February, 8, 2005 archives

the founder of go daddy has a blog where he says something very interesting about their super bowl advertising: “There was also one other benefit -- it’s tax deductible, so the Federal and State governments will pay a little more than 38% of the cost.”

advertising is tax deductible? what kind of insanity is that?

while i like the spoof-the-censors spirit of the commercial, i have to say i found it pretty weak, even in the extended version.

congrats to mark fletcher and the bloglines team on being acquired by ask jeeves.

once upon a time, a business development person at ask jeeves called me to talk about blo.gs. as i recall, the gist of the conversation from my side was that the site made no money, i spent no time on it, and there really wasn’t much to it.

this is another of those obvious-in-retrospect services that i can now kick myself for not building. having the vision, courage, and patience to execute on the idea is the hard part, of course.

at last year’s foo camp, when the limping feedmesh thing kicked off, someone suggested that we set up a yahoo group for discussion, and i made some comment about preferring something “more real.” a funny thing to say when one of the guys who built it (mark) was in the room. but in hindsight, i’m glad nobody wasted the time trying to create anything more real.

who’s next? i would think pubsub.com would be a likely acquisition for someone.

i also find this acquisition funny because there was a time when i almost ended up working at ask jeeves because i knew the ceo at the time. i got an early-morning call (or what was early-morning for me those days) where i agreed to fly up to interview, but i turned around a few hours later and cancelled, once i was awake and realized that i had no desire to work at a place using iis and asp, or relocate to the bay area.

the new york times takes a look at world of warcraft, and in particular the growing pains that blizzard has encountered because it has been so popular.

i’m still playing, and i’ve found myself focusing more on one character now. there’s just an amazing depth of content in the number of quests.

i wonder what blizzard is working on for the future. expansions to world of warcraft? world of starcraft? world of diablo?

jared diamond talked tonight at the los angeles central public library about his most recent book, collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed. i don’t have much to say about what he said other than that he says very smart things, and i look forward to reading the book some day.

i did find it tremendously amusing that he made a comment about how americans need to re-evaluate their consumerism, and then there was a large line of people outside waiting for him to scribble on their dead tree with his words printed on it. (that the event is held at a library just makes that even more amusing to me.)

almost every time someone asks a question at one of these things, i think i get driven further to the right on the political spectrum just to give me some distance from the sheer braying banality of what they say. and those aren’t even the questions that make my head explode. if you find yourself asking a question about the narrative of a space, or telling jared diamond to “let the birds talk,” know that i am in the corner with my brain melting.

also, i would think the people who put on these lectures (which are great, don’t get me wrong in that regard) would have figured out how to manage a question-and-answer period. they need to start it by reminding people to ask a question, not ramble for three minutes about how they don’t like the current administration. then the people (or person) with the microphone needs to be moving the microphone from the person who just asked a question to the next person who will ask a question while the speaker is still answering the question.