Super Bowl, America's annual celebration of the gridiron game, tends to be the most expensive day on any advertiser's calendar. Or maybe not. Oreo Cookies took a novel approach to its marketing during the big game last night by keeping its advertising team in the office, ready to respond to any unusual events during the match. Such an opportunity arose when the power inside New Orleans' Superdome went out, and the marketing minds quickly set to work on producing a poster ad for their product that played off that anomalous incident. After only a brief time, Oreo's Twitter account was up and tweeting the "You can still dunk in the dark" image, which resonated with Twitter users and has so far resulted in more than 14,000 retweets.

C...

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