Disqus - Friends of itsdono

Re: India - a summary

phbradley — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 06:19:07 -0000

approve

2008/11/21 Disqus <>

Re: Change I'd Like To See

phbradley — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:29:43 -0000

if there's one thing to hope (I'm a brit, I'm not the one doing the hoping! asides from no more master-and-dog escapades in the middle east...) it's that this 'change' campaign gives him the extra political capital to do it.

the flipside, of course, is that this extra leeway is just a much looser leash for a dangerous dog to wreak havoc! I guess how you see it depends on how much faith you have in the man and the team he will build around him

Re: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility - Continuations

phbradley — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:00:01 -0000

their reputation for not manually altering their search results - and thus returning only unbiased, objectively-determined 'quality' results, is worth infinitely more to them than Knol ever will be. It would be brand suicide.

qdub, i think you're more on the mark with your comment made 2 levels up - they have an inherent knowledge of SEO, and they'll never get blacklisted, they'll be fully aware of what path their spiders take through the site, what it sees, what it likes, what it dislikes, etc. Expect Danny Sullivan and co to pay very close attention to Knol's design features and to extrapolate good SEO practices from it. This may not be all bad for clever content publishers...

as for the CPMs (and the ROI corollary - as I said, it'd be interesting to see how much google has staked on Knol - doubt it's much)... it would seem unlikely that, with the insider's perspective we just agreed they have, they would be putting low CPM content up; after all, doubtless they have a sandbox environment that they can run a knol page in and see what CPMs it would likely fetch, and what it would displace in the rankings, no? Besides, is there any reason to presuppose that these will be low-CPM pages? The emphasis is on authoritatively put together, highly-useful, zero sales-pitch quasi-encyclopedic content, with high-interest visitors... sounds like for a given topic it ought to tend to a naturally high (relative) SERP, and for high CPMs too (again relative to others in the niche), over time. I can't quite see it displacing higher-returns business, especially further down the line.

It may kick the crutch from out of a single-keyword reliant publisher but is there anything inefficient about that? This ecosystem can heal itself extremely well - it's one of the most diverse ecosystems of human activity, and low low low barriers to entry mean something else, better adapted, will just flow into the virtual space left by it.

spam and content scraping is an interesting question: will anyone risk google's fury by copying their content or trying to insert your own links into it?

Re: Manifesto for Microphilanthropy

phbradley — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:58:36 -0000

Pure commoditisation - which ultimately, is what needs micropayment - is almost the exact opposite of microphilanthropy! It leads to donation requests getting so micro as to make the donation they ask for so small that potential donors can't be bothered to do it - it's too much effort to get your wallet out, type in the card details, etc (hence the need for micropayment systems to get over this).

Microphilanthropy is not (in my eyes) the act of commoditising charity into tiny, massmarketed, micropayment experiences (i.e. micro-donations by millions of people) - it's about fostering a Long Tail in our new hyperconnected world. The micro relates more to the size of the niche - specific families, specific stories - than to the size of the donation. Micro-donation is an alternative model for charity perhaps more suited to the existing, highly institutionalised model of philanthropy (but could be very important/useful to it, so also requires discussion)

There's no reason why average donations can't stay relatively upscale in microphilanthropy - it is based around the creation/display of hyper-personal, highly niche charitable actions, thus it finds unusually devoted people (because it's highly personal, it should be of high value to people, hence the large donations), and it finds enough of them to put together a group just large enough to make the world move in that tiny niche. Before the internet, it was too hard to find those people, so charities had to stick to mass-appeal issues, staying very general. Since everyone is different, millions of niches get worked on, all in parallel. Microphilanthropy is a hyper-parallelised model of charity - its a similar boost that you get from a dual-core processor (parallel computing) versus single-core.

Re: Paradoxical lifestyles

phbradley — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:29:59 -0000

if you really care about the methodology, which upon a quick scan seems sound, here's the direct download link: http://www.iew.unizh.ch/wp/iewwp151.pdf

Ultimately the utility of these findings, and of the field itself, is in providing us with an awareness of inherent decision making biases, such that we can rationally address/redress the biases and make better decisions. Scientifically elucidated, codified and distilled wisdom. The above finding is an example of empirically-derived wisdom - but I agree with you about the dangers of correlation and causation - its like any science in that only when you go deeper (more micro) can you get really useful knowledge, and thus technology, out of it. Just like Mendel's "discovery" of inheritance in biology, it took more precise "wisdom" - e.g. DNA (i.e. molecular genetics) before it became a truly useful tool in the lab.

There's clear and present danger of abuse as it gets more advanced (more 'micro') - it could dramatically enhance propaganda, giving it precise and powerful rules/techniques for how to frame issues/prime audiences to be more receptive/accepting of a statement/policy. As behavioural science attains the advanced level (and thus increased utility) of other sciences such as physics, chemistry or medicine, with their highly informative precision tools giving their users ever clearer pictures of cause & effect in the systems they observe, we get uncomfortably close to informing - and thus empowering - brainwashing.

Behavioural science will lead to behavioural technology (in the true sense of the word - I don't mean gadgets, I mean largely immaterial 'tools' - like framing [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(economics) ]), with potential for good and bad use, like any other technology. It'll be interesting to spot the development of that technology; most other technology you can put in your hands, or at least put under a microscope, and examine. We may not yet realise just how important humanities will be in the 21st century. And this is coming from a biochemist!

Re: A lesson learnt

phbradley — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:55:05 -0000

Two primary decision vectors when deciding whether to hit the 'publish' button:
a) Does it add value (i.e. does it avoid repetition of other material already generally available, and will anybody coming across it find it interesting or valueable?)
b) Is it 'safe' - i.e. free (within reasonable bounds of probability) of negative repercussions for the writer or anyone associated with the text. In this case there's a chance of negative repercussions on myself, being a public, self-redacted slur on my own character, that may put others off wanting to work with me etc. But I'm aware of the threat, weighed it up and decided that its utility/potential value to myself as a personal 'scarecrow', and to readers in a similar situation - and the probability of getting some great comments that I would find useful - outweighs that risk.

Certainly other 'dirty laundry' situations I have seen others airing on the web would easily fail at least one (or even both) checkpoints.

Re: A lesson learnt

phbradley — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:25:11 -0000

The specific companies are not relevant to the post - asides from the 'long term' one dragging its feet, they are largely faultless in the affair, so are totally irrelevant to the scenario (though the startup, by being open about its feelings in the matter, really helped in my understanding of what just happened - kudos). I wrote this mostly as a permanent reminder to myself of a lesson learnt the hard way, and partly in the remote hope that someone will avoid it entirely after reading this. This comment thread, full of wisdom, is an unexpected bonus.

I think your point about transparency being the simplest strategy is spot on. I'm reminded of the late John Peel's quote: "I don't know what people mean by âintegrityâ. Iâve always found it easier to tell the truth because that way you donât have to remember what youâve said. So, for purely practical reasons, it is the best thing." - I think the same goes for transparency. If you're not a bastard, by and large there should be no reason to not be clear about your actions and intentions. Oddly for me, that's usually a principle I stick to with ease - why I haven't applied it to this jobseeking process I haven't a clue.

But yes, it is easier said than done to tell a startup - that has and will be making sacrifices to extend you an offer to join the team - that you're soliciting other offers (though in this case, not necessarily mutually exclusive ones - but as a way of unlocking working for the startup, not as a replacement - though I'm not sure what I'd do if they conflicted; in the text I said I'd err towards the long view; maybe, maybe not). That's what I struggled with here, and failed to take the right course of action in response to the challenge.

[As regards the related posts, they're automatically generated, I have no idea what's coming up (I write this remotely) - apologies!]

Re: Blacklight Power claims nearly-free energy from water — is this for real?

phbradley — Sat, 31 May 2008 19:26:03 -0000

I'll take those odds!

Re: WTF-of-the-day: Friday 30th May ‘08

phbradley — Sat, 31 May 2008 19:23:04 -0000

I suppose I could rephrase - rather than say something along the lines of 'his maths is bad' to 'his maths isn't good enough for quantum physics and was riddled with errors', would that be more appropriate? I thought that was close enough.

The optimist in me desperately hopes that despite the valid cause for scepticism here, the guy is right (and so are his backers), and the physics world needs to update its theory; this technology could be absolutely fantastic for humanity. Sadly though I think for the time being my cynicism has the edge on my general view of Mills' claims.

Re: Your food has… software?!

phbradley — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:49:04 -0000

There's certainly a lot of room/potential for innovation in the micro-/p2p agriculture sphere, however it really doesn't fit into our current society and infrastructure, so I suspect if it does happen, we'll see it coming from South America or Asia (maybe the African continent) - whichever is the most innovative/least reliant on developed countries for urban/social planning direction

Re: Energy

phbradley — Thu, 29 May 2008 02:32:03 -0000

Ah, the problem of externalities. Turns out economics does have the answer, but politics is lagging. Putting taxes on tires or road users comes across as "yet another stealth tax"... when really all it's doing is forcing people to compensate society for the bad effects of their behaviour. Sadly politicians don't have the willpower to make that happen.

Re: Last.fm taking major step towards becoming great big clever iTunes in the sky

phbradley — Wed, 28 May 2008 17:07:41 -0000

I can well appreciate that your comment that I may be getting ahead of myself - I often do.
But content is already very impressive and growing steadily, so apart from the files it doesn't have (yet?), it *is* a 'jukebox in the sky', to all intents and purposes. How it caters to the niche versus the mainstream in its ever growing catalogue remains to be seen. Here's hoping both are equally well served

now, as for only being able to play them 3 times, I largely suspect that's because they haven't yet totally figured out the revenue side of things. 3 plays is a taster. In this post I linked to an earlier post I made: http://www.overthecounterculture.com/2008/lastf...
Check the screenshot. It promises "unlimited access", does it not? But they need to make sure they know how much that's gonna cost them in order to know how much to charge for the service; part of that is knowing what the auxiliary (non-subscription) revenue is to a streaming service - how many shoppers do they send to Amazon to download/buy the single or album, how many ads get clicked on, etc, how many times do people listen to each song and is that from (costly) major labels, or are people streaming underground stuff that maybe costs last.fm less (in terms of streaming royalties)... etc.

Re: Last.fm taking major step towards becoming great big clever iTunes in the sky

phbradley — Wed, 28 May 2008 09:32:03 -0000

Well here's the thing. Firstly Last.fm has a very good online catalogue of songs, available streamable, for free - and legal, too; being purchased by CBS will probably help them really put their backs into doing bulk deals with all labels, major or indie. So the big streaming jukebox in the sky isn't a pipe dream - there's already more free streaming music up on there than anyone's hard drive could hold; much less a mobile phone, nor even an ipod.

Secondly, this is a jukebox you can add albums to on the fly, wherever you are - you might be watching TV, hear a cool song and if that TV is interactive, press the red button and add it to your online jukebox; or you might be listening to it through web radio, it gets scrobbled and added automatically. Even in mp3 format you are still physically tied to your music; you have to sync it between all your devices to be able to listen to it. In an increasingly all-IP-connected world of consumer electronics, it makes precious little sense not to hold all your media in the cloud. And rather than each person having their own cloud, last.fm appears to be building one cloud and figuring out who has what access to which bits of it.

This is not just wishful thinking. It's the path of least resistance for the tech, and a reasonable explanation for this particular redesign/re-emphasising of the Library feature.

Oh, and the service *DOES* add every song you play, if it gets 'scrobbled'. That's technology they've had since day 1 (when last.fm was just Audioscrobbler); now they use that (plus albums/tracks you manually add) to make up your 'Library', and tie each song in your library (that they have in their cloud) to a full, streaming track; and links to download it as mp3, for those weekends/commutes that happen to be off the grid.

This is not "wishful thinking".

Re: Energy

phbradley — Mon, 26 May 2008 07:37:04 -0000

A problem with 'going solar' is that datacenters (perfect converters of electricity into heat, plus a bit of noise and airflow) increasingly need to be located in cold environments (Siberia, Greenland, Alaska), though solar intensity in those regions is low. Unless the energy can be transported between the two zones (by wire or as a fuel), solar may be out of the question for powering the 'net.

Re: Revision

phbradley — Sat, 24 May 2008 05:09:51 -0000

The mindmap I learnt yesterday, covering all of cancer treatment (traditional chemo, chemoresistance, immunotherapy, small molecule inhibitors, nanochemo, and future perspectives, is 5x5 sides of A4, and covers over half of my double bed

Re: Last.fm taking major step towards becoming great big clever iTunes in the sky

phbradley — Wed, 21 May 2008 19:54:07 -0000

Come to think of it, that *is* quite similar! Funny indeed (especially in the week in which the labels announce a bit partnership with Napster)

Re: It's Not The Data, It's The Flow

phbradley — Sun, 18 May 2008 20:05:46 -0000

yea, I guess I used the expression dumb pipe because it's something I picked up analysing strategy of ADSL providers - whether they should be 'dumb pipes' simply connecting your house to the Internut, or trying to sell you content as well. They tried various things along the way to avoid the low margins, highly competitive dumb pipe business - first walled gardens, then default portals, triple play (DSL, mobile, cable TV/IPTV), and the latest instance of the ugly beast is visible in UK ISP's installing Phorm to track their users' behaviour and target adverts at them ("fiendish pipe", I guess...). I think government lobbying and monopolistic tendencies are an alternative defence against the market pressuring you to get into the dumb pipe business.

Re: It's Not The Data, It's The Flow

phbradley — Sun, 18 May 2008 14:20:49 -0000

apples to oranges. you're not investing knowledge capital in your newspaper, hence the ease of switching (unless you count getting know the reporters, learning to spot their half-truths, coverups or biases - which I doubt many of us consciously do). Whereas you're investing a lot of intellectual capital in building a social network. Facebook is the service that helps you do that - there's nothing wrong with it keeping it in its own books, not making it public, though it's a pain in the ass for us consumers and I would rather it pick a side (see my comment below - either it's a portable data store - a dumb but secure pipe to wherever I want to add social relevance to a tool, or it's a value-added, funwall, photosharing, superpoking garden - being both, the walled garden, is a PITFA and I will look for more flexible alternatives to this situation (i.e. split responsibility - one site for my network data, and others for the garden stuff). sucks for them.

Re: Ask For The Order

phbradley — Sat, 10 May 2008 12:16:11 -0000

really? how comes you don't do sector DD?

Re: Three Reasons To Use Disqus

phbradley — Sat, 10 May 2008 11:22:01 -0000

the gReader extension started off as a greasemonkey extension but is now a standalone extension for Firefox, btw. No need for greasemonkey to be installed.

interesting how killer apps for software can come from a source completely external to a company. it's the power of APIs. An API early on could mean life or death for a startup - but I wonder if, long term, an API might *cause* death for a startup trying to develop revenue streams or new features to drive eyeballs to their site, but finding that all the added value creation for its service has already been done by other people, i.e. they run out of value to add (and to charge for) and die?

Re: Triangulating For Insight

phbradley — Sat, 10 May 2008 07:04:52 -0000

I just stumbled across a very interesting case where incrementalism was totally acknowledged and encouraged in a maths/programming competition (I've dug out the important excerpt here: http://www.overthecounterculture.com/2008/addic... and the original post is here http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2008/05/cha...)

Wikipedia uses open incrementalism, but that's a simple scenario because it's an altruistic endeavour, so people are happy for their work to be modified or stolen for future revisions. There's no benefit to creating the 'ultimate' entry in wikipedia, so the hippies happily coexist.

But when you have a competitive process where even the most minor tweak of your code by someone else can see first place handed to your rival, competition is extremely intense and you make sure you explore all the angles before submitting. If you, as a contest runner, can avoid the eBay 'bid sniper' tactic of holding back your increment to the very last second, you can have a group of competitors with total attention to detail when they submit, all iterating on each others' ideas - and in this case, the winning submission was 3 orders of magnitude better than the one that kicked it off.

I'm very interested in crowdsourcing (and using it for a new mode of philanthropy) - so to hear this option, of totally open ripoff/addictive incrementalism, is very, very interesting. I might just have to 'increment' my idea with Jeff Howe's!

Re: Triangulating For Insight

phbradley — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:55:54 -0000

I thought somebody might pick up on that. I only meant getting less efficient at living/reproducing in the current niche.

Re: Triangulating For Insight

phbradley — Thu, 08 May 2008 12:07:57 -0000

hmmm, seems i can't edit for bad spelling. sorry.

I should say, this is just spiel/theory. It may be that this isn't a bubble and that advertising really is growing fast enough, for the long term enough, to support all these businesses trying to use the same business model. It didn't last time. Time will tell.

Re: Triangulating For Insight

phbradley — Thu, 08 May 2008 11:54:34 -0000

it's definitely not native to the Internet, agreed. Anywhere it can find equilibrium with other sources of revenue generation, it represents a stable and sustainable future. But during the last dotcom bubble, a steady state couldn't be found, and businesses that had toyed with 'free' crashed and burned a lot of their investors' money.

An unfortunate effect of supportive VCs is to shield weak (fledgling) businesses from natural selection - just like a welfare system, some argue, 'dilutes' the gene pool by curing genetic defects that are passed onto future generations. Note: I abhor eugenics and believe that in the long term a diverse gene pool is more resilient against epidemics and other challenges than a narrow one - but as a short term point of view, eugenics is correct - the species becomes less well biologically adapted to its niche; more inefficient; protection from natural selection causes evolution in reverse. Just like during the last bubble, and perhaps now, terminally sick businesses polluted the economy to a point where their inefficiency at generating money was an unsupportable load on their ecosystem - hence the crash.

Like everything in like, this is all about 2 things: equilibria, and feedback. There is an equilibrium between parents protecting and educating fledgling children through to maturity (the role of angels and VCs), and supporting leeches through to population crash. It's the same reason my parents are cutting me off as we speak - for the benefit of society, I need to learn to gather my own food.

Back to your question. The concept of the freevirus emerged because Alan and I saw profitable businesses, successfully getting people to pay them for a service they provided, attacked by novice upstarts at way, way undercut prices (free) - not just squeezing them on margins (note the big difference between $0.05c and free - as explained by Dan Ariely; well I believe that also works in reverse - if you're not free, you care about margin and equilibrium is gradually restored). These free businesses, even if run by someone who history will show grossly overestimated his ability to run his business at a profit, is still alive long enough (thanks to the overly protective financial backers) to force a response in the profitable business - and 'free' is so powerful, so disruptive, that often the only (perceived) defence against free is free (Kevin Kelly argues there are other responses. That's definitely true). Hence WSJ dropping pay wall, etc.

I see a bit too many businesses being sieged by free for so long that their reserves are weakened before the free idiot perishes. The result is a situation where both die, the customer gets used to the luxury of free, and any new entrant to the sphere, most likely his confidence boosted by some perceived 'increment' (usually to the service, not to the free business model - such is the legacy of Paul Graham and co), therefore also has to be free. The customer is the winner, bouncing from free to free service - thanks, DataPortability.org!

The problem, also, is that the Internet is the most globalised economic sphere man has ever known. And the differences in wage demands (but not skills) means that the US is a terrible place to play with fire/free. It just can't sustain a freevirus epidemic nearly as long, unless it starts outsourcing big time. And as we see from the paper on Google's internal prediction markets, physical proximity is very important.

Because the Internet isn't a US-hermetic ecosystem, I don't think free can ever find a stable equilibrium there (or here in the UK - or anywhere in the developed world) - certainly not on the scale we're experimenting with it at the moment. The economy needs to be generating companies in need of advertising, as well as eyeball farmers. Someone, at some point, has to dip into my pockets for cash. I'm the Napster generation - we're idealistic hackers in the most plastic (as in, ability to build tools) environment man has ever known, and we're hooked on Free. If for-profit enterprises some day soon find they can't offer their service for free, and ask us for money, and we can't find another VC-funded startup that will - we'll just build it for ourselves and run it as a nonprofit.

These are exceedingly fertile times for innovation and experimentation - as is any period in nature when natural selection is paused; weird and funky mutants nobody imagined can come about whereas they couldn't - so let's celebrate it, and the VCs betting on coming out of the freevirus epidemic with winners amongst the rubble. But let's enjoy it whilst it lasts. China and the rest of BRIC may not give us the opportunity for a third bubble. Two Renaissances in the space of 2 decades is pretty luxurious for any civilization, don't you think?

Re: What is this? [o:p][/o:p][/span]

phbradley — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:22:29 -0000

I'm stupid. He's using Entourage, must be on a Mac. Despite several ringing endorsements for WLW in this thread, it just ain't the tool for this particular job.