Monthly Archives: July 2007

Face Bookie?

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John Battell is wondering if Facebook might even reject a 6 billion dollar offer given how high they are flying these days.  I’m trying to read between his sarcasm but he seems to think they’d (foolishly) reject it.  I’m guessing the big money Facebook buyout buzz may be a little more opportunistic and that they’d love an offer like that, playing hard to get just long enough to firm it up.  I would have to admit being *very wrong* to suggest they should have taken the billion from Yahoo last year.   Facebook is probably not even worth that, but they can get more easily now due to the buzz of irrational exhuberance.

Recommendation to FB: Take the 6 billion and laugh all the way to the bank.

Recommendation to MS: Don’t spend this you fools!

Companies with the biggest buzz (YouTube, Facebook) have what appear to be extraordinary buyout valuations that are not consistent with their profitability or what even seems like a realistic, risk adjusted long term analysis.

Why? Market movers as players combine with speculative frenzy and lead many to assume they’ll get out before things change. It’s more like casino thinking than Warren Buffet thinking. Big players like Google and MS can afford to make what I think they’d see as “strategic” high offers but what a reasoned analysis suggests are foolish bets.

Lots of this happened in late 90s and only a handful of the players are left standing, most at a small fraction of their values at the pinnacle of *that* irrational exhuberance.

Zillow Community

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Matt Ingram, in the wonderfully titled “Is Zillow Building a Ghost Town?” is skeptical of Zillow’s new community pages, noting the failure of BackFence. I’m also skeptical of Zillow’s prospects for online community building but I think for different reasons, and both of us are premature to call this so early. Zillow is a big player in the “city information” space and therefore should certainly look for ways to enhance social networking at the site.

I’ll waste a few electrons to duplicate what I wrote over there:

I’m also skeptical but this is no Backfence – here Zillow will not pay to have the content developed so if communities do sprout up they’ll be gravy to the Zillow bottom line which should only have to pay a modest amount to ramp up and keep this going alongside their core competency, RE listings.

However the *idea* of local voices is excellent, in fact I’m hoping to create a more tourism focused approach with local bloggers rather than contributors to a community in which they have little stake. Hyperlocal *news* will keep failing but hyperlocal *blogging* has only begun to flourish, and IMHO could become the dominant form of human communication. (insert trumpet fanfare here)

Go Google Go. Mashups for the Masses

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Google Maps strikes again with enhanced mashupability.   Google maps is clearly the leader in mapping which is curious because there are many other excellent mapping systems that are similar: Yahoo maps, MSN maps, Mapquest, and several more.

Google, as usual, offers simple integration with websites, very easy navigation, speed, and more.  It “feels” easier and more effective than the others even though I’m not sure it really is.   I remain puzzled by some of the approaches taken by others in the mapping space.   When in doubt just do it like Google does and you’ll have a great, heavily used product.

Marc – Got Blogs?

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Marc Andreessen has been posting some very thoughtful and helpful blog stuff since his recent blogmeistering debut, and today’s post about his lessons from five weeks of blogging is no exception – it’s a great article about why blogging matters a lot more than most people realize, and why we have a lot of work to do to improve the sport.

The most provocative idea is something I’ve been puzzling over for some time – how can blogging evolve from the current form to one where the conversations are more interactive and equal, and can more actively include non-bloggers? I don’t mean equal in the sense everybody gets equal space or attention or time, rather in the sense that great comments on blogs are now relegated to far too low a status. Many “A list” bloggers hardly comment at all unless they are attacked or challenged, making it too difficult to get a spirited conversation going about many of the most important topics.

Marc has even stopped the comments at his blog due to junk comments and spam. Understandable but unfortunate because I’m less likely to read posts when I can’t get in my 2 cents in the comments. Trackbacks are good for people like me with blogs, but unless the topic is something I’m really interested in I won’t want to do a whole post about Marc’s interest du jour.

So, what is the solution to creating better blog engagement for all? I still think it’s some form of hybrid between blogging and forums where topics evolve through participation and then all participants have simple ways to engage in the conversation, and if necessary to disengage from spurious comments.

Gabe at Techmeme solves some of these problems by having his routine choose “newsworthy” items and then showing other blogs that have linked to the main posts.   This allows ‘second tier’ blogs to be featured along with the ‘top tiers’, helping to showcase the value of the topic and the conversation that surrounds it.

Technorati, the brilliant blog search engine, brings a lot to the table but to my way of thinking has not really solved the key challenge of blog conversational engagement.   Technorati APIs may have created the groundwork for the perfect application and perhaps Dave himself will develop the “golden mean” approach to navigate the blogs and the conversations that surround them.

Blogging Revolution – Mashup Camp blogs

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Hey Scoble!

Here are some good bloggers you may have missed though I’m sure you know some of them. The list is from the Mashup Camp conference series run by David Berlind ( a very good blog there as well) and Doug Gold who do a great job showcasing some of the new mashup companies and mashup providers like Google, Yahoo, MSN. I’m sorry to miss the one coming up in about a week in Mountain View but I’ll be in Philadelphia wondering how the founders would view the current state of our their great American experiment.

Mashup Camper Blogs:

Adam Trachtenberg

Adrian Blakey

Robot Rats … acting smarter every day

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This set of experiments in the UK is helping robotic scientists create robot rats that behave a lot like real ones. It’s neat to think that this will eventually be able to use IBM’s rat brain research and make AI rat intelligences (and eventually people intelligences) that think just like the real thing. I just hope I live to see (and chat with) the human AI computers/robots.   No offense to the rat version though: “Wow, look at that freaking piece of old CHEESE!”

As AI research evolves I think it will become very clear that there is no “secret magic sauce” to animal intellect in general or to our human intellects in particular. Much of what people think makes us very special is simply due to confusing our innate human intellectual abilities (which are only modestly impressive) with the benefits of technologies that we have developed over years of learning and hundreds of years of societal evolution. Yes these technologies are a product of our collective human effort and intelligence, but it is not reasonable to assert that these are an indication of some vast level of intellectual superiority over dogs, cats, or fleas.

Rather it seems more likely that most human societies, over the past few thousand years, reached a technological tipping point where the technologies have allowed spectacular improvements in how effectively we can process information, food, shelter, transportation, etc.

Holy Crap! $19,000,000 for a space toilet?

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C’mon NASA, you don’t think you could have come up with a space toilet for, say, $18,000,000?

The space station toilet physically resembles those used on Earth, except it has leg restraints and thigh bars to keep astronauts and cosmonauts from floating away. Fans suck waste into the commode. Crew members also have individual urine funnels which are attached to hoses, and the urine is deposited into a wastewater tank.

Hmmm – I guess that urine funnel innovation was just beyond the limits of our American ingenuity.

Thank god for big taxes!

Source: China News

Blogging Revolution – off with their LINKS!

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After joining the blogging revolution last week I got excited about replacing the “A list” bloggers with “better” bloggers that I knew were out there and I knew were not getting read enough. There was enough interest that I thought maybe a bunch of us could use that tiny little blog guilotine and cut off links to the A lister sites and encourage others to do the same, replacing those links with new voices in the blogging community.

One of my favorite A listers, Robert Scoble, was admirably urging on the effort to find good new voices. To Robert’s credit he has always been a great blog community member who engages his readers and other blogs regularly.

Problem ONE has been to identify what exactly “A list” means. I thought there would be *lists* of all the A listers but there are few. Dave Winer The Technorati 100 is a good starting point though so I’m removing links to these sites (yes, I know this is not “fair”, but revolutions are a tough business:

Technorati Top 100
http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/

I’m going to be replacing them on my blog using this excellent list of Venture Capitalists who blog about technology plus some of my own picks from the past year, which I’ll profile as I add them.   The basic theme of the blogs will be technology and business.

VC Blogs:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3071

But wait, that list is from “Seeking Alpha”, an A list blog! That is not fair and not even rational!?

Revolutions are a tough, irrational business. File all complaints with the executioner via email.

To be continued….

The Blogging Revolution has begun! (?)

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Kent Newsome has sounded the clarion call for a blogging revolution, and I for one am *in*. Mark July 4, 2007 as the beginning of the revolution that will bring down the tired elite establishment in favor of more prominence for fresh new voices.

I’m tired of reading the same old people who in some cases are too busy chasing dollars to blog nearly as creatively as they did in the old days (ie a year ago). The more ominous case is the new trend in blogging that has “A listers” effectively (even if not literally) shilling for big corporations under the provocative guise called “conversational marketing”.

I’ve already replaced some A listers with some less prominent but more interesting bloggers and over the next week I’m going to remove all the A listers in favor of new voices. In one sense this isn’t fair to the A-list folks who still have interesting and clear voices, but on balance it is sort of like “affirmative action” for blogging. Search engines tend to favor bloggers who have older and abundant links. Early bloggers have both not because they are profound, but just because they were around early on in the linking process when there were fewer voices of any kind and money had not entered (and distorted) the blogging equation. Search ranking quirks have effectively distorted the ranking of bloggers to such an extent that the small number of ‘A listers’ have far too dominant a voice in many tech blog topics. I’d like to see that end ASAP, so I’ll do what little I can to make it happen and encourage others to do the same.

More from Gaping Void

MSNBC on “the A list”

Philadelphia Freedom

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Happy birthday to our great American Experiment!

Our local morning talk show had many callers who were concerned about American’s poor reputation over much of the world and concerns about the health of the USA as a democracy. I’m not so pessimistic, believing that we should view the violence and instability around the world as caused by those who want violence, instability, and major change rather than those who have as their objective personal freedom, religious freedom, free speech, and prosperity for almost everybody. (ummm – that would be my country that wants all that, right?!)

America’s mistakes – and there are many – almost always come from a *distortion* of the ideas and ideals of the founders rather than as part of the great American experiment. Slavery, poverty, civil unrest, political power abuses, corruption, and most or our other American problems here and abroad are in defiance of the basic US Constitutional and ideological framework, not part of it. Critics of America both here and abroad should spend more time asking themselves “what is the right course of action” and far less time ranting about whatever course the other party/person/nation is currently taking.

Even the founders themselves recognized the challenges of a populist democratic experiment, and even the remarkable and otherwise politically prescient Ben Franklin notably suggested that he’d be surprised if the American experiment in democracy and personal freedom he helped inspire would last very long.

Ironically, Franklin also noted that people should not complain about taxes – unless the rate got to a terribly outrageous amount approaching 10% – in which case another revolution would be justified. “Yo, Ben, put DOWN that muzzle loader, we tax the heck out of everybody now”…

One great irony of the current American situation is how far we’ve come from the original vision of the founders. Even the founders would struggle to understand the sheer volume of our American empire – the largest economic and military power in history. They’d also certainly view with great skepticism our huge federal and state Governments bureaucracies, and also be very concerned about how aggressively we have sought to maintain our power or the power of our allies through force in so many regions of the world. The founders were globalists – remarkable for that time – but they viewed large, centralized governments as dangerous, unneccessary, and an inhibition to innovation and progress.

We are heading to Philadelphia next week and I’ll hope to get some insights about our great American experiment as I sit in the cradle of American liberty. Are we now adrift or does America remain the shining beacon of liberty, justice, and prosperity to all our fellow global citizens? Maybe …. we are both.