Category Archives: personal

Yahoo! It’s time to buy YHOO.

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I've been waiting for a "sign" to buy Yahoo (well, some SHARES of Yahoo ) which seems due for a huge surge when their publisher network revenues kick in later this year. Yahoo has more traffic than Google but you sure wouldn't know it from the buzz, even among industry insiders. Capitalization lags Google big time for what appear to be no really good reasons.

My sign that Yahoo will do very well came last week as I signed up and used Flickr, which ranks among the most intuitive and brilliant applications I've ever used. Checking their Alexa stats Flickr is 85th most visited site and rising fast – proving that Yahoo can take a good idea, make it better, and expand a giant community almost overnight. A giant community that posts, for example, pictures from an Antarctica Science Voyage. Is Web 2.0 cool or what?

It's not that Flickr alone will increase YHOO profits.  What strikes me clearly is that Yahoo – far more than Google – is positioning itself as the front runner with big plans to grow and maintain the flexibility to fill many niche spaces created by the rapidly expanding Web 2.0 economy.

Yahoo's profit boost will come from online publisher revenues which now comprise about 43% of Google's revenue and will flow to Yahoo if they offer publishers a higher revenue share. Yahoo will be able to legally adjust profits upward very strategically using this technique and I'm guessing that they are now drooling at the thought of doing that.

Flickr is only one of many aquisitions of Web 2.0 companies by Yahoo, which is clearly the 2.0 leader.

Google's equivalent in the photo space? Hello? Hello? What the HECKo? It may be a good application, but I'll probably never know and almost everybody's using Flickr now, pulling others in every day.

People are very, very unlikely to switch away from a great application like Flickr once they start using it. This EBAY effect is powerful in some niches like online auctions or photos where the main barrier to participation is signing up and learning to use the service.

Contrast this with NO barrier but the admittedly powerful "habituation" to search engine use where it's likely people will flow to the 'best search' over time rather than the one they started with.   Now that Yahoo is equal to Google in relevancy this will tend to work in their favor as well.

Time to buy Yahoo! 

Deal or No Deal TV show reporting odds …. correctly

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howie.jpg

UPDATE: Ann's clever simulations indicate the odds are as stated on the show.

The TV Show "Deal or No Deal" appears to be a complex variation on the Monty Hall problem, but it's NOT.  I'm deleting my earlier *failed logic* which was wrong.

Apparently Monty's intentions matter in the 3 door game as follows:

Contestant picks door – this door will NOT be opened.

THUS there are 3 possible ways for the remaining 2 doors to be opened:

Empty, Empty
Empty, Prize
Prize, Empty

In Monty Hall, he KNOWS where the prize is and always uncovers an empty door.    However in a game where the host does NOT know and thus the prize CAN be uncovered, the game universe will EXCLUDE the Prize, Empty option.   This exclusion changes the odds, with each remaining option having a 1/3 chance of happening = equal odds whether you switch or not.

Jeremy’s paying attention to our lack of concentration

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Jeremy Zawodny is having trouble concentrating.   I think he's speaking for a large and increasing number of people who suffer from the simply overwhelming and seemingly infinite amounts of information now available.

The barriers to massive amounts of information access approach zero in the online environment, a very different state of affairs than a mere 10 years ago when even simply answers required trips to stores or local libraries and good quality research on complicated or in-depth topics generally meant many trips to a university libary.

In the comments Tracy wondered if "Maybe technology is the downfall of humanity…

This is always a provocative notion. I hope the concentration problems mean we are not losing the tendency for good thinkers to spend long and reflective amounts of time solving complex problems when needed.
I'm still in the "pro technology" camp that says technology is far more likely to save us than bury us, but I'm not sure I'd want to debate that in light of the current state of global affairs and internet abuses and info overload.

If it wasn't a dispicably bad pun I'd suggest we have one of those open format conferences and call it "Concentration Camp" 

The Dovecote

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I’m enjoying the great hospitality of my old friend Tom and wife Diane here in their cozy house in Concord, just around the river bend from the Old North Bridge. It’s called “The Dovecote” and was Louisa’s model for one of the sister’s houses in “Little Women”.

Benjamin Hosmer, a minuteman at the first battle of the American Revolution, lived in this house in 1775. The Alcotts were here some 50 years later. Louisa Alcott’s first poem was written here. Among the greatest thinkers of their time, Emerson, Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott very likely met on occasion here to discuss their progressive vision of the new American experience and ideas about social life, nature, and philosophy called the “trancendental movement”

Taxation within celebrations is Tyranny?!

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Due to the Patriots Day holiday, residents of Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont and the District of Columbia will have until Tuesday, April 18.

Is this fair?  I think NOT!    I say everyone is entitled to an EQUAL right to procrastinate until the last dang minute and this denies me, a citizen of Oregon, an equal right to the good people of Mass.

I think it was New England patriot Patrick Henry who said "Give me more time to file my taxes or give me a deduction"

The shot heard ’round the world

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Concord and Lexington argue over which town can claim the first shot of the American Revolution. Lexington is where some shots first took place as the British moved out of Boston to look for guns hidden in Concord, but Concord's North Bridge is where the more organized and successful resistance to the British gathered early on April 19th, 1775. Several colonian "Minutemen" and British soldiers were killed in this skirmish.

Tomorrow they will reenact that historic battle.

"The Shot Heard Round the World" is a line from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Concord Hymn" about the battle at the North Bridge, a song / poem he wrote in 1827 to commemorate the event.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood;
And fired the shot heard round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps,
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We place with joy a votive stone,
That memory may their deeds redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
O Thou who made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free, —
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raised to them and Thee.

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Inside Hartwell Tavern on the "Battle Road" from Lexington to Concord.   Hard Cider was the drink of choice here in the 1770s and one can only imagine the conversations as local farmers plotted … the American Revolution.

Hartwell Tavern

MinuteMan National Historical Park – Patriot Days!

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Hanging out here in lovely Concord, MA with my most excellent old Pal Tom and his wife Diane. They live just down the street from Minuteman NHP where in many ways the Revolutionary War began.

This weekend and Monday the town celebrates "Patriot Days" with historical reenactments all over the area. Here at Hartwell Tavern on the Battle road Minutemen fought with retreating British troops.

MinuteMen

HUZZAH!

Liberal Agendas + Republican Politicians = innovation?

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It'll be very interesting to see if Gov Romney (Republican of Massachusetts) has come up with a solution to some of the biggest challenges in US health care. Clinton likes it and I think we'll see that the MA approach, which blends fiscal responsibility and quality care for all, may be just the shot in the arm our ailing health care system desparately needs.

Meanwhile Gov Schwartzenegger (Republican of Caleeeforneea) is coming up with some innovative ideas and a strong environmental agenda (his Humvee fetish excepted?).

And then there is presidential hopeful, in many ways the Republican "front runner", John McCain who is anything but a traditional conservative.

It would sure be nice to see a new breed of politician cut in the mold of progressive, penny pinching reformers. Americans are tired of the old, tired, wasteful, and ineffective ideas of both traditional liberals who are stuck in the anti-business big-government mode and traditional conservatives who are stuck fighting for military imperialism and cultural norms that are no longer relevant to the changing and growing American experience.