Bud Light Hardbat Classic at The Venetian in Las Vegas
The Hardbat Classic Table Tennis Ping Pong rumors are not only true, they are truly Table Tennis and it’s going to be Vegas, baby!
I’ll be competing in the Bud Light Hardbat Classic which starts this Friday at the spectacular Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Top prize is … wait for it … $100,000.00 That’s enough money to pay the interest on our blossoming national debt for … well…. a couple of seconds. But never mind that….
I’ll try to keep up with some real time reporting via Twitter or here at the blog, though this may depend on data access at the venue and my own good or bad luck in the tournament.
There will be about a thousand players of all skill levels competing – many after winning their regional bar tournaments held around the USA over the past several months. Even though I won our local tournament it wasn’t a qualifier for the big one, so I’m making my own way there after they opened it up to everybody.
There are also brackets for a special group of “stars” chosen by the Hardbat Tournament, another for walk in players, and one for “pros” who have a rating or have played in USTTA tournaments over the years. Although I haven’t played in tournaments recently I was actually the USTTA National Table Tennis Champ in the “1300″ rating category in 1992 (ratings in Table Tennis are kind of like handicapping in golf).
The Bud Tournament is “over handicapped” , meaning that the very best players will have to spot a lot of points to lower ranked players – as many as 17 out of 21. My take on this tournament is that it will tend to favor unrated players who are very experienced with the “pips out” type of rubber required at the Hardbat Classic.
Hardbat Classic Official Website
Follow the Tournament on Twitter
Follow the Killerspin Team on Twitter
Blogs are talking about the HardBat Classic in Las Vegas at the Venetian:
China shuts access to Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live, Hotmail, Blogger via the “Great Firewall” filters
China is closing down access to various internet services as they approach they anniversary of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests in 1989. The early report from TechCrunch says that Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live, Hotmail, Blogger have all been made hard to access via the “Great Firewall” filters. I did notice when in China last year that there are various programs like ‘Great Ladder” that allow people to bypass these filters, but obviously not many are going to have the combination of nerve and savvy to do this.
I believe that China’s censorship policies are probably counterproductive *even to the Chinese Government’s goals* in the long term, and I’d sure like to find a way for the internet community to make this clear to China’s leaders. Ironically China’s leadership has done a remarkable job transitioning away from the bulky, centralized, bureaucratic economy that had been stifling progress for decades. China’s citizens now enjoy a higher level of prosperity and *economic* freedom than they arguably have ever had in history. Much of this prosperity is the result of producing goods for the US market. What exactly does the government think will happen if they allow more open dialog in China? I’d suggest they’ll find this would tend to reduce the tensions created by unhappy citizens rather than increase them. Suppression of dissent in Tibet routinely brings international scorn to China, where a more open dialog will bring praise, respect, and support.
China needs to realize that the world’s fascination and respect for China’s culture and international influence will be enhanced by free speech, not reduced.
TechCrunch UK is reporting on this and I’m looking for more direct information now.
More from China’s CN Reviews
Sue the bloggers!? [gulp]
Thanks to Paul for pointing us ot this interesting article about blogger liabilities. I’d be interested in how folks here view this topic. Do I need “blog comment insurance”?
Wall Street Journal on Blogger lawsuits
Bloggers are increasingly getting sued or threatened with legal action for everything from defamation to invasion of privacy to copyright infringement. In 2007 — the most recent data available — 106 civil lawsuits against bloggers and others in social networks and online forums were tallied by the Citizen Media Law Project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, up from just 12 in 2003. There have been about $17.4 million in trial awards against bloggers to date, according to the Media Law Resource Center in New York, a nonprofit clearinghouse that tracks free-speech cases.
Why Twitter matters … a lot. Clue = Soylent Green.
Twitter is moving into the mainstream faster than any major internet application in history, and is redefining online behavior as we continue to move away from “internet as information” and into the era of “internet as people”.
Obviously both information and socializing will play a huge role in online behavior for the duration, but like the ubiquitous and mysterious food source in the old Charleton Heston Movie, Soylent Green
Twitter is especially important because …. “Twitter is People”.
Some Twitter enthusiasts wrongly suggest that Twitter is important because it is breaking a few bits and bytes of news in real time (e.g. Hudson Plane Crash, CA Plane Crash) or providing a platform for discussion of pressing social issues (e.g. Gaza War). Meanwhile Twitter critics very foolishly point to the obvious about Twitter’s superficiality as if this was a defect.
Twitter is certainly largely superficial in terms of how people chit chat on the service, but this is the reason for it’s spectacular success. Humans by nature – ie by millions of years of evolution – are not designed well for thoughtful, reasoned discourse. Instead, for much of evolutionary history we were very UNintelligently designed by trial and error and random mutations to survive in sometimes hostile environments. This makes us a short term, superficial socializing thinker more than a long term planner. Sure, we sometimes do that long term stuff but if there are any lessons we can derive from history it is how poorly humanity has optimized our long term well being. One need look no further than the ongoing global financial crisis, global terror threats, tribal disputes across Africa, or global religious intolerance to see how poorly we cope with situations that would probably respond well with even a modest level of long term, optimal planning rather than the short term knee jerk nonsense that often stains our local and international finance, politics, and social relationships.
Twitter’s simplicity and superficiality are exactly why it will continue to thrive, diving into mainstream use faster than you can Tweet Ellen Degeneres, who yesterday challenged her viewers to become “followers” of her Twitter account. Although her goal of a million followers was not realistic, Ellen rose from zero to over 110,000 followers in a single day – perhaps a Twitter record and certainly a demonstration of a significant convergence of Television and internet audiences.
As internet activity stabilizes I think we’ll see people relying more and more on Twitter as their socializing platform of choice. There’s certainly room for many social networking sites, but I think Facebook needs to worry that Twitter may diminish the time people spend at Facebook in favor of the simpler, more intuitive interactions at Twitter. Twitter has done for social networking what Google did for Search – they created a super clean interface and made it extremely easy to participate, building a large and happy user base in a very short time. Unlike Google, however, Twitter will continue to face challenges monetizing their success, for as we’ve learned from Facebook’s experiences with ads and advertising fiascos it is not nearly as easy to make money in social networking as in information searching. I predict it never will be as easy and Twitter is likely to face some interesting challenges as they try to bridge the gap between user enthusiasm for Twitter and aversion to advertising. However Twitter will be a spectacular success with even a fraction of Google’s adverising revenue, so I see them thriving for some time.
TechCrunch’s Erick has this
ASUS new PC line at CES 2009
From CES Unveiled in Las Vegas – ASUS new line of PCs. More over at Technology Report
CES is fun so far with good tech and HUGE shrimp (holy oxymoron, batman!)
PictureMail
Originally uploaded by JoeDuck
Death of the Media Mogul: Digital Diaspora means …. less for everybody.
As podcasters and webcasters and such try to turn a buck they come up against fixed ad revenues.
Ad model is a problem
(Note several comments came in based on those two sentences before I finished this post)
The main point I’m trying to make here is that the internet has created a remarkably cheap and effective content distribution mechanism – a global soapbox for anybody who cares to make a point online. The cost to publish online is now essentially zero for all but very large scale online publishing efforts. Although eventually the number of publishers will level off as everybody who wants to be online gets online and the dropping out folks balance the new arrivals, I think we are still early enough in that process that there’s a lot of new website and blogging action ahead of us.
This suggests that it may be increasingly hard to become a *Media Mogul* even in fairly specific niches. We’ve seen the rise of mini moguls like Arriana Huffington in the Political space, Mike Arrington in Technology at TechCrunch, Jason Calacanis , and Nick Denton of the Gawker Yellow Journalism and Celebrity Blog Empire, but I think the success of early blogs is more a transitional thing than a trend that’s going to stick. Few blogs make much if any money and that’s not likely to change a lot although I suspect we’ll see lots of hard working good writers find comfortable niches of expertise managing to make a living providing online content – at least until the machines start to slice and dice and repackage online information so effectively nobody can tell if it’s organic or artificially intelligent organization.
Now, contrast this trend towards many publishers with the fact that online advertising total spending may actually decline in 2009, and more importantly can only grow so much. Now, it’s true that the online spend is currently low enough that we may see online advertising grow enough to support the growth of online content for some time, but my guess is that content is growing many, many times faster than online advertising it needs to be profitably supported. Luckily for users the content is not going to go away and will keep flowing online, but unluckily for online publishers they are going to have to produce more and more to make the same amount. We’re already seeing this trend with sites like TechCrunch which often spin out dozens of articles daily.
As an online publisher myself I’m not really sure how to address this challenge. Certainly I tend to favor keeping expenses under control and not making the mistakes we did earlier in the travel empire by spending too much to improve websites that were always under the gun of Google’s somewhat algorithmically arbitrary content policies. Better I think to use small amounts of capital to seed a lot of project and then fund the winners and let the losers whither on the vine. I’ve written a lot about this process which I think is somewhat analogous to biological evolution where smart businesses actually are usually working away from failure more than towards success. I know a many successful business folks (and perhaps even *more* biz wannabes) would bristle at the notion that serendipity plays as much a role in success as careful, reasoned strategy but the more I see of success and of failure the less convinced I am that formulas play much of a role. Sure it helps to work hard, have a general idea of what you want to do, etc, but like evolution I don’t think a whole lot of planning is the recipe for most success stories. On the contrary you find engaging people engaged in things they enjoy and are very good at doing, and you find lucky breaks or circumstances that propelled thos particular people to fame. Music and sports are a great example of this – for every thousand excellent singers or sportspeople there are only a handful of superstars, and the road to that stardom is often littered with personal tragedy as well as the failures of the other 999 folks who didn’t make it. I think the reason we tend to think there are success “formulas” is that we examine success too much and failure … too little.
OK, I got too far afield – must be the turkey talking. Hmmmm …. where is that leftover stuffing anyway?
SES, SEO, Blogs
Blogging the conference has been a great way to test some ideas about blog ranking and watch Google struggle to bring the most relevant content into the main search (they’ve done pretty well with blog search, not so well with regular search which will have all the blog content listed in a week or so, basically too late to be all that helpful to users). More importantly the stuff from *this year* will probably be ranked above the SES San Jose 2009 information that is likely what people using that term are searching for effective next year. I’d think they could simply increase the value of ‘freshness’ for listings tagged as events related.
I had a nice discussion about this “events” ranking challenge with Jonathan from Google at the party. The problem is that to combat spam Google does not push out blog content immediately, meaning that if you search for “SES San Jose”, especially a month ago or so, you would have been likely to get old, dated content rather than the current SES page you’d normally want to find. This appears related to linking issues (newer has fewer), but also I think the regular engine is allergic to new content, which is why you’ll often find the most relevant Google stuff at the blog search if it’s a topic that is covered heavily by blogs such as SES or CES Las Vegas where I noted the same issues of “stale content” in the main search with “great content” in the blog search.
I remain convinced that some of the challenges faced in ranking could be solved by a combination of more algorithmic transparency from Google combined with greater accountability by publishers who’d agree to provide a lot more information about their companies so that Google can get a good handle on the credibility of the online landscape. This webmaster ID is happening now in several ways but I’d think it could be scaled up to include pretty much everybody publishing anything online (ie if you don’t register you’ll be subjected to higher scrutiny).
SES San Jose – Lee Siegel Keynote
Lee Siegel is about to speak here at SES San Jose. He’s the author of “Against the Machine” and a senior editor at The New Republic, and a noted critic of the new media, primarily because he feels anonymity is a threat to intelligent, enlightened conversation.
Although I’m sympathetic to Lee’s points about how abusive the online world can be, and how foolish it is to consider as sacred the hate speech and the junk banter that passes as conversation, he’s missing two key features of the new conversational media that effectively sweep away much of the significance of his legitimate concerns.
First, the high tolerance for abusive and threatening language has become something of a new standard, especially for younger commenters. I don’t like it either, but for many writers this does not reflect the type of threat it would under other circumstances. It is not appropriate to apply old interpretations of this language to the modern usage.
Second is that focusing on the defects of blogging and new media distracts us from the profound and positive changes in communication – changes that represent the early stages of truly democratic and massively participatory conversations.
I don’t think Siegel is so much *wrong* as he is making fairly insignificant points about the new media. I’d certainly agree that there is a danger whenever people are stifled. For me the outrageous online treatment of Kathy Sierra, a noted blogger,is the exception that proves the rule. These cases are very few, and in a broad sense are eclipsed by the thousands of new voices coming online *every day*.
So, is there value in paying attention to these problems? Sure. Should this drive our understanding and appreciation of the most profound transformation in human communication history?
Nope.
More Cuil Search fun. Check out the …ummm… multiple personality finder.
Over at Sarah Lacy’s place she’s reasonable asking “Is it Cuil or Us” in terms of expecting too much from this new search startup. Since I’d been poking fun at Cuil’s failure to find itself I thought I better try a new search. Since Sarah’s is indirectly suggesting that bloggers like *me* might be the problem let’s ask Cuil… about me… Joe Hunkins….
JoeDuck’s World has moved CLICK HERE
Online Highways Guide to Travel, Leisure and Recreation …
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Google and privacy
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Twitter / Joe Hunkins: Bill Richardson to Endorse …
Joe Hunkins: ZoomInfo Business People InformationJoe Hunkins, ABR, CBR, CRS, GRI, of Hunkins Real Estate, Inc. in Greenland, N.H. and treasurer of the New Hampshire Association of Realtors was recently appointed as a trustee of the NH Realtor’s Political Action Committee. As a trustee, Hunkins will be responsible for interviewing political candidates and deciding… |
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Now, there is one more “Joe Hunkins” that is fairly prominent online – a real estate guy in New Hampshire – but he’s not pictured here. And neither am I. Despite the fact most of the text does relate to things I have written – though much of it long ago – I’m wondering who the dude is in the first picture? Hey, he’s a pretty good looking guy – maybe I should be him. Nope, the older guy isn’t me either. Hey, the young backpacker dude is more my style. Maybe I should take over his identity? Whoops – Cuil is obviously not gender biased – I also am listed as the two women pictured.
Hmmm – I had an imposter over at Furrier.org the other day – maybe they fooled Cuil, too?
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