week 41, 2004 archives
why kotaku has potential
kotaku is the new gaming-related blog from gawker media. from the kotaku faq:
5. What’s the coolest game ever?
X-Com: UFO Defense.
evan williams, co-founder of blogger, is moving on and leaving google. good luck!
the number of days i have where i wish i could just kick back, read books, and putter around without having work hanging over my head is definitely on the increase.
jobs are for chumps.
reason has an interesting article about the drug enforcement agency’s microgram newsletter, now on the web, and puts it in the broader context of the government’s failure to compete in the marketplace of ideas on the internet, at least with regards to controlled substances.
snap is a new idealab! (oh, i guess they’re “Idealab” now — boring) search company. cnet news.com has the details. i guess i’m too much of a google-lean-and-mean sort of search consumer, since snap really didn’t do anything for me.
but it does remind one of the original snap.com, which was nbc’s bid to get into the portal game. i remember it having a rather nice, plain style, something in the spirit of what myway is doing now.
judging from the posts from jeremy zawodny (who needs a web 2.0 category), it looks like web 2.0 is a heck of a conference. i briefly flirted with the idea of attending, but decided it was too rich for my blood.
(but it’s something i’m very ambivalent about. on the one hand, i can see getting really excited about this whole web 2.0 thing. on the other hand, i am becoming increasingly persuaded that i would be more happy doing something that does not involve sitting in front of a computer for hours at a time. but that may just be october talking.)
eventum
i have been terribly remiss in not mentioning eventum before. it’s the issue-tracking tool that the mysql support team uses, and it is also used for task-tracking by a growing number of groups within the company. we liked it so much, we hired the author, bought out the software, and got it released under the gpl.
the snap.com terms & conditions includes a linking policy (which i just violated). the snap.com privacy policy (oops, there i go again) says, in part, “We may share certain information about you with carefully selected business partners, including those who may offer services that complement those provided by us or which we believe may be of interest to you.”
update: cory lays the smack down. with regard to the linking policy, at least. i think i forgot to mention the “we can sell your info to spammers” clause of the privacy policy.
another update: the linking policy got dropped. no change to the privacy policy. (links from boing boing and snap. am i cool yet?)
along came polly was an extremely so-so film. verging on not good. the sort of film that makes me wonder why it is that i think i like ben stiller. he’s been in some real clunkers. i will, however, find it in my heart to forgive jennifer aniston.
one thing jeremy noted about web 2.0 is that he plugged feedmesh at the “dialing on the app tone” session. too bad the effort seems stuck. no other sites appear to have moved any further along on sharing the ping data that they are currently receiving. the only change is that i have introduced a stream of changes that nobody is using.
phone home
every once in a while, i poke around on amazon to find a new cordless phone (perhaps a multi-handset one). then i see that they all have caller id screens, and get annoyed at how much caller id costs. what earthly reason is there for caller id costing over $6 per month?
another thing i’m considering doing is ditching my monthly cell phone plan and just getting a prepaid card whenever i’m going to be on the road. one problem is that the prepaid plans don’t appear to offer any international service. (i know i can just buy prepaid cards in whatever country i happen to travel to, but that doesn’t really help people trying to reach me.)
i think i could add up all of the time i’ve used on my cell phone since i got it (over a year ago, now), and it wouldn’t exhaust what i’m paying to get each month.
Ω
“assuming the profit position” is a piece from the los angeles times about yoga works, a chain of yoga studios. what makes it interesting to me is that the two founders (rob wrubel and george lichter) are former bosses of mine. the picture of them is priceless.
(here’s another version of the article in case that sticks around longer that the la times version.)
everyone has already linked to the long tail already, but just on the off chance you missed it, here’s another link to it. there’s some really amazing insights in the article, and it is definitely not to be missed.
if you look at the interesting internet advertising plays out there right now, i think the most promising are those that try to bridge the tail of the advertising curve and the tail of the publishing curve. things like blogads that make it easy for a small advertiser to publish on a small publisher’s site. marketbanker is similar. google’s adsense runs the risk of lagging behind because it doesn’t allow a direct connection between an advertiser and publisher. there’s no incentive for me to drive potential advertisers on blo.gs to adsense, which i think is an inherent weakness in their architecture of participation.
i have an idea for a business that would sort of sit in this space. too bad i’ve already got a job.
