OnoTech: Ethan Stock on Technology

Oroborous: Facebook turns itself inside out, devours the Web

2010-04-21T10:02:00.000-07:00

This superb article on GigaOm really puts into context what Facebook is doing. Google's search evolution was two stages:
1) Realize that the links that people create on the Web are a vote about the value and subject matter of websites ("hubs and authorities", aka PageRank)
2) Realize that the clicks that people execute on Google search pages are a vote about the value and subject matter of websites (machine learning on clicks)

and then organize search results according to the composite of the value indicated by those votes.

Facebook is now re-executing stage 2) and moving to stage 3):
2) Capture clicks via toolbar integration on websites and do Google-comparable analysis
3) Realize that "like" and other social actions (forward etc.) that people execute on the Web are a vote about the value and subject matter of websites

and then organize recommendations and exposure (in the Feed, etc.) according to the composite *personalized* value indicated by those votes.

Facebook is truly turning itself inside out with this move, and may re-shape the web around itself, in the same way that desire for "Google Juice" has re-shaped the web as we know it today. The beta phase of social networking has ended, and the real product now emerges. This is going to be an interesting ride.

Geeks of the world, please help Dilbert!

2010-03-16T16:51:00.001-07:00

I just spent five minutes at the Dilbert cartoon site being frustrated by my utter inability to find a comic strip from a few years ago that I'd like to hang on my wall. It's the sequence where the new product is a box of twigs and nuts, which is integrated with the customer's network by running a CAT-5 cable through the box.

There's no text search function on Dilbert.com. No way that I can type in the relevant keywords and find the panels. Google and Bing are mute to the right answer. This is a tragedy. Given that approximately 100% of Dilbert's target audience is search-savvy, 10% of Dilbert's audience could configure a nice SOLR implementation between dinner and breakfast, and at least 1% of Dilbert's target audience could implement a crawler/scraper/parser combo to pull ASCII text out of the GIF panel archive, this is highly sub-optimal.

Geeks of the world, please help Dilbert!

Running a business and blogging is usually a zero-sum game

2009-08-31T16:12:00.001-07:00

While there are definitely exceptions to the rule -- exceptions whom I would love to emulate -- in general it seems to be true that most serious executives at Silicon Valley startups have very little time for blogging. My personal experience is that it's also quite difficult to blog about the most interesting topics raised by startup life. Either the item is somehow closely tied to some proprietary insight or information, or the item will complicate a relationship with a major partner. Since we have *many* major partners at Zvents throughout the local Internet space, I am particularly sensitive to the latter.

I literally have at least a dozen topics of both business neutrality and general interest stuck on my bulletin board to get onto Onotech in the next few months. Perhaps I'll have time, or perhaps it will be a few months yet before I find an occasion to write again. In any case, rest assured that things are going very well at Zvents in the meantime.

Obama grandstanding while Rome burns

2009-04-12T14:10:00.000-07:00

You might have heard from the President that an historic opportunity exists today to refinance your mortgage. Rates are low, the sun is shining, and the green shoots of recovery are just around the corner.

In extensive prepared remarks, the most powerful man on earth took a break from puppy-choosing to inform the American people of the following:

"So the main message that we want to send today is, there are 7 to 9 million people across the country who right now could be taking advantage of lower mortgage rates. That is money in their pocket. And we estimate that the average family can get anywhere from $1,600 to $2,000 a year in savings by taking advantage of these various mortgage programs that have been put in place."

Let's take the high side of President Obama's numbers. 9 million people * $2000 equals 18 billion dollars in annual savings.

So in the midst of the biggest financial crisis of the past eighty years, the President of the United States just expended a precious media outreach opportunity to talk about a program with a maximum impact of about 3/2000ths of the annual American economy of $13 trillion. I hate to be so cavalier with billions, but that's not even a drop in the bucket.

This is insane.

Meanwhile public and steath bailouts such as a $300 billion loan guarantee to Citibank go undiscussed by the President. The increasingly dubious and never-ending AIG bailout has still not been adequately explained to the public by any public official, much less the President.

Talk about seriously misplaced priorities.

I know that Obama has only been in office about eighty days. I know that he's dealing with dozens, if not hundreds, of critical activities. But by any rational measure, the financial crisis is #1 on his list -- and probably #2,3,4,5 and 6 as well. It's that important.

So far he's blowing it. Come on, Mr. Obama. I voted for you because I expected better than this. If I wanted a crony-supporting, opaque, denial-ridden bailout of giant financial companies at the expense of the taxpayer and the common man, I could have voted for a Republican.

The American people deserve better than being patronized on the one hand and pillaged on the other. May we please have more change and less hope?

Facebook vs. Internet: Advantage, Facebook

2009-03-22T22:39:00.000-07:00

Jesse Stay's excellent post on the search potential of Facebook's Lexicon has inspired me to put down a few quick thoughts on Facebook's nearly unlimited potential to capture the future of what John Battelle calls the "database of intentions".

Google's extraordinary accomplishment is that they used superb statistical analysis to make some vague sense out of the complete mishmash that makes up the flat-text Web. But while that accomplishment is considerable, at the end of the day, they're still dealing with mush.

Facebook's great opportunity is that everything within Facebook is structured; and increasingly, users express their intentions against this structured data at scale in a way that can be very productively mined -- for product improvement, for user retention, for advertising. For insight.

Riddle yourself this: You have 200 Facebook friends. They are all pretty active. Does your FB feed actually show every single event from every single one of them? No, it doesn't. FB is algorithmically determining what is most interesting to you - dynamically - based on how much attention you pay to what those users do, and how you interact with them. Facebook knows how much you care about each of your friends. It knows whether you pay more attention to people near or far, to men or to women, to people you work with, went to high school with, or went to college with. It knows because you explicitly describe all those relationships, in a way that Google can never grasp no matter how world-beating its science and how vast its server farms.

Or consider the Lexicon graphs that Jesse highlights in his post. Google Trends can handily generate one of those for you from their painstakingly de-mishmashed dataset. But they can't tell you the demographic breakdown of that interest, because they don't know who's male and who's female. Nor do they know whether that interest is coming from people directly associated with the topic in question; for instance Ohio State, my alma mater.

Here's the Ohio State Lexicon graph, which I have annotated to show the precision of Facebook's read on the importance of a topic:

Here's the term 'Football' as a proxy from the new Lexicon, which doesn't yet allow analysis of arbitrary search terms.

As you can see, FB could allow you to slice and dice the 'Ohio State' search by any number of associations -- male vs. female, by age, and whether the person had attended Ohio State. Google can't do that. No one else can do that, because no one else has assembled a gigantic graph of defined and structured entities within which users apply their attention and annotation.

The implications for local search alone boggle my mind - that's food for another post.

It's worth noting that Lexicon is really, really slow right now. My hat is off to FB for making it work at all -- I assume that some implementation of Cassandra is behind the current Lexicon, and one reason they may not be allowing open-text searching in the new Lexicon is because while they're pushing the envelope developing it, they're crunching big batch jobs on a limited set of terms in Hadoop for the more sophisticated analysis presented there. Zvents has developed some pretty sophisticated internal analytics based on Hypertable, and I'm familiar with the challenges that this sort of slice-and-dice presentation presents -- they are considerable.

Google has taken the statistical analysis of flat text about as far as it can go. The question is, what next? Powerset attempted one approach, which was the semantic analysis of that same flat text. We'll see whether Microsoft and Powerset can make a go of that - the jury is definitely out whether it adds value in a computationally and commercially tractable manner. But in the meantime, my bet is on Facebook -- because the information potential of a structured system is vastly greater than that of a flat corpus, and it is far more tractable to parsing.

Internet, watch out. Here comes Facebook.

Reality Check of the Day: China v. USA

2009-03-16T23:18:00.000-07:00

One of my great realizations from living in the UK for a couple years is just how utterly the U.S. media lacks any perspective on American military actions abroad. The 'abroad' is completely redundant, of course - unlike every other country on earth, aside from our distant independence and single civil war, the U.S. military has NEVER had military action that wasn't abroad.

This piece in Newsweek caught my eye:

"The confrontation last week between a U.S. ship and five Chinese naval craft was just the latest of many low-grade military clashes in the South China Sea, the site of numerous territorial disputes. It was eerily similar to the "Hainan Island" incident in 2001..."

But the punch line was the ending quote:

"This confrontation had been preceded by increasingly bold behavior on the part of People's Liberation Army ships and planes. "They seem to be militarily more aggressive," said Obama's new National Intelligence director, Dennis Blair..."

Um. Yeah.

For the reality-based coalition, here's a handy world map showing the location of the United States, China, and the 2001 and 2009 incidents between the U.S. and Chinese military:

Who, exactly, is being "militarily more aggressive"?

Greenspan 2004: Your house will cover your personal debt

2009-03-02T21:52:00.001-08:00

I randomly found my grumpy notes on this whistling-past-the-graveyard gem from Sage Alan in February 2004, and thought it was well worth posting:

The finances of American households are in generally good shape even though consumers have increased their debt and bankruptcy filings have surged, the Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, said yesterday.

In a speech to the Credit Union National Association in Washington, Mr. Greenspan said that an extended period of low interest rates and extra cash from mortgage refinancing had given borrowers flexibility to better manage their debts...

Consumer debt reached a record $2 trillion in December, according to the most recent figures from the Federal Reserve. That includes credit cards and car loans, but not mortgages...

[Greenspan] said that American households own more than $14 trillion in real estate assets and that mortgage refinancing and the rise in home values have helped to bolster consumer spending in economic hard times as well as better periods.

"Over the past two years, " he said, "significant increases in the value of real estate assets have, for some households, mitigated stock market losses and supported consumption."

Boy, he sure got that one right, didn't he?

Geography is Destiny: Religion

2009-02-11T21:25:00.001-08:00

This fascinating images came my way via Paul Kedrosky:

I read Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" a few years back, and am also familiar with Edward O. Wilson's population biology. The two have led me to believe that climate and geographic circumstance have a huge impact on social outcomes. And so when I look at that chart, I see that in the tropics, religion is common; and in the temperate zones and in the northern regions, it is far less common.

This does not have to be a direct causal relationship. There is a lot more poverty, disease, and tragically shortened lifespan in the tropics. There is more civil war in the tropics. But it can certainly be an indirect causal relationship, as people wracked by suffering brought about in part by the effects of their climate turn to the solace of the hereafter.

What a fascinating image.

Euro Update: Bond spreads widen

2009-02-03T13:07:00.001-08:00

I just got back from a business trip to Europe, and I heard a lot of confirming evidence that the Euro is headed for serious trouble. I think that this also means that Switzerland is headed for serious trouble, because like Iceland, its finance sector is too large compared to its GDP; and without the Euro to flee to, a collapse might occur.

Here's the Bloomberg article via Clusterstock on BlackRock betting that the Euro will stay together.

Prices now reflect odds of between 10 percent and 20 percent that the euro-region will disintegrate following a series of credit downgrades from Standard & Poor’s this month, according to BlackRock. The difference in yields, or spreads, between the three nation’s 10-year bonds and those of benchmark German securities was close to the widest today since the euro’s debut in 1999.

“You have got to ask yourself at what point this becomes ridiculous,” Scott Thiel, head of European fixed income in London at BlackRock, which manages $1.3 trillion, said in an interview Jan. 23.

Actually I have to ask myself when it becomes inevitable, Scott.

That would be the BlackRock whose stock has fallen from 249 to today's 109, BTW.

Goodbye, Euro: Jim Rogers is 7X too optimistic

2009-01-26T13:41:00.000-08:00

My top prediction for 2009 is the collapse of the Euro. I think it is a near certainty that within three years, the Euro will no longer exist in any real form, though its shadow may linger on.

The reason is simple: A currency is backed by a social contract ("the full faith and credit of the United States government", for instance) and there are wildly disparate social contracts within the Eurozone. As modern and emerging economies come under great stress, they will react differently according to their own social contracts -- and they will diverge, breaking the Euro. I broadly consider Europe to consist of four different social contracts:

1) Modern social democratic states: Germany, France, Belgium, Denmark
2) Feudal profitable states: Italy and Greece - ungovernable, despite being productive; little of their commerce is captured in their tax base, and their social contract is written at the local and regional level, not as a true nation-state
3) Emerging states with aspirations: Poland, Czech, Hungary
4) "Failure to launch" states: Ireland and Spain, whose economies rocketed from penury to prosperity over the past 20 years, but who are now being exposed as children of the bubble.

A rare public claim that the Euro will break apart came from Jim Rogers today; but his suggestion that it will take 20 years is lengthy bordering on the ludicrous. The Euro has only existed for 10 years; if you think it's under threat now, why would you possible imagine that its remaining life is twice its history? I think that less than half is more likely, and an implosion during 2009 is genuinely possible. I am told by a reliable source that there is already divergence in the debt terms and pricing available for different Eurozone banks, reflecting the early stages of this process. This trend is something to watch closely.

Bizarrely, having created this crisis, America may continue to benefit in an enormous theater of the absurd; there's simply no other plausible choice as a global reserve currency than the dollar in the short term, so despite our foolish and spendthrift ways, the dollar will continue to strengthen.

The problem with partial transparency

2009-01-15T11:49:00.000-08:00

Kevin Drum posted an interesting piece about the somewhat creepy public mapping of California Prop. 8 donors:

This sort of thing has been possible for quite a long time, of course, but it was inherently limited in scope because of the time and money it took. Technology has changed that: it probably required little more than a few hours of coding to create a map that identified every Prop 8 donor in the state. And that map isn't only in the hands of the folks who created it. It's out on the internet where it's practically begging to be abused by some nutball... I remain a bit of a privacy crank who hasn't yet been reconciled to the inevitability of David Brin's "Transparent Society."

In demonstration of his point, one of his commentators posted an even more creepy follow-up:

I'm in San Diego, and went poking around my neighborhood. Its San Diego, so sure enough there's a a handful of 500 and 1000 donations by various folks. But, there is one very large one. I thought that odd, so I saw the guys employer, googled him and sure enough, he went to BYU. Now he might not be a [Mormon], but all signs point to yes. In other words, prop 8 passed because [The Mormon church] got its members in Utah and elsewhere to pony over large sums of money.

As a guy whose political donation history and incredibly detailed personal information can readily be found by Googling my name, this sends a shiver down my spine. We joke about 'cyber stalking' and Googling our dates, but a lot of new social infrastructure has yet to be created to make this emerging transparent society work.

Most particularly, the entire point of Brin's great and prescient essay is that a transparent society only works if it's bilateral. In addition to the searcher being able to see you, you can see the searcher. I would be a lot more comfortable with the ease of access to this information, if it was equally easy for me to see that Joe Smith at 123 Main Street, Anytown USA, has been doing hundreds of searches on people in a particular geographic area.

That searcher information is quite trackable today (by Google) but it isn't public without a lengthy and expensive process of law enforcement powers and subpoena or search warrant, whereas the Prop. 8 and other political donor information is both highly trackable and very public.

That lack of symmetry needs to be addressed for a transparent social compact to work.

Visions of the Future: Fred Wilson sees commerce, I see war

2008-12-26T09:18:00.000-08:00

As a VC, Fred Wilson is focused on the entrepreneurial opportunity in the commercial part of the spectrum. His take on what sort of interregnum we're in is therefore essentially positive, because within the bounds of that arena, it's clear that this historic ongoing dislocation means that opportunity abounds:

This downturn will be marked in history as the time where many of the business models built in the industrial era finally collapsed as a result of being undermined by the information age. Its creative destruction at work. It's painful and many jobs will be lost permanently. But let's also remember that its inevitable and we can't fight it. Technology and information forces are unstoppable and they will reshape the world as we know it regardless of whether or not we want them to.

'Spectrum' is a good way of thinking about what is going on, and let's call the commercial aspects of the current interregnum and coming change the 'green' part of the rainbow, nicely positioned in the heart of ROYGBIV.

Over there on one edge of the spectrum of the future, I'm spending a lot of time worrying about Red, the color of Mars, god of war.

'Arena' is a word chosen carefully, because commerce is a game played within set rules. The larger struggle is how, and by whom, those rules are set; and that combat both has no rules, and is about to become much more intense. Frail Mercury may sit on the sidelines, or hide in the cellar, while fiercer fights take place.

Why do I feel so strongly that this is imminent? Unrealized to many of us in the west, the beneficial outcomes of the current 'game' of commerce have now been disproven in the eyes of many. Seeing the newly revealed artificial nature of progress and prosperity in the West, does anyone in Nigeria, or Pakistan, or Brazil, or Russia, Malaysia, truly believe that their ladder up through the stages of global capitalism actually has rungs?

If they stop believing that, they stop playing the game, and move on to more fundamental maneuvers. And one of the precepts of those maneuvers is that they must be responded to, which means that only one party's decision is required to set them in motion.

Caught between fundamentalism abroad, fundamentalism at home, and a more prosperous despised neighbor to the east, the current generation of Pakistani leaders no longer believe that they can even rise to the level of prosperity enjoyed by India. What is their next logical move? We're all about to see.

Bob, the word you're searching for is 'Interregnum'

2008-12-21T17:37:00.000-08:00

Robert X. Cringely, in his last PBS column:

The world is unsettled. It's not just this damned financial nightmare we have to deal with but also a sense of between-ness, like something has just ended yet still lingers slightly though it is obvious that something new is about to arrive. But will it be a good something new? That's hard to tell.

In past eras we used to have interregnums between the reigns of kings. These days, we see them in the pauses between empires, hegemonies, and technology-driven waves of infrastructure. We're there.

I'll try to get some thoughts posted on waves of technology and deflation over the Christmas holiday. It won't be fun, but it may be interesting.

China May Fall: The Next Big Problem Is Political Risk

2008-12-21T15:17:00.000-08:00

We're finally to the point in this unfolding economic crisis where most people are seriously willing to engage with the topic of whether this recession is of the magnitude and danger of the Great Depression. That's far cry from a year or even six months ago, when depending on the skepticism of your listener, using such terminology either raised eyebrows or placed you straight into the tinfoil-hat brigade.

That's a good thing, because once we can talk about something, we can analyze it, manage it, and possibly mitigate it in ways that are really difficult to do when we're in a state of absolute denial.

I continue to be puzzled by how many people view market movements as abstracted from real-world events, as if markets are some pure reflection that has little or nothing to do with the facts on the ground. These sorts of arguments are common when people say, for instance, that the fact that the S&P is now trading at or slightly below its long-term "fair value" means that it's unlikely that stocks will go down further. This is a slipshod presumption because there are whole huge categories of risk that have yet to really be taken into account, just as one year ago, the very real risk of systemic defaults on structured finance obligations across all debt classes had not yet been taken into account.

The thing that is scaring me on an almost daily basis is political risk, and I am amazed that this is not a much larger part of the discourse already. One of the few exceptions that I have seen is Gary Shiller's recent discussion of the possibility of regime change in China. Does anyone remember what happened right after the Great Depression? The answer is World War II, and it's worth remembering that World War II was made up of a number of interlocking wars, with the Japanese, Germans, Soviet Union, British Empire (including India), United States, the French Empire, China, Italy, and many other secondary players (the list is endless but includes most of Asia, all of Europe, and most of North Africa as well as our good friends the Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders) all throwing their entire military and productive capacity into a struggle of resources, ideology, economic systems, power, and race that the world has not seen before or since.

It is my sincere belief that both the Great Depression and World War II were the direct outgrowths of the protracted collapse of the British Imperial economic order, which first started to crumble with the Boer War in South Africa circa 1900, and whose final death knell was sounded in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the effective end of colonialism. A huge swathe of actual and abstract infrastructure needed to be swept away to prepare the world for a new economic and political system, as the illogical remnants and deep-seated contradictions and flaws of the prior order were exposed, exploited, and exploded. It was an era where the myth of white supremacy was as outdated as the battleship, and in ten years of global struggle (1936 - 1945) and megadeath, the foundations were cleared for what came next.

We are now twenty years since the end of the Cold War in 1989, and we are due for a big war or two. We can get lost in the metaphors of whether what may come would be the equivalent of World War I or World War II. What worries me is that it is coming, and it is coming for both a long-standing reason and a proximate reason.

The long-standing reason is that we have hugely illogical and remnant pieces of global political and economic structure. When the Cold War ended, there was still no effective difference between a telephone company and a national government; paper was still the major form of bureaucratic communication, advertising, and information dissemination; petroleum's energy supremacy was unquestioned; and the vast majority of the world's economy was composed of the US, Western Europe, and Japan.

The core structures of our natural resources extraction, global shipping and trade, transportation systems, energy systems, information systems, and military makeup haven't really changed that much. Tanks, jets, and aircraft carriers still dominate the modern military, though their conceptual resonance with armored knights on horseback in the emergent era of the first firearms grows stronger by the day. Vertically managed corporations still rule the economic landscape, though their resemblance to discredited socialist bureaucracies is as strong as ever. Factories may have moved to China but largely still run just as they did thirty and fifty years ago. Pensions, retirement funds, education, healthcare... the list goes on. The world has changed, and our systems cry out for a reboot. Such rebirth - renaissance - turning of a new leaf, the turning of a globe, revolution - is inevitably painful, miserable, and destructive. I'm not calling for it; in fact I fear it -- but I am predicting it.

That is the general cause.

The proximate cause is quite simply poverty. Material poverty, poverty of spirit, and poverty of ideas. In perilous times, rulers fall; and rulers who may fall will do anything that they can to maintain their tenuous grip on power. The most logical move in the world is for a ruler to focus inward anger outward; to create or highlight a wrong or an enemy, and unite a populace against that cause. The wrong may be true, or it may be constructed; there may be a valuable prize to be gained (such as resources) or war may simply drive domestic political benefit. But as sure as the sun rises, right now, threatened rulers in many halls of power are contemplating wars of many kinds. In retrospect it becomes a difficult question whether the rulers led the people to war, or whether the populace demanded rulers to lead them there; once a politician puts himself at the head of a parade, who is to say whether a pull or a push is in progress?

But in either case the war happens.

The political risks of our current crisis are practically immeasurable; they are easily as profound as those extant in the decade leading up to WWII.

* China faces domestic unrest that may cause it to implode.
* The EU faces internal schisms that may cause it to break apart.
* Africa faces an existing tide of lawlessness and poverty, and spark-points such as Zimbabwe, that may draw much of the continent into varied forms of bloodshed
* I will be shocked if India and Pakistan don't have a war in the next decade, and relieved beyond expression if that war doesn't go nuclear
* The United States will face its own serious domestic discontent, as it has the most to lose from the dissolution of the current world order
* A nuclear-armed and belligerent Russia is about to be impoverished by the collapse of oil prices. The last time that happened was 1989, and the Soviet Union fell.
* The many petroleum-fueled autocracies of OPEC face similar threats - and many are well-armed
* South America has large states with little petroleum -- Brazil, Argentina, and Chile -- and small states with a great deal of petroleum -- Colombia and Venezuela.

Even leaving aside additional sources of potential stress such as drought and declining food and water supplies brought on by climate change and overfishing, there is such ample opportunity for global disaster here that it's hard for me to imagine that the coming decade will be peaceful.

In terrible recessions, markets don't trend 50% below their "fair value" for abstract reasons. They do so because the outlook for the future at those dark, bleak times is truly terrifying.

I fear that we will see those times again.

Calling All Pirates!

2008-12-07T17:59:00.000-08:00

An article I read on Bloomberg today sent of all of my "looming unintended consequences" radar into turbo overdrive. It's about the spread between current and futures oil prices, apparently called Contango, and the fact that this spread is so unusually large right now -- $41 current price vs. $55 December 2009 futures contract, so $14 per barrel -- that it's actually cost effective to:
a) rent a supertanker
b) borrow enough money to buy a Buh-Buh-Billion dollars worth of oil
c) anchor said tanker offshore somewhere and
d) physically deliver the oil a year hence.

Some Oil Dude in London is reliably quoted as saying that this strategy should deliver 11% profits over the forthcoming year, which looks pretty darn tasty when Ye Olde Worlde is ending all around us, and Treasuries are paying less than 1%.

The reason that my looming disaster radar is going Beep! Beep! Beep! is because as sensible as it sounds, this is just the sort of nothing-can-go-wrong "auction off our lottery and our turnpike" sort of thinking that has gotten us so deep into our current financial crisis.

So for those who habitually stomp through graveyards, the foolish of all stripes, and investment bankers in particular, here's a short list of what could go wrong with this strategy, from the likely to the formerly absurd:

* Bankruptcy and/or default of whoever is sitting on the other end of that billion dollars worth of futures contracts. I can certainly imagine that entity either having gone under in the normal course of business 12 months from now, or seeking bankruptcy protection to avoid paying what could literally be $500 million worth of additional costs, if oil is at $28 instead of $56 when December '09 rolls around. Since every contract we can imagine has turned out to be worth the equivalent of toilet paper over the past 12 months, what's to say that oil delivery futures contracts won't suffer the same fate?

* Storm and/or other damage and destruction of the tanker and the oil. Sure, there's insurance against such things. Insurance companies are just SO financially stable these days, and happy to pay billion-dollar losses rapidly and fully, don't you agree? (cough) AIG (cough).

* Pirates and terrorists, oh my! The article goes on to say that as many as 16 supertankers may be booked for such use; which means that they'll be sprinkled around the globe in all sorts of locations, ripe to be hijacked, blown up, spirited away, or other malfeasant use.

Seriously, what really gets my hackles up (in fear not in anger) is that this sort of stupidly rational strategy is the height of "the system works" thinking, which assumes that a long complex interlocking string of contracts will be honored. Let's look at the string here:
* A current contract to buy a billion dollars of oil
* A loan to finance a billion dollar purchase
* Rental of a supertanker [and crew?]
* Insurance on the tanker and the oil
* Some sort of anchoring rights [or the knowledge where to anchor in international waters]
* A futures delivery contract for the oil

Think that anything could go wrong here? See any arcane interconnection of previously uncorrelated financial instruments and indices? Worried about the odds that at least one single thing in this long chain will go slightly wrong, in a world where Things Going Wrong has lately proven to be the approximate statistical equivalent of the sun rising in the east?

Nah. Count me in. Pirates be damned -- 11% sounds awesome!

PS. 2:1 leverage for 22%? Anyone? Hello, calling 2006... anyone?

Local Search: Every Brick is a Survey

2008-11-28T23:01:00.001-08:00

One of my investors, David Carlick, is a pioneering thinker in online advertising. David was a founder of DoubleClick, and has been a leading proponent of behavioral advertising. He is fond of saying that "every click is a survey," and that pithy phrase captures a lot about how the aggregate of human behavior can be turned into knowledge.

I've been thinking about local for a few years now, and I'm increasingly obsessed with the kind of ranking intelligence that can be derived from the physical map of cities. Most of the features of cities - streets, buildings, transit systems - are not there by accident. Rather, they are the accrued choices of generations of human beings, a physical record of millions of discrete building and buying and selling decisions, made over decades or centuries.

In truth, every brick is a survey.

Here's a very simple example: What's the most expensive and valuable part of Vancouver? How about the part with the tallest buildings?

If you were told to a) choose a hotel for an urban weekend, cost no object; or b) choose a prestigious location for your multinational headquarters, you could do far worse than to point to the high point on the implicit value graph of the skyline and say, "here."

There are hundreds of other examples too lengthy to record at 6am UK time, which is when this urge to blog has struck me. Unpacking this latent ranking intelligence in physical reality is a very interesting and potentially lucrative search problem, one that I'm looking forward to working on for years to come.

Inflation and Deflation are the Same Thing

2008-11-24T20:05:00.000-08:00

What?! you say. Ethan has a screw loose. Inflation and deflation are opposites!
Au contraire, mon frere.

In practice, inflation and deflation are effectively the same thing. Inflation is "you have lots of money but it isn't worth anything" and deflation is "money is worth a lot but you don't have any."

In either case, massive social and economic dislocation occurs. And the same crisis can simultaneously cause both outcomes - witness during the Great Depression, which created deflation in the United States and hyperinflation in Weimar Germany, both with the same root cause: the collapse of the British Imperial trading order and the decline of the pound sterling as the global reserve currency.

For an orderly and functioning society, the intersection of people having money and that money being worth something is required. I don't think we're heading there, and whether we drive off the right side of the road or the left side, this is going to be ugly.

WaPo's David Broder joins the Wooster, OH election beat

2008-10-28T18:06:00.001-07:00

Well, look at that. David Broder of the Washington Post stopped by Wooster Ohio to discuss the election, too. Welcome to my beat, David ;-)

My Mom emailed me with the story, and told me that she was disappointed that she wasn't in the bustling Obama headquarters when Broder stopped by:

Two local women at the tables -- Cullen Naumore and Catherine Wiandt -- heard Sen. Joe Biden when he spoke in mid-September at the College of Wooster. Naumore had never thought of volunteering in a campaign, and Wiandt had abandoned politics, disillusioned, after working for Democrats in her younger years. Now they are part of a volunteer force that Litt estimates at "100 per week and growing." Two others are Jessica Schumacher of Lexington, Ky., and Sarah Green-Golan of Boston, respectively a sophomore and a senior at the College of Wooster. I met them on campus and heard how they and their friends had persuaded 700 of their fellow students to register in Wayne County, where the Republican presidential margin has ranged from 11,000 to 12,000 votes in the past two elections."It's going to be different this time," they assured me.

Yes, times change. And people change them.

How times change

2008-10-28T08:28:00.000-07:00

When I was growing up on a farm outside of Wooster, Ohio, my parents used to gently mock the city values of the county seat, where, astonishingly, a Democrat was mayor. Wooster's population then was about 18,000, and it's the sort of place with a gorgeous courthouse, empty streets, and 'family values' signs in the windows of businesses downtown. Berkeley it ain't. But from the comparative conservative high ground of the countryside, it seemed like a suspicious hotbed of liberalism.

This year, my Mom, now moved to town, is going door to door for Obama.

Times do change. And it's people who change them.

Breaking News: Obama is a socialist, Ethan still voting for him

2008-10-27T14:06:00.001-07:00

There's a tempest in a teapot brewing over in right-wing land over this quote from Obama on a 2001 radio talk show:

"One of the I think the tragedies of the Civil Rights movement was because the Civil Rights movement became so court focused I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change and in some ways we still suffer from that."

If you think that the word 'redistributive' means he's a socialist, well, sure, game over, he's a socialist. But then you probably think FDR was a socialist, too, and I think that he and Ronald Reagan were the two greatest presidents of the last century.

The simple fact is that all of society benefits when there's a floor at the bottom and no ceiling at the top. FDR built the floor, and fifty years later, Reagan fixed the ceiling problem. Now, 25 years later, it's time to repair the floor, and in 20 or 30 years, some new Reagan can come along and fix the ceiling which by then will no doubt need repair.

I'd have voted for both FDR if I were alive and Reagan if I were of age, and I'll be voting for Obama and no doubt for Reagan's future successor to come. Management is mostly about pragmatism, and oversight of management is mostly about choosing the right guy for the problem. FDR, Reagan, and Obama are all that guy, and I'm looking forward to contributing my small voice to the process of choice in a week's time.

Portrait of a market in distress

2008-10-15T22:11:00.000-07:00

If you had any doubt that we live in interesting times, check out this amazing stock chart:

That's Japan's Nikkei 225 average over the past 5 trading days. It looks like it was drawn by a five-year-old who doesn't understand the concept; since when are stock charts made up of straight lines and gaps?

Even more interesting is that this is an *average* of 225 stocks. Isn't diversity supposed to even out fluctuations? The entire world financial system is now learning the painful lesson discovered by Long-Term Capital Management in 1998 -- that in edge and corner cases, entire asset classes, and multiple asset classes, can unexpectedly be deeply correlated, with the result being severe dislocation. Condos in South Florida and the Icelandic Krona -- who knew?

Everyone who hasn't yet read Nassim Taleb's _Black Swan_, get busy. It is well on its way to being book of the decade.

Goodbye, Hedgies!

2008-10-14T08:31:00.000-07:00

"For the $2 trillion hedge fund industry, a long-feared shakeout is at hand. Some analysts say one out of every 10 funds could fold."

Seriously? News flash, NYT: When an illiquid asset class that grew on excess leverage and irrational hopes of profit collapses, you'll be lucky if one out of 10 survives.

Ask me how I know.

Fortunately, there are useful things for all those unemployed quants and asset managers to do.

MBA and law students, please do something useful

2008-10-12T09:29:00.000-07:00

This is probably the most depressing thing that I've read all week:

For students who set their sights on Wall Street during the boom years, the end has come just as they are getting ready to join the party... But even as the markets spiraled downward, business and finance students at top universities said they were not panicked about their futures and were confident that the financial markets would recover. For the young achievers drawn to finance, expectations die hard. [Kenton] Murray, [a senior at Princeton,] described the mood at Princeton as cautiously optimistic. No one I’ve talked to is worried about moving back home yet,” he said. “But everyone I know is studying for the LSATs right now, people who a month ago had no intention of ever going to law school.”

Jian Yang, 25, who is in his second year at the University of Chicago's graduate business school...expects to graduate with $200,000 in student debt.

Ye Gods.

Part of the reason that we got into this mess is that too many bright people are doing relatively useless things like investment banking and lawyering. Another key reason that we got into this mess is that once any entity -- from an individual person to the Federal Government -- gets themself under a massive pile of debt, their options are highly constrained. Prison may be more crushing than debt service; but it may not, because in prison, you don't have to spend your sentence productively.

To all the MBA students out there -- please don't double down on this historic mis-allocation of resources. If you are quantitative enough to consider finance, look into data mining and machine learning for product and marketing design and refinement. Translation: search relevance and ad targeting; but these are only the tip of the iceberg. Soon these disciplines will spread, because they add real value both to consumers and to merchants. Operations research for resource allocation is another huge area. The world is undergoing another historic transition now, which is toward connected, data-driven marketplace of real stuff -- not the fake packaged stuff that has been driving Wall Street for the past seven years. You won't ever get a $500K bonus working in this field, but you'll make a good salary, you'll add to the productive economy, and if you join (or start) the right company, you'll get rich beyond Wall Street dreams of avarice -- and deservedly so.

To all the law students out there -- if you are articulate and nuanced enough to consider law, how about a management or leadership career? The world needs more thoughtful communicators and accomplished managers. Running a team is a lot harder than running a trial, but much more rewarding. Understanding and influencing the people who work for you and who struggle to work together is a lot more interesting than navigating a jury selection pool. Negotiating a business partnership is a lot more fulfilling than a litigation settlement. I see the insides of hundreds of organizations that we partner with, and good management and leadership is all too rare. You too can make an enormous difference to the productive economy by refocusing your talents elsewhere. Are we electing Barack Obama president because he's a good negotiator? Or because he's a great leader, communicator, and manager? You know the answer. Be that answer.

And to all of you - please, please be careful about getting yourself buried under a mountain of debt, such that you end up having to work at a career that you may hate, in an industry that may not really provide anyone lasting value, simply because you are crushed by your debt service. I'm sorry, but if it takes $200K in debt, then whatever your parents told you about getting into that 'top school' is probably wrong. The ROI to your life is negative. I flunked out of one top school and left another before completing my PhD, and I was neither struck by lightning nor am I begging on a street corner. If you're truly smart, talented, motivated, and capable, you'll do fine.

There's a lot of broken economy to fix. Let's get to work.

So where did all that housing money go? You already spent it

2008-10-06T18:35:00.000-07:00

The size of the numbers is staggering -- $700 billion here, $900 billion there -- and a lot of people are wondering how it's possible that seemingly every bank and every homeowner is suddenly broke.

There have been clear signs for a while that something was amiss in the housing and consumer consumption market, and one great indicator is Mortgage Equity Withdrawal, or MEW.

This is, quite simply, the net amount of cash that people pulled out of their houses to spend on Other Stuff -- either by a home equity loan or, in the case of retirement, selling an expensive house and buying a cheaper one. The financial blog Calculated Risk reports, buried in an article about the collapse of MEW, that U.S. consumers pulled $2.7 trillion out of of their houses during the five years from 2004 through 2008:

Equity extraction was close to $700 billion per year in 2004, 2005 and 2006, before declining to $471 billion last year and will probably be less than $100 billion in 2008.

While some of that might have been spent on the houses themselves, in the sensible form of new bathrooms or additions, a lot of it was spent on questionable upgrades like granite countertops and flat-out expenditures like flat screen TVs, Hummers, and vacations to Fiji. So the reason that all those Wall Street banks are going bust? Because they thought that you -- or your neighbors -- were actually going to pay back the inflated mortgages that backed up that giant sucking sound of the home ATM in overdrive.

For those of you who protest (as I do) your innocence, realize this simple fact: Even if you didn't do such an extraction yourself, whatever business you are in benefited from the huge increase in consumer spending that this MEW generated over the past four years. Retail, manufacturing, advertising, financial services, construction... we all lived a little or a lot better.

And now, not only is it gone, but we've got to pay it back in the form of systemic collapse, higher taxes, or inflation. None of us were as wealthy as we liked to pretend over the past four years, and now we're all going to be a lot poorer than we're ready to admit.

Zvents raises $24M for local & mobile search

2008-09-30T10:52:00.000-07:00

It has been pointed out to me that for a blog ostensibly about things other than Zvents, there's been hardly anything but Zvents news here of late.

Separately, it has been pointed out to me that for a life that is ostensibly about other things in addition to Zvents, I've been doing precious little but work of late.

To you my blog readers let me say that this is the last Zvents post for quite a while; and to you my friends and family let me say... hang in there, it can't stay this crazy for ever.

That being said:

Zvents raised $24M in funding from Nokia Growth Partners, AT&T, Navteq, and our existing venture investors Vantage Point and Red Rock. We will use this money to make our local search service for our media network even more awesome; advance our very promising new local ad model; and as a warm, fuzzy security blanket against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Lots of people are writing about our round, including VentureBeat and Paid Content, as well as local gurus Pete Krasilovsky of Kelsey and Greg Sterling.

AT&T even issued their own press release about their strategic investment in Zvents.

How did we manage to raise all that money in tough times for both VCs and startups? Is there a pony in there somewhere? Forbes lays out a nice explanation.

And now... back to work building the future of local search.

The Google Alphabet: 23% of top search terms are local

2008-09-07T13:26:00.000-07:00

Brady Forrest has a nice post over at O'Reilly Radar about the 'Google Alphabet,' the top suggested search terms for each letter. He makes a bunch of interesting historical observations, but through my local lens I noticed something different:

23% of top search terms are local.

The list:

Craigslist
Ikea
John Lewis (a UK retailer)
Sears
Target
Zipcodes

6/26=23%. You could argue that 'Kelly Blue Book' is a 7th, but you could also argue that there are some ecommerce implications to some of the retailer name searches, so we'll call it a wash.

Local search is very big business.

Update: I posted this to my blog and checked out how it looked, and lo and behold, the very first local event for today in the SF Bay Area displaying on my Zvents left sidebar widget was 'Target Free Sundays' at the Asian Art Museum. Apparently retailer Target is sponsoring Sunday museum admissions as a local marketing tool. Yet another example of local merchants using events to promote their businesses.

Zvents news: Too much to ignore!

2008-08-26T10:56:00.000-07:00

I've got a list of interesting topics right here on my desk, on a couple of increasingly tattered Post-it notes.

There's the 'Poker Analogy' post for machine learning-driven processing of log data.
There's the 'Match.com Analogy' post for how search is a collaborative process.
There's the 'Spice Rack' post on building search relevance.
And there's the 'Smart Delivery of Dumb Objects' post about ad targeting.

In addition to these four fascinating posts (trust me ;-) I've got at least two really cool related product ideas moldering on that same little collection of decaying desktop notes.

So what's keeping me from fulfilling my bloggy destiny? As usual, Lots Is Happening (I almost typed Happyning... can your fingers create malaprops?) at Zvents.

Today's particular news is that as our marketing VP Paul O'Brien has noted at length, we're launching dozens of campus guides for MTVu, powered by Zvents local search. It's gotten a ton of press, written by people less busy than I -- check it out!

Substantive posting will resume in September. I think.

14-year-old real estate moguls and the end of bubbles

2008-08-16T10:13:00.000-07:00

Home in Detroit sells for $1.

Writes the Detroit News, "...some abandoned homes in Detroit sell for $100; vacant lots can be purchased for $300."

"My 14-year-old son could buy a block of Detroit property," said Ann Laciura, senior servicing specialist for the Bearing Group.

Whenever someone tells you that it's impossible for an asset class to go to zero, they're either dumb, or hoping that you are. If the carrying costs and net obligations of any asset exceed the cashflow, it's worth zero or less than zero. We saw this a lot during 2001-2002, as companies with insane cost structures met grim fates, occasionally returning as shadows of their former selves, or reinvented as actual profitable businesses.

Businesses probably worth less than zero right now:
GM and Chrysler
Citibank and Washington Mutual

Silicon Valley got crushed in the last asset bubble deflation. This time around will be relatively kind to us, but there will still be pain.

Winter is coming.

Dancing with Elephants

2008-08-04T11:19:00.001-07:00

I try to keep the Zvents news to a minimum here, but I'm very excited to note that we're now powering local event search for the new MSN CityGuides. We've been powering major media sites since our first partner, the San Jose Mercury News, launched in July of 2006 -- over two years now, and it's seemingly gone in the blink of an eye. Even versus our now-hundreds of local media partners, big sites like MSN are a whole new level of scale. It's not just their userbase - which numbers in the millions per month - but as one of the biggest technology companies on the planet, their expectations around SLAs, integration, product and project processes, etc., require us to really step up our game. I'm excited that we're proving that we can play in this league. We may still be a little mouse of a company, but we're dancing with elephants ;-)

Some coverage of the announcement -- thanks, guys!

Greg Sterling before
Greg Sterling after (No, Greg, you didn't blow the embargo!)
SeachEngineWatch
LostRemote
Adotas Interactive Advertising
Local Biz Bits

Search relevance and the data-driven web

2008-07-25T17:37:00.000-07:00

My frustration with CNET's informative but misguided article on Microsoft's BrowseRank has only redoubled with the reading of some other stuff like Andy Ha's breathless and utterly silly piece on VentureBeat -- I refuse to link to it, but you can go look it up if you're curious. Example phrases (good for searching on, too ;-):

"could really shake up the search landscape"
"it would upend the way companies get attention online."
"it might be able to reverse MSN Search’s slide towards irrelevance."
"a new kind of search"

Aargh.

I decided to channel my powers for good instead of evil, and rather than trolling in the VentureBeat comments, I decided to trawl through the Onotech archives and pull together many pieces I've written about search relevance into this one handy post that I can refer to in the future.

Note that this is not just about search. Search is just one facet to the golden rectangle of the data-driven web -- search, ad targeting, discovery, and analytics -- that makes every modern web company rivers of cash. All of these product mechanisms share underlying concepts and technologies, and I've blogged about them (and the infrastructure that makes them possible) many times over the years. Here, in time order, are some of the better posts on the concepts behind the data-driven web.

Another time, I'll pull together a second summary blog post on infrastructure thoughts - because there are some really cool software technologies that make this all possible.

This is also probably a great time to show off my birthday present from Somer Simpson:

Schweet. I may make T-shirts -- email me if you want one ;-)

OK, here we go:

Click data drives not just search, but all advertising

The impact of monetization on search result ranking

Query type differentiation and machine learning

All search is social search because people determine value

On relevance/selection mechanisms, and types of voting

The four fundamental ways to determine ranking

Updated:
How to better understand user intent

CNET on BrowseRank: An informative article with a nonsensical premise

2008-07-25T12:31:00.000-07:00

It's great to see a well-written, informative article, "Microsoft tries to one-up Google PageRank," about an innovation in search ranking, published at a major tech news outlet like CNET. Stephen Shankland's piece on Microsoft's BrowseRank is definitely all that. It thoughtfully discusses the concept that people's click behavior is a very powerful (and different) voting popularity mechanism than the link graph of PageRank to assess web page search relevance. All good.

However it's maddening to see yet another naive or deliberately misleading article on an innovation in search ranking, that perpetuates persistent misunderstanding of how search works and what makes search better. Maybe it's just a standard media trope to essentialize any topic to the point of parody, but I'm so tired of seeing pieces that fetishize "The Algorithm" as some singular magical trump card by which search is won and lost. Combining scientific models to produce a ranking function is difficult, obscure, and incredibly important, so to some extent I can understand why the media keeps writing stories focused on this. But it's sort of like watching a Saturn V take off for the moon, and turning confidently to your neighbor and saying, "that thing takes off because NASA figured out The Engine... I hear the Russians are working on something better than "The Engine."

Please. Great search is made up of a couple major areas of competence:
* Scaled aggregation of content. It doesn't matter how good your matching might be if you don't have what the user wants in your cupboard of goodies.
* Scaled user voting behavior to assess value. Be this the ability to crawl and assess hyperlinks, access to and the ability to assess user clicks, or one of (as Udi Manber rightly says) hundreds of other variously valuable and tractable methods, you need access to behavior metadata, crystallized in one form or another
* A scientific process and platform by which you can run many experiments to fine-tune the value of various voting behavior signals.
* A technological platform to rapidly and cost-effectively perform this mind-boggling level of computation, faster than the answers and the questions are evolving on a global scale.
* A bunch of really great scalability engineers to build that platform
* A bunch of really great search scientists to conceive, build, and test models on a continuous basis
* Oh, and a very effective monetization effort to pay for all of this incredibly expensive infrastructure, people, and time cost.

It sounds a lot more like General Motors circa 1955 than it does "genius in a garage cooking up the next great thing," doesn't it? Perhaps that's why the media always falls into this trap - the brilliant loner or breakthrough insight that changes the world is just such a powerful narrative hook, whereas a discipline, competence, process story is just kind of... boring.

The reality of world-class search today is that it's big, complicated, and multi-faceted. It has emerged into a discipline of technology all its own, and advances will tend to be subtle and hard to explain. Remember that whenever you read the next excited story about the Next Great Algorithm.

Update: I've written a new post that channels my grumpiness to productive ends -- a few more thoughts on the data-driven web and an index to my various posts on search relevance. Reporters, please read them all... twice!

The tech bubble's toxic legacy

2008-07-19T09:42:00.001-07:00

An article on GigaOm caught my eye: "With Exits Barred, VCs Keep Investments Flat". In the piece, Stacey Higganbotham relates the reassuring news to entrepreneurs that VC investment in early stage companies remains strong, and that later-stage deals are being done at a historic clip -- 318 in the second quarter alone. But then she drops this little tidbit:

If those companies don’t exit within the next two to three years, VCs will have to start selling at a loss or pushing firms into bankruptcy.

Huh?! What's wrong with this picture? Any 'late stage' deal likely means a C and possibly a B round -- so the company involved has been in business for 2 or 3 years already when it raises the round; and the round should last it for at least another 18 months.

The presumption here is that tech startups don't get to profitability.

This is the worst legacy of the tech bubble, when lots of permanently unprofitable companies were started, funded, and even IPOed. It's got nothing to do with the true legacy of Silicon Valley, where superstars of past eras -- Intel, Apple, Sun, PeopleSoft, Oracle -- became insanely profitable companies. And this presumption is blinding us to what's happening in the Valley today. It's the same mistake that made you not buy Google shares at $85 in 2005, and you shouldn't let it blind you again.

I personally know of at least three highly profitable startups that may go public in the next 12 months, and may not. All three of them have been in business for over five years, and they are throwing off not just revenue but cash profit at a very impressive rate. To those three, I can add at least a dozen that I'm pretty sure are highly profitable as well, I just don't know for certain. All of these companies are the types of startups that are raising the "late stage rounds" that Stacey seems to believe must lead to exit or bankruptcy, because there is no third path.

Every startup that I've built has been intended from Day 1 not just to be transformative to its market, but to be a real, profitable business, with real customers. That's the true legacy of Silicon Valley, and the sooner we get our heads past the failed abberation of 1999-2001, the better.

Doug Judd presents Hypertable at Structure '08

2008-06-25T15:57:00.000-07:00

Liz Gannes at GigaOm has the story and the pictures. Hypertable will be going beta Real Soon Now, and we're very pleased at the press and traction that it's been getting. It's the featured article in the June 2008 Linux magazine (link soon when it's on the web) and Doug has a pretty packed speaking schedule this summer including OSCON and FOO Camp.

Even more exciting is that we've got Hypertable in production at Zvents, and we're starting to see some of the benefits of a really fast and scalable analytic platform for search relevance, analytics, and ad targeting.

It's not that often that you can do a cool thing, a good-for-the-world thing, and a smart business thing all at once. I'm pretty happy that our two-year adventure with Hypertable appears to be that rare intersection.

Jeff Weiner, CEO of Facebook?

2008-06-16T15:21:00.000-07:00

It's pretty common for accomplished executive talent to join VCs in EIR positions -- with the 'E' being either 'Entrepreneur' or 'Executive' In Residence. But this may be the first time that I've seen someone join *two* VC firms in such a role simultaneously. The purpose of an EIR role is to help advance the agenda ( = fund returns) of the VC, while advancing the career of the exec. Hard to do that for two different VCs at once. So unless Weiner is such a rare talent that he got Accel and Greylock to agree to go halvsies on his potential future value creation, there must be some reason that that they're mutually interested in him.

The biggest thing that Accel and Greylock have going together is... Facebook. Now we all know that Mark Zuckerberg is firmly ensconced in the CEO role there. But is he really? A year later, Beacon is a failure. Jerry Yang has spent the last six months giving us all a lurid demonstration that even with fifteen years of seasoning, founding CEOs rarely are the right guys to manage public companies. Facebook has made no secret of its intentions to stay independent and go public. So... Jeff Weiner as CEO of Facebook? Don't be surprised.

Is Weiner a good fit for Facebook? It's a company with serious platform ambitions, which has been successfully recruiting senior technical talent from Google. It's a classic Web 2.0 company, scaled to the max. And it's a company that is poised to inherit the mantle of Yahoo as the biggest property of the social/personal web, as Yahoo continues to bleed away its birthright. Here's a snippet of Weiner's resume from the Accel release:

During his tenure, Weiner helped drive the Network’s Open and Social strategy and expansion of the company’s category-leading consumer web products... Prior to his Network role, Weiner was part of the Search leadership team that directed the acquisition and integration of Inktomi, AltaVista, FAST as well as the development of Yahoo! Search Technology. He helped launch the company's suite of social search products - including Yahoo! Answers - and led the acquisitions of del.icio.us and Flickr. He was also part of the leadership team formed to help revitalize the company's Search Marketing efforts.

Yeah, that experience might just apply to what Facebook is trying to do.

Kara Swisher has some thoughts on the implications of Weiner's departure from Yahoo, and she also wrote the magic 'Facebook' word before I did ;-)

It's all happening

2008-05-28T23:59:00.000-07:00

I generally try to keep the Zvents posting light. This is not a long post about the company - it's just a quick note, somewhat of a milestone of awe. I've been so silent for so long because I've been utterly immersed, spun up in a tornado of business - for four months now, seemingly without end. It's been incredible. Exhausting. Exhilarating. I just did a quick count, and I've received 195 emails today - 97 of which came after 5pm. This past Memorial Day weekend, from 4pm on Friday through Monday at midnight, I personally did more business than many startups see in a month. At least six customer and partner calls, and endless email. This is not meant to brag. It's more of a sense of wonderment. When everything starts working, the net acceleration is just incredible.

I hope there's not a big wall out there just over the horizon, because we're moving at the speed of light.

Snapshot taken. We'll see in time which story it's telling.

AOL: The Network is the Content, the Network is the Ad

2008-04-15T07:37:00.000-07:00

There are two big AOL announcements floating up TechMeme today. Most interesting is the news from Comscore that due to Platform A/Ad.com, AOL leads all major internet companies in reach, touching 9 out of 10 users on the internet.

The second is that AOL has acquired Sphere, Tony Conrad's blog recommendation engine, for about $25m. Since it launched three years ago, Sphere has done a great job of bringing its 'related commentary' widget to the content pages of very large sites like the New York Times, Washington Post, and Time magazine.

These two announcements are related, and I'm surprised that the usual commentators haven't picked up on this yet. The future of the internet is becoming increasingly clear -- it's advertorial, or a blend of commerce and content. In a huge number of cases, the content that users consume - presented either editorially, via search, or via a recommendation - is highly commercial in nature. If you care about gadgets, for instance, Engadget or Sony.com are both great landing sites for your online explorations. Cars? You may go to an enthusiast site, or Porsche.com.

Both content and advertising are best distributed via analytics- and algorithm-driven networks. Sphere is quite simply an algorithmic content redistribution network, and AOL's platform A is a (targeting) algorithm driven advertising network. These are different stripes on the same zebra.

Google, of course, has been experimenting with embedding content such as YouTube videos into its huge AdSense network; and there are a number of very interesting large-scale advertorial networks emerging such as Aggregate Knowledge's Pique. (Disclosure: I am an investor in AK). I will be very interested to see how AOL adds Sphere in to its market-leading network, and to watch how this emergent trend evolves.

Alan Greenspan is the Robert McNamara of economics

2008-03-17T00:01:00.000-07:00

I was reading Krugman's latest piece on the ongoing meltdown of the capital markets, and he offered this quote:

Meanwhile, false beliefs in the political arena — the belief of Alan Greenspan and his friends in the Bush administration that the market is always right and regulation always a bad thing — led Washington to ignore the warning signs. By the way, Mr. Greenspan is still at it: accepting no blame, he continues to insist that “market flexibility and open competition” are the “most reliable safeguards against cumulative economic failure.”

It hit me: Greenspan, in practice and in retrospect, reminds me of nothing so much as Vietnam-era defense secretary Robert McNamara, the proponent of "the domino theory," and his still-ongoing and increasingly tragic efforts to shift all blame from himself long after the disastrous damage is done.

Greenspan's trumpeting of the ludicrous notion of efficient markets and support for the demise of market regulation will one day been recognized as equivalent folly.

The real tragedy here is that both of these men are geniuses in every sense of the word. It's impossible to watch The Fog of War and not come away impressed with McNamara. I highly recommend that film to anyone who has ever suffered even a little from hubris or ego. McNamara is smarter than you, better educated than you, more subtle and strategic than you, and he still blew it about as badly as a human being in power ever has done. Why? I can only guess, ideology.

Which is exactly how Greenspan has sent our country into our current tailspin.

Coming to a theater near you in 2028, _The Fog of Commerce_.

Hopefully, coming soon to a government near you, competence unblinded by nonsense.

NYTimes: It's all about the data, dummy!

2008-03-10T09:13:00.000-07:00

Great article in the NYTimes on ad targeting and data scale. This is probably the first intelligent article in the mainstream media that I can remember on this topic - explaining that the combination of on-site and off-site behavioral data by consumers is what's driving the Internet today. An extension to the claims in this piece is that the same data is used to drive *products* (i.e. search relevance) as well as ad targeting; but I'll wait for their follow-up piece to close that gap.

Worth noting: The NYTimes has integrated "blogs" and their conversational style allows Louise Story to add some useful and interesting information to the more formal article. Check out her piece at the "Bits" blog for more data and further insight.

Some key quotes:

The rich troves of data at the fingertips of the biggest Internet companies are also creating a new kind of digital divide within the industry. Traditional media companies, which collect far less data about visitors to their sites, are increasingly at a disadvantage when they compete for ad dollars.

The major television networks and magazine and newspaper companies “aren’t even in the same league,” said Linda Abraham, an executive vice president at comScore. “They can’t really play in this sandbox.”...

Web companies once could monitor the actions of consumers only on their own sites. But over the last couple of years, the Internet giants have spread their reach by acting as intermediaries that place ads on thousands of Web sites, and now can follow people’s activities on far more sites...

“So many of the deals are really about data,” said David Verklin...

Some advertising executives say media companies will have little choice but to outsource their ad sales to companies like Microsoft and Yahoo to benefit from their data. The Web companies may prove they can use their algorithms and consumer information to better select which ads for visitors better than media companies can.

“I think a lot of publishers are going to find they don’t have enough data,” said David W. Kenny, chief executive of Digitas, a digital advertising agency in the Publicis Groupe. “There’s only going to be a handful of big players who can manage the data.”...

Even with all the data Web companies have, they are finding ways to obtain more. The giant Internet portals have been buying ad-delivery companies like DoubleClick and Atlas, which have stockpiles of information. Atlas, for example, delivers 6 billion ads every day. The comScore figures do not capture such data.

I am pretty confident that there is at least one zero missing from every number the Times quotes in this article. This is happening today at a monumental scale, and will only get larger as time goes on.

Data is the new lock-in and sustainable competitive advantage.

So how do you collect, store, and analyze all that data? That's why we built Hypertable...

Google uses prior searches and spelling correction to match AdWords

2008-03-03T21:46:00.000-08:00

I imagine that one of the problems that Google has is matching existing ad inventory against all the wonderful random crap that searchers type in - with many searches being really hard to monetize by "traditional" means. Thus the many experiments they run. I wonder what the ROI on this particular example is?

This is a random discovery which came about as I was looking up some old co-workers. First names have been changed to protect the innocent.

First I searched for my old co-worker "Ed" Biasi:

Note that there are no ads. Name searches are tough to monetize.

Then I searched for my old co-worker "Joe" Satchel:

Note the ad match - It's for a Biasia satchel - which is apparently some sort of $200 name-brand purse:

Not only is Google doing spelling correction on my Biasi search, they're remembering the immediate prior search term to match the ad. Apparently they only remember one prior search - when I did the same search twice (either Biasi or Satchel) the ad disappeared.

Fascinating.

Hypertable - press and traction

2008-02-19T11:19:00.000-08:00

It's now been two weeks since we launched the 0.9 alpha of the Hypertable distributed database, and we've been a bit blown away with the excitement it's generated. The release got picked up on Slashdot (w00t!), in LinuxWorld, and just today, the 451 Group in the UK published another great piece. Meanwhile it's causing a little enthusiastic consternation in relational land -- my absolute favorite quote is from DBA4Life:

"HyperTable is sexy... yet, not relational... This is very confusing... I have to go now."

That's the sound of the world changing :-)

Most exciting, however is the level of engagment we've seen with the actual codebase, since that's where real open-source traction occurs. In addition to a vibrant mailing list, we're getting tons of feedback and bug reports - perhaps driven by the fact that in just two weeks, Hypertable has seen over 2600 downloads (!) -- of a 700MB tarball that you need significant skills to unpack and install. We're seeing all sorts of cool ideas about how this could be used, and look forward to many more.

Meanwhile, Zvents is laser-focused as always on the future of local search...

Hypertable is launched!

2008-02-05T15:21:00.000-08:00

For the past year, Zvents has been sponsoring the open-source Hypertable project for a distributed, web-scale database and analytics platform. I am *very* pleased to announce that earlier today, the alpha version of Hypertable became available for download, at the new hypertable.org site.

Data scaling dudes of the world, rejoice!

AbleGrape: Superb new vertical search engine for wine

2008-01-31T14:14:00.000-08:00

I love this story. It's what Web 2.0 is *supposed* to be about, but rarely is.

Here are some of the key themes of Web 2.0:
* Search is centric
* Open-source software makes starting up cheap
* People who lived and learned from Web 1.0 applying the lessons to succeed
* Increased internet usage makes niche sites possible and profitable
* New UI tools (AJAX etc.) make UI innovation possible again

So what do we actually get? A few great new companies, and a bunch of silly no-hope websites trying to make money off of each other's widgets. Uncov, we miss you already.

That's why I love AbleGrape, which my friend Doug Cook just launched earlier this week. AbleGrape is a vertical search engine for wine:

At launch, it supports English, French, and Italian; it has fully international content; it has really interesting new UI features for fast, sophisticated searching; and it's astonishingly relevant for even obscure wine queries.

The release email states:

We aim to be your first online stop for trustworthy, up-to-date wine information. Our public beta covers some 32,000 wine sites, with about 10 million pages of content, and we've put a lot of work into returning highly relevant results and providing an innovative, powerful user interface that helps you find things faster.

Doug Cook, the founder, coder, sole proprietor, and general polymath behind this achievement, was formerly a search engineer at Inktomi, and rose to VP of Engineeringat Yahoo! Search after the acquisition. He's also a world-class wine guy, who speaks several wine-useful languages fluently and has one of the better wine collections I've ever seen.

He has spent the past 2 1/2 years building AbleGrape himself from the ground up - coding, tuning the crawl and relevance, and engaging with the thousands of vineyards, negociants, appellation boards, government agencies, and other businesses and entities that make up the wine world. This has been a huge solo effort -- a personal memory I have of the process is watching Doug attempt to check the status of his crawl over a 9800 baud dial-up connection from a house in the Tuscan countryside of Italy - in August, 2006.

Let's walk through that supposed Web 2.0 stack again:
* Search is centric
--> AbleGrape a search engine. A damn fine one.

* Open-source software makes starting up cheap
--> Doug built AbleGrale with major pieces from the Lucene/SOLR/Nutch open source projects

* People who lived and learned from Web 1.0 applying the lessons to succeed
--> Inktomi to Yahoo to AbleGrape. Check!

* Increased internet usage makes niche sites possible and profitable
--> Let's hope -- for every wine question that you have, this is the first place you should go.

* New UI tools (AJAX etc.) make UI innovation possible again
--> Doug has a number of fast, clever, interactive features for search refinement based on his years of search experience that take a second to learn, but are really useful. Doug describes them better than I would.

Amidst all the baloney, hype, and general mediocrity of much of the Internet space, examples like this give me hope and happiness. This rocks. Great job, Doug!

Sadly, I have no financial interest in this company. But Doug does share superb wine with me from time to time.

TubeMogul's sweet new video distribution and analytics service launches at DEMO

2008-01-31T10:51:00.000-08:00

Video distribution on the Internet is already a huge and fragmented market, with consumer traction spread across a host of destination sites and widgets from VideoEgg to Vimeo to YouTube. It's also a rapidly growing and evolving market, with potential big players like Hulu lurking in the wings.

So if you've got video to distribute, and understanding consumer uptake is the lifeblood of your business, what do you do?

One great answer is TubeMogul, which formally launched its distribution and analytics service at DEMO yesterday. I am proud to be an investor in TubeMogul via my partnership at NetService Ventures.

TubeMogul has a great product that's gotten significant initial traction, both with major users like CBS Interactive and with a long tail of more than ten thousand video creators. Their launch saw some great press commentary as well. Hats off to Brett and the team for a great job thus far!

I think that TubeMogul, as well as another NSV investment, SingleFeed, are representative of an emergent trend toward distinct buyer- and seller- focused analytic offerings as multiple Internet marketplaces evolve from their initial stages toward a more sophisticated bid/ask framework. I'll have a further post on that soon.

Google Newspaper Ads 2008 = CueCat 1998

2008-01-29T10:25:00.000-08:00

Congratulations, Google. You've managed to revive one of the dumbest and most reviled companies of Web 1.0 Your new newspaper ad bar code plan smacks of nothing so much as CueCat, the ill-fated money pit that Forbes, Radio Shack, and others poured tens of foolish millions into. People really hated the CueCat.

Good luck with that.

Update: Commentary on this is breaking out into two distinct camps: Those who were grownups during Web 1.0 and paid attention, and those who were either younger than 12, or missed what went wrong.

I'm proud to be with the grumpy oldsters here, and Joel nails it with "it doesn't say much for the quality of those 150 people Google hires every week that they're now chasing some of the worst of the bad ideas of the fin de siecle."

Zvents launches federated local search

2008-01-28T13:37:00.000-08:00

I try to keep the Zvents product announcements to a minimum, but I'm really excited about this one. As part of our ongoing expansion of focus on local search, we've launched a new federated local search page on Zvents.com. We've been live with dozens (now hundreds) of media partners for over 18 months, and we've observed behavior of both searchers and local merchants that strongly suggested that we should unify our search experience across events, venues, restaurants, and performers. As we add in additional categories of local merchants, this blended result becomes even more important.

Doing federated search well is a hard, open problem, and while I don't think we have the perfect answer yet, this is a huge step forward for us, and an indicator of many great things to come. I'm loving our role as the deep technology provider for local media, and looking forward to more cool things we'll be rolling out in 2008.

There are a couple of nice writeups from Chris Smith at the Natural Search Blog and Greg Sterling at Screenwerk.

Check it out!

Dear Hippies: Your cool car is starving poor people

2008-01-19T00:12:00.000-08:00

I've always thought that biodiesel was a dumb idea. Maybe it's because I grew up on a farm in Ohio, where a yield of 180 bushels of corn to an acre of land is considered outstanding, on some of the richest farm land in the world, where water falls from the sky. 180 bushels of corn may sound like a lot (a bushel is about 9 gallons for you city types) but this site says you get a grand total of 2.7 gallons of ethanol from a bushel. At 25 miles per gallon, that will drive one car about 12,000 miles -- the average distance that most people drive in a year.

This other site (thanks, Google!) says that you get 134,000 food calories from that same bushel - which is enough to feed a person for 61 days.

So that's your tradeoff -- from a single acre of good farm land, enough food to feed 30 people for a year, or enough ethanol to support one single car, driven as we do today, for a year. 30 people vs. one car. Huh.

It is just about now, dear reader, that it should be dawning on you that the oil economy only works because the entire biomass of millions of years worth of extremely energy-rich plants and animals were compressed into this super-handy stuff we called oil. We have busily extracted this incredibly concentrated goodness from every convenient and many inconvenient places on earth, to the point where its future supply grows uncertain; and we frac it down into the gasoline we put into our cars, and kid ourselves that cleverness and progress is the root cause of our luxurious lifestyles, rather than the tapping of this one-time bonus from the geophysical history of the earth.

From Flickr: Originally uploaded by Michiel2005

And now, as the remaining loose change from that historic bonus starts to rattle around in our pocket, we're desperately casting around for alternatives - and wondering if the globe's yearly spread-out dose of agricultural sunshine can somehow support a lifestyle grown large and fat on the hyper-concentrated fossil extract, without negative consequence.

Um, no.

But don't just take my word for it. Bitter economic truth is exerting itself as we speak, as demand for biofuels grows due to a combination of dopey hippies, foolish politicians, and farmers who never saw a subsidy they didn't like -- I'm looking at you, Iowa-caucus-goers and your bizarre cartel to mis-direct the agenda of U.S. presidential politics. Here's a great article in the New York Times that lays out how globally,poor people are either paying more money for oils or eating less calories because of this trend.

I am a big fan of environmentalism, but at its core enviromentalism means that we must do more with less. Many big green trends today - can you say "carbon credits" for your sports car -- are attempts to deny reality and kid ourselves about the innovation or sacrifices that are yet required of us. Biodiesel is yet another of those false, self-indulgent dead ends.

But there's hope. "The do more" part of the honest environmental equations fires me up. One reason I love the business of computers and communication is that it drives incredible efficiencies in the physical world. I am wildly excited about the many opportunities for innovation - which is what drives TRUE progress - but in order to concentrate on what matters, we have to stop pretending that dumb farm subsidies can save us, and get to work.

Rich Democracts vs. Poor Republicans

2008-01-04T01:40:00.000-08:00

The results of the Iowa caucuses presage the coming big shift in American electoral politics. The Democrats are going to become the party of money and modernity, and the Republicans are going to become the party of economic populism and social conservatism. Some interesting results:

* Mike Huckabee (economic populist, social conservative) won the Republican vote.
* John Edwards (economic populist) won the self-described conservative vote caucusing Democratic.
* Mitt Romney (A Democrat in spirit - the Bain Capital governor of Massachusetts) lost the Republican race big to Huckabee.

Obama is a candidate that can deliver the White House to the Democrats in a transitional phase from 2008 to 2016 -- in part because he will hold the votes of African-Americans, who otherwise favor both economic populism and social conservatism. Look for a Republican to win a surprising victory around 2020 in part by winning black votes, and look for increasing rejection of President Obama as "not a real black man" by the end of his second term.

Meanwhile, the Democrats become the party of business and trade. John Edwards may run for president again, but he'll do so as a Republican -- and the unions (the few that are left) will back him again, and vote a Republican ticket.

The Hispanic vote will become the new Democratic flank, replacing blacks - since "economic populism" will include anti-immigrant and anti-Spanish-speaking sentiment, expressed by both blacks and whites.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled technology.

Calculated Risk: Great finance analysis, great writing

2008-01-03T09:59:00.000-08:00

Or, Uncov for the mortgage industry ;-)

Silicon Valley is as much about finance as it is about technology, and I appreciate great finance writing as much as I love great technology analysis. Silicon Valley is also a real-estate-obsessed place, so when that finance writing is about the greatest financial calamity to ever beset the housing market, the enjoyment is multiplied.

I'd like to call out Calculated Risk, a superb blog on the mortgage and housing industry, with two pseudonymous authors (CR and Tanta) who write with enormous knowledge and great flair about the debacle in progress on Wall Street and in Middle America right now.

In particular the recent post, "The Un-re-dis-inter-mediation Blues," is a scathing indictment of the sort of business model foolishness -- in this case carried out by Merrill Lynch -- that you may have thought was only the province of Web 2.0 startups. Highly recommended, and a good mental tonic when too many thoughts of advertising-supported business models and viral marketing are getting you down:

Aside from the idea of loan officers having sufficient spelling skills to play Scrabble, which is new to me, here we have the two same old dumb ideas that emerge in any mortgage downturn, with a delicious twist that it's Wall Street getting it instead of Main Street.

First, there's the old "let's retrain a bunch of subprime loan officers to be prime GSE loan officers." You civilians might think this should be fairly easy, but the fact is that training a lot of these people to be prime loan officers basically means training them to be loan officers. If they had any basic depth of understanding of the business they're in, they could move to prime origination by just reading that other rate sheet. The reality is that they've been doing no-doc no-down no-sweat stuff for so long--some of them have never done anything but--that they're sitting around with the PlayStation waiting for someone to tell them how a 30-year fixed rate loan with a down payment and verified income actually works...

Item the second causes a deep belly laugh in anyone who ever worked for a depository in a mortgage downcycle: "Why can't we just put the loans on the balance sheet?" I know it makes me a bad person, but the thought of Merrill getting this one from its mortgage people is floating me heavenward on a warm tide of schadenfreude...

That is--or once was--an old strategy for depositories: when you can't sell your loans, hunker down, stuff 'em on the books and wait for the tide to turn. We are seeing depository after depository shutting down its wholesale and correspondent lending divisions, meaning it will, as always, only allocate those portfolio dollars to keeping an expensive but much safer retail operation alive...

But Merrill really really wanted to be a retail originator in its own right. Welcome to the other side of the mortgage world, Mother Merrill, and try turning in some tiles. Maybe you'll get a vowel.

The power of traditional media: NPR and Kipling

2007-12-06T16:23:00.000-08:00

I've gotten several phone calls from friends who heard my comment read on NPR's All Things Considered this evening. I was upset with their Tuesday story on a new Rudyard Kipling museum in Mumbai, and dashed off an email to the comment form on their site.

A few observations:

* I write on this blog at least weekly, and rarely hear from friends about its contents. The reach of traditional media and its broadcast/push format still have incredible power to communicate and persuade.

* I can write whatever I want on this blog, and yet I'm thrilled to get 30 seconds of airtime, edited and second-hand, on NPR. I can't quite express why that is; perhaps because it feels like I've passed some test.

* "Passing a test" is a very useful metric for writing. I actually crafted my comment carefully to be succinct and punchy, knowing that if I rambled I wouldn't get air time. Editors may sometimes be wrong, but they're direct; whereas if your audience doesn't like what or how you write, they just go away, typically without telling you.

* Don't offer up shallow interpretations of Kipling when I'm around, unless you've read a lot more of him and about him than I have, and are rhetorically fast on your feet.

Giga, Tera, Peta: Om on Google's Infrastructure

2007-12-04T10:43:00.000-08:00

Om writes that Google's infrastructure is its strategic advantage. He lists "fiber networks, data centers, switches, servers and storage devices" as key components. He correctly identifies "Relevancy of results, Speed of search, and Cost of executing a search query" as key benefits of this infrastructure.

All true (and better ad targeting is a fourth key benefit).

My only beef: Where's the software?

A huge portion of Google's opex is people, and many of those people are the systems guys who built fundamental software infrastructure like UNIX, C, and TCP/IP. Those guys aren't there for their halo effect - they're there, despite Google's youth bias, to build software infrastructure.

Scan this Bell Labs alumni list, and see how many times Google comes up as a current gig. Answer: 21.

As Steve Jobs continues to demonstrate in the consumer device sphere, custom hardware + genius software yields magic. Google is the server-side doppelganger to Apple, and their platforms like GFS, BigTable, MapReduce, and Sawzall are core to their competitive advantage. For a great overview of how software and hardware work together at Google, check out this great 2006 presentation on Google internals by Toby DiPasquale.

Zvents also believes in great software infrastructure. More soon on that front.

Update: If you're showing up from TechMeme and you find this post interesting, there are plenty more on related topics. It's been a bit rich about Google here on the blog lately, but they are the dominant technological force of our times. Just click here and hit page down.

What Google hates and loves: Why Wikipedia is taking over search results

2007-12-02T14:33:00.001-08:00

John Battelle recently posted a report which states that Wikipedia pages are taking over the organic search results of the major search engines: "Today 27% of Google’s results on the first link alone come from Wikipedia, as do 31% of Yahoo’s."

What magic power causes a free site like Wikipedia to own between a quarter and a third of results for the single most powerful page position at the world's two largest search engines?

It's simple. Money.

Google and Yahoo make more money by putting Wikipedia and sites like it first in their results.

Let's look at a scenario that Google hates. Christmas is coming, and a searcher puts a broad but valuable query term like HDTV into Google. The results that come back are clearly delineated between organic content and paid ads:

But here's what drives Google (and Yahoo) absolutely crazy. There in the third link position is CNET, with a feature called HDTV World. CNET is a media company which creates great, rich content about tech topics like HTDV. Google can hardly ignore them. But boy, do they wish they could! Because in two short clicks, a user goes from the organic results on Google to a highly monetized buying guide and store for Samsung HDTVs on CNET -- and Google makes exactly $0.

It's enough to cause heartburn at the 'plex.

Now let's walk through that scenario with a similar search for hearing aids. In passing, it's interesting to note that Google has no top-line ads for 'HDTV' (which I presume young, savvy people search for) and it displays three top-line ads for 'hearing aid' - which I presume older, less savvy searchers tend to type in. Nothing to see here, they're still not evil, just as long as they keep it below 49%.

Ahem. Back to our topic at hand, Wikipedia love.

Here's the paid/unpaid split for hearing aids:

We can see that like the HDTV search, Wikipedia is the first organic result, which means that it will collect the bulk of the clicks for unpaid traffic on the page. This delights Google, because there are no ads on Wikipedia. By displaying Wikipedia links in the most prominent free position, not only can they deliver a useful result to a searcher, they can't get into the CNET/HDTV situation which they hate - letting a searcher with strong commercial intent escape without the lucky advertiser paying the Google tax.

There's a further benefit to Google in promoting Wikipedia in organic results. Even within the context of a buying decision, searchers strongly type for commercial and non-commercial intent of a particular query. When a searcher is in the exploration and research phase of a hearing-aid buying decision, they want information, overview, context. When they have found out what they want, they switch to a transactional mode, and are ready to be marketed to. Over time, Google can use free, non-commercial content like Wikipedia to actively train searchers that they won't find commercial offers in the organic results:

...and over time, encourage them to look first in the paid ad positions when they want to buy something. Commercial nirvana.

That commercial nirvana is why Google and Yahoo love Wikipedia, and you'll continue to see more Wikipedia links in high organic positions over time.

Unless Jimmy Wales allows ads.

Update: I've just noticed Matt Cutts' new post on Google's efforts to nuke people who sell links with PageRank. Matt asks, rather piously, "Now, think about how you would feel if your medical search was influenced by pages like this," and points to a paid content page about the Gamma Knife, which is apparently a cancer treatment.

Hmm, Matt, I'd feel about the same as I do when Google influences my search by prominently showing a Gamma Knife ad on the first SERP:

Let's be clear - piety aside, Google isn't worried about your finding out about the Gamma Knife - they just want someone to pay them. That's why they are happy to prominently feature it in their ads at the same time that Matt is finger-wagging about it in his blog.

This battle is all about searcher differentiation, and paying the Google Tax on the way to commercial nirvana.

Note: For more on query-type differentiation, see my previous post, "Why Google owns your lunch."

Why Google owns your lunch: The "I'm feeling lucky" button

2007-11-20T22:06:00.000-08:00

Google is a force of nature in global business today, in the same way that the Velociraptors ate everything in Jurassic Park, and Napoleon conquered everything non-frozen in Europe.

So I am bemused at Valleywags's credulous acceptance of Sergey Brin's statement that the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button costs Google $100+ million a year because they miss out on the advertising on the subsidiary pages when users click that button.

Yeah, right. Aren't you Valleywag guys supposed to be snarky?

News flash, Silicon Valley: Google is composed of some of the smartest machine-learning dudes to ever walk the planet. They have transcended their humble beginnings in web graph analysis to meet their true calling, which is to capture and analyze every single bloody user click, everywhere, ever, that they can get their hands on.

Within that context, if you think that the "I'm feeling lucky" button still exists because of some avatistic non-commercial motive within Google, get a clue. While a friendly grad-student impulse may have been the original source of the button, that button has long since proven its worth on a simple, highly commercial scale: query term type differentiation.

There are, broadly, three classes of queries on the Internet: discovery/information, navigation, and transaction. "Navigation" is of the type: "I need to know the URL for IBM, please take me there." A considerable amount of query-response and relevance angst is expended by most search engines on differentiating the three types of user intent, because users in each mode have vastly different expectations. Google, unlike others, gets at least half of this differentiation for free, because of that magic, friendly, 'Lucky' button.

Sergey, that's worth $110 million and more, and you know it.

That crucial differentiation makes Google search better; and better = more profitable. Scoreboard!

How and why does this work?

Because there is a strong predominance of searchers with navigational intent who click the 'Lucky' button. Users with informational (discovery) or transactional intent, on the other hand, tend to click the 'search' button. That distinction allows Google to build a dictionary which correlates a certain set of search terms with likely navigational intent -- for free, in machine learning terms. Voila! Google take a set of searchers with inherent low monetization potential -- after all, they only wanted to find their way to IBM's website -- and makes its insanely profitable search engine even better.

money...
...money...
...money

Sergey may pitch this as some charitable instinct on Google's part, but we know better.

Rock On, Google Borg!

Footnote: I talk a good game, but I only vaguely understand this stuff, and I am thrilled and humbled on a daily basis by the brilliance of the people who work with me and help me understand how much this sort of science and engineering matters. Thanks, Z Team!

Waiting for Virgin America...

2007-11-12T15:30:00.000-08:00

I tried three times to do a flight search on Virgin America.

No dice.

JetBlue just got over $1000 of my business, because their web site works.

Web sites matter, people. Site performance and search performance are two of the most critical customer-service metrics you can measure, across an incredibly wide range of retail and commercial endeavors. They're hard to do well. Which is why they matter even more than you think -- because you can differentiate from your competitors, and delight your customers.

Higher-Performance Computing: Improving the Google File System

2007-11-06T17:42:00.001-08:00

For those of you interested in high-performance computing, Doug Judd, our principal search architect at Zvents, has an awesome new post on the Zvents developers blog called "The Google File System - and How It Can Be Improved." Doug is leading our forthcoming Hypertable open-source project, which builds on top of distributed file systems like GFS, HDFS, and Kosmos, and he's got plenty of interesting thoughts on why GFS works well, and where it can be made better.

The market is winning: Google's ranking is under strain

2007-10-29T21:15:00.000-07:00

It's an interesting philosophy question: When an irresistible force meets an immovable object, what happens?

Google has invested billions in computing and commercial infrastructure in order to secure its immovable dominance in search, which is fundamentally based upon parsing the web graph of links better than anyone else. It has a gigantic $210 billion market cap that is also fundamentally based upon its continued ability to generate reality-defying free cash flow from that search dominance.

That free cash flow creates an irresistible force -- the market, in all its insane brilliance, attempting to reverse engineer Google's map of the Web and modify the link domain to suit the commercial desires of thousands, millions, of individual participants.

Unless Google had an endless bag of tricks up its sleeve, this was never going to end well. And indications are increasing that it's going to end badly. As Peter suggests, fighting paid links is like fighting terrorism. I've got an even more terrifying analogy than that: Fighting paid links is like fighting spam. At best the forces of order are at stalemate in the spam war, and there "we" benefit from the fact that there's no single obvious beneficiary from the current borked email system, and so every major Internet company is motivated to work together to stem the tide. In search, MSN and Yahoo and Facebook are perfectly happy to see Google go down... so defeat is even more likely than what we've seen on the spam front, not less.

I am seriously unhappy with the extent of Google's current dominance... but the prospect of a chaos without center may actually be worse.

This is going to be fascinating to watch. Google has incredible resources to bring to bear, and as I've said before, they haven't even really been tested yet. But... my money is on the market. I'm not short Google, but I'm not long, either. They're priced to perfection, and there are plenty of signs that all is not perfect out there.

Facebook: Options pricing is no hiring hurdle

2007-10-29T09:58:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal has a lurking-schadenfreude story which suggests that the imputed $15 billion valuation of Facebook after the Microsoft investment will cause them hiring problems. I think not.

Firstly, I'd be shocked if the clever guys at Facebook haven't structured this deal so that part of the money that Microsoft is paying doesn't accrete to an imputed valuation - instead, it's payment for ad rights, or something similar. If the accounting only puts half of the $240m against the stock purchase, then Facebook's value for options purposes is more like $7.5 billion.

Secondly, the rule of thumb in the Valley is to grant common options at a strike price of about 10% of the preferred, since these shares have less rights which can theoretically decrease their future value in many downside scenarios. That handily locks in a 10X gain in the all's-well-that-ends-well scenario.

Thirdly, most option-motivated employees are looking for a 10X gain in the enterprise value while they work there -- given the built-in 10X from the strike price rule of thumb, that nets out to about 100X in actual return on options for four years of sweat, toil, and tears. On the scale that FB is playing (high stakes, win or lose) that 100X translates to millions in any 'win' case. Can FB get to $75 billion in enterprise value over the next four years? It will be hard, but it's not impossible.

But there's another factor at work. Given the scale of what FB is trying to accomplish, they're looking to hire successful, smart people who have done it before. And it's in this context that the M$ money is a huge win. At this point in the evolution of the web, there's a very large class of professionals - engineers, product people, managers, BD and marketing people - who have mortgages, kids in school, and gold-plated resumes loaded with relevant experience for building great companies. People who, say, went from Netscape '95 to CommerceOne '98 to PayPal '01, just to make up one arc. Hiring those people is tough for an under-funded startup, because they're at a clearly different point on the options-vs-salary & benefits curve, favoring the latter. Google has accelerated its business by being able to pay top dollar for people at this stage of life -- the cream of the crop of HP, Sun, Oracle, and a dozen other companies -- and Facebook can now go toe to toe in compensation package for both upside-motivated and cashflow-driven superstars. As Google has demonstrated, when you join the young, hungry and brilliant with the wiser, experienced and brilliant, seismic events can happen.

The schadenfreude may yet play out, but not this time.

Want to talk local at Web 2.0? Email me

2007-10-15T22:24:00.000-07:00

I will be at Web 2.0 for most of the conference. If you are going to be there and want to talk about local, email me myfirstname at zvents.com. If there's enough interest, I might try to put together a dinner on Thursday night. We could go to one of the 732 restaurants within half a mile of the conference.

Internet Retail: Painfully slow still nets you $100K per hour

2007-10-13T13:06:00.000-07:00

I'm buying some birthday presents for my nieces and nephews, so I did separate orders on Lands' End today - one package per kid. My first order, ID number xxx1398, went through at 12:31pm; my second order, xxx2206, went through at 12:51pm. That's one order every 1.4 seconds. If you assume an average order size of 40 bucks, mid-day on this particular Saturday, Lands' End has an Internet cashflow of about $100,000 per hour.

If their site didn't suck, they might be doing 5X that.

The reason I'm on the Lands' End site at all is that my sister (bless her) directed me there for appropriate gifties, and it's alluringly easy for a time-swamped entrepreneur to follow through on such highly targeted suggestions. I'm not there because the LE brand springs first to my mind; I'm not there because they show up highly in a Google search; and I'm certainly not there because the shopping experience is pleasant.

I would rate the functionality of their site as 'high' -- for the particular gift I got (monogrammed bath towels) they have a highly interactive AJAX configurator that shows the particular color, pattern, monogram, etc. But the responsiveness is HORRIBLE - so much so that I read several New York Times articles in another Firefox tab while waiting for basic tasks like the switch from the item page to the shopping cart to.... load. And it's no coincidence that it took 20 minutes between my orders -- that is the total start-to-finish time I went through on executing the second order. 20 minutes!! I could drive downtown and buy something in that time... and if I were buying for myself, I just might.

They've got to be losing customers in huge volume, who either abandon during the search process, or abandon during the ordering process, simply because they get frustrated with the lag. It genuinely feels like dial-up.

As GigaOm noted earlier today, Silicon Valley is all excited about Web 2.0 and consumer, advertising-focused businesses right now, but there's a fortune to be made by some smart new startups building modern, effective Internet software for enterprises like Land's End.

Update: Lands' End actually owns the #1 organic spot for 'embroidered towel' on Google, apparently thanks to smart use of GoogleBase catalog upload. That kind of prime distribution makes their execution even more frustrating -- all those people showing up, and each one having a crappy experience.

More on Google / IBM 'cloud computing' initiative: Tech journalism stinks

2007-10-08T08:26:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has a near-verbatim repeat of the News.com story. Mention of IBM's open-source tools is added:

"The centers will run an open-source version of Google’s data center software, and I.B.M. is contributing open-source tools to help students write Internet programs and data center management software."

I particularly enjoyed this Palmasino quote, given my observation last night:

Mr. Palmisano noted that cooperation between the two companies was easier because Google is mainly a consumer company, while I.B.M. concentrates on the corporate market. “We’re more complementary than anything else,” Mr. Palmisano said. “We don’t really collide in the marketplace.”

The Wall Street Journal actually adds a little journalistic merit to its piece, mentioning Sun, HP, and Microsoft as other players in the massive datacenter business; and laid out Google and IBM's open-source rationale as an anti-Microsoft differentiator:

"Frank Gens, an analyst with market-research concern IDC in Framingham, Mass., said the companies also are united by a rivalry with Microsoft, and "they'd like to influence the future of online business before Microsoft extends its influence." IBM and Google stressed that much of the infrastructure will be open-source programs that are freely available, rather than proprietary software programs such as those sold by Microsoft."

There are a number of commentaries visible on Techmeme, none of which goes any deeper than the source articles; Donna Bogatin questions the neat "consumer/business split" but that's all the analysis I see. And none of the commentaries or source articles mention Amazon, who's done more in this area with EC2 and S3 than anyone.

Hopefully someone will start asking some useful questions soon.

UPDATE: The Google press release has key details:

"For this project, the two companies have dedicated a large cluster of several hundred computers (a combination of Google machines and IBM BladeCenter and System x servers) that is planned to grow to more than 1,600 processors. Students will access the cluster via the Internet to test their parallel programming course projects. The servers will run open source software including the Linux operating system, XEN systems virtualization and Apache's Hadoop project, an open source implementation of Google's published computing infrastructure, specifically MapReduce and the Google File System (GFS)."

Key questions answered:
* No Google code open-sourced
* No advanced functionality (BigTable) -- just MapReduce/GFS as implemented in Hadoop.
* Yes, Kevin was wrong (sorry, Kevin :-)

This all fits quite nicely -- IBM gets a great new Open Source Java/Eclipse program to promote (Hadoop is all written in Java), and Google gets to promote its world-view without going through the hassle of open-sourcing any of its own code.

Google, IBM to fund 'cloud computing' data centers for open research

2007-10-07T21:57:00.000-07:00

So says this article in news.com. Clearly, IBM and Google have agreed to divide the Microsoft universe between them -- IBM wants to own B2B, and Google wants to own B2C. We'll see whether Microsoft acquiesces to this plan

I'll be very curious to see if Kevin Burton was right about the open-source release of GFS, MapReduce, and BigTable. If he was, I'm never playing poker with him :-)

Questions:
* Is this just an open service, or open-source software?
* Is it separate storage and processing (like S3 and EC2) or linked processing and storage?
* Does it include advanced functionality (BigTable) or just lower-level components (MapReduce)

Looking forward to finding out more...

Nokia + Navteq: Local, meet mobile

2007-10-01T10:02:00.001-07:00

Today's announcement that Nokia is buying Navteq at a $2 billion premium to its market cap is a very big deal. Winning the next generation of the Web is all about owning data, and Navteq is the clear leader in local data. As the second use case for local emerges -- mobile users with immediate contextual questions, as opposed to deskbound users planning for the future -- Nokia's mobile platform technologies and devices will play more and more central a role in user's access to information. Navteq's data underpins both of those use cases, both today and in the future.

When Google is building phones, Nokia is buying data service companies, and Apple is gleefully playing up and down the stack, it's time to recognize that the mobile/web, phone/computer convergence that we've been talking about for at least 10 years is finally arriving.

Why the Kosmos open-source file system matters

2007-09-27T23:29:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Sriram, Anand, and our other friends over at Kosmix on the release of the Kosmos distributed file system.

This is important stuff. Why? Google. Google has built up a platform advantage for doing web-scale computing that puts them in a different league than everyone else. Their hundreds of thousands of servers are old news, but what's regularly ignored is the superb software engineering layer that makes it possible to run large analytic processes -- like search crawling, search relevance, and ad targeting -- seamlessly across those many boxes. GFS, Google's distributed file system, is part of what makes that possible, and this Kosmix open source release is the next big step, after the Hadoop project, for this critical technology to be available to the Rest of Us.

In the same way that widely available technology like Linux and MySQL made what we now call Web 2.0 possible, layers like KFS will enable major companies (hello, Facebook and the social graph) to scale and compete better today, and allow the next generation of startups to flourish.

I'll be writing more about this area -- a lot more -- as Zvents is at play in the same sandbox. In the meantime, Rich Skrenta is on the story, too.

Uncov on Zlango: Ruder than Onotech.

2007-09-27T11:12:00.000-07:00

Uncov has a great piece on Zlango, which is appropriately rude. I think I was too nice when I wrote about them in 2006. (page down after click because blogspot's permalinking sux)

CEO conversation: Startup personalities

2007-09-16T22:33:00.000-07:00

I had a great strategy discussion about the immediate future of the Internet with a couple other CEOs and a VC partner this past Saturday. Most of what we talked about can't see the light of day, but one snippet is shareable and worth sharing:

"There are three kinds of startup employees: People who want to win, people who want to be right, and people who want to make money. You can hire all three, but especially in senior management, you have to understand what kind of personality each person has; because they'll be motivated by different things, and under stress, they'll react (and fail) in different ways."

My CEO friend went on to say that his A-round backer told him that he'd decided to fund the company because the CEO is a "want to win" kind of guy, and the VC believed that the biggest startup successes are founded by "want to win" CEOs. I am sure that other VCs would strongly prefer "want to make money" founders; and some of your core engineers (particularly the ones in scaling and operations) had better be "want to be right" guys.

I think I'm somewhere in between "want to win" and "want to be right". I'm definitely not a "want to make money" guy -- I assume that will be a considerable artifact of the other two, and in the meantime, I've got a nice garden, a nice woodshop, and a nice view -- none of which I get to appreciate as much as I should, because I spend all my time working on winning and on being right :-)

Startup life.

2191 days later -- September 11th, 2001

2007-09-11T11:33:00.000-07:00

Six years ago, I lived in London, and September 11th unfolded on a beautiful fall afternoon. This is the essay I wrote and sent to dozens of friends that day. Six years later, I stand by every word.

----

An English friend called me on my cell phone. "I thought you should know...," he began. A hijacked plane had been crashed into the World Trade Center, he related, "...and one of the towers has collapsed." He was concerned, for me, for America, for his friends in New York, for this world as we know it. As I sat there on the bus, I was sure, in my heart, that it was a rhetorical flight of fancy. A hijacking, certainly. A bomb, a crash even, an explosion. But, a tower collapsed? These things, these most awful of nightmares, do not happen in our world. Or, at least, they had never yet happened in mine. Well, youth is fleeting.

Within two minutes of his call, I'd received the same information from two other sources -- a startled man entered the bus, Walkman radio earphone tight in one ear, and announced to us all, the passengers of Bus 88 assembled, that two planes, not one, had hit the building. He told the driver first, as if that man's status as a government employee somehow made his prior notification an important duty. This was, he said, bad for world peace. For the United States must retaliate, surely. At the next stop, a woman walked along the sidewalk, talking so loudly on her cell phone that, through the window of the bus, I had no trouble hearing, "...bombed the World Trade Center...!" before we moved off. The news was spreading.

I sat on the bus, as it slowly wended its way northward though London traffic and remembered a pale foreshadowing. In the spring of 1995, I was sitting in a corporate classroom in Plano, Texas. Our head instructor walked in, interrupting the lesson. He said, "I thought you should know...a bomb has exploded in Oklahoma City at the federal building. They think it was terrorists." Sitting there in Texas, I *knew* that it was Islamic terrorists. This was retribution, for America had just bombed someone, or done something, somewhere Over There, as we tend to do -- as the long historical record of military somethings, somewheres, that we have written as a nation over the past century testifies. I knew this, but I was wrong. It was instead an American, who felt betrayed by America, betrayed by the very system that earlier freedom fighters and founding fathers had created to govern the free, by the just.

My immediate reaction was to think of who I knew in New York, to see how closely this touched me. As it happened, two friends from London are there, both of them working in the financial district, one for Chase Manhattan, one for Salomon Smith Barney. Were they all right? I tried to call one, a quixotic impulse at best. Not surprisingly, the connection of one UK cell phone to another in New York was not deemed a high priority by the overwhelmed telecoms network.

My second reaction was to gather all news, any news, obsessively hunting scraps of news, furtively collecting small mental piles of the scraps, and playing with, puzzling over, and piecing them together to make sense of this tragedy. What of the fourth plane? What of the fighter jets sent to intercept it? The reports of car bombs at the State Department? The mysterious plane crash in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, hundreds of miles from the coast, where there is little of value save the local inhabitants, including my grandmother, fifteen cousins of varying magnitude, and about thirty thousand white-tail deer? Sometimes, impersonal tragedies work in mocking ways, giving me a vague personal connection when, in truth, I desire none.

My third reaction brought me more peace. I need no personal connection, because I will rise above the solipsism of this age, this self-centered, individual-obsessed era, and weep for the many, cry for the lost, for the spirit of society, the dreams of the nation, the ideal of the masses who yearn still to be free. Thousands are dead, and we will never know them. They were not heroes, cast in bronze. They were not perfect. They were human, they were ordinary, and they have died not by choice, but by coincidence, and died not for a cause, but for a crime.

What do we believe in? Do we, America, deserve better than this, this crematory pall of ash over Manhattan? Will we, the many, take away from this great conflagration only some sound bites, only some collected tales of heroism and shattered normalcy, only some ephemeral connection to the reconstructed media shadows of the fallen few, or will we take away something more?

In this terrible time I find clarity, and in my clarity, I find belief.

I believe in justice.

America must act with restraint before knowledge, and with righteous anger when knowledge is obtained. We cannot allow this monstrous act to go unanswered, but most certainly we cannot allow ourselves to be sullied with the same taint of slaughter that these criminals have brought upon themselves.

I believe in freedom.

America must change its practices and, perhaps, its laws, so that this does not happen again. But America cannot, it must not, sacrifice its ideals in that pursuit. Freedom lost is too high a price to pay for peace of mind renewed, and Pyrrhic victories serve no one. We must not give up what we seek.

I believe in leadership.

America has led the free world for over fifty years. We have not always been wise, but our actions have largely been of good intentions, and, despite the difficult path that good intentions tread in this uncertain world, largely of good result. We must not take this devastation as a sign that leadership is a burden no longer worth bearing, and we must redouble our efforts to lead through wisdom, and to lead through justice. Let us lead the law-abiding, let us lead the angry and dispossessed of foreign lands, let us even look within and lead the doubters of our own America. Let us lead by example, an example of justice, and of freedom.

I believe in peace.

The world has known little enough of peace, across the globe, and throughout history. Some would claim that the day will never come when all lay down their arms, and I say, that day will come, and may it come soon. I see countries and peoples consumed by anger, laying waste to the land, poisoning the minds and the lives of their children, and bringing down death and destruction upon their neighbors. Rarely do I see this where I see justice, freedom, and leadership. Peace is the fragile child of all these three, and may it be borne of them again.

I believe in humanity.

When I look at us, I see no ideal, no shining vision, of what we could become, what we should become, of what is 'best' in us. I see who we are, we grubby, smelly, apes, and I love us. May we live our silly lives in happiness, may we pursue our plebian dreams, may we bounce our grandchildren on our knees, argue with our annoying relatives, drink our nasty potables, and watch yet another rerun of classic television. In that ordinary society I see happiness, I see beauty, and I see dignity, of friends and family known and loved, of work well done, of Sunday afternoon naps well taken, and I say, let it be so.

Let us all be human, and let us all one day soon, weep only for the tragedies of the past, and no more the tragedies of today. Let there never be another September 11th, I pray.

Google's highly dynamic indexing

2007-09-01T20:52:00.000-07:00

For a while, my friend Prabal Dutta has been in the #1 spot on a Google search for his first name. Recently, I checked to see if he was holding his spot. Nope! Some other dude had it, instead, and Prabal had dropped to #2. I sent him a teasing email, "Dude, you lost 'Prabal!"

He wrote me back from Japan, where he is attending a conference, "I seem to have won it back," and enclosed a screenshot showing him in the first position.

I immediately checked on my end. Nope! Still some other dude in the first position.

While his location (Japan) might be at play here, it's even more likely that with him logged in, Google is blending some personalization in to the results. That itself is quite interesting, but not the most interesting discovery to come from our exchange. After we swapped screen shots, I clicked on the link to his page for whatever behavioral boost it might give to him, and went off to have a fine dinner party.

Tonight, 10 hours later, I checked again. I'll be damned. Not only is (my friend) Prabal Dutta back to #1 in my search results, but Prabal Gadh has absolutely vanished. I am not logged in for any of these searches, though I am almost certainly cookied.

The big news here is that not only is Google crawling and integrating new content incredibly rapidly (as I mentioned in my recent Scoble post) but they are re-indexing and modifying ranking incredibly rapidly, too. It's a highly dynamic index -- vastly different from the once-every-three-months crawls and refreshes of 2002, and worlds away from the crawling and indexing policies of trailing quasi-competitors like Yahoo.

It's as if they had the world's best distributed computing platform, or something.

I'll have more to say about that platform soon.

All search begins and ends with people AND algorithms

2007-08-30T22:43:00.001-07:00

OK. This is genuinely beginning to drive me nuts. This whole "people vs. algorithms" thing. This whole "social vs. search" thing. News flash, blogosphere -- it has always taken both people and algorithms. It has always taken both social and search. Google is much more like Facebook than it is different.

What does Google do? They:
a) analyze links on the web. Who put those links there? People. What are those links equivalent to? Recommendations.
b) analyze user behavior (clicks) within Google, which is a lot of clicks. Who does the clicking? People. What are those clicks equivalent to? Recommendations.

Here is the singular brilliance of Google: Unlike all the great data-driven marketing companies that had come before them, they figured out how to bootstrap this giant people-driven recommendation system using someone else's data. Free data. Public data. It was all just Out There on the Web, and they went and examined it, and said, "Hey! All these people are implicitly making recommendations with their hyperlinking habits! We could USE that!"

Previously, you had to have inside information to assess what people thought, what they wanted, what they recommended. You had to work hard and spend money to collect that information. On a small scale, like Zagat. On a big scale, like Nielsen. On a giant scale, like FICO. Do you think Proctor and Gamble wasn't driven by the preferences and recommendations of people in 1950? Of course they were. But they weren't sharing. Google grabbed the brass ring of the web, leveraged it up into their own highly trafficked search engine (and its highly proprietary set of consumer data) and now, they sit at the center of a set of human recommendations -- clicks, blog posts, hyperlinks, ad buys, domain name purchases, etc. -- the breadth and richness of which boggles the mind, and turns Facebook green with envy, their considerable bravado notwithstanding.

Two years ago, I wrote a post about the different ways that users express their preferences. Then Nivi said it better than I did. Nothing has changed here -- and search and social are still much more similar than different, and Google remains the greatest and most profitable people-driven recommendations company on the planet.

Mahalo, Techmeme, Facebook, Google, Scoble

2007-08-26T12:15:00.000-07:00

Which of these is not like the other?

Trick question, actually. All of these are very much like each other -- they are social relevance mechanisms. They just use different data to assess social relevance. As I discussed in a post about social search relevance in 2005 (which inspired Nivi to write his awesome Trillion Dollar Matrix post) all relevance calculations rely upon people, because we're the only thing that matters when it comes to assessing relevance. And in whatever form we assess relevance, contrary to Robert's assertion, we're susceptible to "SEO".

Here are the relevance mechanisms:

Mahalo - perceived prestige and accuracy of sites -- gathered by many social mechanisms
Techmeme - blog link graph and textual correlation
Facebook - 'social graph' of friends' interests, links, activity
Google - web graph of hyperlinks, and increasingly textual correlation -- links made by people!
Scoble - "ear to the ground" in Silicon valley -- via phone, email, twitter, the center of a social graph all his own

And here are the SEO mechanisms:

Mahalo - Persuade an editor that your site is important - PR or payola
Techmeme - Persuade three bloggers that your site is important - again, PR
Facebook - Persuade a cluster of friends to use your site and drive newsfeed items - marketing
Google - Persuade (or fake) a bunch of hyperlinks from important sites to yours - SEO
Scoble - Persuade him that what you're doing matters - PR

So I must respectfully disagree with Robert's assertion that these mechanisms are SEO resistant -- they are just as susceptible to persuasion as Google is, and possibly even moreso, since the scale of effort required to game Google is fairly monumental.

Now, to Robert's second claim:

"Oh, and the only way you’ll watch these videos is if someone tells you to watch them. No Google."

Here are screenshots I took a few minutes ago for some Google searches:

Mahalo, Techmeme, Facebook, Google, Scoble: Nails it.

Mahalo, Techmeme, Facebook, Google: Nails it.

Mahalo, Techmeme, Facebook: Nails it.

Mahalo, Techmeme: Nails it.

Note that these Google searches are from 12:10pm on Sunday -- 20 minutes after Scoble wrote that post. Ye Gods. Anyone looking for information about social search mechanisms is going to find that post, and those videos, just fine using Google. Google is scarily good right now -- they are indexing phenomenally fast, and extremely well, across most of the high-value portions of the web. We see crawl logs at Zvents that demonstrate that their crawling capacity, accuracy, and cycle time blow away everyone else in the industry. I will be as delighted as the next guy to see Google's dominance reduced -- it's part of our mission at Zvents, in fact -- but I can't see that they are fundamentally disadvantaged vs. these other social relevance mechanisms. Quite the opposite, in fact -- are Mahalo's editors reading this in bloglines yet? Are they working on Sunday? The Googlebot is.

Scoble is more fun to party with than the Googlebot, though. :-)

Yelp launches local events. 230 of them, anyway

2007-08-23T22:42:00.000-07:00

Earlier today, Josh Lowensohn at Webware posted an article on Yelp's new events feature. Josh compares the nascent service to Yahoo's Upcoming.org, and correctly notes that Yelp's integration is better. He then writes,

For instance, say you want to catch the Beastie Boys show at the Greek Theater tomorrow night in Berkeley. Upcoming can tell you about the venue, but first it'll have to spit you out to Yahoo Local. Yelp on the other hand has their review ratings integrated, so you can quickly tell if the venue is hot or not (sometimes literally) without making you feel like you're being jettisoned to a different Web service.

I'm not surprised that Yelp is adding local events. We believe that events are the pivot point of local search and local commerce, and anyone with serious local aspirations needs to do them well. And while I applaud Yelp's social model for restaurant reviews, their new event service is pretty raw. How many events do they list in San Francisco? 230.

Zvents has 43,000 events in San Francisco. Granted, that's one of our better metros -- in Boston we have a mere 47,000 events, in Detroit we have a bare 13,000 events, and in Chicago, a snip at 7,900 events. Sigh. Gotta work on Chicago.

It's also worth noting that 'search' is a fairly important part of local search. If you click on that link to Zvents' open search for San Francisco between now and noon Saturday, you'll see that the Beastie Boys show in Berkeley that Josh mentions comes up first. Why? Because one of the several flavors of secret sauce that our dynamite search team has baked in the Zvents relevance algorithms is popularity, including both click and search query factors. So if you didn't know that the Beastie Boys were playing this weekend in Berkeley (I know, it happens to even the most-informed of us) Zvents will help you discover it -- and many other events besides. And if events aren't your cup of tea? How about a quarter-million restaurants, or over a million movie showtimes?

Social sites like Yelp -- and like Eventful, Attendio, and Going -- have an important role to play in finding, communicating and coordinating local things to do with your friends. Social networks and good old fashioned email are critical, too. But at the heart of local discovery lies local search, and I'm proud to say that Zvents is doing local event search better than anyone else -- both for our own site at Zvents.com, and for over 70 local newspaper partners, ranging from the biggest local city site in America to local community papers.

Hedge funds hate taxes, but love big government

2007-08-20T12:32:00.001-07:00

A couple months ago, those titans of hypercapitalism, those steely-eyed creators of economic value, were spending all their time arguing that paying income tax like everyone else Just Wasn't Fair.

Now that their Ponzi scheme built on pretending that sub-prime mortgages were safe investments is collapsing, what does Wall Street do?

Sit around and wait for the Fed to intervene. Wow, that's great risk-taking and value-creating behavior, guys.

This kind of hypocrisy makes me sick. Creative capitalism -- the Silicon Valley way -- is as different from this nonsense as night and day.

Update: A NYT article today entitled, "Investors Say That Fed Must Do More to for Markets" contains this great quote from that captain of capitalism, Richard Berner, chief United States economist at Morgan Stanley: “If the money markets are still in disarray a few days from now, I would think the Fed is going to have to take additional steps.”

"Markets in disarray"? I thought markets were perfect?! I thought that markets were efficient?! Can it be true that markets need regulation and intervention? Nah. Couldn't possibly be true.

Funny how when the big bonuses are replaced by the big abyss, all the Wall Street capitalists get religion. Maybe they should pay their taxes, so there's a government to protect them when they need and beg for it.

Ethan's two iPhone annoyances, and two from everyone

2007-08-10T17:50:00.001-07:00

In the spirit of collective product feedback, and inspired by Rich's post, I'll throw out two things that drive me nuts about the iPhone, and two things that drive *everyone* nuts about the iPhone:

1) When you're on a call, you can't look up a number out of the 'recent' list. You can look up contacts; you can use the keypad; but there's no way to get to 'recent'. There are a couple key use cases for this -- I'll give two examples.

a) Often when an emergency occurs, a new unfamiliar number enters your life. My dad went in to the hospital, and a series of calls went around the family with his room extension. When I called my brother, I couldn't jump over to 'recent' to give him the number. I had to hang up and call him back.

b) When you're planning around a new destination, you are again using an unfamiliar number. Restaurant, hotel, whatever it might be; if you are coordinating with another person, you often need to tell them a number that you just called, which is only in your 'recent' tab.

And no, you cannot even go out to the main screen and delve in to it -- the magic 'phone' function that gets you there defaults to your ongoing call, not the the standard phone menu which includes 'recent'. Dumb.

2) Path dependency on contact UI. Normally, when you go to a contact, you can edit it:

However, if you go to a contact via 'recent', you can't edit it:

Here's the case for this one: Someone calls me via a new phone number, and tells me that this is his new cell. From 'recent,' I select "add to existing contact" and add his new number in. I now want to delete his old cell number -- but I've got no edit button!! I have to go the whole way out to the main screen and dig down again to remove his old cell. Dumb.

Universal iPhone gripes

3) You are being mocked because we all want some key punctuation characters on the main keyboard. Please. Maybe even numbers, too. Typing addresses into Google Maps is just a PITA. Some people have been driven to outright rudeness.

4) Everyone would like cut and paste. Please. Just add it.

Facebook: The 'viral marketplace'

2007-08-03T12:19:00.001-07:00

Perry Evans has a fantastic post on Facebook:

Adsense is a brilliant machine, designed to optimize and extract the “transactional lead value” out of every consumer search.

FB app distribution should become a brilliant machine, designed to optimize and extract the “viral network value” out of every social connection they facilitate.

Transactional revenue model - meet your match - it’s the viral network marketplace model. If FB evolves to create the “must be in” marketplace for viral distribution of consumer applications, it will become a really, really important company.

I think that Perry has this exactly right. I'd just add two words to his key point:

"If Facebook evolves to create the “must be in” marketplace for viral distribution of consumer applications and content, it will become a really, really important company."

Why are these two words really important? Check this out:

* "Google is the “must be in” marketplace for search distribution of consumer applications and content."
* "Windows is the “must be in” marketplace for PC-based distribution of consumer applications and content."
* "IBM was the “must be in” marketplace for mainframe distribution of enterprise applications and content."

Yeah, there's gold in them thar hills.

I just said "thank you" to a computer

2007-08-02T14:56:00.000-07:00

I just got off the phone with the customer support number at UPS, which I had called in order to modify delivery arrangements for a package.

I talked to no one but a computer, a pleasant and articulate young woman who neglected to tell me her name. After about 90 seconds of her asking the right questions, telling me what I needed to know, and listening politely when I gave her more information, I said, "thank you" and hung up. The only bobble in the entire call was the ending sequence -- when she asked if there was anything else she could help me with, she didn't pause and listen for me to say "yes" or "no,thank you", but immediately launched in to a list of options.

I keep saying "she" because it was much more a "she" experience than an "it" experience. That's a first for me talking to a VRU, and I wanted to properly timestamp it. These computer thingies... they're going to be big.

My Data Smog: Email Stats

2007-07-26T23:17:00.000-07:00

I just read this Slate article on the 1997 book 'Data Smog' and was amused by the following passage from its author, David Shenk:

Ten years and about 50,000 inbox e-mails later, it's pretty obvious to me that smart filters have a vital role to play.

Hah. I just checked my email inbox. It goes back to February 7, 2007 -- 168 days. It contains no spam, and almost no newsletter type email -- I delete all that stuff. I have 14,145 items in there, an average of 84 per day.

Startup life.

iFolded

2007-07-05T22:57:00.000-07:00

I caved in and bought an iPhone. I am not, I repeat not, an early adopter. I bought my last cell phone in 2004, and that was the first time I'd ever had a phone that could do anything besides make calls.

At the time, I was working on a big project about the future of mobile for NTT, and I thought, "time to give this stuff a try". So I bought the Nokia 6600 'Pandaphone' from T-Mobile with the unlimited data plan. Bluetooth, color screen, cameraphone, web browser, email... yeah baby.

I actually got the bluetooth modem trick to work, a few times. Slow as molasses. I never, ever figured out how to email a photo from the cameraphone, despite hours and hours spent online and on the phone with their tech support. As for web browsing? Give me a break.

So it turned into a phone for... making phone calls. And I stayed stuck in the 90s.

Then came the iPhone.

You know the drill. You know the hype. Well, my friend Jason Zien bought one, standing in line on the weekend to get it. On Sunday, he came up to Redwood City to show it off.

Jason's iPhone was a revelation. The touch screen, as everyone says, is magical. No other word for it. The screen resolution and sharpness is amazing. It's gorgeous and clear. It... just... works. I instantly fell in love - not because it's an object of desire, but simply because it is... useful.

I took a picture of him and Andrea. And emailed it to myself. It showed up.

Hey, T-Mobile and Nokia! Are you listening?

So I decided to buy one. This, you recall, after the "They didn't sell out, nothing to see here, move along" weekend.

Well, actually, in Northern California, they did sell out. On Monday at lunchtime, none to be had at the Burlingame store -- and none had arrived that day. Monday night, I checked the 'locator' on apple.com. Sigh. None were going to arrive on Tuesday. Now, I am not the kind who has to have things Right Now -- but what i hate is the incremental process of getting something. If I could have just ordered one to show up in two weeks, that would have been fine, but this Chinese water torture approach was not going to work. So I checked the locator for Columbus Ohio, where lo and behold, there were plenty of iPhones. I got my friend Craig to buy me one at 9am the next morning. Which he did (thanks Craig!!) with no muss, no fuss, no line.

His critical addendum to the iPhone,you can see in the photo yourself -- click for detail.

I love it. It's still not entirely set up, and I love it. I've only found one problem, which I will note here in detail.

Apple, you are morons for how you handle wifi passwords.
Maybe this is in a manual somewhere -- but the device is so damn easy to use, I haven't cracked the manual, and I don't want to. If you have a hex or ASCII WEP password to your wifi hub (doesn't everyone?), you have to go into Settings and change the settings (under wifi, other, security) to "WEP hex or ASCII". Then, when you enter said password, if it's hex, you have to precede the hex with a $ sign like this: $4B42C7 and if it's ASCII you need to put it in quotes like this: "password". Otherwise it Will Not Work. Aargh. Jason bailed me out on this -- thanks Jason !! -- I'm not sure if it was due to his PhD in computer science or his slavish fanboy devotion to Apple :-) -- it *couldn't* have been that he RTFM, nah -- but he saved me in the one pinch I've had thus far.

Tomorrow, life will go on more or less as before.

Today, well, cool.

PowerSet: Let's Re-Invent Everything

2007-06-28T23:40:00.000-07:00

I drove up to San Francisco for the inaugural PowerLabs open house. Nearly four hours later when it was all over, I gave three PowerSet people who had missed their train a ride down the Peninsula. "What's great about this company is the business people," said one, a PhD. "They really seem to know what they're doing."

Yeah. There are a lot of smart tech guys who've been in too many dumb companies. This certainly isn't one of those.

The big knocks on PowerSet -- 'PowerHype,' etc. -- can be broken out into three categories:

1) Can they build it?
2) Will anyone care / do they have a business?
3) What will Google do in response?

I've not been worried about 1) for quite a while. While there are many real technical challenges to bringing up a web-scale search service, there are many real technical guys at PowerSet who've done it before and can do it again. Since modern search is far more heterogeneous than most people realize -- a spaghetti ball of models, features, and evidence driving every instance of ranking and retrieval -- PowerSet doesn't have to climb all the way to the top of some brand-new semantic mountain to launch *something* decent. What they're trying to do is technically hard and thus quite risky, but they've certainly got the right team to try.

To my surprise, they made a very impressive stab at persuading me about 2) 'Will anyone care' tonight. Though they compared it to World of Warcraft several times, the PowerLabs concept bears the most resemblance to an open source project in general, and the Slashdot community as a particular instantiation. Submissions, votes, feedback, and all the other communal goodies of the open source way, wrapped in a slick interface and presented to prosumers who will give feedback and product advice, tell their friends, blog incessantly, and create a large nucleus of interest and buzz about their new service when it emerges. It's smart. It's also, take 2, very risky. It can fail in a lot of peculiar ways, and it's a brand-new innovation to the company launch problem. We'll see if they celebrate or curse this decision years from now.

I am compelled to add that it's not just the concept that's impressive about the business side of this company. Their PR has been impeccable since launch, their fund-raising was also eyebrow-raising, and this whole evening was handled very well. Steve Newcomb, COO and founder, was calm and impressive in presenting the vision, answering nearly every question, and conveying an absolute sense that this company stands for something, and is striving to do something great. I dare say it's almost impossible to fake that sort of sincerity; I admire them greatly for making this huge bet, and am intrigued to watch whether they can pull it off.

3) remains to be determined. WWGD is a (the?) key Valley question, ignored by any technology company at their peril. The big G is not infallible, but no one has even stressed them yet. Microsoft managed at least two really outstanding strategic pivots (Office in response to Borland, and Explorer in response to Netscape) and web search is Google's game. Tonight, Steve and I had a spirited exchange about whether Google can emulate the results of natural language using statistical methods. While I concede his point that there are edge and corner cases that can't be done by any other method, I maintain that enough core cases can be derived from query behavior analysis to really limit PowerSet's perceived advantage to end-users, and thus their motivation to switch. Steve's ultimate response was, "in any case, we'll have moved search technology forward"; a good answer for the world, regardless of what that might mean for PowerSet's option-holders.

I got laugh line of the night, so I've gotta blog that. Steve revealed some numbers about their indexing time per sentence; he played the crowd well, with repeated, "I don't know if I should tell you... Barney [CEO Barney Pell] might kill me..." before the big reveal. When a minute or two later he said again, "Barney might kill me," I called out, "Who killed Steve?" in best PowerSet query style. Laughs all around.

Summary: This is still incredibly early. The core of their technology just came out of a LAB, for God's sake; they won't have a real search engine for half a year at least, if not longer; and any speculation about whether they'll be better than some multi-billion dollar competitor is kind of like wondering whether Greg Oden will break any of Wilt Chamberlain's records.

They've put together an impressive bet; they're making all the right noises; they could become General Magic, or they could become great. In any case, it'll be fun to watch.

Startup life.

Update: Dan Farber at CNET and Kevin Burton also have commentary.

Close your eyes and make cyberwar go away

2007-06-24T21:15:00.000-07:00

The New York Times today published an incredibly bad piece on cyberwar. Entitled 'When Computers Attack,' its entire purpose seems to be to allow reporter John Schwartz to wave his hands, make vague assertions, and explain how there's nothing to see here.

I am a big fan of the writing of military expert John Robb, so perhaps I am particularly sensitive to the fragility of complex technical systems and the real risk of their disruption. But even with that discount factored in, the Pollyanna attitude of the piece is incredible. Here's an early paragraph:

"But how bad would a cyberwar really be — especially when compared with the blood-and-guts genuine article? And is there really a chance it would happen at all?"

I'm just guessing here, but it appears that the two main claims of the piece will be, "It won't happen," and "If it does, it won't be bad." Hmmm. Kind of reminds me of our government response to a certain famous memo.

Yes, Virginia, terrorism happens, and yes, it can be bad.

The meat of the article supports the possibility of cyberwar being a big deal:

* "China, security experts believe, has long probed United States networks."
* "The United States is arming up, as well. Robert Elder, commander of the Air Force Cyberspace Command, told reporters"
* "An all-out cyberconflict could “could have huge impacts,” said Danny McPherson, an expert with Arbor Networks."

Sounds pretty serious, right? But that's before Schwartz dismisses the experts.

"Whatever form cyberwar might take, most experts have concluded that what happened in Estonia earlier this month was not an example."

Wait a minute! Estonia is a particularly wired place, and pissed-off persons unknown brought key infrastructure of the country to its knees by blocking access -- to banks, to government websites, to overseas consulting gigs. How is this not cyberwar? A blockade is an act of war. This was a blockade. Just because the harbors and ports are digital doesn't make it any less harmful, or any less aggressive.

Schwartz then makes assertions that net out to, "it wasn't cyberwar because the Russian government wasn't involved, just sympathetic Russian hackers." Come on. When the United States was funding the Contras in Nicaragua, using convenient irregulars to mask our role, was it any less warlike of us?

Then we get to the most breathtaking dismissal of all, especially for a writer in New York:

...the technologies and techniques used in the attacks were hardly new, nor were they the kind of thing that only a powerful government would have in its digital armamentarium.

Perhaps Schwartz's clever uses of obscure synonyms for 'arsenal' dazzled him so much that he forgot a certain incident carried out by a non-powerful-government with non-new-technology that had some slight consequences for world history:

I'm afraid it may be worse than bad memory -- other parts of Schwartz's brain also appear to be functioning poorly. Next, he argues that since war bears risks, no one will enter into it:

In fact, an attack would have borne real risks for Russia, or any aggressor nation, said Ross Stapleton-Gray, a security consultant in Berkeley, Calif. “The downside consequence of getting caught doing something more could well be a military escalation,” he said. That’s too great a risk for a government to want to engage in what amounts to high-tech harassment, Mr. Lewis said. “The Russians are not dumb,” he said.

Yeah, right. Those attacks that result in escalation never happen.

So Schwartz doesn't understand war. But he can still go out with a bang: he doesn't understand economics, either!

...Kevin Poulsen, a writer on security issues at Wired News, said that he had difficulty envisioning the threat that others see from an overseas attack by electrons and photons alone. “They unleash their deadly viruses and then they land on the beaches and sweep across our country without resistance because we’re rebooting our P.C.’s?” he asked...
...Down on earth, by comparison, this correspondent found himself near the Kennedy Space Center in a convenience store without cash and with the credit card network unavailable. “The satellite’s down,” the clerk said. “It’s the rain.” And so the purchase of jerky and soda had to wait. At the center’s visitor complex, a sales clerk dealt with the same problem by pulling out paper sales slips.

People, after all, are not computers. When something goes wrong, we do not crash. Instead, we find another way: we improvise; we fix. We pull out the slips.

This is breathtakingly bad fluff.

Does Schwartz not understand why we bombed the crap out of Germany and firebombed Japan during WWII? It wasn't because the Germans couldn't "pull out the slips" and build airplanes underground. It wasn't because the Japanese couldn't "pull out the slips" and rebuild their small workshop factories. It's because total war is economic war, and a good way to win an economic war is destroying the efficiency of your competitor.

No silly "Red Dawn" style invasion is necessary. Economic blackmail -- or economic destruction -- is plenty good enough.

Our entire society rests on fragile, difficult-to-defend infrastructure. At a basic level, our survival depends on systems of distribution for food, water, and energy which might easily be disrupted. At a more elevated level, our prosperity and happiness as a nation depends on those systems, and others -- such as international trade, the media, the financial markets -- not just working, but working flawlessly and efficiently. Any attack which reduces that efficiency has real economic consequences to us, whether we "pull out the slips" or not.

Cyberwar can impact those systems, and thus it is a real threat, a real risk, and something that deserves being taken seriously. Bin Laden understood this. It's a shame that John Schwartz doesn't.

Who are the heroes? And why do we ignore them?

2007-06-24T20:20:00.000-07:00

There were endless news stories about the tragic death of nine South Carolina firefighters in the media last week. Driving to and from work the day of their funeral, I caught at least three distinct references on NPR, including a brief clip of the mayor speaking in somber tones about what heroes they were. The coverage was hagiographic, everywhere -- as in this piece, Firefighters pay tribute to those who answered 'death's call' -- in a small-town paper in Massachusetts. Or this piece, 'Brotherhood of Honor,' from Worcester, Massachusetts.

Massachusetts!! It's a long way from South Carolina.

Firefighting is a hard, dangerous job. I believe that those who choose to become firefighters do so partially out of a sense of duty and service, and I am sure that they are brave. Their death was tragic, and their remembrance worthwhile.

But their incredibly public death and remembrance starkly demonstrated what is utterly, totally missing from our public discourse today -- and the echo of its absence rang loud to me all that day, and still.

The day after the South Carolina fire, nine soldiers and Marines died in Iraq.

Where were their two thousand news stories?

Every day, our soldiers and Marines are dying in Iraq. Eighty-six have died thus far in June -- four every day, day after day. Their job is harder and more dangerous than any firefighter's. They too serve out of a sense of duty and service, and their bravery is beyond question.

But their death is doubly tragic, and their lack of remembrance doubly stark. They are dying not in an attempt to extinguish a blazing warehouse. They are giving their lives in a futile attempt to temporarily bank the raging fires of sectarian collapse in Iraq, so that the failed policies and cynical policy-makers of the Bush administration can escape part of the blame they so richly deserve.

Meanwhile, we, and our media, sit silent, our gaze awkwardly averted; or we throw ourselves into frenzied ceremonies around some other, smaller, but at least meaningful tragedy. How can we let one small sadness overwhelm our sense of the greatest tragedy of our times? Why does no one make this point? Silence, here, is complicity.

Event search drives traffic; Zvents expands partnerships

2007-06-07T10:17:00.001-07:00

The incredibly exciting opportunity that drove me to start Zvents is that one third of local search -- "discover things to do" -- is an untapped market. I define local search as three major areas:

* What to buy: Yellow pages & merchant search
* What to do: Events, movies, restaurants, activities
* What happened: News

Of these three, "what to do" is completely untapped, whereas the other two have seen significant efforts, both by traditional media and by Internet companies.

There's a simple reason that "What to do" is untapped - it's hard to do well. Events expire rapidly, events are highly structured (think repeating series of plays, with different times on weekends) and events are very fragmented -- in a major metro area, there are tens of thousands of events in a given week, across a vast range of categories like sports, music, performing arts, classes, politics, community, clubs... the list is endless.

So it's very gratifying to see the positive response that our local search engine for things to do has garnered -- both among users, where we've seen huge growth in traffic; and partners, where we've been signing up media firms at a steady clip, with the New York Times Regional Media Group being our latest relationship.

Local analysts Pete Krasilovsky and Greg Sterling both wrote about our latest news this morning, and I encourage you to check out their pieces. "Discover things to do" is a great opportunity and a fun place to be, and across the market of Zvents and the others chasing it, I look forward to huge advances and lots of fun.

Startup life!

Props to Google: Users Create Content!

2007-06-06T21:42:00.000-07:00

I was looking up the upstate New York church where my cousin Greg is getting married Saturday, and lo and behold, there's a new feature on Google Maps:

There in the lower left, it says, "New! User-Created Content"

I can hardly express how this warms my heart. The big G realizes that users are people, and that they are creative! Too bad that most of the Web 2.0 community is so far behind. If I could choose one phrase to have a stake driven through its soulless, MBA-mouthed, PowerPoint-printed heart, it would be "User Generated Content". I have blogged in the past about using human words for human deeds (see note at the end of the post). Machines generate. Humans create. Nice one, Google.

Google Street View: Brin's Transparent Society

2007-06-06T14:01:00.000-07:00

I just read all the comments over at BoingBoing about Google's Street view.

All these people need to buy and read David Brin's excellent essay, "The Transparent Society".

Welcome back to the village, humanity.

Startup CEO: Three kinds of serious conversations

2007-06-06T13:22:00.000-07:00

There are three kinds of serious conversations that the leader of a startup can have with his team. The first kind is, "We're in deep trouble here, and we have to fix it."

Six weeks ago, I had one of those conversations with our engineering team at Zvents. As our traffic and partner network really started to grow, we were having scaling issues, uptime issues, and process issues, and after a few wobbles, there was a real possibility that we were going to fall over hard. The team responded magnificently. We've completely reworked our release and QA processes, and we've fixed some glaring issues in the code base, and I no longer stay awake at night worrying about what will break next.

The second type of serious conversation is, "We've got an incredible opportunity here, and we have to focus the particle beam and make it happen."

I had that conversation with the engineering team yesterday, and we'll be talking about it with the whole company in the next few days. In a startup environment, it's just as important to succeed at upside tasks as it is to respond to downside risks -- and we've got some really great prizes in clear view that we need to achieve. The reason that we're all in a startup is the joy of running absolutely flat out to grab those prizes, and we're going to have a fun -- but deadly serious -- couple of months of sprinting to take Zvents to the next level.

The third type of serious conversation is, "We just accomplished something important and amazing. Now, what do we do next?"

We've had that talk a few times at Zvents already. As a startup, you don't last two years without a few amazing victories along the way. The first time was when we successfully launched at Web 2.0 on about $50K in total funding, and there have been several others since. I look forward to having that conversation again -- both soon, and many times more.

Startup life.

Kawasaki's Web 2.0: But Weren't Websites Always Cheap?!

2007-06-04T12:18:00.000-07:00

Guy Kawasaki is very smug about how cheap it was to launch a moderately useless site like Truemors.

As I recall Bubble 1.0, one of the big problems was that people confused the following:
* ideas vs. businesses
* web sites vs. software

Nothing has really changed. In 1999, it was cheap and easy to turn an idea into a web site. In 2007, (shock!) it's still easy to turn an idea into a web site -- though now with open source and open APIs, you can get a more functional one for your trouble.

It's always been hard and expensive to write software, and it's always been hard and expensive to create a real business. Even in 2007, it's still hard and expensive to build a real software-driven business. There are always exceptions; but their rarity proves the rule.

If this is link-bait to make Guy $150 per month, and to garner a few hundred thousand page views from users who will never come back, then fine. It costs me nothing, and it benefits Guy hardly at all.

Meanwhile, the real business of building Internet-focused, software-based businesses goes on. And at Zvents, it's going really well.

Why is Facebook hiding platform application user numbers?

2007-05-30T13:28:00.000-07:00

Facebook's launch of their new platform has been the hot story of Silicon Valley for nearly a week now. An initial rollout of 80 apps on an open platform created a wave of buzz and adoption that has been impressive to behold. But the hot story hasn't been just about Facebook. It's been about Jeff Jarvis' teenage son Jake creating a last.fm app that garnered over 15,000 users. And most notably, it's been about iLike's astonishing rise to over 750K users in less than a week.

Are stories like this one on VentureBeat -- all about iLike, and not about Facebook -- the reason that, with the rollout of their new "most recent" and "most popular" functionality for finding apps:

Facebook appears to have hidden the number of users for a particular app? I can still see the friends, I can still see the reviews, but I can no longer see the number of users:

Whassup? Hey, Facebook! Doesn't open mean open?

Zvents answers Eric Schmidt's question; John Battelle worried

2007-05-24T14:14:00.000-07:00

On Searchblog, John Battelle writes,

"The Day I Ask a Search Engine 'What Shall I Do Tomorrow'...is the day one of you, please, should put me out of my misery... once I can have that kind of a conversation with a search engine, it's entirely arguable if the search engine is anything other than a human being, right?

John, Zvents has been built to answer exactly this question. Here's your answer to, "What shall I do tomorrow in San Rafael?".

And since Eric Schmidt asked the question in the first place, here's the answer to "What shall I do tomorrow in Mountain View?"

It's not human. But it's pretty smart!

Hey, Scoble: It was a B-24, not a B-17

2007-05-22T12:07:00.000-07:00

Robert writes: "Oh, heck, I just posted some photos of a B-17 that’s been buzzing Silicon Valley, too."

That was a B-24, not a B-17. Twin tails. Four engines. Passed over my house about six times this weekend, at about a thousand feet.

At one point I thought I saw a B-25 as well (twin engines, twin tails) but I may have been mistaken.

I had a thoroughly mis-spent youth as a WWII airplane geek, and occasionally it pops through. How mis-spent, you might ask? How many nine-year-olds do you know that listened to their record player on an original B-26 pilot's flight helmet instead of earphones?

Steve Ballmer: Market Capitalism Doesn't Work

2007-05-19T10:41:00.000-07:00

I found this quote on Donna Bogatin's Digital Markets blog. Regarding Google:

“I don’t really know that anyone has proven that a random collection of people doing their own thing actually creates value,” [said] Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO.

Um... free markets? Invisible hand? Hello, Steve.

I don't want to beat on Mr. Ballmer too hard, because it's always been a peculiar tension of capitalism and a thorn for its most fervent (market fundamentalist) adherents that the macrofauna and apex predators of capitalism, public companies, work nothing like free markets internally, and in fact strongly resemble the command-and-control economies that capitalism is supposed to supersede.

Nonetheless, a very funny quote.

No wonder the country is a mess

2007-05-17T07:57:00.000-07:00

The NY Times notes some interesting results of financial disclosure forms by presidential candidates:

Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California, reported assets worth hundreds of thousands of dollars but also said he owed more than $30,000 in car loans and more than $75,000 in credit card debt.

There are two ways to read this:

a) for a decade Congress has been run by people like Duncan Hunter who are too dumb to understand that $75K in credit card debt is a financial disaster, and equally too dumb to understand that pile-driving the budget into the ground by combining an expensive war, a moronic new Medicare benefit, and giant tax cuts is a financial disaster.

b) is even more depressing. For a decade Congress has been run by people who don't care about running debts up while in office, because they know their special-interest buddies will lavish them with rewards for their toadying once they've done their duty and graduate to the private sector.

The Times being the Times, of course they focused the article on the fact that some of the candidates are rich.

Hand Wringing About Education

2007-05-16T09:20:00.000-07:00

It seems to be our national pastime to worry that today's kids are kind of dumb compared to some ideal representation of past glory. One of the key ways this is expressed is bloviating articles about dumb high school kids that come out every time some national test result is published.

The New York Times is the latest perpetrator of this meme. Despite generally positive results versus earlier years, the entire spin of their article is dumb kids, dumb kids, dumb kids. But the remarkable point to me is what an incredibly high standard they need to invent in order to garner a suitable quotient of worry.

They write:

...more than half of the nation’s high school seniors still showed poor command of even basic facts like the impact of the cotton gin on the slave economy or the causes of the Korean War...

I am in the tiny fraction of humans who enjoyed and excelled at history so much as to enter a PhD program at a top tier university in the subject, and I don't view either of those items as "basic facts". A "basic fact" is something like, "What was the outcome of the Korean war for Korea?" (answer: Partition along the demilitarized zone between North and South).

"Causes of the Korean War" is really quite complicated, especially when subjected to the incredibly imprecise testing method of multiple choice, with questions designed to trick. It's only because I was a very serious war history geek that I knew much about the occupation of Korea by Japan from 1905 through World War II when I was in high school, and any attempt to address the causes of the Korean War which ignores the post-colonial impact of Japan's departure is laughable.

I also happened to study the history of science and technology in grad school, and I find the claim that "impact of the cotton gin on slavery" is a "basic fact" to be downright silly. I suppose that the answer to the question is that the cotton gin made the refinement of cotton into cloth cheaper and faster, driving down its overall price and putting demand-driven market pressure on the South to vastly expand the institution of slavery in order to grow more cotton to process with cotton gins; but I would be extremely impressed with any high school kid who could come up with that; so impressed as to probably offer them a summer internship at my startup.

The reporter, Sam Dillon, closes his piece with an example multiple choice question, which is a rhetorical hook designed to let your typical upper-middle-class, highly-educated New York Times reader walk away from the article shaking their head about those dumb kids:

The test asked students, “What did Abraham Lincoln mean in this speech?” and listed four possible answers.

a) The South should be allowed to separate from the United States.
b) The government should support slavery in the South.
c) Sometime in the future slavery would disappear from the United States.
d) Americans would not be willing to fight a war over slavery.

Fifty four percent of the fourth graders given the test failed to pick the correct answer, letter c). “These are very worrisome results,” Mr. Rabb said.

You've got to be kidding me. That is the trickiest wording imaginable for that question; the right answer is wishy-washy and vague, and the three wrong answers are precise sentences about the key issues of the civil war, with the key word "not" either missing or present to make them false. Knowledgeable is not logical, and logical is not diligent and precise, and I am dubious that this question answers anything more than whether high school seniors are highly logical, diligent, and precise in their test-taking. No. Shock, surprise.

Parents have been griping about the fallen morals and depressed intellect of their children since at least the introduction of that social scandal, the waltz, into England in 1820. Get over it, everyone. Your kids are going to be fine.

The Best and the Brightest

2007-04-23T18:54:00.000-07:00

David Halberstam died yesterday. I am currently reading his outstanding book, 'The Best and the Brightest' which is a extraordinary series of portraits of the men who made up the Kennedy administration, and who led us in to Vietnam. I discovered from the New York Times that he lived in the Bay Area and died in an auto accident in Menlo Park.

He wrote of people who were so close to greatness, but created tragedy. I'm fascinated at how this small tragedy has revealed to me how close to this great author I was, and never even realized it.

His book has one core message, which applies to startups as much as politics: Don't waste your opportunity to make a difference by being arrogant, narrow-minded, or dogmatic about reality. Adjust and thrive. Deny and die. Even the best and the brightest can blow it.

Negotiating for Minority Rights with Car Bombs

2007-04-18T11:02:00.000-07:00

It's a horrific scene, and an even more horrific number of deaths. No, not in Virginia -- in Baghdad. Again. 115 die in a single gigantic explosion.

This is really quite simple, and it's based on the diffusion of technology, in the form of high explosives. The Sunnis are a minority in Iraq, and to make their position even worse, they're the deposed former nasty overlords and oppressors of the Shiites. The Shiites are, not surprisingly, highly enthusiastic about massacring the Sunnis as soon as the Americans get out of the way.

But wait, say the Sunnis. You may massacre us -- there's frankly not much we can do to prevent it, since you've got lots of guns and explosives of your own, plus control of government and an advantage of numbers -- but we're certainly not going to go quietly, and you're not going to get anything like peace. In fact, you'll get fear and chaos and random death which will make any massacre-based future social order carry the distinct and unpleasant taste of spoiled victory. We'll mostly be dead, but we'll keep blowing you up, too.

So let's negotiate about this whole massacre thing, OK?

That's why 115 people just died in a single gigantic explosion in Baghdad today. To send a simple message -- "Let's talk."

Iraq is very far gone, and it's almost entirely due to widespread availability of guns and high explosives, which make conversations like this quite a bit more percussive and destructive than they otherwise would be. So what do the gun nuts recommend for our society? More of that recipe, please!

Product Review: Moka Junior Express Coffee Maker

2007-04-14T11:00:00.000-07:00

I've now raved about this little coffee maker to a couple of people, so I'm writing a review that I can point everyone to instead of repeating myself. This is a stove-top coffee maker that looks (and works) a lot like those little camping espresso makers you saw back in college:

It takes about a cup of water and about two scoops of coffee. The water steams up through the grounds as you heat it on the stove, and the results are dark, rich, and utterly fabulous. It's coffee that is halfway to espresso - I cut it about 50/50 with milk -- and the taste is out of this world. For $20 at Target or Amazon, it's a real winner.

The back story on this is interesting: My friends Matt and Jen swear by this coffee maker, and have been using it (and its larger sibling) for years. They bought me one about three years ago, and somehow I never got around to using it -- force of habit with the drip coffee maker, I guess. We have a friend, Ophelia, who travels lightly through life -- she's biked across the U.S., and is currently camping out in the Bay Area post grad school at M.I.T. When she recently showed up to stay with us, carting her approximately 40 pounds of worldly possessions, lo and behold, a Moka had made the cut. After she made me some coffee from it (which Matt and Jen did years ago -- mea culpa, guys, I was young and foolish!) I was hooked. I dusted their old gift off and have been avidly using it ever since. I now plot how to get a first cup of Moka coffee in me before I head to the office -- a real behavioral change. For the cost of three drinks at Starbucks, you've gotta try it.

Concierge selling services: Reverse your model!

2007-04-01T14:44:00.000-07:00

There are a ton of people in the business of packaging up your stuff to sell on eBay. AuctionDrop are the ones that come first to my mind, but this article lists about a dozen.

The basic premise is that a local business can provide a service involving listing, packaging, shipping, and managing the paper trail for used goods and make plenty of money. All these people have focused on sellers thus far -- I suppose on the theory that the motivation to clean our your garage is stronger than the motivation to buy some shiny object in a faraway place.

This is silly, because attraction to shiny objects is deeply human. In my previous post, I discussed a multi-city search for a Performax sander. I'm a woodworker, and I've decided it's time that I had a sander in the shop because I'm tired of two-week gaps in projects while I take a pile of panels to the mill. In my quick survey of Craigslist, I found broadly similar sanders that I would buy in cities ranging from Boston to Los Angeles -- at prices ranging from $850 to $2800. Now, guess which one I want to buy? But do I even want to deal with the hassle of trying to arrange buying something remotely and shipping it to myself? Unlikely. I may even have a tough time having a serious conversation with the seller, given that what I want to do bears a strong resemblance to some well-established scams.

AuctionDrop and others should step in to this market. "Listing, packaging, shipping, and managing the paper trail for used goods" can work with the causality arrow pointed in both directions -- or, said another way, as a post-purchase rather than pre-purchase option. I want to be able to get an approximate quote from AuctionDrop to drive to zip code 90210, pick up a purchase weighing 300 pounds, put it in a box, and send it to me in 94025. I want to be able to loop them in to the email chain after I buy something in Boston and have them deal with the details. Inspection of the goods at a basic level would be great, too -- there would have to be some significant liability waivers, but "I plugged it in and it ran" is certainly something that they could indemnify. This could be very lucrative. In order to get the $850 sander vs. the $1800 sander, it's easily worth it to me to pay someone $500, and I can't imagine that shipping costs from LA are more than about $200. There's a fat margin in there waiting to be exploited by... someone.

Craigslist: Please Innovate!

2007-04-01T14:31:00.000-07:00

I spent some time using Craigslist this weekend. It works spectacularly well for many things, such as local searches for stuff to buy with a specific keyword. My example of the day is Performax sander, and yup, there is one. I can even grab an RSS feed of this search and dump it in to Bloglines as a way of watch-listing newly posted items -- probably the #1 most useful feature on Craigslist for me.

But I can't search for similar sanders in Los Angeles, or even Sacramento, without going to those separate city instances -- and I have to click through the miserable front page (apparently designed as a one-time picker for your home city, and little else) to get to each of those cities. None of the listings have any structure to them -- which means that when there isn't a handy keyword, I have to go through thousands of listings by hand with almost no tools to help me narrow my focus. Aargh! And where are the maps, or at least the easy tools for people to include maps from 3rd party providers? I get about a 50% hit rate on map connections for real estate listings, so something is clearly broken there.

Ironically, I end up doing Craigslist cross-metro searches on Google by default. This Google search for "Supermax sander for sale" returns listings in Boston, Madison, Los Angelss, and San Jose -- all on Craigslist. Is it really that hard for Craigslist to do this? And do they really want this business going to Google by default?

Being free and basic is great. But the world needs something more than basic, and is willing to pay for it. Oodle, Vast, and others are trying to make this work -- with limited success thus far. Craigslist can innovate, and it should.

Demise of the Music Industry: Rookies Competing with Babe Ruth

2007-03-21T00:16:00.000-07:00

In a great article today, the Wall Street Journal reported that music (CD) sales are plummeting:

In a dramatic acceleration of the seven-year sales decline that has battered the music industry, compact-disc sales for the first three months of this year plunged 20% from a year earlier, the latest sign of the seismic shift in the way consumers acquire music.

How bad are we talking? Really bad.

This year has already seen the two lowest-selling No. 1 albums since Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks music sales, was launched in 1991. One week, "American Idol" runner-up Chris Daughtry's rock band sold just 65,000 copies of its chart-topping album; another week, the "Dreamgirls" movie soundtrack sold a mere 60,000. As recently as 2005, there were many weeks when such tallies wouldn't have been enough to crack the top 30 sellers. In prior years, it wasn't uncommon for a No. 1 record to sell 500,000 or 600,000 copies a week.

But there's hope -- consumers haven't abandoned music entirely, reports the Journal:

Apple Inc.'s sale of around 100 million iPods shows that music remains a powerful force in the lives of consumers.

What's going on here?

Well, as a guy who has recently gotten back into music after a long hiatus, I can report the not-so-startling fact that while there are a lot of great bands out there, there are very, very few that can possibly compare to the murderer's row of the greatest hits of the past six decades of rock n' roll, and even fewer that can defeat the combined forces of rock, jazz, blues, classical, baroque, and whatever else I've forgotten -- all of which is sitting in my iPod, waiting to be played.

You're a rookie pitcher. You've made the major leagues. Your first game arrives, and you face the following lineup, all in their prime:

Ozzie Smith
Willie Mays
Ted Williams
Hank Aaron
Babe Ruth
Barry Bonds
Lou Gehrig
Joe DiMaggio
George Brett

What are you going to do? Maybe take up cricket. Maybe take up golf.

That's the sort of situation that faces your average rock band today. You write some nice lyrics and some clever hooks, and you get your block knocked off by Arethra Franklin or Frank Sinatra or The King Himself or a goddamn Foreigner greatest hits, and you ask yourself, what's a hard-working musician gotta do to get some sales? If Oasis had been started in the 60s, we'd talk about them like we do the Rolling Stones, or at least Eric Clapton -- but they were 30 years too late, so we forget how great they were for those two awesome albums.

iPods are the problem with new music sales -- there sits 30GB of music, some of which, with normal human diligence I haven't gotten to in a year, and yet shuffle play brings it up in queue to me, and keeps me from buying new stuff, unless that new stuff is so irredeemably awesome that I would kill myself if I didn't.

This doesn't mean that a great band can't carve out a niche for itself. It can play live gigs, it can engage with its fans, it can politic for the starving of Africa, it can do all the things that dead icons can't quite pull off. But primary on the list of things it *can't* do better is move CDs through Wherehouse, which is the problem that the music industry must face.

Some clever person pointed out a few years back that Microsoft's biggest remaining competitor in the OS and desktop application was its own installed base. Hello, music business: Steve Jobs didn't kill you with iTunes, he destroyed you with shuffle play of the vast, awesome archive of your past success.

Babe Ruth wins, rookie. Now whatcha gonna do?

Zvents is two today!

2007-03-19T15:54:00.001-07:00

Happy birthday, Zvents!

Political season comes early: I shook Barack Obama's hand

2007-03-18T11:32:00.000-07:00

A group of us went to the Barack Obama rally in Oakland yesterday. Jodi, the sister of my college roommate Mark, works on the campaign, so we ended up getting very good seats near the podium. I got a bunch of great pictures which are up on Flickr, and SFGate got a great photo of me and Barack right before I shook his hand:

Click on the photo to see my whole set on Flickr.

I'm still undecided between Hillary and Barack, and I wish a decent Republican candidate would emerge to really push whichever Democratic candidate takes the nomination. It was great to see him speak in person, and hear how he played to a very liberal crowd without pandering. It's going to be an interesting 20 months of politics.

I think that democracy is working better because of the Internet -- six or eight years ago, this sort of posting and communication about candidates simply was not part of normal conversation.

Eyetracking study proves men are... men

2007-03-14T10:17:00.000-07:00

This is completely sad and completely predictable. Men of the world, be warned -- increasingly sophisticated consumer research technology is exposing just how silly we actually are.

From the Annenberg Online Journalism Review:

Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed.

Coyne adds that this difference doesn’t just occur with images of people. Men tend to fixate more on areas of private anatomy on animals as well, as evidenced when users were directed to browse the American Kennel Club site.

I'm going to go watch the Discovery Channel now.

Where is the Amazon birthday present planner?

2007-03-13T21:28:00.000-07:00

This is a billion-dollar idea that I hereby give to Amazon for free. Why? Because they have everything it takes to make it happen, and I want it now.

My sister Meg in Philadelphia has four children -- Connor, Nick, Lucy, and Bea. They're all less than eight years old, and somehow their birthdays seem to show up more than once a year.

But it's not just family members who are multiplying my chances to give. My local friends have all apparently gotten a secret telegraph signal to breed; at our recent ski weekend in Tahoe, there were 13 adults, 7 children under 3, one in the oven, and one on the, er, drawing board. Drawing bed? :-)

That's a lot of presents! Clearly, I need help. Let me make my motive clear. I am not just looking to buy these chillun' any old present out of some misplaced social urge crossed with good old American excess consumption. There are particular gifts that I want to get them -- great books I read as a kid, cool science toys, that sort of stuff. But I'm always frantic and behind the curve when their birthday comes, and the timing of me having a great present idea never seems to correlate with a suitable birthday.

I want the present planner from Amazon.

They've already built most of it. They already have most of my friends' shipping addresses in their system, a legacy of gifts past. They have a huge catalog of stuff. All they need to do is allow me to enter the name and birthday of the kids at each address, and create a special shopping cart / present pool that I can throw stuff into at any time during the year. Then, either prompted or un-prompted, they mail an appropriate, pre-chosen gift out a week in advance, gift-wrapped from Unka Ethan.

It's yet another instance of ERP for people.

That's version 1.0.

Version 2.0 is for the harried person who really doesn't know what to get his nephew. For this to work, Amazon only needs to collect one additional piece of information -- the age of each kid. Then, they will begin to learn what 5 year olds in zip code 44691 are getting for their birthdays. At scale, they can use this to make awesome recommendations -- "here's what her friends are getting from their uncles."

I can't believe this hasn't been done yet. It's a logical explosion of the PIM into verticals. Amazon already stores task-specific address book information, and it should start providing task-specific calendaring as well.

Heck, they should provide an Outlook upload feature -- I'd add a bunch of people to their address pool if they built this.

I can't wait. Please hurry, Amazon. Make yourselves a billion dollars.

Comments still not working - Help!

2007-02-23T15:31:00.000-08:00

So I'm still not seeing comments. Here are my current comment settings on Blogger:

I can't figure out what should be different. If you have any ideas, please click through to Flickr and leave comments there -- they seem to have commenting figured out!!