sean

Boston Barcamp

 

BarCamp looks really cool - (Link: BarCamp.)  We should have one in Boston. 

 

Several other people agree:
Link: The Life and Times of Sooz � Bar Camp Boston.
Link: pc4media: BarCamp Boston or BarCamp New England?.

I will help organize.

Experiments in web2?

Mark makes some very interesting points in this post. 

One of his ancillary points is an area that I have been thinking about recently.  He writes "irst, i'd apply the 1% rule that we followed when i was at TCI. john malone's approach was dont waste your time on any investment or new project that doesnt have a reasonable expectation of increasing the entire company asset value by at least 1%."

My theory is that in the old world it is expensive to develop things, so you study the market very carefully to be as sure as possible that the investment is worth it before investing.  In the new world, projects are cheaper, so the model is to build a functioning but not perfect version of the product, actually test market demand, and then make the decision whether to invest more.  This is possible with search engines, web applications, etc.  not possible with cable systems, tractor factories, etc. 

This is a very big change - for the first time, developing things is cheaper than studying them.

Link: Mark Pincus Blog: if i were ceo of yahoo....

Stupid customer service

This reminds me of an incident where I had a bad customer service experience with Dell.  They were not able to send me a replacement power cord for my wife's computer in a timely fashion even though I had spent a few extra hundreds to get the next day on site service.  She needed her computer for an exam and I got really angry at Dell, yelled at them, and went to Best Buy where I bought a Belkin iGo knock-off. 

Dell had their customer support people from India call once / week for the next 3 weeks to ask me if I was satisfied with the service and see what they could do to help.  To which I replied "no, I am not satisfied with the service, it was horrible, I didn't get what I paid for and I'm upset" to which they replied "we are sorry" to which I replied "I don't believe you, if you were really sorry you would just do a better job, or you would refund me for the small amount of money I had to spend to buy the part that you couldn't provide to me" to which they replied: "we can't do that".

So what's the point?  You are calling to say you are sorry, and just wasting more of my time with an obviously insincere apology. 

Link: Customer service that is too polite - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals).

Google Blog Search

Can someone explain to me how blog search need be any different than regular search?  I understand that the fact that particular content is a blog is useful metadata to help users narrow their search.  But I don't understand why the usual search algorithms are not appropriate for blogs or why this is anything new at all (I find blog content using google all the time)...

I just don't get it.

Link: The Kelsey Group.

Finally my phone number is transferred

7 weeks ago I decided to start using my Blackberry as a phone - I was sick of carrying an extra phone and my phone, which was almost 2 years old, was pretty close to broken.

Just now, after 6 hours on the phone over 8 calls, did my number get transferred. 

This was really frustrating.  Earthlink needs to do better on their customer service.

Russia pictures

We went to Russia in August.

Pictures available at FLICKr This is one of us in front of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.  I have some observations about Russia, I will post some later when I have more time.

Looks like umair haque is my favorite blogger...

As I blog him twice in 1 day. 

This is a fascinating post.  But I am not sure that I see where the network-ness of google is.  Does the value of my search increase as the number of searchers does? 

I can imagine ways that it might, maybe their engineering gets better as they have a bigger data-set to work on, or maybe they can have AI built in like A9, but it is not an automatic link...

Link: Bubblegeneration - Evil Corporations Only.

Young vs. old

Umair Haque says: "You know, from my POV, despite all the buzz surrounding Web 2.0, Media 2.0, and all the cool new disruptive technologies/startups that are germinating, all the great discussions I have, etc...it's hard to be a young person in this ecosystem these days.  "

I couldn't agree more.  I am working in VC and it is really hard to see room in the industry for young guys.  Most VCs (at least on the east coast) seem to get worried when a CEO/founder is < 40 and clamor to bring in a new CEO who has "done it before".  I haven't been around long enough to argue whether that is a good idea or not, but it is depressing that guys 10 years older than me are considered "too young" and that there are thousands of old guys with long resumes crowding me out.

Link: Bubblegeneration - Evil Corporations Only.

blackout

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LA_POWER_OUTAGE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2005-09-12-16-20-31

Large Portion of Los Angeles Loses Power   

By LAURA WIDES         
Associated Press Writer

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A large portion of Los Angeles was blacked out Monday when electrical power was lost. The power got knocked out shortly before 1 p.m. after two power surges.

Traffic lights throughout downtown and the San Fernando Valley were not working, causing major traffic problems, according to video from helicopter news crews.

Downtown highrises also were darkened.

The city's department of water and power said it was investigating the cause and extent of the outage.

power out in LA

Just got a text message from a friend - I hope everything is ok.

@messaging.sprintpcs.com

to me

More options

4:09 pm (2 minutes ago)

Power is out all over la something is going on