The complicated "Liberal thug-wimp" meme

Nothing delights the frothing portion of the Right more than an opportunity to paint liberals (and the one remaining American centrist) as wimps. They're wimps because they fail to "Support our Troops and President Bush."



Of course. They're wimps like this:



On the other hand, no outrage or indignity supposedly perpetrated by liberals must go un-reported, because it's all about hate, hate, hate, right?

So, in breaking news (and I apologize to the future that I know very few facts beyond the initial report as I write this) it appears that a National Guardsman has been attacked by persons unknown in Seattle, and Michelle Malkin and other feral pundits are in full cry that thuggish liberal wimps must be to blame.

Um... guys? A word to the wise. "Thug-wimp" is going to be very, very hard to maintain as a useful meme for misleading and enraging your electoral base. Because, you know, thugs are tough and scary. You might want to re-think this one, though your now-dwindling success with "Iraq, the central front in the war on terror" suggests that even this ludicrous extreme might get you at least a week's worth of gullibility from some folks.

Terrorism <> Iraq

The single biggest anti-terrorist success since 9/11 happened over the past few days, as the British, U.S., and Pakistani governments rolled up an apparently widespread conspiracy.

Latest Headline: "19 Suspects Are Identified in Britain"

How was this success achieved? Police work and international cooperation.

Iraq is the single biggest disaster since 9/11.

Latest Headline: "Blast Kills 35 Iraqis at Shiite Shrine in Najaf"

How was this failure achieved? Traditional military force and unilateralism.

The future is all about networks and fourth-generation warfare. When we recognize this, we win. When we don't we fail.

Why is Israel so determined to fail in Lebanon?

Latest Headline: "Israel Expands Offensive in Lebanon"

The Iraq model is a failure. The entire right-wing war machine that promoted it is now focused on justifying a lost cause.

Meanwhile, fighting terrorism works. And there are many important, obvious, sensible, anti-terrorist policies to be pursued, revolving around police work, international cooperation, and creating networks of peace and stability.

Let's get to work.

Kevin Burton: The Numbers Don't Lie

Kevin has an awesome post on blogosphere growth up today. I encourage you to go read it -- it's a great example of how hype can be deflated by applying a little math to the numbers at hand. All credit to Dave Sifry for what he's built at Technorati, but I strongly suspect he got trapped in this "doubling every six months" thing about two years ago, and now he can't get out of it without the entire punditocracy falling on his head.

There were some other guys who got caught in that kind of hype cycle, too, but they were running a public company. The guys at WorldCom -- several of whom are now in jail for their lies -- were possibly more responsible than anyone else for the inflation of Bubble 1.0 with their made-up claim of "Internet traffic doubling every 100 days."

"It was an essential ingredient of dotcom business plans and conference slide-shows: Internet traffic, went the industry's favorite statistic, doubles every 100 days. The claim assumed unimpeachable status when it appeared in a report published by America's Department of Commerce in April 1998. Unfortunately for the telecoms firms that rushed to build networks to carry the reported surge in traffic, it wasn't true. So where did the claim come from?..."folks from WorldCom”, typically Bernie Ebbers, its recently departed chief executive, or John Sidgmore, his replacement."

Web 2.0 is all about disruption of the existing media and creation of the new. It doesn't require magical thinking or puffery. The revolution really is here.

Zoli: Informed Comedy. Readable, Too!

Zoli Erdos posted a hilarious and informative follow-up to my earlier post about Microsoft and Nortel's press release. Zoli, I had never heard of the Gunning-Fog Readability Test, but now I am a better man. Thanks!

Microsoft: Crimes Against the English Language

It's not just humanities PhDs who write incomprehensible tripe...

Nortel and Microsoft Form Strategic Alliance to Accelerate Transformation of Business Communications: Shared vision for unified communications to drive new growth opportunities for both companies.

The title of that press release has 25 words and 171 characters, for an average word length (aka bullsh*t index) of 6.84. The first paragraph, complete with obligatory soulless handshake photo:



scores a slightly-better-but-still-horrific 6.07.

Contrast that to the gold standard for communicating meaning without baloney, Winston Churchill. The famous final paragraph of his 1940 "We shall fight on the beaches" speech scores a 4.3. Recalling that the word 'the' scores a 3, that's astonishing.

Microsoft, you still have a lot of work to do. Nortel, I'm surprised to discover you're still in business.

Back to the revolution...

Zvents powers San Jose Mercury News

Today the first enterprise customer for my startup, Zvents, goes live. At Zvents, we've always had the vision of powering the complete local events ecosytem, from individual venues all the way through to major local media. This launch is a major step toward realizing that goal.

One of the constant worries of the startup experience is what I call "360 degree vision" -- the possibility that at any given time, you could be working on *anything*; and the related concern that whatever you're focused on at the moment might be 180 degrees opposed from what you should actually be working on.

It's a considerable effort to create the organization, the relationships, and the codebase to make an event like this partnership with the Mercury News possible, and I'm incredibly proud of how our team has not only made this huge deal happen, but managed to keep several other balls in the air as well. Zvents is really on a roll.

Check out the Zvents blog announcement for more details.

The Sociology of the Sociology of Science

Before I dove into the startup life in '96, I was a PhD student at UC Berkeley in the history of science program. I overlapped there for a year or two with a smart guy named Alex Pang, who now works at the Institute for the Future and writes a blog called Relevant History.

As opposed to his regular interesting posts, Alex recently made a [thankfully rare] comment on academic sociology of science, which caused him to quote this passage:

[C]onstructivist sociology of science offers case-based analysis celebrating contingency and locality, favors archival and ethnographic methods, emphasizes agency over structure, and often focuses on issues related to epistemology and knowledge. Neo-institutionalism, on the other hand, searches for patterns over time and space, is more enthusiastic about using statistical and quantitative methods, emphasizes how structure can constrain actors, and returns in part to a sociology of scientists and organizations that was more characteristic of the pre-constructivist, Mertonian era.

Ye Gods. That's just painful to read. I don't know who wrote that, but they're never, ever going to be able to communicate with normal human beings unless they start speaking English. I thought it would be interesting to do a quantitative comparison between that ...stuff... and actual prose. Alex is a fully trained SoS practitioner who's broken free from his chains to rejoin the human race, so I compared the academic passage to one of his recent posts that I consider a favorite:

As an historian interested in Silicon Valley, I'm fascinated by Castilleja. More than any other place, it's given me a sense of just how tightly-knit the area's elites are: for all its global reach and influence, the Valley is still a bunch of small towns, knit together by schools, churches, volunteer organizations, and all the things that turn groups of people into communities. I come to events here, and the parents include people who were recently on the cover of Business Week or Wired. The real power scene isn't Stanford or Sand Hill Road; it's the line of parents waiting to pick up their kids from Menlo or St. Joseph's or Casti.

The students are in their dress whites this morning. Since they're normally in dress blue, it actually isn't that much of a step up in sartorial splendor, but it's a nice gesture. It's hard to raise a bar that's already high. Friedman is pretty high-profile, but the school has a constant parade of Macarthur genius prize-winners, Nobel laureates, people who used to have Secret Service details, and other generally fascinating people who come and speak to the students. (It's hard to raise the bar....) If, as I've sometimes heard, middle school here is like high school in most other schools, the speaker series rivals that of many colleges.

Introduction.... actually being done by one of the students. That's cool. She started an NGO that does relief work in Africa. Okay, that beats my vice presidency of my high school chess club (two years in a row). Would my high school record even get me into community college today?

Friedman's up now. Some anecdotes... why the world is flat... some more anecdotes... references to Lexus and the Olive Tree... I've posted the rest of the talk on Future Now.

Q&A is restricted to students. Love it: I recognize half a dozen CEOs and VCs, people who normally are the center of attention, and they're sitting in the back, listening. And not grumbling. Here, they're just parents.

I don't have to tell you which is better by any rational measure. But here's a numeric measure:

* Passage 1: 509 characters, 77 words, average word length 6.6 letters.
* Passage 2: 1625 characters, 337 words, average word length 4.8 letters.

Winner: Alex.

Social science grad school: Add 37% to your word length and remove 99% from your prospective audience. And it only takes away four, er, six years of your life.

Zlango: Didn't we solve this problem 3000 years ago?

Techcrunch is reporting on the launch of Zlango, an SMS icon service from Israel. According to Mike:

"Zlango...has created a very interesting new language...that could change the SMS landscape. The language is based on icons, or pictures. Each icon has a specific meaning - a person pointing to himself for 'me' or a heart for 'love'. There are over 200 icons included in the Zlango language today."

Didn't the Phoenicians solve this problem 3000 years ago by inventing the incredibly flexible and efficient symbolic alphabet? Because it sure looks like hieroglyphics to me.

Zlango's millenium-busting innovation:


State of the Art:

Zvents 2.0 is launching today

By the time you read this, Zvents 2.0 should be up and running.

Right now, hitting our site gives you this message, a portent of good things to come:



What's new and improved about this version of Zvents?

* Improved search relevance -- when you've got thousands of events in a metro area, relevance becomes a key to happy users. Our results are materially better than before, and we're committed to continuous improvement for relevance.

* Category navigation - refine or browse to events by category, reducing time and effort to find what you're looking for.

* Embeddable calendars are now CSSable version 2, vastly improved - a live example of a 1.5 version is Visit Marin.

* Much faster, lighter code -- less than 1/2 the size -- means faster response times.

* Improved navigation and look and feel

You'll also notice that we've got less features, not more -- we're running against the "features are king" silliness of Web 2.0 here, but we think that great design means focusing on what matters most.

Coming in the next 30 days - major customer announcements, plus bonus fun stuff!

Lunch 2.0 at Zvents -- the aftermath!

We got a huge turnout for Lunch 2.0 at Zvents on Wednesday - thanks to Mark Jen and the guys at Plaxo for creating this cool event. I would guess that about 40 people turned out - we bought burgers and sausages for 44, and the last two people to eat had to split the final one! sorry, guys :-( But aside from a slight demand-supply mismatch on the grilling front, it was a great place to meet folks, chat about startups, and enjoy the awesome weather and great back yard of our friendly incubators, NetService Ventures.



All the pictures are here.

Zvents powers Palo Alto Daily News

My startup, Zvents, has some cool media partnership news. Check it out!

Dear Google: Arabic Gmail to estock is spam

I like Gmail, and I use it as a personal account for this blog and other purposes. One of the things I like best about Gmail is the one-click ease of reporting spam and having it vanish from my inbox, with the sense of accomplishment that due to my small contribution, the Google anti-spam terrier is getting sharper teeth and a nastier disposition.

Except the terrier seems to be sleeping. Unless I am blind to some subtle i18n character set issues, it should be really, really easy for the Bayesian filtering algorithms over at Google spam central to figure out that hey, *every single* Arabic email that estock has received, he's classified as spam! And look, *every single* cyrillic and Mandarin character set email he's received, he's classified as spam as well! Hmmm. What could we do with this information? I think that just possibly, entropy could be reduced a little by incorporating it.

Ten or so of these a day, every day, get old. No, I do not want to hire any stock brokers from Dubai, even when they write to me in English -- and especially when they write in Arabic. Really. Hey, spam terrier -- bite 'em!

Lunch 2.0 at Zvents -- Wednesday, May 31st noon

Come join us for BBQ in the back yard of Zvents / NetService Ventures -- part of the Lunch 2.0 series started by Mark Jen and the guys at Plaxo. Read about the whole Lunch 2.0 series here.

RSVP by commenting on the Lunch 2.0 web site, or by adding a comment to the zLunch event page:

Parking will be tight, so please carpool, or park at the Sharon Heights Safeway, which is about a 5 minute walk west on Sand Hill Road (turn at the light at Sharon Park Dr.)

We'll provide all the food and drink, you provider the conversation!

Daniel Yergin's "The Prize" - History of Oil

I was chatting with one of my self-identified libertarian friends tonight (he started out the conversation with "were you referring to me in that last blog post?") and I ended the evening by recommending Daniel Yergin's fabulous book The Prize to him. It's a history of oil from its discovery in 1850 through to the first Gulf War in 1990, and it won a well-deserved Pulitzer. It's a huge tome (800 pages, I think) but an outstanding history of the single most important factor in world history during the past century and a half. If you read it, you'll be amazed how the thread of oil runs through the waning days of imperialism, both World Wars, and the Cold War... it really has been the fulcrum of power in modern times. Highly, highly recommended.

Airlines vs. Fuel Costs = Dirigibles?

I just read a fascinating article in the New York Times about Boeing, Airbus, and the future of commercial aviation. Boeing, as airplane geeks will know, has bet heavily on the 787 'Dreamliner', a highly fuel-efficient midsize plane designed to serve point-to-point international routes -- San Francisco to Shanghai, Athens to Boston. Airbus, on the other hand, is building the massive A380, a plane designed to carry 500+ passengers on core 'hub and spoke' routes such as New York to Tokyo, with smaller planes serving as 'feeders' to these routes.

This multi-billion-dollar faceoff between two different philosophies and infrastructures is reminiscent of so many other distributed-vs.-centralized battles. FedEx created a business by going with centralized hubs. "Mesh" networking is supposed to be more efficient and resilient by getting rid of hubs. However, it's clear in this case that one simple calculus will decide the fate of Boeing vs. Airbus:

Fuel cost vs. customer happiness.

As recently as 12 months ago, I would argue with friends about 'peak oil' and what an economy looks like as it slides down the back side of a bell curve of production; and I would get signficant pushback that we were anywhere close to such a circumstance. The more libertarian-minded were fond of citing the famous Simon-Ehrlich bet on commodities as a supporting point.

And here we are. Massively rising demand for oil from China and India; potential disruption of significant sources of production ranging from Venezuela and Bolivia, Nigeria and Sudan, Iraq and Iran, to the Khazak basin in the former Soviet Union. No massive new sources of oil discovered, and few likely to come on line soon. And wild cards such as the Canadian tar sands are predicated on... high oil prices to make them relatively cost-efficient to produce.



Which got me to thinking: If the tradeoff for airlines is fuel efficiency vs. customer satisfaction, why not dirigibles or blimps? Right now it takes about 10 hours to fly the 6000 miles from SF to London, at about 600 miles per hour. An appropriately designed dirigible could do it in 24 hours at 250 miles per hour, at a vastly (90%?) reduced fuel cost -- since a dirigible would benefit both from the cubic reduction in power-required vs. speed flown, and the absence of the need to expend power to keep the aircraft up in the air, which accounts for a large percentage of airplane fuel cost. Imagine that, instead of spending 10 hours on a cramped, noisy, EXPENSIVE airplane, you spent a full day and a full night on a quiet, spacious, dirigible? Broadband internet access would be essential -- not only could you make crystal-clear phone calls, but you could transfer any volume of data. You'd get nice meals from a large kitchen. You could walk around and exercise. You could sleep in a real bed. And in a world of $70 - $140 a barrel oil costs, all of this might be CHEAPER to provide than a miserable 10-hour flight.

The key, of course, is making the experience as business-like for business travelers, and as vacation-like for vacation travelers, as possible. Without doing some considerable aeronautical math, I can't estimate at what fuel price point dirigibles would start to make sene. But it's certainly fascinating to consider.

Portfolio Management, the Yale Way

Jason Zien over at Spotsearch recently wrote a post about Yale's asset allocation strategy, which has garnered amazing results - read Jason's post for the details. In about 2001, I read a book by David F. Swensen, the Chief Investing Officer of Yale University, called Pioneering Portfolio Management. It is one of the better investment books that I've ever read, and I highly recommend it. Swensen apparently has a new (2005) book out, "Unconventional Success," which is also well recommended on Amazon.

Ponytail Sweepstakes: Ted Waitt, Gateway

I've gotten a few emails based on yesterday's post about Jonathan Schwartz. It has been brought to my attention that Gateway founder and ex-CEO Ted Waitt was ponytailed for much (or all) of his tenure at Gateway:



There's a great quote on Waitt in a recent Fortune article, that foreshadows Sun's challenge:

"But while Waitt, the ponytailed visionary, was looking toward the future, boring old Michael Dell was obsessing over efficiency, thinking about how quickly a PC could be assembled rather than how fast it ran. As it turned out, execution was everything."

The ability of the Internet to quickly and easily answer idle historical questions such as "what was the market cap of Gateway during Waitt's tenure" is still limited, but a quick scan of the stock price suggests that it may have been as high as $28 billion circa 2000. This would significantly eclipse Sun's current $17B number under Schwartz.

The race is on, Jonathan!

"What's a Blog?" - Six Apart at Maker Faire

This was my absolute favorite sign at Maker Faire. I promised Elizabeth (the girl in this picture) that I'd blog about it, so here it is.



There was lots of other cool stuff at Maker Faire, including awesome mathematical castings from Bathsheba, which embarassingly I failed to photograph. Oh, and I-Wei Huangs's steam robots!

Scott out, Ponytail in, shares up!

Sun send Scott McNealy off into the sunset today, after a run of 22 years at the helm. I can't think of too many other CEOs who have run a company that long -- though I bet Michael Dell will get close.



In related news, Jonathan Schwartz is CEO -- does anyone out there know of a CEO of a company larger than Sun run by a ponytail-sporting guy? He may have the market-cap record for that particular feature.

I know a lot of guys rooting for him to hold the "return on shareholder equity" record for ponytails, too.

Search Trends: The Search For User Intent

There are several interesting trends afoot in the world of search. As I have previously written, concepts as disparate as editorial news and personalization are simply different ways to get to a better search answer. I'm now ready to extend this thesis a bit further, and claim that the next big leap in search is going to be driven by a superior ability to acquire and understand user intent.

In any query:response system, the quality of the output is fundamentally limited by the information contained in the query. In a mathematical sense, it's impossible to have more significant digits in your answer than you had in your input data. No matter how well you tune your response algorithm, not only will "Garbage In, Garbage Out" always hold true, but the more general case of "lack of precision in, lack of precision out" will limit how good your results can be.

On a general search engine (Google, Yahoo, etc.) an inbound user query can, quite literally, be about anything. Presented with a blank box that can encompass anything, the user then types in an average of 2.4 words, and the search engine must give back an ordered list of 10 relevant results (having worked very hard to remove spam, porn, etc.) that may approximate what the user is looking for. Suppose the user types in "Peru". Is the user a 4th grader writing a report for school? A college student planning a backpacking trip? A consultant searching for economic data related to a project? A Peruvian looking for things related to their home country in their local area? All these, and many more, are possible.

It's a very tough problem, and a key reason that search quality has ground to a halt, or at least stopped improving dramatically, is that in this completely general context, it's very hard to understand more about the user's intent than they grudgingly give you in their 2.4 words.

So how can search engines solve this problem of paucity of intent?

Answer #1 is to verticalize. Zvents, my startup, is an example of this trend -- as are Simply Hired, Kosmix, and many others. When someone types Peru into Zvents, we know -- simply because we're a search engine for local events, and nothing else -- that the user is looking for something to do in their local area having to do with Peru. In order for Google to get that kind of intent, the user would have had to type, "something to do in my local area having to do with Peru" or a similarly complex query. Zvents gets a great deal of intent information simply by being a specialist. When someone shows up in our search interface -- either directly, or via a media partner -- we can be confident they're looking for stuff to do. Simply Hired, similarly, would know that the user was looking for jobs either in Peru, or related to it; and Kosmix, under its healthcare filter, could infer that the user cared about health issues related to Peru.

Answer #2 is to personalize. Google is the most interesting case emerging at the moment. Go to the Google homepage and in the upper right you'll find a link to the new personalized home. It's a HUGE departure for Google -- who has built a multi-billion dollar business on a purely "visitor" experience -- to be moving to a registered user experience. It's likely that Google is doing this is to get a much clearer sense of search intent, based on personal past search history. At least one very senior technical person involved in the Google personalized home page has a background in mining extremely large log files to extract business intelligence -- exactly the kind of resume you'd want if you were attempting to derive intent from search history. I've also had some discussions with folks at Yahoo (who are also very happy to let you log in while searching) about the extremely sophisticated state information that Yahoo maintains as you move through the Yahoo portal; all aimed at improving the targeting both of ads and products.

Answer #3 is to get more intent directly from users. Many of you might recall the original concept of Ask Jeeves, which was to "answer your questions in plain English". In a recent conversation with some folks at Ask, they mentioned that one of the reasons they'd retired Jeeves was that delivering on this "brand promise" was nearly impossible - but that because of that historical promise, the length of their typical search query was vastly greater than comparables at the other big search engines. That begs the question -- what if you could successfully parse natural language English like "something to do in my local area having to do with Peru"? It's an incredibly hard problem, but the ability to accurately extract enough user intent to deliver a truly better search result would yield enormous market benefits. I know of at least one current serious search startup that is taking exactly this approach -- building a general-purpose search engine that can better parse complex intent, and accurately respond to it. If they succeed in their quest, and establish a "brand promise" similar to the original Jeeves, they'll have a significant advantage in actually giving users what they want.

There are other answers, but they look less and less like search. Aggregate Knowledge, for instance, is a matching engine for supplementary navigation based on heterogenous item:item matching in a "people who viewed this, also viewed that..." sense. At scale, AgKnow can derive intent from the cumulative behavior of multiple users who were exposed to similar information -- and as their scale increases further, they could slice even more finely to begin to distinguish path dependencies as well. I think we'll see an explosion of search alternatives in addition to advances in all three categories mentioned above, as dozens of companies large and small strive to crack the problem of too much information, not enough user intent.