Yahoo! …. I finally bought the company….well…I bought a little piece of Yahoo!.

Posted on September 29, 2006 by JoeDuck

I’ve been watching Yahoo the company and Yahoo the stock for over a year, and finally put my money where my mouth is and picked up 600 shares at 25.31

I feel the stock is really undervalued due to what should soon be a huge wash of new cash that Yahoo will get next spring from the launch of the publisher network to a wider audience. This is Yahoo’s version of Google’s adsense which nets Google about 43% of their revenues and growing. This is the long tail money and I think the smart money says the long tail money will eventually be the big money. In the old days I would have thought “Wall Streeters MUST understand this process and thus the price MUST already reflect this”, but after the internet stock meltdown it was clear that Wall Street did not understand many aspects of the online economy and didn’t care about them much anyway.

Also important to my decision was that Yahoo’s been doing the best 2.0 stuff for some time. For example today’s Yahoo Hack Day, a special event open to developers from all over, is a brilliant example of how Yahoo! wants to take back their old reputation as the coolest company and may just do it.

They deserve to be treated much better, both by online commenters and by Wall Street, because Yahoo!, far more than Google or MSN, is coming up with both simple and complex developer tools to facilitate the new internet, which is shaping up to be a monstrous, layered, interconnected, cross referenced and community-fied ocean of information where distinctions between websites and even businesses are broken down along the lines of what people need to learn and need to do. That’s cool.

Action	Buy
Symbol	YHOO
Description	YAHOO INC
Quantity	600
Order Type	Market

Asphalt, the underrated innovation

Posted on September 28, 2006 by JoeDuck

Billions use it daily on roads and on roofs, but Asphalt really does not get the respect it deserves. Concrete too, but everybody loves a cement mixer and I think many boys fondly remember their toy truck cement mixer. However I don’t know any kids with a toy asphalt hot mix street paving vehicle.

“Mommy, I’m sorry I spilled tar all over the dog again….”

They are paving the road behind our house and I’m enjoying the symphony of engineering, construction, and innovation involved. The concrete sidewalk routine was impressive but the biggie with road building is the pavement itself.

I thought the Scot MacAdam invented it but NO WAY.

In fact I bet YOU didn’t know this Babylonian Asphalt fact:

The first recorded use of asphalt as a road building material was in Babylon around 625 B.C., in the reign of King Naboppolassar. In A Century of Progress: The History of Hot Mix Asphalt, published by National Asphalt Pavement Association in 1992, author Hugh Gillespie notes that “an inscription on a brick records the paving of Procession Street in Babylon, which led from his palace to the north wall of the city, ‘with asphalt and burned brick.’”

We know that the ancient Greeks were familiar with asphalt and its properties. The word asphalt comes from the Greek “asphaltos”, meaning “secure.” The Romans changed the word to “asphaltus,” and used the substance to seal their baths, reservoirs, and aqueducts.

Many centuries later, Europeans exploring the New World discovered natural deposits of asphalt. Writing in 1595, Sir Walter Raleigh described a “plain” (or lake) of asphalt on the Island of Trinidad, off the coast of Venezuela. He used this asphalt for re-caulking his ships.

Surely this proves that King Naboppolassar really deserves more of a place in history than he currently commands?

Mall of America on Travel Channel

Posted on September 27, 2006 by JoeDuck

Hey, I really like the Mall of America. When we visit our Minnesota relatives we often head over there for a day and it’s really an intriguing place. In some ways it’s the capital of American retail consumerism, a dubious but interesting distinction. In a world fraught with violence, intolerance, war, disease, and hardship isn’t it nice to have four miles of enclosed, climate-controlled store fronts, amusement park, aquarium, and theme restaurants? No? C’mon, you call yourself an American?

Travel Channel notes:

The Mall of America is effectively an entire enclosed city. Designed by 40 architects and designers over a period of four years.

Giant Rectangle, allowing strolling without backtracing.
Each floor has over a MILE of storefront space.

4 malls in one with different themes:
North Garden

West Market – RR station theme.
South Avenue – Southern grand hotel theme.
East Broadway – modern high tech design

Glass sphere spy cams document shopper’s every move.

120 security gaurds plus dogs to sniff out trouble.

250k visitors daily during peak times

Camp Snoopy makes 25 million per year.

20,000 parking spots in 3 square miles of parking. State, symbol, and color designations to help mall visitors find their car.

20 sit down restaurants plus 30 fast food.

14 screen movie theater.

Chapel for marriages is the “Chapel of Love”.

5 themed restaurants and Hooters is the most popular watering hole in the mall.

Underwater Adventures is a huge aquarium located in lower sections.

The Ghost in the Machine … is a Human Being!

Posted on September 25, 2006 by JoeDuck

Last week or so Matt was asking what new gadgets we’d see in the future. Some suggested Star Trek style devices, but I think they (and Star Trek) are wrong to suggest that we’ll continue with our current model of humans using separate function, hand-held devices. Rather we’ll soon see human integration with devices in ways analogous to the evolution from spectacle to contact lens to corneal implant. When that corneal implant can go online you can sign me up for one whether I need it or not.
Although many people cringe at the idea that we’d implant chips in ourselves and connect them to our brains they are ignoring the logical progression of biology and technology. The recent invention of a bionic arm controlled by nerve feedback is only the beginning.

Seems to me that we want to *completely* erase the physical distinction between gadgets – especially phones and computers – and ourselves. In fact I think most sci -fi treatments really miss this as an inevitability of our technologically innovative future lifestyle.

I’m Hoping to see more human/gadget interfaces so we can directly access computerized info with our non-computerized brains. This would really enhance creativity, and I’d even suggest we’ll see a lot of spin off benefits.

For example if world leaders can instantly access extensive, encyclopedic treatment of history, languages, and other topics their ability to make wise decisions will be elevated.

Well, maybe that’s too optimistic.

John Battelle’s Search Mob. Mob Rules. Rules for the Mob. Search Mobsters?

Posted on September 24, 2006 by JoeDuck

John has launched “SearchMob”, a Digg-like story submission and review community thing where users send stories they find which are reviewed by others to attain popularily. He asked for feedback and I suggested this:

I’m somewhat confused by the voting both in terms of low numbers but also because the articles with many votes usually show only 2 or 3 names under the discussion list.

Without trying to be too provocative here I’ve wondered if the articles with high votes are simply folks who are voting for their own articles – or asking others to vote – from different machines. In this environment it’s easy to spoof interest and attain the top spot.

Based on limited data I’m now thinking that most of the people come here for John Battelle insights (ie the JB filter) and simply getting articles by other users (ie the JB Search community filter) is not stirring much interest.

Therefore instead of Searchmob, John, you need to become a Search Cult leader and hole up in a heavily armed Palo Alto Coffee Shop with your search apostles while the FBI files motions to get YOUR database of intentions.

Blog readers and blog writers redux II.1 The downfall of Cicarelli?

Posted on September 24, 2006 by JoeDuck

This blog readers vs writers thing remains intriguing. Now, “Jonny” is the top blog search and I’m having trouble figuring out exactly why since the name refers to several pop icons. In fact that may be why it’s up top – it’s a term that overlaps several popular searches for people named Jonny. My own “cicarelli” post is getting some traction but the top referrer for me by far is a reference to my first post about this readers vs writers issue and it’s coming from people over at Technorati searching for “Assparade”.

From an SEO perspective it appears we may be seeing signs that writing about the top term is less likely to get a lot of traffic than writing about highly searched but secondary term that is getting much less press. Still way too early to come to this conclusion though.

The Technorati search list is changing more day to day than I would expect, perhaps an indication of the fleeting nature of human interest and big media focus. The tag list seems more stable and that would make sense if we assume the following about writers vs readers:

Blog writers are a smaller, more focused group

Blog writers tend to stick to same general topics

(?) Blog writers tend to address richer, more stable, deeper subjects and therefore these don’t change at the whim of masses and mass media.

Top Tags

Hugo Chavez and Noam Chomsky

Posted on September 23, 2006 by JoeDuck

Thanks to Hugo Chavez, Noam Chomsky’s book Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (The American Empire Project) is now number one at Amazon.

Chomsky has always bothered me … a lot …. He’s a good linguist, a foolish economist, and a terrible social scientist / political commentator. Ironically it’s only the last two topics where Chomsky gets any attention and he’s an expert in neither.

He’s the the guy who suggested back in the 70’s that the regime of Pol Pot was not a great threat to the people of Cambodia. When it became clear that Pol Pot’s communist government, the Khmer Rouge, had murdered by many accounts over a million Cambodians Chomsky’s tune changed to suggest it was American destabilization of the region that was to blame.

Although this latter argument has some merit, clear thinkers will note that Chomsky’s failure to hold ruthless Communist regimes accountable while at the same time holding America “overly accountable” for virtually all the bad in the world is a very suspect political philosophy. Here’s a good critique of Chomsky’s hypocrisy.

However, I should caveat all this by pointing out that in a world where so many people and countries are challenging GW, Dick, and the Neocons imperial vision of the USA it’s very important to have more points of view out there than our commercialized media allows. Chomsky is one of the most articulate spokesman for an intelligent radical vision of the world and I’d like to see more of him rather than the inane ranting of intellectually lobotomized right wing radio talk show hosts.

Perhaps careful consideration of many points of view will lead us to some answers. We sure need them.

Posts that contain Hugo Chavez per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Virtual thermometers are better than real ones. Cheaper too!

Posted on September 23, 2006 by JoeDuck

Matt was pointing out something I’m noticing about using the computer to find information you *used to find* by going to yellow pages, a calculator, or other gadgets.

We broke our outdoor thermometer painting the house, and just a few minutes ago this forced me to look online for the temperature. I’d assumed I’d have to settle for the temp in larger cities of Medford or Ashland which are each about 6 miles away, but even here in rural Oregon there is a weather station less than a mile away from my house reporting continuously.

Thus I no longer need a thermometer at the house to know the temp to within 0.1 degrees and by using that virtual tool I get other info I could only have with a weather station (and meteorologist!) in my yard such as precipitation, humidity and forecasts.

Blog readers are not blog writers.

Posted on September 22, 2006 by JoeDuck

Check out the top Searches at Technorati for today:

Clinton Global Initiative

Posted on September 21, 2006 by JoeDuck

The Clinton Global Initiative is tackling the world’s major problems. It’s a great effort with the backing of one of the world’s most effective superpower schmoozers, Bill Clinton. Although I’d suggest that the Copenhagen Consensus is a more rational way to prioritize spending, Clinton’s group is far more likely to bring big money and big corporations and Government interests to the table.

Today’s announcement is that Richard Branson will donate 3 billion towards reduction of Global Warming via the Clinton Global Initiative. Although I’d much rather see the group put more towards current catastrophes at least this donation is consistent with the notion that big providers of greenhouse gasses like Branson’s many transportation interests should do the most to alleviate the effects of those gasses on the environment.

Perhaps my friend Linda was right to suggest that some people will support Global Warming initiatives in ways they won’t get behind those confronting global poverty. If we can do it all that’s great and for the first time in my life I do think there is a great, driving force on the part of most people, policy makers, and even Governments to initiate “Global Improvements”. Let’s do it!

Joe Duck

Have Blog. Will Travel. Vaccinate!

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