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.

Kijiji starts with a whimper not a bang

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Lots of buzz today about EBAY’s entry into the online classifieds space with Kijiji.com but I don’t think Craigslist has much to worry about. Kijiji is easy to navigate with maps and Kijiji is easy to understand and Kijiji makes it easy to register….but…. there are practically NO LISTINGS! Obviously it’ll take some time for them to promote the service and gear up, but one of the big 2.0 challenges now is that users don’t want to submit listings to dozens of websites or even to two for that matter. Rather, ideally, you’ll submit to Craigslist and have Kijiji pick up the listing automatically. I’m assuming they’ll bring this functionality in at some point but clearly they have not yet – there appear to be very few listings or registrations so far based on the forum and some quick surfing.

The World According to Cutts

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I really like Matt Cutts. He’s one of the most personable people in the search business while at the same time discussing and blogging complex search topics in an articulate and authoritative way.

Two really interesting issues are in discussion over at Matt’s blog. The first is Lauren’s controversial “official” Google post criticizing the movie Sicko and suggesting that advertising purchases at Google are the best way to win the info wars. Here’s my take on that little episode:

The challenge with big company “official” blogs is that they tend to suck. They are at best basic information outlets and at worst bad PR nightmares. Not because the authors are bad people, but because “official” company blogs reverse the optimal relationship between blogger and reader. For example here, at Jeremy Zawodny, and at Scoble (when he was with MS), the blogger develops a trusted, somewhat personal relationship with the reader. A company blogger can’t really do that. They are generally trustworthy honest people but they are constrained by not being able to bite the hand that feeds them and also contrained by our expectation that they are beholding to the employer.

Ironically Lauren crossed this line in both directions by giving her own personal opinion (good) at a corporate blog (unusual). But her opinion happened to line up very well with Google’s advertising agenda (hmmmm) and her own personal agenda of selling more ads (hmmmm).

The debates over conflict of interest at blogs are really heating up as they should until we can find ways to keep things transparent, honest as we continue to keep the discussions lively and robust.

The second issue is one I need to digest a bit more. Matt is rejecting the idea that Google’s webspam fight is a sham. Certainly Matt’s team works hard to fight search junk but the spam issue is a lot more nuanced than Matt acknowledges. Clearly there are conflicts between maintaining profits and providing users with the optimal experience. Lighter shading of Google advertising is a good example where it is unlikely users benefit from the lighter shading, yet it is certain Google gets a lot more activity from that User Interface “improvement”. Also, the definition of spam itself is very subjective and also very query dependent. If I’m searching for “Hotels” and get a list of Viagra sites the results are clearly “spammy”, but if I’m searching for Viagra those same sites may be exactly what I want.

Yahoo’s Decker has a lot of fans

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This NYT Article is a helpful primer on Sue Decker and how well regarded she is in the highest of tech circles. Dinner with Bill Gates? Microsoft would be well advised to purchase Yahoo but that deal seemed to have cooled months ago after much speculation. I’m wildly guessing it remains a very strong possibility.

Update: This Yahoo Press release about the new Yahoo ads just came out today. Hard to know the impact until we see advertisers reporting some results.

Disclaimer (dat claimer, we all claimer for ice cream!): I’ve got some Yahoo stock