wanderingstan

Last week we got an email from Gwen and Paul of Plunge Artist Design that they couldn’t make our meeting because their house burned down. Incredible.

Paul was by the office today and showed us some incredible pictures.

So what does a MacBook look like when it’s been through a 600+ degree fire?

Notice the Apple logo still visible in the center.

More details and video commentary at Gwen’s blog.

Adobe used to make great products. They would innovate like crazy even with no real competition. Photoshop and InDesign are great products. But it seems that alas they too have jumped the shark.

The latest example came this morning when I tried to use my newly installed Acrobat 8 from Adobe’s creative suite:

WTF? I have to have Photoshop open in the background to edit a PDF? That’s not exactly a lightweight program.

Okay okay, but I need to do this. So I open Photoshop and launch Acrobat again. And what happens…?

See Photoshop open in the background? And it gives me the same message telling me to open Photoshop! Arrgh!

Patience at an end, I decide to go back to Acrobat 6 which at least works. I fire up the installer and get this:

I give up.

Long ago I replaced Acrobat Reader with the faster-loading Foxit Reader, and now it looks like I’ll be switching to the Foxit PDF Editor too.

Adobe, what happened to you?

Its amazing to me how much interest there is in analyzing the huge body of work that is now available in blogs and other social media. I just heard a very interesting talk by Hugo Liu about Gender Modeling.

For example, consider this graph that shows the sorts of “time” words used by men and women. It seems that women write much more about the here-and-now, near future, and on a day-of-the-week scale. And men write more about the future, and on a month scale.

And this graph shows use of pronouns by gender. Top is female, bottom is male.

And perhaps coolest of all, they applied their algorithms to create male and female versions of Google news. You can see the demo here.

The full paper is available online and has many more interesting tidbits. All graphs in this post were taken from it.

(You might also enjoy the Gender Genie. It worked on my blog and on Tara Hunt’s HorsePigCow.)

The next few days I’ll be at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media here in Boulder. Though its highly academic, there were several good talks todays spawning many interesting thoughts.

But I have to mention that I found yet another icon for blogs. Earlier I blogged about the need for a standard icon.

This one was from the excellent talk about the paper
Traffic Characteristics and Communication Patterns in Blogosphere.

Abdur Chowdhury, Summize.com (formerly at AOL, made decision to release the AOL search data.)

• 3 Questions you must ask yourself before opening your data:
• Why are you opening the data?
• Right answer: You firmly believe that you are helping people/consumers.
• What are you going to do once you open the data?
• Are you ready for the unexpected consequences?

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Gerry Campell

• This is sort of a “coming out party” for Reuters.
• We (Reuters) have content and he have to connect with our consumers. They have trouble finding it.
• Reuters is watching what’s happening out there, looking for how it can serve vertical markets: finance, technology, you name it.

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Esther Dyson

• You’re 85 years old and on your deathbed.  You have 50 million dollars and you have 10,000 friends on Friendster 8.0 … Which is weirder?! You can’t spend all the money and you can’t enjoy that many friendships.

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Chris Law, Aggregate Knowledge

• Your social network is a poor proxy for what you’re interested in.
• Your behavior is a good proxy for what you’re interested in.

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Sanjiv Das, Morgan Stanley

• Information is so important to us, and gives us so much proprietary advantage. “Open data” is scary to us.
• Data is going to be a commodity. get ready for it. The ORGANIZATION of that data may NOT be a commodity.  that’s interesting.

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David Cancel, Compete

• 2 million people being monitored
• 250-300K have the toolbar installed
• ISP’s are monitoring and licensing data to compete

Seth: This is granted deep in the EULA of the ISP?
David: Yes, just like its deep in the EULA of a credit card company.

Seth: How much do you pay an ISP?
David: For an ISP with millions of users, a million or so a month. [year?]

Seth: If I’m a comcast user, I’m worth about $.40/month for my entire clickstream
David: Yes. 10-12 folks buying this data, that I know of. (So you’re worth more than $.40!)

Seth: What percentage of us here are having our clickstream sold, would you guess?
David: 10%

Seth: Is the government buying this too?
David: Yes, I’m pretty sure they are.

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Dick Costolo, Feedburner

• Opening an API can have unplanned good consequences: Overnight we had a ton of new users from Spain. Someone there had used the Feedburner subscription count (obtained via the API) as part of a reputation/ranking algorithm, so now all the blogs were signing up to raise their stats. Now we probably won’t see a competitor come out of Spain.

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Scott Rafer – (formerly of) MyBlogLog

• People got into blogging to make new human connections, and somehow some part of our forebrain mistakes these little pixel collections for human connection.

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Seth Goldstein

• Imagine there is information about “Who is influential” … Who does that info belong to? To the people who are influential? To the people who calculated it?
• Alignment — if you pay attention enough, you start to align with someone. I hate how much I am influenced by Fred Wilson, but I pay attention to his stuff, so I am.

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Random Quotes and Exchanges

“The best guarantee for attention is living your life as openly as possible, expressing yourself as publicly as possible as early as possible.” – Goldhaber

??? – The Genie [of data collection] is out of the bottle, now its time to ask for the 3 wishes. We’ve gotta think carefully about what those 3 wishes should be.

Chris Law (Aggregate Knowledge): I wish AttentionTrust compliance was widespread…we don’t want to surprise people.
Steve Gilmore: This is bullshit.  Have you signed/endorsed the AttentionTrust principles?
Chris Law: No, we’re looking into it.

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Great post from Rich Skrenta about Winner-Take-All: Google and the Third Age of Computing. To his initial chart I would add a third column reflecting what they were monetizing:

IBM	1950-1980	Sell hardware
Microsoft	1984-1998	Hardware is commodity, sell software.
Google	2001-	Software is a commodity, sell attention.

• IBM sold you hardware in exchange for money.
• Microsoft sold software you software in exchange for money.
• Google gives you stuff for free, but sells your attention to advertisers. (Using the mechanisms I explained in Attention to dollars, and other exchanges)

Note that both IBM and Microsoft were selling “stuff”, even if the stuff was just an arrangement of 1′s and 0′s as in Microsoft’s case. To borrow a page from Goldhaber, now that “stuff” is so easy for people to get, the real economy is in attention–the one thing which cannot be commoditized or pirated or open-sourced.

Google Custom Search is cool. And it’s a natural step for Google to distribute their search technology (dare I say “longtail-ize”?) in the same way that they distributed their ad technology when they expanded Adwords (on their domain) into Adsense (on anyone’s page). So it was a natural fit for us to use it as the backend for our Lijit Personal Network Search, and we’ve been happy with the initial results.

But it’s not perfect.

Ethan Zuckerman wrote about problems with Co-op search back in October, and Google quickly responded with a fix. However, we’re seeing a lot of Ethan’s problems here at Lijit as well. The problem is that if your desired search results would not normally fall in the top 1000 results of a normal Google search, they don’t get included in your results. For example, Brad Feld has written a ton about Microsoft in his blog at feld.com as can be seen in a typical site: Google search. However, when you use a Co-op search which includes feld.com/*, you don’t get any results fromthat domain. The problem seems to be that feld.com doesn’t make it into the top 1000 results for a normal search for ‘”microsoft”. In a similar vain, if you search me for “sex” you’ll get stuff from BoingBoing (a high PageRank site) but not my post “Attention is Meme Sex” like you might expect.

So it seems that the fixes implemented for Ethan aren’t working across the board. But I am encouraged by Google’s response to Ethan and hope that they will eventually be able to solve our issues.

It’s snowing in Colorado! My car was snowed into the parking lot so I opted for the bug. The bus never came, but a chain smoking lady with her pinky recently cut off gave me a ride into south Boulder. A half hour wait there with a Chillian scientist for the next bus which got me a mile further. Then caught the airport bus on its way back in. It was full of people whose flights had been canceled, and they’d been on the bus for 6 hours! It’s good to be home.

If this Lijit thing doesn’t work out, there’s always Plan B

Stanley James is a singer not afraid to sing about the issues of life,love and relationships.

Ever get something out of the blue? Bruce Sanders, my former prof from CU, just sent me a newspaper clipping about the first internet game that I developed…way way back in 1997 when Netscape 2.0 was hot stuff and long before MMORPG was a word. The game was UltraCorps and is now owned by Steve Jackson Games.

You can read the whole article here.