Google's highly dynamic indexing

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

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

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

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

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

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'

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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!

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

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

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?!

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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!

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

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!

Happy birthday, Zvents!

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

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

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?

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!

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!!

Personal Information: Beware the search session

The New York Times has an article on a new service, StolenIDSearch.com, sponsored by TrustedID. You can search for your social security or credit card numbers to see if they're already floating about the Internet:

TrustedID, a company that sells services to consumers to give them more control over who sees their credit reports, has compiled a database of compromised numbers that could already be traded or sold on the Internet.

It has created an online search tool, StolenIDSearch.com, where people can check at no cost to see if their number is one that is in a too-public domain.

TrustedID said that about 220,000 people have tested their numbers in the three weeks since the site has been open to the public.

The Social Security number remains the personal identifier not only for government documents, but for credit applications and medical records, as well as video and cellphone stores.

I went there and typed in my SSN -- according to them, it hasn't been hacked. I was going to type in my credit card number for a similar check, when I stopped and thought, "they have a search session ID on me -- and if I type that number in now, they'll have associated that CC number with that SSN. This is Not A Good Thing."

A problem with the modern world is that databases are everywhere, forever, and creating an a-->b-->c-->d linkage when you've got highly distinct key values (like these ID numbers) is just way too easy. Even with the best will in the world toward TrustedID, I don't think I'll hand them that particular linkage on a whim and implicit trust of the NYTimes.

This same fact is, of course, at least half the reason the modern world works so well -- but it's important that we're all aware that the downside has teeth, too.

As an aside -- this demonstrates the continuing value of journalistic trust. If I'd read that article on RandomInternetNewsSite, I wouldn't have clicked through and entered my SSN at all. I assume the Times has checked these guys out, and that they're fairly legit.

Of course, I assumed that the Times had checked out Dick Cheney and WMDs in Iraq, too :-(

Please comment!

Zoli has been nudging me to turn on comments. I finally (with his input) figured out how. Yes, I do run a software company, and yes, *your* user interface is probably more obscure than you realize.

This is a test to see of comments show up. Thanks, Zoli!

But Fred, maybe you *belong* on top of the Google charts...

Fred Wilson is perturbed that he's got Google Juice.

"I got 36 visits (about 1% of all my visits yesterday) from searches on "we were dead before the ship even sank". That's a lot of words to write in a Google search so those people were clearly looking for the new modest mouse record of the same name...
...Number one is Wikipedia, the owner of more Google Juice than any other website in the world. Number two is this blog. Amazon gets the third spot... Modest Mouse's own website barely made the first page.
...Google Juice is not a perfect system by a long shot. Everytime I see this effect and I see it a lot, I think... there's a lot more headroom in search."

The implication of Fred's post is that there's something wrong with a system that puts him ahead of Amazon, and ahead of the band he's writing about. I disagree. From my perspective, Fred is a perfect example of a highly authoritative source on music.
* He posts about music often.
* His posts are very timely - many of them are about pre-release albums, release parties, and real breaking news.
* He posts widely -- gems from the archive, brand-new stuff, top-10 lists.
* He has a theme - I'd call it "classic rock meets new music."
* And he posts about the range of musical activities -- listening to albums, going to concerts, playing Guitar Hero, analyzing Last FM and Pandora, etc.

I recently decided that I needed to stop being passive and out of touch about music, and Fred was one of a few key sources that I used to seed my search -- I also talked to a couple friends, and then took their recommendations and fed them into Amazon, Last FM, and a few other good sources of "related stuff." I've bought about 20 CDs in the past month, and am really happy with all these new tunes.

"Someone I trust enough to buy CDs based on their recommendation" is exactly who should be at the top of a Google search, I think. And the band itself doesn't qualify.

So enjoy your Google juice, Fred. You've earned it.

The empowerment of open-source innovation

Smaller. Cheaper. Lighter. More effective. Opens new vistas of usage, allowing people formerly reliant on expensive, centralized solutions to express themselves more freely.

The PC?
The cell phone?
Browser-based apps?

Nope. IEDs.

Andrew Cockburn has a nice piece in the LA Times about "explosively formed penetrators," the subject of much dinosauric rhetoric from our Dear Leader.

The punchline:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld...bequeathed the Army the Future Combat Systems, a $168-billion extravaganza of computers, sensors and robots... Rumsfeld's mentor, defense intellectual Andrew Marshall, marketed the phrase "revolution in military affairs" as a justification for high-tech programs such as Future Combat Systems. But those copper disks [of EFP IEDs] represent the real revolution in military affairs, and it is not in our favor.

Are you a startup guy? Open source stack? Commodity servers? VOIP provider? Sneer at the old, the slow, the walnut-brained, who you're rapidly replacing with your clever new widget?

News flash: the nation-state you rely upon for the stability, social mobility, and capital that makes your life possible is fighting people just like you. And those people are winning.

I see the Bat Signal in the sky. After we make sure that we're the good guys, how are we going to help the good guys win?

PowerSchwag from PowerSet

I went to the PowerSet funding party on Saturday. It was the best party I can remember since that Scient/Viant guy flew in a 747 full of flowers, rented out Treasure Island, and shot off fireworks in February 2000. I was having a housewarming party in the Berkeley hills that same evening, and we got a great aerial lights show for free.

Click the photo for schwag commentary. Here was the haul:



By far the most memorable event was one of their investors (Peter Thiel?) reading a lengthy poem about the history of search - which was surprisingly inclusive, mentioning Altavista, Inktomi, Excite, Yahoo, Ask, etc. Lots of mockery of the dropped ball of Yahoo and the failed NLP promise of Ask; and the punch line to the whole thing, which I am doing no poetic justice to whatsoever, was something like,

"We'll know we've succeeded when Google's best guess,
will be to say I don't know, so go ask PowerSet."

I'm assuming that their codebase will be better than their rhymes.

Mike Arrington posted and linked to some video, and for more flava, I am sure there are tons of action shots on Flickr.

A shout-out to Marc Canter

Marc dropped an "emotional outburst" (his words) on the blogosphere last night, after Om Malik wrote a post on white-label social networks that didn't mention Marc's company PeopleAggregator.

The first person I ever heard say "social networks are a feature, not a product" is Paul Martino, who brought Marc in to advise Tribe Networks back when the whole world temporarily didn't care about the Internet. Marc has been thinking and building this stuff for years, and not only is he defining the white-label social network space, he's been an essential thinker for me and plenty of other entrepreneurs with his concept of "digital life aggregators" combined with vertical web services. Vertical web services like, ah, events.

Thanks, Marc. Keep leading the charge. And occasionally wearing your heart on your sleeve is way OK with me.

The bad guys are hackers, too

The world has reached a certain fascinating state when the New York Times, the gray lady herself, writes a bemused and almost laudatory article (no, wait, it's a blog post!!) about a pseudonymous hacker who's broken the content industry's latest quixotic attempt at copy protection. I can think of no better proof that the hacker culture of freedom has deeply affected our modern culture.

Unfortunately, a lot of innovation is done by bad guys, too. Spam, phishing, and box cutters + airliners = -skyscrapers are all great examples of brilliant hacks, and they've made our lives measurably worse. The latest example comes from John Robb -- apparently some guerilla hacker has figured out how to block GPS signals with readily available, cheap tech. This does not bode well for the maintenance of structure and order that is so important for the fragile capitalist economy.

Every time you celebrate innovation, the open-source spirit, and radical change, ask yourself, "do I disproportionately benefit from the status quo, and am I at risk?" Much more often than you realize, the answer is yes.

The second most sincere form of flattery...

...is a Google ad against your name.



Zvents says thanks, guys.

Some other names you might consider buying ads against:

Denver Post
Boston.com
San Jose Mercury News
Freedom Communications

Coming Soon: The American Democratic Revolution

From today's New York Times:

Illinois Is Putting Lottery on Block for Quick Payoff
The state of Illinois yesterday took the first steps in selling its state lottery system, hoping to attract as much as $10 billion from investors who, in return, would own a monopoly that could turn out to be the biggest jackpot yet.

The first thing that sprang to my mind was the pre-Revolutionary practice in France of the Fermiers. According to this convenient website, "The fermiérs paid a fixed sum of money every year to the King. It was then their responsibility to collect the taxes for their region - taxes on the tobacco, the salt, the materials that come and go from each city."

Needless to say, if you've paid a fixed sum for something from which you can derive variable income, your motivation is to squeeze every last nickel from your franchise.

Needless to say, this can be hard on the populace, when your authority is backed up by the state.



And pointedly, fermiers were among the significant causes of the revolt that became the French Revolution, and many of them ended up under the guillotine.

Lotteries are demonstrably a disproportionate tax on the less-well-educated, less-well-off members of society. That they are voluntary is no excuse. State involvement in gambling has always been papered over with false moral rebates like "it will be used for education" or other nonsense.

Now, Illinois is skipping past all the fake morality, and simply grabbing cash to pay its operating deficit while casually mortgaging its residents' future expenses.

It terrifies me that every possible measure of indebtedness in this country is rising, while every possible future income is being packaged and peddled. After we're done mortgaging our last remaining free cash flows and fully selling our souls to the false twin gods of excess consumption and no new taxes, maybe it will be time, again, for the American Democratic Revolution.

Owning local search results - and avoiding the "Google back button tax"

Don Dodge has a great post on the big gap in local -- newspapers, yellow pages, and the big search portals have thus far all failed to own local search results. I think that Don is right that papers need to do a much better job of exposing (largely through SEO) their content to the major engines; but they have an equally important task, which is to retain the user through value once the user arrives at their sites, by offering them parallel navigation, related content, useful search tools, and appealing options to explore and expand on the initial query that brought them to the site.

While papers have to live in a world that starts with Google first, they have to maximize their value in that world -- which means attempting to avoid the "Google back button tax" of the user clicking back to Google after every search that lands them on a newspaper content page, to give Google first crack at the targeted ad dollars on each subsequent search.



This requires serious product thinking, user testing, and technology on behalf of newspapers and other local content owners. It will hopefully surprise no one that Zvents, my company, is heavily engaged in all three. We're going to be at the NAA conference in Las Vegas, and I'd be delighted to speak with papers about how they can not just compete, but win, in the local search market.

Calling YouTube: Michael Oher

I've just finished reading Michael Lewis' excellent new book The Blind Side, which details the evolution of the left tackle position in the NFL, and traces the extraordinary personal story of a gifted young left tackle, Michael Oher. The book begins with the tale of a grainy videotape of an extraordinary block by Oher being sent to a national football scout, and the book describes many other such plays during his high school senior year. But there's nothing on YouTube for Oher. Why hasn't someone posted this? Why hasn't Michael Lewis posted this?

I've gone from never having heard of the guy, to wanting to watch a 5-minute highlight reel. Isn't this what the user-created, on-demand economy is about?

Maybe I'm just kidding myself -- or maybe I'm just years ahead of the "extended conversation" that I envision emerging around all media. Oher is supposedly a latter-day Orlando Pace, the fantastic Ohio State player and current NFL all-star, whose amazing play from the mid-90s helped Eddie George win the Heisman. There's nothing on YouTube under "Orlando Pace" either.

I dug around and (apparently) found some Oher video -- but I have to subscribe to a prep football scouting site to view it.

How Web 1.0.