The Internet today, is a lot like mail delivery in the 1800’s. Surprisingly, web services don’t have “flags”. Rather, applications are forced to “ping” Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, etc. every few minutes and ask “have any of our users done anything new?” These applications are literally checking to see if each virtual mailbox is empty/full every couple of minutes.
Redeye VC on Internet Applications
3 July 2008
2 July 2008
Finding something you to love to work on seems to be a much more fruitful pursuit than trying to get away from the notion of work altogether. It’s much easier too! The likelihood that you’ll strike gold after year’s of death-march living is still pretty low. The chance of finding something you love doing? So much more achievable. Millions of dollars not required.
37 Signals on Work
Sometimes it will be hard, or impossible, to discover simple models explaining huge collections of messy data taken from noisy, nonlinear phenomena. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Hypotheses aren’t simply useful tools in some potentially outmoded vision of science; they are the whole point. Theory is understanding, and understanding our world is what science is all about.
Cosmic Variance on Theory
1 July 2008
Over the weekend I went with a friend of mine to see Jolie’s new flick “Wanted”. It wasn’t Wall-E but it was delicious in it’s own way. All action, violence, curse words and Angelina’s ass. It was over the top, made no sense 15 minutes after you walked out of the theater and impossible in a ‘no way in hell” way. But it didn’t matter.It was still cool as fuck.
Chartreuse on “Wanted”
The concern, in short, is that the Internet will kill the goose that lays the golden egg. But this is unlikely. If online viewers want the level of news and opinion that print reporters generate, the Internet news services will hire reporters, defraying the cost out of their online advertising revenues, which will be greater for an Internet news service that attracts additional viewers by offering them richer, newspaper-type fare. Indeed, long after newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post have ceased print publication, their Web sites may be among the leading Internet news services.
Richard Posner on Newspapers
30 June 2008
For the first time in a long time I’m really anticipating the release of a new game. Anticipating it in my bones. This has the potential to be one of the greatest games of whenever the heck it’s launched. Even better than Duke Nukem Forever. If Blizzard sticks to their successful format and doesn’t change the game beyond all recognition.
ArsGeek on Diablo 3
29 June 2008
Features, I’ve recently come to realize, can be obstacles. Problems. The more powerful an application is, the more specialized it is, and thus with increased power its intended audience shrinks, and ironically, it becomes more, not less, vulnerable to competition.
Mashable on Features
27 June 2008
You wouldn’t believe how many times I have heard “Advertising” when asking a client how they plan to make money with their start up.Scarier yet, most of them are working with less than 25K and no programming experience.They see all the hype behind the latest VC investments and think they can be the next Facebook or YouTube.The fact is that the Facebook’s of the world are simply a fluke. They basically hit the lottery.
How To Split An Atom on Advertising
But it’s the singularity of their [Bill Gates and his peers] missions — their obsessions, if you will — that truly makes them special. So special, in fact, that no one currently on the horizon will even come close to replacing them.
GigaOM on Bill Gates
26 June 2008
So the question I’m left with is, if Yahoo execs are not really using Flickr in a Web 2.0 sort of way personally, can we really expect them to understand the tremendous innovation that Flickr represents for Web 2.0 in general? If they don’t “get it” first hand. If they don’t eat their own dogfood, so to speak, can we really expect them to truly take Flickr and social sharing in general where it needs to go?
Thomas Hawk on Yahoo