New JOHO

Doc reminds me that I published a new issue of my newsletter this morning. Yeah, I remember now! In it you’ll find some previously blogged stuff PLUS reader mail and link contributions. And a Bogus Contest. In fact, here are the contents:

Links and Horizons: There’s more to the Web - and to the real world - than meets the eye The word “horizon” became important to some philosophers in the second half of the 20th century. “Horizonal this” and “the horizonality of that” are sure signs that you’re dealing with a so-called Continental philosopher. They’re also the ones talking about silence, gestures, and, occasionally, nothingness. There’s a reason for this… Teams vs. Individuals: Strong individuals can make lousy teammates … Hegel and the Web to the rescue! There’s always been a contradiction of an Hegelian sort (oy, what’s with me this week!) between the value of individuals with strong beliefs and the need to be flexible enough to subordinate one’s beliefs for the sake of the team. Passion versus teamwork. Commitment versus compromise. Individualism versus collaboration… So, You Go: The verbal tic of choice So, you can already tell I’m a webby type of guy. The giveaway was in the very first word of this paragraph. “So,” I began, thus taking up an affectation of speech that is to web entrepreneurs what “what-ev-er” is to Valley girls and “On the other hand” is to philosophers… Misc.: Why search engines suck™, XP as pirate, and spam vs. English The Anals of Marketing: Miscellaneous marketing stupidities Walking the Walk: San Jose Bicycles talks the talk, in the best sense Cool Tool: ClearType works Links: Your pointers Email, Arbitrary Insults, and Suspicious Hacking Coughs: Your comments Bogus contest: Neologisms

2 Comments »

Kevlar’s Good but Dupont Sucks(tm)

From http://dpsftp.sourceforge.net/about.html:

DPS-FTP is a multi-threaded FTP client for GNOME. It was originally called Kevlar FTP, since its interface was inspired by Bulletproof FTP, and Kevlar is bullet-proof. But DuPont actually sent me a notice telling me that I can’t use their trademarked product names in my product name. They were generous enough to allow me to say that my product contains Kevlar, however. After explaining to them that, being software, my “product” does not contain Kevlar, and that I’m not making any money from the “product”, they still would not let me use it. So, I renamed the program to DuPont Sucks FTP, or DPS-FTP.

[Thanks to T. Byfield for pointing this out on a mailing list.]

3 Comments »

Philosophical Death Match

RageBoy, in an email, points to an entertaining book review by Jim Holt in the NY Times. The book, Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a 10-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, provides the context for a famous encounter between Wittgenstein and Karl Popper in 1946. The book sounds excellent, the review is very well done, and — as Chris points out — be sure not to miss the snarky last line.

Be the first to comment »

Scrambled Edress

Found on Gary Turner’s blog: A
site that turns your email address into a string
of ASCII character codes. For example,
self@evident.com gets represented as:

self@
evid
en
t.com

(s& is the HTML code for ASCII character “s”.) Use this in the HTML version of a page and the
browser will render it correctly as
“self@evident.com” but - and this is the important
part - programs scouring sites for spammable email
addresses won’t recognize it as an address (unless
they wise up).

Be the first to comment »

Vomitous Flashes

In response to our call for holiday Flashes that deserve to die, Israel Orange writes:

While hunting down some drivers for a friend’s flaky hardware I wandered onto NEC’s website a few days ago, and the flash animation they threw at me struck me as “tedious, pretentious, empty and boring” as you say. Also completely unbearable and totally hideous and all kinds of other negative appellations. My god. They truly and really oughtta shoot the suit that thought this was a good idea. I volunteer.

Ah, the miracle of clip art!

Be the first to comment »

One Line Per Life

Being your completely predictable liberal, humanist type of person, my initial reaction to today’s article in the Boston Globe listing the notables who died this year was: How terrible to have your life reduced to a single phrase! For example:

• “Robert Rimmer raised eyebrows with ‘The Harrad Experiment,’ a novel about contemporary sexual relationships.”
• “Christopher Hewett played ‘Mr. Belvedere.’”
• …”actor-puppeteer Lewis Arquette…”

What rich lives are thus reduced to a short string of words. How sad! How wise and compassionate a person I must be to be bothered by this! Yada yada existential yada.

Of course, what’s really bothering me is that I haven’t done enough with my life to be able to reduce it to a four-word phrase. Yes, I’m suffering from a classic case of Obituary Envy.

Be the first to comment »

50 Fond Farewells

Gary Stock writes:

Half of these I just don’t get.
Half of the remainder are not funny.
Half of the remainder are sort of funny.
Half of the remainder are really funny.
The remaining half-dozen are very, very funny.
“50 things we’ll be glad to see the back of in 2002″

1 Comment »

Rowling Weds!

J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, today married anesthesiologist Neil Murray. The private Rowling issued no photos, but the happy couple were caught on film several months ago:

Immediately after this picture was taken, however, a gust of wind blew back the good doctor’s hair:

For purposes of creepy comparison:

---

NOTE to commenters: I love your passion for the Harry Potter books, but you should be aware that there’s no reason to think that JK Rowling reads this blog.

145 Comments »

Kuhn’s Paradigm

Chris RageBoy Locke has sent an email to a few of us pointing out an excellent article in the NY Times by Edward Rothstein about recent books about Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and the guy who - damn his eyes! - introduced the phrase “paradigm shift.” The article talks about Steve Fuller, a sociologist who has written a philosophical biography (which I have not read).
The Times article summarizes Fuller’s position:

Mr. Fuller, in fact, suggests that Kuhn, despite his reputation, had too much allegiance to the old concepts of science. Kuhn, says Mr. Fuller, retained the “elitist myth” about “visionary geniuses” who changed the world by shifting paradigms. The notion of a coterie of specialists coming to agreement, Mr. Fuller says, supports the idea of an authoritarian, antidemocratic establishment.
…Unlike the object of his criticism, Mr. Fuller doesn’t offer many scientific examples but he does follow some of Kuhn’s precepts in mounting his attack. Like Kuhn, he treats scientific inquiry as a matter of sociological confrontation rather than a progress toward truth; he just thinks the confrontations should be taken out of the hands of specialists. Science, he says, should become a democratic clamor of competing ideas.

Fuller’s attack (or the Times’ representation of that attack) seems off base. Kuhn was an historian of science. He found a paradigmatic movement in that history. The fact is that Newton, for example, smashed the old paradigm through an intellectual breakthrough so radical that it can only be called an act of visionary genius. (I just finished Newton’s Gift by David Berlinski, an oddly ornate but quite effective effort to explain the magnitude of Newton’s genius to those like me whose math is 400 years behind the times.) Within the bounds of the new paradigm, science becomes a more-or-less democratic clamor of competing ideas. The fact that science operates within - conforms to - a paradigm discovered by a (usually) dead white man may make us uncomfortable politically, but I think Kuhn’s description (notice, not “prescription”) is brilliant and can only be refuted by an hypothesis that accounts for the facts of the history of science as well as his does. (The Times points out that Fuller’s critique is not redolent of historical facts.)
Now, having said that, Fuller is certainly right that science is becoming democratized and messy, no little thanks to the Web. What started as a way for scientists to exchange information is sapping the power from the scientific authorities, for the old guard worked by limiting access to information - could your article make it into Science or JAMA? - and now, of course, we not only have unlimited access to information, but that access is causing new scientific communities to form the way rocks cause eddies in streams.
But does this mean Kuhn is wrong? Not in the essence of his insight. Paradigms are second-order information. They frame the eddies. They determine which questions are sensible to ask and which issues are urgent. They enable science to proceed with its daily tasks. They require, by definition, an act of genius to be born. But perhaps we have entered a time when multiple paradigms can exist.
The Web is ready for this but the real world isn’t … and the funding comes from the real world.
[Note 1: This doesn't touch on the truly sensitive topic: can one paradigm be said to be closer to the truth than another or are all paradigms equal? Don't even get me started!]

[Note 2: RageBoy has found a really interesting article by the philosopher Don Ihde about why there aren't "science critics" equivalent to art critics. RB mentions this over at Gonzo Engaged where he also reminds us that Jeneane is up to some important blogging.]

Be the first to comment »

Killing the Too-Clever Clipboard

If you want to get rid of the annoying clipboard in MS Office that pops up when you all you want to do is a two-finger copy and paste, you “just” need to edit a line in your registry. Microsoft has directions here. (If you’re using Office XP, it seems likely that you can replace the 9 with a 10 when you’re browsing the registry.) Obviously, editing your registry is a dangerous undertaking, you should make a backup, don’t come whining to me, etc. etc. etc. [I found this tip in the Lockergnome discussion forum. Thanks!]
You may also be able to set this using the excellent x-setup tweaker from Xteq.

Be the first to comment »

Events, Stories, Life

Jennifer Balderama is blogging about finding her father floating face down while swimming in Hawaii. She leaves us hanging about how he’s doing because no one at that point knew what was going on with him.

She’s a terrific writer. She tells the story well. It makes you wonder anew at the fact that life comes in stories.

[Jennifer, I know it's not just a story to you. I'm sure everyone who reads your blog wishes you and your dad the best.]

Be the first to comment »

Meaning Index

Due to the events of the past few months, the meaning of the universe has been downgraded to 39.

- The Management

Be the first to comment »

E-Friends Redux

Gary Turner has a new suggestion for what we call people that we are friends with through email. Rather than “e-pals,” as suggested by Bethann, Gary would have us use:

equaintances
No reason we can’t use both as estrangers become equaintances, then epals, and finally, as efamiliarity breeds econtempt, e-nemies.

Be the first to comment »

Gonzo Self-Promotion

Mike Sanders has raised a question at GonzoEngaged (and we didn’t even know Gonzo was going steady!):

I was wondering how integral self-promotion is to Gonzo Marketing? It seems that the most succesful web personalities like Rageboy, Dave Winer and Andrew Sullivan do a decent amount of it. Is this the discovery of voice or some other essential Gonzo theme?

In the ironic spirit of self-promotion, and assuming that cross-blogging is frowned upon, I won’t reproduce here my response there (which is basically that, no, you can be gonzoidally engaged without taking yourself as your subject).
Meanwhile, I am so stricken by a neurotic, self-involved self-effacement that only in this meta-meta-meta guise can I bring myself to note in public that the first early readers’ comments (= “blurbs”) have started coming in for my book. I should really get over getting over myself and just print them here, don’t you think? Does someone have the name of a therapist with some spare cycles and a flair for the absurd?

Be the first to comment »

Ev on Weblog Stats

Ev responds to our bloggerino about weblog statistics it’d be interesting to know:

…as far as I know, that data has not been collected. And, I agree, it would certainly be interesting. An easy way to derive a lot of it would be from the Blogger database — and/or the LiveJournal database. These are probably the richest and easiest-to-crunch sources of weblogging data, as they have all the data for all their users in one place. (Though their extrapolation to the rest of the blogging world would be up for debate, it’d be a good place to start.) (I’m not sure about editthispage and weblogs.com-hosted sites, because I don’t know how exactly that data is stored or how much of it there is.) I would love to have those numbers for my purposes and be glad to share them if I did. My only problem is I don’t have time to do all the analysis - or the money to pay someone to do it. At least not right now. Hopefully, soon. Alternatively, I would be open to giving access to someone who wanted to do the crunching for non-commercial purposes - perhaps for a student project or someone just for fun. Feel free to put that word out.

Consider it put - although putting out a word in this obscure weblog may be more like putting out a fire.

But here’s the big news: Ev expects to have money soon! Perhaps he has insider information that the world is about to become a just and fair place…

Be the first to comment »

Google the Good, Part Whatever

John Loverso has found an undocumented command that lets us ego search UseNet while excluding our own messages:

loverso -author:loverso

Another correspondent on the mailing list where John produced this info, Anton Sherwood, refined it so that you don’t exclude messages from other people named “Loverso”:

loverso -author:jloverso@emailaddress.com

Note to the Dumb: This works with names other than Loverso.

1 Comment »

A Christmas for Everyone

Christmas
is too cool a holiday to confine it to Christians. We ought to reformulate it as a secular two-day holiday, Dec. 24-25. On the 24th, we’d
all decorate our homes with lights, reflect on peace, get together with the family, exchange presents, drink
eggnog, kiss strangers under mistletoe, etc.,
just because those are fun things to do near the Solstice. It’d have nothing to do with Jesus, mangers or myrhhhhh. Then, on the 25th, the Christians could
celebrate Christ’s birth by going to church,
praying, and engaging in activities more spiritual than whining about misfired gifts before heading out to an afternoon movie. The rest of us would have a second day off.

So, I guess my new party platform is: “Let’s get the
Christ out of Christmas.” In fact, let’s call the
new two day federal holiday “Mas.” Got the Spanish
connection and everything.

---

George Lyon responds:

.. I urge you to take heart as I did from
a recent (yesterday or the day before I think) feature on Marketplace
(the NPR business show). It casually stated
that many more Japanese celebrate Christmas than are Christian and moved
on to the main point which is that many more Japanese than should (my
spin) eat Kentucky Fried Chicken on Christmas because they believe that
is what Americans do…

It’s like seeing your own unconscious habits reflected in your children’s behavior. Embarrassing.

Be the first to comment »

Ideas about the Universe I’ll Die Not
Understanding (Or: Why a Little Knowledge Is a Stupid Thing)

I’ve read a lot of books that try to explain
modern physics to laypeople (i.e., morons like me who can’t
do the math). As a result, I am in the position of a
goldfish stumped by the concept
of glass.
Here are some of the questions I will never
understand. I mean never. So please don’t write to
me thinking that with one more explanation I’ll
finally get it. I won’t. I started down this path
when I was about 13 by reading a book Einstein wrote
for laypeople. (Anyone know the book I have in mind?
I can’t find it at Amazon.) As with every book I’ve
read, I understood it paragraph by paragraph and
came out with a set of concepts I could mouth but
not really make sense of. So, unless you think you
can do better than Einstein, don’t try. (Nah, I know
this won’t stop you.)
And, yes, I do know that the big
misunderstandings I’m about to reveal betray my
ignorance. No need to remind me of that. This is all
part of the process of preemptive self-embarrassment
that is the aim of my working life and, indeed, of most of my
waking life.
Here goes:
1. We all know that if we were to send a twin
into space in a space ship, less time would have
passed for her than for her twin on earth; if she
traveled sufficiently close to the speed of light,
she would find that her twin had aged many years
more than she had. But, since Einsteinian space has
no privileged frame of reference, we could just as
well describe the event as the twin in the space
ship staying still while the earth (and the rest of
the universe) zoomed out from under her. Under this
description, the twin in the space ship should age
more. Wazzup?
2. Is Indeterminacy an ontological or
epistemological statement? Or is it really not a problem with observation
but a problem with thinking that there are such
things as particular moments of time? That is, an
observation has to be an observation of something at
a particular moment. But if there is no quantum of
time, no atom of time, then indeterminacy isn’t
caused by observation but by our assumption that
there are moments. For example, if you ask me the exact position of a car on the highway between any two seconds, the answer will be a short strretch of road with the car somewhere in between. As you decrease the specified amount of time, the length of road gets shorter by the answer is still a mushy “Somewhere between A and B.” We never get to a precise answer unless we can name not a stretch of time but a precise moment. No moments, no precision. Discuss amongst yourselves.
[Note: A famous astrophysicist at MIT tells me that
this idea is crap. Obviously, he just can't keep up
with my breathtaking insights.]
3. Do strings actually have shape? Or is that
just a convenient way to describe them because it
allows us to talk in terms of vibrations? Do they
actually vibrate or is that merely a way of talking
about properties describable only in mathematics?
Please confine yourself to a Yes or No. Thank you.
4. If the light is on in your closet and the door is closed, when you turn off the light the closet gets dark because the light inside
bounces around until it finds the crack and
“escapes.” That’s my understanding, anyway. So, if I
had a dark room with no openings, would it stay lit?
Further, if I’m in the darkened closet with the slit
at the bottom, why doesn’t an equal amount of light
come bouncing in as comes bouncing out?

5. Won’t someone please feed Schroedinger’s cat?

1 Comment »

Right on, Ev!

Hackers are jerks. I just wanted to go on record with that.

Be the first to comment »

Helpful Forums

I, along with 250,000 other people, subscribe to Lockergnome, a daily email newsletter, because it’s got tons of Windows tips and pointers to useful downloads. Also, the author, Chris Pirillo, has more personality than he knows what to do with - a lot of groansome puns balanced by a wide range of enthusiasms. Lockergnome also has its geeky side, and its newsgroups are a great resource if you have questions about XP, Linux, Mac, games and two dozen other topics. (You’re also allowed to participate if you actually have answers, or so I’m told.) Sure, there are lots of other forums, including UseNet (which should be experiencing a spike in usage now that Google has enabled us to find stuff there again), but I’ve found the Lockergnome XP forum in particular to be responsive, non-spammed, and free of Only-A-Moron-Would-Ask-Such-a-Dumb-Question replies.

1 Comment »

A World without Gray: Why Customer Support Sucks

I called RCN a year ago shortly after they installed my brand new cable modem account. “Look,” I said to the customer service rep, “I know your support stops where your wire stops, but I just spent 5 hours trying to get my Linksys-based home network running again and I’m wondering if you can tell me if it can be done.”
“Sure,” said the rep, cheerily. “I have one at home.”
“Great! Is there some trick to getting it to work?”
“Um, yes, but I can’t talk with you about it.”
“But there’s some one thing I have to do?”
“Yup.”
“Can’t you just blurt it out?”
“These calls may be monitored.”
“Ok, I understand that, and, for the record, you’ve been great and have followed the guidelines. Is there a Web page that talks about how to do it?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Can you email me the trick?”
“I’m sorry, but I’m not allowed to help you with this.”
Obviously, this rep was going out on a limb just by saying that RCN cable can be home-networked via Linksys. It was RCN, Inc.’s fault that the call went wrong. Their message that “This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes” should say “We may listen in to make sure our reps aren’t using their own judgment. Remember, here at RCN Customer Support, customer support comes second and protecting ourselves comes first.”
The problem isn’t just that companies are afraid of the legal implications of going beyond the smallest range of responses. It’s that the legal system has scared the gray out of the system. Had the rep said, “Look, we don’t officially support home networking and there’s nothing in the RCN playbook about this, but I have one at home, and here’s something you might try…” I would have understood — from the words and their context — that this wasn’t an officially sanctioned RCN procedure for which I could hold them responsible. Our language accommodates conditionals and qualifiers. Our legal system doesn’t.
Even better, I wish RCN had set up a customer-to-customer support board. I’d be happy to share the PPPoE tip. And I bet the support guy would have already logged on from home with step-by-step instructions on how to get a home network going.
Two followups:
1. After another day of trying, I randomly discovered that you have to unclick the PPPoE box on the Linksys prefs page.
2. RCN Support now answers questions about home networking with the Linksys box.

Be the first to comment »

Cho Cho Cho, Merry Christmas!

Binyamin Jolkovsky, editor of the Jewish World Review, is passing around an article by Michelle Malkin that says that Ron Sims, county executive in Seattle, deserved the pummeling he took for suggesting that public employees avoid the phrase “Merry Christmas” or any other greeting specific to a particular faith. Malkin says that Sims was wrong to try to exclude religion from the public sphere.
Humbug! It’s not a big deal - not big enough to get all snippy and self-righteous when someone wishes you a cheery “Merry Christmas!” - but it is rude and thoughtless to assume that everyone is of your faith. It’s more troublesome if the person is representing our government. Sims was, in my opinion, 100% correct.
No, it’s really not a big deal. It’s worth a memo or an email reminder, but not worth a reprimand. Personally, if I’m feeling feisty, I respond with a festive “And a happy Chanukah to you!”
And, while we’re on the subject, if you’re Christian, I hope you have a warm and restorative Christmas.

1 Comment »

Meta-Ads

We went to see Jimmy Neutron last night at a National Amusements brand theatre (tagline: “Applying Real-World Stickiness to the Bottom of Your Shoes”). The children in the audience (including ours) enjoyed it. I myself was nationally amused by a screen that came on before the lights went down: “This pre-feature entertainment is brought to you by SomeCo.” [Unfortunately, I was so dazzled by the concept that I forget who the actual sponsor was ... not a hearty endorsement of this form of sponsorship.] There then followed three commercials, followed by a number of movie trailers.
Yes, the commercials now are being sponsored. Can’t we please take this up one more meta level and sell sponsorships of sponsorships? “This pre-entertainment sponsorship is being sponsored by Bayview Ford where we deliver on the idea of the idea of customer service!”

Be the first to comment »

The Red Pill

Gary Stock points us to an academic article by Nick Bostrom of Yale’s Dept. of Philosophy, the title of which poses a question with relative succinctness: “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Dr. Nick summarizes:

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the transhumanist dogma that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

If I understand this - and there’s no reason to think that I do given that my eyes glazed over rather early on - the professor is saying that if our descendents managed to evolve into something post-human and care enough about the past to build a simulation of it, then, yes, we probably are living in a simulation.
Note to my puppet masters: Would it hurt to give me the Brad Pitt skin?

2 Comments »

Have Yourself a Very Jewish Christmas

Ah, Christmas, that most wonderful time of the year. For Jews anyway. None of the stress. All of the time off. You can work without the phone ringing. You can not work without having to pay for it by packing the kids into the car and driving to see relatives constrained to be jolly. So long as you don’t mind those damn Christmas carols blaring everywhere, and can put up with the casual assumption by every town and store clerk in America that you too must be Christian, why it’s the most glorious time of the year!

Be the first to comment »

Developers x 3

Vergil Iliescu points us to an MP3 (found by his 13-year-old son) that sets to music the footage of Steve Ballmer chanting “Developers developers developers.” You can download the footage at tdcrc.com There’s also a music video that failed to play on my machine.
This continues the Ballmer self-bashing that began with the release of the infamous Monkeyboy video showing Ballmer doing an unfortunately simian dance of enthusiasm at some morale-building internal MSFT event. (I wrote a half-assed defense of Monkeyboy that says that making an ass of yourself in public may be a good thing, especially if you’re an Important Guy like Ballmer.)

Be the first to comment »

Neology

World Wide Words, a weekly ‘zine, reports that the BBC is gathering its list of 2001’s important additions to the language. Among the entries:
box-cutter
asymmetric warfare
wi-fi
weblog
It’s followed by a list of suggestions from We the People, including:
Potterphobia
e-sackings (being fired by email)
Euronating (media hype over the introduction of the Euro)
Leader envy (people in the US who wish Tony Blair was their President)
Any other suggestions?

Be the first to comment »

e-pals

Bethann replies to my passing conundrum: What do we call people we know through email and the Web?

I call my Web acquaintances e-pals. You know, like pen pals.

Of course!

Be the first to comment »

Blogful Statistics

A few people have written in with suggestions for where I might find the statistics I’ve been looking for.
Meg Hourihan writes:

I don’t know if there is any one place that has the kind of blogging stats you’re looking for, but I’d like to see them too. When we were raising funding at Pyra (spring ‘00) we crunched some numbers and came up with one interesting stat: Blogger users averaged 2.5 updates *a day* their pages. That was total users, we didn’t do any filter to remove inactive users when we got that number, so I imagine a more realistic number might be higher.

Michel Benevento suggests we take a look at some Yaysoft stats:

you’ll see that you can view a couple of thousand different blogs by latest entry, total entries, average entry per day of, and so on. It uses data from weblogs.com.

Of course, then there’s my own special scientifical journalistical approach to stats: Skip over them when other people cite them and make them up when I need them. It really works. Why, a recent study shows that this approach brings a 68.7% increase in the quality of information. Really.

Be the first to comment »

Have yourself a Vomitious Flash Xmas

A correspondent who wishes to be identified only as Donald sends us to a Flash-animated Christmas greeting that is tedious, pretentious, empty and boring. But surely it is only a 5 on the scale of tedious, pretentious, empty and boring holiday-themed Flash animations. Do worse! Let me know and I’ll compile the list. I’ll even check it twice. (Note: I’m looking for corporate entries, not personal tedious, pretentious, empty and boring holiday-themed Flash animations. I’m not that mean.)

Be the first to comment »

Why Search Engines Suck(tm)

Just a little thing, but type “drivers” into the search box at Epson, and you get the following screen in return:

Look at the bottom of the navigation box on the left hand side. Look at the results of the search engine. Repeat.

Be the first to comment »

How to Impress a VC

Ack! I actually skipped a day blogging. But it couldn’t be helped. I was on the road, making the rounds of local venture capitalists, helping to get a start-up funded by saying all the right things … you know, the things VC’s love to hear:

1. “There’s no marketing slide in this Powerpoint presentation because the product is viral. It sells itself.”
2. “This’ll be the new new thing.”
3. “The product will be really simple for mom and pop to understand. It just requires a paradigm shift.”
4. “As this 2×2 shows, we have no competition.”
5. “The death of dot coms has been greatly exaggerated.”
6. “It’s a billion-dollar market. All we have to do is get 1% of the market.”
7. “People are just waiting the chance to switch office application suites. Word, Powerpoint, Outlook, Excel … they’re so yesterday.”
8. “Then the network effect kicks in!”
9. “Good point, with a free product there’s no revenue. But if you amass the names of millions of visitors and track their behavior on your site, that’s gotta be worth millions to marketers!”
10. “Microsoft’s never been good at this type of software.”
11. “Our success in the market will be our defense against Microsoft.

”

12. “Microsoft is too focused elsewhere to notice this market … and by the time we penetrate it, it’ll be too late.”
13. “Could you please hold your comment? The slide isn’t done animating.”

Your own contributions would be, of course, appreciated.

Be the first to comment »

The Silence of the Wolves

Gary Stock points us to Poynter.org where we can read this memo:

Panama City (FL) News Herald chief copy editor Ray Glenn’s memo re war coverage

Oct. 31, 2001

“…Per Hal’s order, DO NOT USE photos on Page 1A showing civilian
casualties from the U.S. war on Afghanistan. [Note: "Hal" is News
Herald executive editor Hal Foster.] Our sister paper in Fort Walton
Beach has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening
e-mails and the like.

Also per Hal’s order, DO NOT USE wire stories which lead with civilian
casualties from the U.S. war on Afghanistan. They should be mentioned
further down in the story. If the story needs rewriting to play down
the civilian casualties, DO IT. The only exception is if the U.S. hits
an orphanage, school or similar facility and kills scores or hundreds of
children. See me if there are any special situations…”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how it happens.

---

PS: JSB (aka Floyd Turbo) points us to a response from Hal Foster.

Be the first to comment »

Weblog Stat Questions

If you check one of the weblog directories, you’ll see the ol’ 80:20 rule at work…except on the Web, that becomes the 80,000,000:20 rule. There are a heck of a lot of weblogs out there, but a random sampling of them shows that while they are sociologically interesting - the things that people care about! the way people write and think! wow! - only a handful are of enough appeal to get me back for a second visit. This doesn’t mean they’re not appealing to anyone or that they’re self-obsessed ramblings as some critics of weblogs have said. It just means that on the Web, everyone is famous to 15 people.

If weblogs shouldn’t be measured by mass market, broadcast standards according to which success is directly proportional to the number of readers (excuse me, I mean “eyeballs”), it’d be interesting to know the shape of weblog success. Is anyone - Ev? Dave? - keeping track of numbers such as:

1. Average frequency of postings
2. Patterns of posting frequency, e.g., do people start out posting every day and then move to every week, or what?
3. Average longevity of a weblog, measured by looking at the time between the first post and the most recent one
4. Percent that last longer than 6 months or a year
5. Average readership
6. How persistent that readership is (I’m not saying these would be easy numbers to gather)
7. Average webloglogrollery
8. Here’s a tough one to track: Is there a correlation between the degree to which a weblog is topic-specific and how long it lasts, how many people read it and how many weblogroll it?

What would these numbers tell us? Maybe nothing. They’re just numbers. Weblogging is going to roll along no matter what the numbers say. But why should the broadcasters be the only ones who know - or at least assert they know - the numeric shape of their market? (Ok, I’ll tell you why: because it’s easier to extrapolate to a mass market than it is to count the ripples made by rain on a pond.)

Covering My Ass: I recognize that it’s quite likely that there’s a prominent page that has all of these stats plus many more. I fully expect the response: “Yo, dude, haven’t you ever been to www.scriptingnews.com/weblogstats/answersyourdumbfuckingquestions.html?” My defense: I’ve made a career out of being ignorant in public.

4 Comments »

Cleartype Web Tune-up

If you’re running Windows XP and have a digital display, you can tune your ClearType implementation at a nifty Web site Microsoft provides. In fact, on this page you can check and uncheck a box to toggle ClearType and watch the text on the page go from crummy to spiffy in real time.

ClearType is Microsoft’s version of a technology sort-of invented by Apple that takes advantage of the fact that a single pixel on an LCD screen is in fact composed of a red, green and blue sub-pixel. By turning on the sub-pixels selectively, text can be smoothed out (”anti-aliased”). (Adobe also has a version of this technology, called CoolType.) It does make a difference.

(Here’s something I wrote about ClearType a while ago if you want more info. And here’s a Seybold Report on the topic too.)

Be the first to comment »

Windows, Sharp and TinkyWinky

Bill Seitz looks at the similarity of the default backgrounds of the Sharp Actius laptop and Windows XP and asks:

I think the scarier question is why both of them look so much like the
“set” of the Teletubbies

You heard it hear first: Windows XP is gay. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)