sean

hackoff

Interesting concept - a blook - I really like the references to MacHack - which I remember very fondly.

Link: hackoff.com: Chapter 5 - Afternoon April Fools Day, 2003 - Episode 2.

Devil's advocate

I don't think that people are paying enough attention to how little a slice of the internet all the money is coming from.

The web is obviously a very effective platform for facilitating shopping. 

The web is obviously a very effective platform for organization and dissemination of non-commercial knowledge.

But how are the two connected?  Only in a very indirect and inefficient way.

Let's not make the assumption that the rest of the web will be as easy / possible to monetize as keyword searches for commercial information - it won't be.

Weblogs inc

I do not understand this acquisition. 

To me the value of blogs is that they aggregate the knowledge and opinions of the distributed populace.

Weblogs inc, about.com are no different than traditional media.  There is no scale here.  It is humans, creating very low-value content.  This sort of human filter seems like it will easily be replaced once tagging is done right and can even be replaced by algorithms in certain cases. 

The Idea Economy: Battle over right to sell knowledge - Technology - International Herald Tribune

Link: The Idea Economy: Battle over right to sell knowledge - Technology - International Herald Tribune.

Interesting ideas about patents - says "Start-up companies use patents — often their only collateral — to lure investment from venture capitalists." 

Patents take so long to get approved that we almost never run across a company that actually has patents.  They all have filed for patents, and we almost always ignore them since it is hard to tell whether they will be granted. 

I question the value of patents in our economy. 

I would realy like to know how many patents litigations are won, settled, lost.  Anyone know where that data can be found?

Googlodification

It's not that google is making things commodities, it is technology making things (and people) commodities - if we can track we no longer need to estimate based on people's characteristics.  By definition this makes us more interchangable, since we are evaluated as business partners based on reality rather than estimates.

When I was working as a consultant I experienced this at a big wealth management company.  They gave their relationship managers a large amount of discretion in setting the prices of their products, because the RMs job was to evaluate the potential size and profitability of the relationship and give discounts to win future business.

I thought that was dumb.  You can see what products they buy - why not just set a discount schedule - more assets = better prices? 

But they couldn't see what products they were buying, since they didn't have their data in order.

Lots of creative jobs are going to be replaced by computers. 

Link: BuzzMachine � Blog Archive � Google commodifies everything.

search paradox

This is the paradox - most of the time people do not know exactly what they are looking for - but most of the time the do know what they are looking for when they are looking to buy something.  And that is where most of the money is. 

And the reason why product-related search isn't better is because most of the data out there is hard to get.  You basically have to screen-scrape, which is hard.  Unless you are google and you can get everyone to send you a feed...

Link: John Battelle's Searchblog: Scoble Suggests The Search Chapter 13.

YubbyNubNubb

Why can't we figure out what to do with YubNub?  Because the useful features, like | haven't been implemented yet. 

The killer app here is going to be the ability to do "mashups" without coding.  This will require 1. the ability to parse and extract structed data from a page and 2. the pipe command.  The pipe command is problematic because it is useless unless there exists a convention from sending data from one command to the next. 

Link: Venture Chronicles by Jeff Nolan: Thinking About YubNub and a GUI IOS....

Workin' Women

Wow - NYT article spurs big discussion in the bloggo-world.

Link: Gotham Gal: Career Women?.

This is certainly an issue that my wife and I have been talking about recently.  It is really hard to imagine having children and working the amount that we both work now.  The two issues of particualr interest to me:
1. What do women that had stopped work to have children do when the children are grown? 

2. Why isn't it acceptable for men to take time off / scale back / etc. to care for children too?  It may be that there are industries where this would be acceptable even if not commonplace (tech maybe?) but I can think of many where it would be stigmitized.  Ex. my wife's soon-to-be-employer (big law firm) has lots of flexible options to scale back and stay on partner track but they are only pitched to women and I don't think any men take them (I could easily be wrong about this), same story with my former employer (big strategy consulting firm).

It is obvious to me that our society needs to create much more flexible working arrangements.

Why doesnt gmail have tags?

One thing I commonly find myself doing is forwarding email to myself with descriptive tags - this way I can more successfully search for it later.  Why doesn't gmail have tags?  It seems so natural, given their search-based paradigm...

Link: Read/Write Web: Gmail/Google backlash.

Vonage is awful

This blog seems to be turning into my ranting space.  I am completely fed up with Vonage. The linksys adapter is blinking the power light repeatedly - it is OBVIOUS that it is dead. I have waited on hold forever this evening. If I could transfer my number to skype I would.

Vonage is spending all this money to create a good consumer brand...only to be derailed by their poor customer service.  These Indian callcenter guys are cheap - hire some more! 

Link: Vonage VoIP Forum Forums - Post 48074 - same problem.
Link: Vonage VoIP Forum - Linksys RT31P2 with power light always blinking.