Monthly Archives: December 2008

The Encyclopedia of Life

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The Encyclopedia of Life is a wonderful project

spearheaded in part by Harvard biologist E.O.

Wilson. The idea is simple but ambitious: create a website with a single page for each species on earth – about 1.8 million pages in all. Like Wikipedia the EOL will use the expertise

of the online community to create, update, and ehhance the Encylopedia of Live.

I’m also feeling some biological guilt for focusing so much on the alarmism that now characterizes the climate debate while peI have failed to recognize that the number of species appears to be going down faster than at any time in history outside o the massive extinctions of the cretacious..

Charlie Rose hosted an excellent segment about Biodiversity where Wilson of Harvard, the President of of Rockerfeller University, and Novacek of the Natural Museum of History are discussing the dire significance of this challenge of species decline.

OMG – It is Socialism on the Internet!

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There does not seem to be enough reporting or buzz about about Google and Facebook’s social networking widget strategy..

The Industry Standard notes the growing Facebook v Googe battle for “internet mindshare”.

I’d argue this is the single most important aspect of the current internet landscape, where users will eventually insist that their their single identity flows around the internet as seamlessly and simply as possible,in what I like to think will be an analogy to a global gathering / party / conference / lounge environment.

Soon we will surf on in to a website and decide what information we’ll share with that site and with others who arepresent there at the time.

MyBlogLog, now owned by Yahoo, is for me the closest thing to that ideal environment because it allows you to see others who are at the site and then click off to more information about them.

OJ Simpson Trial Sentencing

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OJ Simpson is getting sentenced in Las Vegas but it’s hard to understand exactly what all this means, though I think he’s in the slammer for at least 5 years and probably more.

The judge initially seemed to be defending herself as much as sentencing simpson, and is reading the sentences very fast.

Fox is reporting that the sentence is 16 years with parole eligibility after 5 years but there is also a “consecutive” sentence which means another 1.5 years, so Fox suggests 6.5 years minimum though there is some confusion about how this will play out for Simpson.

Winer on Tech Cycles

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Dave Winer over at the Scripting News has a geatpost today about why technology innovation tends to cycle through generations of programmers. As old approaches become inadequte new folks come online and change the game, leading to a new cycle.

I think Dave is describing a very important aspect of how technology changes, especially online. There are exceptions of course but he has described in very simple terms why so much technology innovation tends to cycle as it does, moving forward in spurts rather than gradually.

I agree with Dave that we are approaching the end / beginning of such a cycle – though I think in this case it’ll be

more based on a lack of capital that will chase away the old guard than other pressures. I’d also suggest the pressure will be to make the internet and websites and applications themselves mostly transparent to the overall information landscape.

Ideally we are simply *connected*, sharing information (with some limits that we control) seamlessly across all the devices we use and not just with “friends” but with everybody else who might be interested.

reply edit record video comment reblog

Yahoo Buyout Rumor – this one is real

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The faulty Times of London rumor over the weekend about a pending major Yahoo search deal with Microsoft was likely spawned in part by what appear to be correct reports that Jonathan Miller, former CEO of AOL, has been working to pull together at deal that would value Yahoo in the $20-$22 per share range and lead to a takeover of the company, presumably the deal would put Miller in a key role.

Jessica V at Wall Street Journal Reports

Miller’s interesting history as an AOL innovator and corporate rescue man who was fired after what many think were successful actions suggests to me that he’s eyeing Yahoo as a way to get back in the internet saddle in a major way.    Yahoo’s internet footprint remains *larger than Google’s*, yet Yahoo’s legendarily inept monetization of this online traffic has let Google leave them in the revenue dust.    As a company Yahoo is a lean shadow of its former self, but as an internet empire they are still doing just fine.   One caveat is that Yahoo continues to lag Google big time in the most lucrative online activity of search.   However, as one of a handful of global website empires that can shape user behavior simply by adjusting their offerings, advertising, and navigation elements Yahoo optimists like me continue to think that Yahoo’s problems can be fixed, leaving them in a position to double revenues in short order.    They do not have to match Google’s revenues or monetization to be wildly successful – they just need to *do somewhat better than they do now*.   I’m betting they can.

Disclosure: Long on Yahoo (in fact I just bought more today)

Twitter Ads: Magpie “offers” Scoble “up to” $30,646 per month to run Magpie.

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There’s a lot of buzz about Magpie, the new Twitter based advertising system that matches up twitter folks and those who follow them with advertisers.  Jeremiah O has a good test and expresses reservations that Magpie is “self diminishing” and I think I’m inclined to agree.   For most Twitter folks the money will be small and the distraction to users high enough that I think many would drop folks who use this to the extent their other social media efforts – and possibly their credibility – will be damaged.

I’m actually a big fan of the idea of targeted contextual ads, but skeptical that Magpie will be prudent enough to make this a truly “helpful” system for the viewers, whose only advantage is the prospect of a wonderfully targeted ad.   Google and most sites, by contrast, allows you to *ignore the advertising area* where my take is that Magpie ads will appear in the twitter stream.  They’ll be tagged “Magpie” so you could ignore all but the first line, but part of what makes Twitter enjoyable is that you generally do not have to filter out commercial content – if somebody is always posting commercial promo stuff I just dont’ follow them.  Magpie makes that … hard to do.

That said I’d like to see somebody with a huge Twitter footprint try this out and then broadcast all the commentary.    Hey Robert!  Magpie is offering you big money based on their revenue calculator

I’m skeptical that Scoble would see even a tenth of the 30k+ Magpie lists but I promise not to stop following you _and_ if you donate some to charity I’ll match up to $500 of your first month magpie proceeds to help justify the experiment.