Monthly Archives: February 2006

Regarding attention, A-lists, and oxygen for content: the Economist published “Sing a song of Spitzer” back on Jul 28th 2005. It’s a brief piece on bribery in the radio industry: Continue reading →

Last weekend Katrin and I visited with friends Saul, Kristen, Aaron and Kim in Richmond, Virginia. We’re all friends from Seattle, originally, so between the six of us we had a great west-coast-goes-east-coast reunion.

In between amazing meals (Kuba Kuba, Mama Zu’s, Cafe Gutenberg shown here, and Kristen and Saul’s home cookin’) we explored the city, and on Saturday in Carytown Saul and I stumbled across One-Eyed Jacques, a cool little gaming store. They bill themselves as “The Finest Game Store in Richmond, Virginia”, and from the vast selection of board games, miniatures and puzzles, it’s easy to see why.

I asked the manager what it’s like running her small mom-’n-pop shop, and she kindly spent a few minutes sharing with us. To wit:

* Competition has heated up radically Continue reading →

Blogging for me is a hobby. I’ve only been doing it a short while, and it’s not my day job or something I try to promote. I’m pretty sure most of my readers are friends and family who humor me by visiting on occasion. So this morning, on seeing my blog traffic running at 10x its normal level, my initial reaction was fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Continue reading →

From their FAQ:

How can Spurl.net cover its costs?

Spurl.net’s core business is in mining information about the World Wide Web from our databases. Note that it is information about Web pages in the database, NOT about the Spurl.net users, whose privacy we respect greatly (see our Privacy policy).

Continue reading →

Thanks for all the great comments on NewCo Compensation Principles, both public and private. Great food for thought.

Rob, I agree with your assertion: corporate feudalism is the norm today. Most companies have the equivalent of royalty, nobility, knights and serfs, both in terms of power structure and compensation allocation. Serfs are told they can climb the ladder to become royalty, but in reality that’s out of reach for most. If conditions are oppressive for long enough the serfs will revolt. And while a “revolt” these days won’t result in beheadings, it at least means poisonous morale, lower productivity, and unwanted employee attrition. (OK, we’re mainly talking about tech companies here, and tech compensation packages these days are hardly oppressive, even for serfs. But you get the point… it’s about perceived fairness.) Continue reading →

How many people, out of everyone who has ever lived on Earth, find work in their lifetime that they truly love doing? Almost none, I suspect. This topic is often on my mind; at least once a year I pop up from the rabbit hole and ask, “Do I love this job? How long should I keep doing it? What needs to change? What else could I be doing instead?” If you’re obssessed with the same meme, check out Paul Graham’s essay, How to Do What You Love.

Continue reading →

Over dinner with friends this weekend we debated the Danish cartoons and the corresponding backlash. I’m particularly interested in the issue, having parents of mixed religion — a Nigerian Muslim father and a Danish Christian mother — and a childhood spent in Nigeria and Canada. At the core of it I think most non-Muslims, especially the ardent free-speech advocates, either don’t understand or refuse to acknowledge the real motivations behind the reaction. Abbas Raza has an inkling: he posted an essay today on 3 Quarks Daily that provides insight and great food for thought. In my humble opinion, he is right on target. Continue reading →

Katrin, Grace and I watched this movie last night, and we all really enjoyed it. We spent 30 minutes afterwards analyzing and failing to reach concensus on what it’s about. Themes: the ephemeral nature of life; isolation; trouble-free superficiality versus painful profundity; and the desperate human need for affection, belongingness, acceptance. The movie conveys an eery sensation of barely but gently skirting disaster. The story and characters are quirky, fragile, real, and darkly funny throughout.

I love films that leave you with that tip-of-the-tongue feeling: you know you’ve just learned something about life, but you can’t quite articulate the newly gained knowledge. I was left wanting more, and definitely want to track the writer, Miranda July. I’ve added this movie to my list of really good stuff.

Links:
The official movie website
Miranda July’s website
IMDB coverage

P.S. Caveat Emptor. Difficult subject matter. And I’m told I have quirky taste in movies.

For those of you who browse the web site directly rather than reading my RSS feed, I spent some time mucking around with site design over the past two days. You should see a new theme, a “most popular items” widget, and a “recent activity” widget that displays recent comments on posts. You should also be seeing images in many posts now; I’ll try to do this more from now on. Lastly, most long posts are truncated on the main page so that you can easily scan all the articles without too much scrolling. I did some testing in Firefox and IE. Please comment here if any of this doesn’t work.

Kudos to Richard and Emma Boakes — I took design inspiration from their elegant site and I’m using Richard’s MostWanted WordPress plugin .

If you’re interested in search and ad-based business models, check out Gravee. I heard about it on Alec Saunder’s blog, where he summarizes some of the presenters at the most recent DEMO conference. Alec sez:

Gravee is a search engine / and advertising model. It’s kind of like Google with tags, and a reputation system plus a better business model. You claim your site, for instance, and get paid when people access it via a Gravee search. I’ll be signing up.

Gravee sez:

Our TagScore system takes inputs from humans and machines (including other search engines), rather than solely from only one closed, proprietary algorithm for determining the relevancy of a particular search result. An algorithm like Gravee’s TagScore system, that takes inputs from humans as well as machines, can better keep up with the lightning speed at which content is being generated on the Web today. A more collaborative, contributory, and open approach can better serve the needs of both searchers and content owners alike.

I sez: (1) Innovative biz model. (2) Biz model is a magnet for spam / gaming. (3) This is metasearch… they get around the heavy lifting of crawling and indexing the web by using other engines. (4) I’m skeptical of “annotate the web” schemes. There are an awful lot of pages out there, and far fewer end users, so annotations will be sparse until you reach critical mass of participating users. Also, you need several annotations from different users for a given page before you can say anything assertively about the page’s relevance. (5) Privacy fears may hinder adoption… you have to be logged in to provide relevance feedback.

More here on ResearchBuzz!