Disqus - Friends of julien51

Re: OSCON Interstitial Music

whitneymcn — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 12:25:41 -0000

My list is pretty heavy on the Self-Starter Foundation...I'm not associated with SSF, just like the bands. Many of the songs appear to be available through iTunes, the rest can be downloaded from http://www.selfstarterfoundation.com

The 101: 6/8

The Red And The Black: Plans For Next Year, Three Degrees

We: Diablos

Sea Ray: Lalaland

Lifter Puller: Let's Get Incredible

Cherubino: Mercury Retrograde

Actionslacks: I Hope This Makes It Easier For You

Propellerheads: Take California

Re: Chink in the Open Source Armor?

whitneymcn — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 15:14:10 -0000

Others have already made the point that this isn&#039t unique to open source -- it&#039s as bad or worse in the closed source world, with photoshop plugin compatibility as the example that&#039s burned into my mind -- I&#039ll leave that one alone. :)

Two things I&#039ll add...

First, a quick note to the plugin developer often works wonders. "Hey, I think plugin X is great and use it all the time, but noticed that FF version X.X.X isn&#039t supported -- are you planning to update plugin X?" As often as not, the answer is "yep, a lot of people are asking about it, so a new version should be out in n days/weeks."

Like any other software developers, the folks writing extensions won&#039t bother to do something if no one&#039s going to use it. Let them know that you use and like what they&#039ve done.

For that matter, when you&#039re talking about a FF extension or a tool written by a single developer or small shop, you should really send them a note and let them know that you like their product, in any case. Developers get a lot more "why can&#039t I hammer nails with this screwdriver you developed?" and "why does your program crash my virus-ridden Pentium I running Windows98, you asshole?" than "hey...thanks for creating something really cool and useful." Yes, it takes time to do that, but it seems to me like a pretty good way to spend ten minutes a week.

That was an awfully long first thing, so I&#039ll cut the second short: a lot of extensions are released under open licenses, so someone may have already done the updates to the extensions you&#039re looking for, though it can take a little searching to find them. They&#039re often out there, though, and they&#039re out there because of open source. :)

Re: Chink in the Open Source Armor?

whitneymcn — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 15:14:10 -0000

Two things I&#039ll add...

Like any other software developers, the folks writing extensions won&#039t bother to do something if no one&#039s going to use it. Let them know that you use and like what they&#039ve done.

Re: Chink in the Open Source Armor?

whitneymcn — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 15:14:10 -0000

Others have already made the point that this isn't unique to open source -- it's as bad or worse in the closed source world, with photoshop plugin compatibility as the example that's burned into my mind -- I'll leave that one alone. :)

Two things I'll add...

First, a quick note to the plugin developer often works wonders. "Hey, I think plugin X is great and use it all the time, but noticed that FF version X.X.X isn't supported -- are you planning to update plugin X?" As often as not, the answer is "yep, a lot of people are asking about it, so a new version should be out in n days/weeks."

Like any other software developers, the folks writing extensions won't bother to do something if no one's going to use it. Let them know that you use and like what they've done.

For that matter, when you're talking about a FF extension or a tool written by a single developer or small shop, you should really send them a note and let them know that you like their product, in any case. Developers get a lot more "why can't I hammer nails with this screwdriver you developed?" and "why does your program crash my virus-ridden Pentium I running Windows98, you asshole?" than "hey...thanks for creating something really cool and useful." Yes, it takes time to do that, but it seems to me like a pretty good way to spend ten minutes a week.

That was an awfully long first thing, so I'll cut the second short: a lot of extensions are released under open licenses, so someone may have already done the updates to the extensions you're looking for, though it can take a little searching to find them. They're often out there, though, and they're out there because of open source. :)

Re: From Bootstrap to IPO?

whitneymcn — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 13:08:37 -0000

NetCreations: self-funded by the founders in 1996, quickly cash-flow positive, IPO in 1999.

Re: The Name

whitneymcn — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 10:34:46 -0000

Interesting -- for reasons that I don't entirely recall (probably having something to do with Google search results), I'd assumed that it had its roots in the Zulu (see http://isizulu.net/):

wesabe [wÉ›Ëˆsa:É“e] â†? wa + esabe
Imperative singular of -esaba (v/t.)
OC: cl. 6
fear them

wesabe [wÉ›Ëˆsa:É“e] â†? wu + esabe
Imperative singular of -esaba (v/t.)
OC: cl. 1a, cl. 3
fear it

wesabe [wÉ›Ëˆsa:É“e] â†? u + esabe
Subjunctive of -esaba (v/t.)
SC: 2nd sg., cl. 3
you fear
it fear

wesabe [wÉ›saËˆÉ“e] â†? u + esabe
Perfect tense of -esaba (v/t.)
SC: 2nd sg., 3rd sg., cl. 1, cl. 1a, cl. 3
you feared
he feared
she feared
it feared

Re: Condo of the Day: 242 Greene Avenue | Brownstoner

whitneymcn — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 09:44:15 -0000

My wife and I looked at them a couple of weekends ago. We're currently in a (more or less) renovated industrial space right across the street, so it was an interesting comparison.

The conversion is worlds above most of what we've seen in the area: they don't have that "just slap some granite in there and call it a day" feeling of many "luxury" offerings, and it looks like an architect was allowed in the room when they were deciding how to break up the space.

That said, we walked out and said "eh, whatever." With a 2BR/2ba in the Ping Pong building also listed on Corcoran at $629k (with lower maintenance, to boot), these feel overpriced to me. Better than much of what's out there, I'll grant you, but overpriced.

Re: Mixed Results on Greene and Grand

whitneymcn — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 06:32:52 -0000

I don't even know where to begin to respond to the anonymous comment defending the heinous monstrosity, so I'll just leave that alone.

Now a note related to the picture: in the lower left-hand corner you can see a small building. I live a block away, and so my wife and I have been watching the work on that little building with interest -- it looks like it should be a restaurant or small commercial space.

When my wife asked someone who was working on the building, though, they told her that it was going to be a residence. Anyone got any info?

Re: Attn Steve Jobs: Red Swoosh P2P Service Wants To Save You $15 Million

whitneymcn — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 16:23:29 -0000

Steve Jobs may well already be thinking in this direction. Last spring Mac OS rumors posted an "insider tip" that:

'"Leopard" [MacOS 10.5] will include a system-level "BitTorrent" filesharing client that can be user-customized to 'donate' upstream Internet bandwidth for things like pushing Software Update packages to Leopard users, delivering iTunes Store content, and just about any purpose to which Apple puts its bandwidth. ...Rewards would include credit at the iTunes Store and the Apple Store as well as other affililated offers like free airtime minutes for Apple's forthcoming "iPhone" and the like.'

Re: The Elusive Electronic Health Record

whitneymcn — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 10:34:52 -0000

There's been a push recently from the employer side, as well. Under the umbrella of the Dossia project (google fodder), five big employers "announced an initiative to provide their combined 2.5 million employees and their dependents with personal health records in an effort to reduce administrative costs, duplicative care and medical errors." It's big-ticket folks:
<ul><li> Applied Materials
<li> BP America
<li> Intel
<li> Pitney Bowes
<li> Wal-Mart</li></li></li></li></li></ul>

I have a good friend who works for the Omnimedix Institute, which is the nonprofit tasked with creating the personal health record (PHR) infrastructure for these guys, so the undertaking came immediately to mind.

iHealthBeat article on the project announcement here:
http://ihealthbeat.org/index.cfm?Action=dspItem&itemID=127943

Re: Twitter vs. Blogger growth

whitneymcn — Tue, 08 May 2007 11:48:52 -0000

You don't think that it was the buzz coming from SXSW as a whole (with the dual 60" plasmas streaming twitter messages) that was the engine behind the March growth spurt?

Re: Twitter vs. Blogger growth

whitneymcn — Tue, 08 May 2007 15:31:42 -0000

This info has probably flowed in via other channels, but apparently the data that Kottke was working off of is unreliable:

http://www.kottke.org/07/05...

Apparently the folks at Twitter are going to be working on some visualizations, so the horse's mouth version should be available in a couple of weeks.

Not to say that the new data won't confirm the power of Scoble and Laporte, of course... :)

Re: One Million Zunes (Somehow) Sold

whitneymcn — Mon, 28 May 2007 14:51:24 -0000

I'm also curious to see some more details on that 1MM number. While it's certain possible that 1,000,000 people have purchased Zunes, given the high profile that MS gave to the "million zune march" Microsoft *had* to make this number.

That opens up possibilities like "one million Zunes have been sold into retail," which could include all units sitting in store inventories (i.e. not yet actually sold to a customer) and units currently in transit to retail stores. That's a game that Microsoft has played before when actual consumer-purchased units don't match the number they'd like to report.

Again, it's entirely possible that there are a million Zunes in consumers' hands, but I'd like to see a bit more information before accepting that as gospel.

Re: Adidas Adicolor, Seven Short Films About Color | Laughing Squid

whitneymcn — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 08:53:44 -0000

Very nice -- harkens back to Ken Nordine's 1966 album "Colors," the first few tracks of which were created as commercials for the Fullers Paint company.

Re: Microsoft's Positive Trajectory

whitneymcn — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 12:38:29 -0000

Though also note this line from the Reuters piece: "Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platforms and services group, said the company is building on momentum after its Windows Live Search gained market share over competitors in the quarter ended in June."

Let's remember that the ComScore report being referenced attributed much of Microsoft's search gains to its "Live Search Club"—incentivized online games that run searches as the user plays the game. (For example, the "seekadoo" game has you find words in a grid of letters; when you find a word, a Live Search is then run on that word.)

While that certainly does increase the number of searches run using MS Live Search, it's debatable whether that's a solid base upon which to build: it's possible that users will note the search results while they're playing the games and decide that they should try MSLS for their actual search needs, but by no means is that guaranteed.

Re: Microsoft's Positive Trajectory

whitneymcn — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 12:38:29 -0000

Re: Microsoft&aposs Positive Trajectory

whitneymcn — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 16:38:29 -0000

Let's remember that the ComScore report being referenced attributed much of Microsoft's search gains to its "Live Search Club"&#8212incentivized online games that run searches as the user plays the game. (For example, the "seekadoo" game has you find words in a grid of letters; when you find a word, a Live Search is then run on that word.)

Re: Is FeedHub the answer to information overload?

whitneymcn — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 09:20:37 -0000

It's probably worth keeping an eye on Yahoo in this area, too. Back at the start of the year they acquired the assets of SearchFox, which had a pretty nice personalized RSS reader.

I used the searchfox reader for several months and thought it was quite good; the only big concern I had was my usual (not specific to searchfox) "personalization" worry: in the absence of input from other sources, how quickly do you end up with a personal echo chamber, where you get more and more of what you're already interested in, and less and less of everything else that's interesting but outside your normal scope?

Not a killer problem, since there are a variety of ways around it, but worth noting.

Re: Plentyoffish: 1-Man Company May Be Worth $1Billion

whitneymcn — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 10:08:31 -0000

@Fish Tales:

Be careful how you use SpyFoo's stats: remember that they promote it as a tool to see "which keywords your competitors are buying," not "how much your competitors are spending on keyword advertising." That "daily ad budget" of $2k - $16k is a (very broad) range calculated from search term frequency and keyword value stats, and doesn't reflect how the site might cap, regularly change, or otherwise manage their keyword advertising spends.

It's absolutely true that good gross revenue numbers don't necessarily imply good bottom line numbers, but unless Frind opens his books we're all guessing -- and spyfoo isn't great data to inform our musings.

Re: Studios Unveil DVD Copying Schemes; Aim To Provide Piracy Alternative

whitneymcn — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 22:14:56 -0000

Christopher -

If we emphasize the word "strict" that was in the sentence that you quoted, does that help? DRM technology is neither good nor bad in itself, it is a tool; when that tool is used in a way that makes customers feel that they're being arbitrarily denied the ability to do something reasonable, it will make some of those customers look for other alternatives -- legal or otherwise.

Take the case outlined above: if I purchase a copy of "Live Free or Die Hard Collector’s Edition," is it unreasonable of me to want to watch it on my Zune if that's the portable video player that I own? Even if I own a PlaysForSure-approved Zen Vision and can enjoy Bruce Willis as I ride the subway home, will my Zen Vision support watching "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" when it comes out?

With DRM used as it is at present, my choice of playback device (computer operating system, personal media player, even DVD player in some cases) eliminates the possibility of legal, authorized playback of certain content.

When the customer's options are legally purchasing "Live Free or Die Hard" along with a new $399 Zen Vision to watch it on or illegally downloading a copy that they can watch on the PSP that they already own, I have to agree with Mr. Weisenthal that DRM can make piracy and illegal downloading attractive.

Re: Creepy Double-Decker Bus at McGuire’s Irish Pub in Destin, FL

whitneymcn — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 17:38:22 -0000

I'm still just gazing in amused wonder at the sentence "previously I did not notice the creepy double-decker bus full of mannequins with an animatronic driver parked out front." Exactly how drunk were you on prior visits to this establishment?

Re: Social Blogging

whitneymcn — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 12:39:07 -0000

Fred (or anyone else who has an answer, for that matter), have you thought about adding your disqus comments feed to tumblr?

In your case (Fred) it's pretty heavily weighted to comments on AVC, but the main thing that I find interesting about services like Disqus and Intense Debate is that they automatically collect one's comments from here and there around the Web for a more complete picture of both an individual's input and their output.

Importing that comment feed as Tumblr links could be interesting...they're links to the stuff that the Tumblr-er finds interesting, as well as snippets of commentary on the link, and best of all it's totally low-friction from the user's perspective: just point Tumblr at the feed and the rest happens automagically.

I just started playing with Tumblr a couple of days ago, but what's most interesting to me about it right now is that "low friction" character: my tweets, my del.icio.us links, and (when I find time to buy a new phone and get off the T68 backup) my random pictures all just flow in to Tumblr, merging into an interesting little lifestream. I just started following the list that you dropped, so we'll see how the social end grabs me...

- Whit

Re: Social Blogging

whitneymcn — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 18:07:21 -0000

I was thinking that it'd be a relatively simple matter to strip out comments associated with your own blog, but a quick look at the disqus comments feed makes me think that's not the case right now (I don't immediately see any elements in the feed that tie comment back to source site).

I'll send to disqus as well (assuming they're not following your comments), but what about adding something like a Dublin Core "relation" element to each item in the comment feed, to identify the blog/site associated with the comment? That would make the community involvement of your ranking idea an interesting supplement, rather than a requirement , and add some pretty interesting metadata to boot. Basically, I guess that I'm intrigued by the idea of frictionless comment tracking, even though it scares me a bit. (And apologies to Dave Winer for suggesting fucking with RSS even further.)

- W

Re: Scoble and his Facebook data (Scripting News)

whitneymcn — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 16:51:57 -0000

I was wondering the same thing with regards to Plaxo's access to the data.

I suppose that any matches who now have their "Facebook user" and "Friend of Scoble" flags set in the Plaxo database agreed to Plaxo's terms when they clicked "yes" on that "Scoble is using Plaxo to keep track of his contacts" email, so they may be fine with Plaxo appending this data to their records. That's the part that concerns me a little, though: Scoble pulled all of his Facebook friends' names, emails, and birthdates for himself? Sure, why not. That Scoble provided that information to a third party, without those friends' knowing what that third party can and can't do with the information? A little more worrying.

Depending on Plaxo's policies and behavior regarding data they get this way I might feel a bit better about it, but it feels very much in the grey area to me.

Would be very interested in seeing the policy that governs Plaxo's use of "friend" data...anybody have access to it, or do I need to bug Plaxo's (probably overwhelmed) PR people?

Re: What I was using to hit Facebook — unreleased Plaxo Pulse

whitneymcn — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 17:01:51 -0000

Out of curiousity, do you (Scoble) have access to the privacy policy that covers Plaxo's retention and use of the data gathered through this feature?