To Twitter or not to Twitter

Posted on March 11, 2007 by JoeDuck

Thanks to Pete Cashmore for answering my question about wazzup with Twitter, the new and skyrocketing-in-popularity social networking tool that really does not seem to make much sense … unless … you want to throw out little tidbits to friends and to the world every so often and see what others are doing or thinking about. Pete calls this “talking about your cat” and I think he’s hit the nail on the head. Most of us, as humans, like some attention, and bloggers are usually hungry to interact with as many people as possible, superficiality be damned. Enter Twitter, which allows you to follow friends or the Twitterers at large who are throwing out a little piece of their life every so often. Unlike long, often boring or repetitive blog postings the twitter stuff is a quick look into the lives of others, and that’s always a fun thing even if they are having a boring life/day/twitter posting.

I’ve been playing with Twitter for the past day and although I’m not hooked (yet?) I can understand why this is taking off in the digital community so fast. In fact I’ve already made friends with John Edwards, Presidential Candidate dude. That’s pretty neat, right?

Twitter also has another thing going for it – founder Evan Williams also brought Blogger.com to fruition as a Google buyout, and as such was one of those who really helped bring blogging to the mainstream as a simple way to share.

I’m not even sure I understand what Ross Mayfield is saying about Twitter Tipping the Tuna, but it’s a nice alliteration. Perhaps he’s suggesting it’ll be a flash in the pan after initial surge of adoption? That’s possible, but I think Twitter’s got a long life ahead, though not sure if that’s good for the world or just another goofy internet thing to keep uninspired levels of productivity … as high as possible.

San Diego, California

Posted on March 11, 2007 by JoeDuck

We are heading down to So. California in a few weeks so I’m pulling together information about what we’ll try to do during our week in the area. Southern California is one of the world’s top travel destinations so there are literally thousands of attractions. The challenge there is not finding things to do, rather it’s focusing on the “best” of many great attractions and experiences that are suited to your tastes.

The Travel Channel just had a nice feature on San Diego and I’ve sketched some of their advice below. I’ll flesh this out and add links later.

With 1.2 Million people San Diego is the USA’s 7th largest city.

Mission San Diego de Alcala

Balboa Park

San Diego Zoo

Sea World, San Diego. You can dine with Shamu. Trainer for a da.

La Hoya. “Beverly Hills on the Beach” Exclusive shopping.

Surfing. South Coast Surf Shop is the place for gear. Surf Diva Surf School is all girls but they also have guys class.

History

Weather

Navy Town USA. Principle port for the Pacific Fleet of US Navy. 1846. Maritime Museum of San Diego, home to HMS Surprise of “Master and Commander” fame, and Star of India 1863, the oldest active sailing ship in the world.

USS Midway operated for 47 years 1992 is the US’s longest serving Aircraft Carrier. at total of 225,000 sailors served on this ship at some point in the history of the USS Midway.

Port of San Diego is huge, and supports both Cruise lines and shipping.

Hotel del Coronado. “Hotel Del”. This lavish hotel, inspired by railroad architecture, 1958 “Some Like it Hot” was filmed here.

Mexico!

Old Town

Bazaar del Mundo in Old Town

Dining: 6400 restaurants in San Diego and surrounding cities. Point Loma Sea Food on San Diego Bay is among the most famous Seafood Restaurants in the world, and arguably one of the finest. Their smoking process and tartar sauces are secret recipes are guarded carefully.

The Marine Room in La Hoya. On the beach since 1941 offering some of the most elegant seafood dining in California.

Casa de Pico is one of the best Hispanic restaurants in the USA, offering famous, and huge, Margaritas. El Agave Tequileria offers a Tequila Museum as well as one of the finest collections of Tequila in the world. 1500 types of Tequila are here and you can sniff and sample El Agave’s spectacular selection in special Tequila glasses.

Fish Tacos: deep fried pollock in corn tortilla with lime and cabbage?. Ralph Rubio may be the guy who brought the Fish Taco to America. He opened Rubios Fresh Mexican Grille, with 150 restaurants all over the country. The very first Rubios is still open in San Diego.

Gaslamp district

East Village Neigborhood. 108 redevelopment projects are underway. Petco Park, home of the San Diego Padres is making this one of the key new hotspots for the city.

Thinking about the IBM Blue Brain Project … thinking …

Posted on March 8, 2007 by JoeDuck

The IBM Blue Brain
project is working to model a human brain using computers. They expect to have a neocortical column, which they think is likely the key building block for conscious thought, modelled by 2008. If they succeed the next step will be to connect these columns and allow them to exchange information. At the point where enough information is exchanged it seems reasonable to assume the machine will probably become conscious, and that will be … cool.

Spam hyped stock study indicates they did go up in value. SEC suspends trading on 35 “spam hyped” stocks for 10 days.

Posted on March 8, 2007 by JoeDuck

The SEC has suspended trading in stocks that were hyped by spam campaigns. Incredibly the spam campaigns appear to have lifted the prices on some of these companies as indicated by the SEC study:

http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2007/2007-34.htm

On Friday, Dec. 15, 2006, shares in Apparel Manufacturing Associates, Inc. (APPM) closed at $.06, with a trading volume of 3,500 shares. After a weekend spam campaign distributed emails proclaiming, “Huge news expected out on APPM, get in before the wire, We’re taking it all the way to $1.00,” trading volume on Monday, Dec. 18, 2006, hit 484,568 shares with the price spiking to over 19 cents a share. Two days later the price climbed to $.45. By Dec. 27, 2006, the price was back down to $.10 on trading volume of 65,350 shares.

On Dec. 19, 2006, trading in Goldmark Industries, Inc. (GDKI), closed at $.17 on trading volume of 126,286 shares. On Dec. 20, 2006, the spam campaign started, with e-mail proclaiming “GDKI IS MAKING EVERYONE BANK!,” and setting a 5-day price target of $2. By Dec. 28, 2006, spam emails boasted of the price spike that had already been achieved — “$.28 (Up 152% in 2 days!!!)” — and promised a 5-day price target of $1. That same day, GDKI closed at $.35 on a volume of more than 5 million shares. By January 9, 2007, the closing share price was back down to $.15.

A spam campaign in Healtheuniverse, Inc. (HLUN) stock began on Sept. 4, 2006, with emails incorporating a Healtheuniverse press release proclaiming that HLUN was “focused on being the first to commercialize stem cell applications in the $15 billion worldwide plastic surgery and cosmetic surgery market.” On Sept. 7, 2006, HLUN closed at $.12 per share on trading volume of 3,000 shares. The spam campaign accelerated, and HLUN shares spiked to $.22 per share on Sept. 11, 2006, with over 2.2 million shares trading hands. By Sept. 22, 2006, the closing price had dropped back down to $.11.

Goats in Argan tree – Morrocco

Posted on March 8, 2007 by JoeDuck

goats in argan tree

Originally uploaded by Lottelies.

Incredibly, the Goats in a Tree stuff is not a hoax. Goats graze in these Argan trees in Morocco, and you can see several pictures of them at Flickr.

Global community spirit

Posted on March 8, 2007 by JoeDuck

Over at Techmeme I’m struck by three stories that nicely showcase the importance of *community* to dot commers and to the expanding online universe.

The most interesting is that Yahoo Answers is going social, offering social networking as part of the answers concept. I was bullish on Yahoo Answers a year ago and it appears they’ve done a great job at growing this project. Incredibly the number of answers users is comparable to the number of Myspace people. This is not entirely apples to apples comparison because I’m guessing the Myspacers spend a lot more time online at Myspace, but if Answers can get the community ball rolling there is huge potential to become something of a “thinking persons” (or at least a “questioning person’s”?) Myspace.

The second item is Kevin Rose reporting that Digg has a *million* users. That is quite a milestone (though a long way from the approximately 60-100 million users claimed by Yahoo Answers and Myspace. I’ve never really understood the appeal of Digg as more than a superficial way to identify oddball news, feeling that dedicated diggers tend to prefer goofy stories rather than substantive ones, but the concept is brilliant and provocative.

Third, and perhaps most significant, is SONY’s Playstation 3 virtual world that launches this spring. Critics are raving about SONY’s brave new world, some suggesting it’s superior to the top virtual world “Second Life” which suffers from technical complexity, a steep learning curve, and a lot of skeptics who think second lifers are just escaping their first lives. It seems to me the Playstation world could become the “Myspace” of virtual worlds and captivate the teen crowd that already is practically living online ( WI or XBOX could also get smart super fast and get their own virtual world going. Both appear to be on the road for more widespread adoption as gaming systems than Sony’s PS3, though this can all change quickly).

WordPress blog = open ID. Brilliant!

Posted on March 7, 2007 by JoeDuck

Matt M, Simon, and the WordPress gang strike again with a simple yet extremely intuitive and useful solution to OpenID challenges. They are allowing WP blogs to pass ID info to other applications. For the WordPress gang I guess it’s just another day at the office but this really is a great development that will help a lot of folks who don’t want to hear about standards and technical issues and just want a simple solution to online ID issues. Other applications are doing this as well, which will make the OpenID transition a lot easier.

This seems so simple compared to the recent developments with Yahoo’s BBAuth and other OpenID approaches – I think these have focused heavily on ways for developers to build on, for example,Yahoo’s ID and bring it into applications. Good, but better to first establish a bunch of simple OpenID implementations for people’s Google, Yahoo, blog info.

I would like Yahoo to just establish a simple system like WP has that allows me to authorize Yahoo to release my Yahoo info to others as I’m doing with the WP solution. (did they do this and I missed it?).

I think we may all be surprised how registrations have been more of a barrier to entry than it would seem they should be by just requiring a few minutes of sign up. It’s a brave new world of short attention spans and attention deficits and as OpenID becomes ubiquitous and easy we can roam the wild online range even more quickly and superficially than before.

OpenID info at Word Press

Alexa – Beware the Satanic Statistics?

Posted on March 5, 2007 by JoeDuck

Peter Norvig over at Google has published a quick little study indicating how unreliable the Alexa Metrics are if you want to know about website traffic. Thank you Matt for pointing out this Peter paper, which is very intriguing as it demonstrates that Alexa is off by a factor of 50x (ie an error of five thousand percent!) when comparing Matt Cutts’ and Peter’s site traffic.

I’ve realized the problems with Alexa for some time based on Alexa comparisons to sites where I knew the real traffic, but 50x is a rather spectacular level of error. So great in fact, given that these sites are both read mostly by technology sector folks, it suggests that Alexa is effectively worthless as a comparison tool unless there is abundant other data to support the comparison, in which case you don’t need Alexa anyway.

Of course the very expensive statistics services don’t fare all that well either. A recent, larger, and simply superb comparison study by Rand over at SEOMOZ collected data from several prominent sites in technology, including Matt Cutts’ blog, and concluded that no metrics were reasonably in line with the actual log files. Rand notes that he examined only about 25 blogs so the sample was somewhat small and targeted, but he concludes:

Based on the evidence we’ve gathered here, it’s safe to say that no external metric, traffic prediction service or ranking system available on the web today provides any accuracy when compared with real numbers.

It’s interesting how problematic it’s been to accurately compare what is arguably the most important aspect of internet traffic – simple site visits and pageviews. Hopefully as data becomes more widely circulated and more studies like these are done we may be able to create some tools that allow quick comparisons. Google Analytics is coming into widespread use but Rand told me at a conference that even that “internal metrics” tool seemed to have several problems when compared with log files. My experience with Analytics has been superficial but seems to line up with my log stats well.