This is a quote from "the black swan: the impact of the highly improbable":

If you are a researcher you will have to publish inconsequential articles in "prestigious" publications so that others say hello to you once in a while when you run into them at conferences.

...

Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized. They look like idiots to their cousins, they look like idiots to their peers, they need courage to continue. No confirmation comes to them, no validation, no fawning students, no Nobel, no Shnobel.  "How was your year?" brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their year will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside. Then bang, the lumpy event comes that brings the grand vindication. Or it may never come.

Video of the talk given in the lean startup circle meetup:

Drew Houston at Lean Startup Circle from David Binetti on Vimeo.

Good detailed overview of scaling at Facebook. (via highscalability). Some good bits about the facebook culture and how they manage to out-execute everybody else with very few engineers.

The new upcoming Digg seems interesting. It seems they are trying to reclaim their territory back from Twitter. Simplifying and streamlining submissions while adopting the twitter follow metaphor.Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian responds claiming Kevin is getting sidetracked by VCs. Not sure if I completely agree. There is nothing wrong with embracing good ideas of competitors and evolving your product.

However, I would want to see Digg going beyond the "follow". Let us call it upvote a user instead. If you upvote a person, you do not have to show everything the people you upvote say nor are you limited to displaying only that. Furthermore, you do not have to reveal to a user which users upvoted him. This takes care of the noise caused by reciprocity. What is in a name? An upvote fits better with what Digg is and what Digg offers, and can offer a more useful semantics. I think there is room for a cleaner Twitter, one without all the chatter and Digg could become it. As for streamlining the submission process, I am a great believer in the "Path of Least resistance" so that is definitely a good thing. Now we can sit back and watch.

 

API, Application Programming interface are a set of agreements or contracts between a program or a library and any other programmer that wishes to use them. For example, the iPhone API allows programmers to easily make use of the iPhones GPS, touchscreen and motion detection. The programmer is usually assured that this contract will keep working with the current version of the iPhone which will be supported for the next few years.

I would argue that much of Twitters success is the combination of missing features along with very open API. Third party vendors helped make the platform useful quickly while developing what they believe to be complementary business plans. The problems start when "complementary" is ill-defined. The trouble usually does not stem from the software API changing or being discontinued, although that happens too. Lately, what breaks are the business APIs.

First let us take a look at Facebook. Let us ignore the implicit contract with the users. What about the contract with facebook application developers? Zynga invested a lot in bringing highly addictive games to the facebook platform. Needless to say both companies benefited. However, facebook is now going to change the business API requiring application developers to use the Facebook Credits and pay a 30% Facebook tax. Facebook and Zynga did eventually reach an agreement.

The reason Twitter could grow at such an amazing rate is that third party developers provided all the missing functionality, turning Twitter from a very limited social blogging platform to an empire. But then the business API changes. Some of the functionality provided by third party applications is made redundant by the expansion of services offered by the company. Examples include search and native clients. The most recent change bans third party application developers from in-stream advertisement, which may foil some business plans.

The reason the precise definition of business API is needed is exactly due to the investment needed by third parties. Investment a platform company relies on. Similarly to developing the software architecture around the software API a platform company needs to develop the business plan around the business API. Unless they know that the API will not change for the next X years it may not be worth it to invest the time in the platform.

So, I argue that to bootstrap an empire based on minimalistic functionality and an open API, a business API makes sense for all sides.

Mozilla explains why they chose Riak over Cassandra and HBase!

Cute prototypical social network startup video spoof.

Richard Stallman visionary, utopian or ocd?

How to scale with Python.

A good video from Jack Dorsey on his take-aways from starting companies like Twitter and Square, What I found interesting is that it seems he sees the roots for both Twitter and Square in ideas he has been carrying with him since he was a kid. He also talks about how important it is to flesh out and share your ideas, listen to your users and based on what you hear either adopt ideas like the @ symbol, the word tweet and the concept of a re-tweet or quickly kill the project.

Some good observations and tips for being more productive.

Techcrunch reporting on domainfest Dating.com sold for $1,750,000.

Targeting a facebook ad at a single person, wow that is cool...and freaky. To be fair, you cannot be sure it is only targeting that person but still very cool.

On the other hand, targeting who you hope would be your future boss, that is just genius.

Good tips from Naval Ravikant on how paranoid to be about your ideas, how important is being in Silicon Valley and more

The privacy concerns everybody has been having regarding facebook is undoubtedly what caused 3033 people to pledge 116,902 dollars on Kickstarter to the open source project Diaspora. It took them only twelve days to reach 10,000 dollars. Diaspora, as far as I can tell is not much more than an idea at this point. This did not stop the New York Times from covering them already, an article which quickly people discovered includes a very geeky unix joke :), which was then promptly removed. See the guys behind Diaspora on youtube... oh so that is how you pronounce it.

It is worth sidetracking for a second to talk about Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a new type of funding site that is not actually focused on startups and software but on "art, music, design (fashion, product, game, app, etc), film/video, food, journalism, and other" which is an interesting spin. It is not a crowd sourcing investment site since the creators keep 100% ownership. Crunchbase does not have much to say but you can check their FAQs. With all this attention, more people are going to take notice of Kickstarter but both sides are going to be slightly surprised.

Back to facebook. Is facebook going away? No not really. They still have over 400 million users which means at least some of your friends are likely there and it is a great way to stay in touch and to create new connections. The pivot they are currently doing might actually make them more successful. However, Diaspora represents an opportunity to try and create new open protocols that in the long run will level the playing field and give more power to the users. The idea, I believe is to ultimately reclaim ownership over your personal data. Let us watch what happens next.

lessons learned at reddit: A FOWA 2010 presentation by Steve Huffman. Interesting stuff about how they use postgresql in a schemaless manner, how they avoid joins, how they use memcache and memcachedb, and other high scalability tips.

More input from reddit this time about slowness downtime and some good details about working with cassandra

No techcrunch50 this year. instead Jason and Arrington will each do their own thing. The more the merrier?

If you have not stumbled upon Jason Calacnis new empire, checkout thisweekin.com not to be confused with the equally excellent twit.tv.

Rather than pouring my "creative" energy into twitter, I am going to do "daily bits" blobs of random thoughts and links. We will see how that goes.

Tips on bootstrapping a marketplace startup.

Great visualization of the evolution of privacy on facebook.

The death of the file metaphor?

stop talking start doing

Heroku, an interesting ruby on rails in the cloud service.

Discussion, which one to start with? NoSQL or SQL?

The latest buzz word on all the startup blogs seems to be "pivot" (see also here). The idea is as follows. Let us say you are a young startup: you already raised some money, assembled the team, started developing software and maybe even have some clients. Things are going great! Great that is, until at some point you discover you are headed towards a dead end or maybe an even a greater opportunity. what do you do? You pivot. Being so young here is an advantage. You can talk to your small team and convince them that this new direction is much more promising. Ideally, the new direction would work even better for your existing clients and would allow you to salvage some of your efforts uptill now. Congratulations, you pivoted. There is a nice thread on the lean-startup-circle attempting to break down the concept to a whole pivot taxonomy.

Now what happens if your company has been running for more than six years, you raised several hundred million dollars, have over 400 million active users and now, for some reason you want to pivot?

You are positioned as the safe haven for you and your friends and you are great. Everybody loves you and trusts you. However, suddenly you become jealous of the new guy (Twitter envy?)? Maybe you realize monetizing social networks is tricky? Maybe you realize there is a whole web out there and you want a piece of that too? You make up your mind you are going to pivot. Pivot the whole planet; Pivot your 1200 employees, the code and the concepts. You also have to pivot the 400 million active users into thinking their safe haven was actually a public park all along. That public is the new private. You can learn about the new APIs facebook introduced: the open graph, facebook on connections and eff on connections., I am not going to go into details.

Some people find it scary? A lot of people are upset, trying to hold on to the wall and pivot the thing back. Returning your privacy one site at a time. Some people just want to leave their violated safe haven. Politicians as well as the eff also found it necessary to voice their concerns.

Facebook made a strategic decision to try and aggressively encourage people to be more public about their information. I am not sure that is such a big sin. They were one of the first companies to face the need for these type of privacy controls. Quite frankly, I think Facebook offers the users amazingly fine grained privacy controls which should be studied and adopted. Facebook is a business, and the owner of the business made a strategic decision to attempt and speed up social evolution. If nothing else it is a daring attempt that is very interesting to watch.

Nice story from Tina Seelig which I found on VentureBeat. Six minute video embedded below

If you "like" databases and are "into" file-systems you should become familiar with NoSQL. The short story is, in order to achieve good scalability you may be willing to give up some of the power of a full fledged ACID guaranteeing, SQL compliant databases. Linux magazine has a nice article on it.

Bear With Claws has a nice piece about the nontrepreneur. Basically he talks about the talkers and encourages them to do. This article spoke to me but I think there is a bigger picture.

There is an evolution or a hierarchy of people who aspire to be entrepreneurs.

1. The idea guy: He has tons of ideas, some of them even good. A good idea guy, keeps one of those little notebooks, maybe even some electronic device to keep track of all his ideas. He keeps it very very secret and does absolutely nothing with it. Happily counting them off as others build them and make them popular.
2. The Talker a.k.a the nontrepreneur: He wants to get something going. He wants to find the right partner to somehow get beyond the idea stage. He talks to his friends and they talk back. Maybe they spend a lot of time convincing each other that their ideas are not good enough.
3. The starter: The  starter picks one of his ideas and starts working on it. Maybe he does a bit of research, writes a design, buys a domain. An advanced Starter may even start implementing something. Eventually the starter will lose interest, get distracted, lose focus and move on.
4. The finisher: This guy knows that beginnings will get you nowhere, you need to finish something. He will finish a prototype. He has the focus necessary to stick with something for more than a week. He might be one of these guys that does not want to leave in the middle of a movie even if it makes him physically sick (Cloverfield?). He might even post a link or give it to one of his friends. Eventually, since he built it and they didn't come, he'll forget about it.
5. The Successful Entrepreneur All the previous categories were easy, they defined what was missing, what might stop you from being a successful entrepreneur. But what does it take to be a successful entrepreneur? I cannot really say. Maybe it's having ideas, identifying the good ones, having the focus and determination to start and finish something, getting friends to help you, getting friends to try your product, pushing and pushing, changing the focus when needed... Maybe it's having a business plan?

Maybe someday I'll have a better answer, if and when I move to the next stage :).

Eliot's Blog has a great series of posts asking 50 successful domainers for "one piece of advice they would give to a part-time domain investor looking to build his business.". The series will consist of 50 experts, 10 experts in each part. Part 1 and part 2 are already available. Cool.

Bottom line, if you are serious keep doing what you have to do. Rejections should not stop you. YCombinator backed Directed Edge says it nicely here telling the story how they got rejected a year before they got accepted and finally got backed. Here is the video of their second application.

Mint CEO Aaron Patzer on Startups from Techcrunch on Vimeo.

Kevin rose describes how to make your site popular:

Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Some of the points discussed:

• leaderboard
• give credit and recognition to your users
• Don't assume anythin, build, release and measure. Repeat as necessary

I spent a few hours installing moinmoin. I chose moinmoin because it is implemented in python and having enjoyed python lately I wanted the option of adding some stuff to the wiki.

The installation was long but not painfull, I figured out what I needed to do, I did it and it worked. All the features I expected seemed to be there, so I spent a few more hours entering and importing content into it. Finally, our group had a meeting to review what to do next.

One of my mac friends, showed up with his new shinny macbook pro. I've been thinking of getting one myself and seeing one made resisting harder. Unfortunately, moinmoin refused to show the WYSIWYG editor in the safari browser. Bummer, that's a deal breaker.

Moinmoin may be a brilliant piece of engineering but we are going to switch to twiki which does work in safari. One missing feature, bug or quirk is enough for ungrateful people to toss all your hard work aside and go play with somebody else. This feature happen to be the killer feature for us, but any other feature may be the killer feature for your users.

I experienced a similar incident from the other side of the table, albeit with a much more humble half-baked endeavor. I wrote a small site for personal use, a site I have been using for over a year. But it was in no way, stable, debugged or ready. I showed it to a friend and the thing crashed quite horribly. Now, even though I prefixed this demo with all the usual disclaimers it still made a bad impression. Next time when I show him anything he will approach it with reserve and apprehension. Bummer.

What's my point? You can't do it all, but anything less than awsome is just not good enough.

(update: we're trying to follow up on moinmoin. It uses FCKEditor which should support safari now, and supposedly so should moinmoin since the FCKEdit version is high enough. You get the picture.).

When I have an idea for a new website, I like thinking of names for it. Actually, my fondness of coming up with names goes beyond my possibly pointless hobby slash addiction with domain names. I often joke that the achievement I am most proud of in all the work on my masters degree is coming up with its name: "Do Not Crawl in the DUST: Different URLs with Similar Text". But do domain names have a value beyond proving your copyright abilities?

A name is a way for people to reference a specific person or entity. So when I say youtube you can easily guess or search how to find the site I'm talking about.  So if you can't spell it right (Did you say U2?), pronounce it easily, or if a search can't find the site or the ranking of your site for your name is very low this name might be problematic.

A name has to be memorable.That usually means it has to be short, composed of simple parts and preferably pronounceable by as many people around the world.

Finally, you want to build your name, meaning you want to create a widely accepted mapping between certain concepts and your name. Certain such mappings already exist in your mind: "video", "social" and "a friend" for example. Building on such concepts should be easier,

Taking all that in account, and assuming that domain names are here to stay, people choose and buy domain names in hope it would ease establishing their unambiguous, memorable and appropriately associated name. Fame and fortune is sure to follow.

Having said that, I find it interesting that 10 of top 50 properties according to Comscore are short, pronounceable but many are not inherently related to the concepts they represent and many are quite common words: Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, AOL (America Online), Fox (Fox Interactive Media), eBay, wikipedia, Amazon, Ask and Time Warner. A few of these have great association to desirable concepts: America Online for an Internet provider, Ask for a search engine, Microsoft for a company providing software to microcomputers and wikipedia for an online encyclopedia. One could argue for Time to be included in this group as well. However, eBay, established their associations in the minds of millions without any natural association. A quick wikipedia peek reveals that: "The company officially changed the name of its service from AuctionWeb to eBay in September 1997." They change their name from the "perfect natural association" keyword match to the name eBay. According to internet-story, they became successful as AuctionWeb and switched early in their success.

The last three domains are Yahoo, Google and Fox. Fox has the additional "Interactive Media" in its name. Google is hard to spell and was actually a misspelling of the word Googol which is a very large number. Despite the misspelling and the fact the word wasn't known to many Google managed to get their name in the dictionary! Isn't that the ultimate proof of establishing the association between concepts and a name?. And what did they do? They tried to fight it! Well apparently, if you do too good a job, you may lose your trademark. Finally, Yahoo established their name against all odds and against the current. The word is taken from the novel Gulliver's Travels and had 'become synonymous with "cretin," "dinosaur," and/or "Neanderthal."' due to this book.

To summarize, short, memorable and pronounceable are great. The great ones build their name from scratch and even overcome existing negative connotation.

Michael Arrington gets a brilliant interview with Kevin Rose. Kevin Rose tells a lot of what happened on the business side from the idea, running out of money, angel investments, registered users, unique visitors etc. Cooooool.

Arrived a day early in Madrid for WWW2009. The first day seems packed with good stuff, all at once which means you have to choose. Currently thinking of going to one of: "Search Metrics User Satisfaction", "Query Log Mining" and "Web Search Result Summari­zation and Presentation".

Today was nice, some food, some presents and nice weather. Updates to follow.

I've been using twitter for...about two months now. Not exactlt a heavy user, I've made 85 updates in 2 months. When looking at Twitter, one thing that is undeniable is how fast it is growing. So I would say for now it's a success, and as such, it is interesting. But why is it a success? What did they do right? What did they do wrong?

First of all what's good about twitter. When you like someones tweets, you follow them. However, unlike in facebook, somehow its more acceptable not to follow them back. That's a good thing in this case. It allows different types of relationships between people, not just symmetrical friendship.

Next, twitter limits the size of their posts, your tweets. This immediately creates a different medium. Whatever you say on twitter is much less "official", less heavy and serious than your normal blog.

The size limit also forces you to use services like tinyurl, because otherwise a single URL could use up the 140 characters you have per post. The value of URL shortners was recently discussed in many places whether or not they are a good thing. Generally, I think it is a bad thing causing needless redirections, shortening the expected life of your content and fragmenting the "Universal Resource Locator" into different URLs. Just take a peek at my dust paper to see how useful URLs can be.

One thing twitter clearly did right was release an API early. This created a whole eco-system of third-party applications. I believe this still serves to fill the void of missing functionality needed to make the service trully useful.

Which brings us to the next problem. Twitter doesn't scale, at least not in its current level of service. I'm not talking about the computers, the architecture, memcached mysql and what not. No. It doesn't scale for us, the human beings. If you follow around 50 carefully chosen people, you already have to spend way too much time keeping up with them. Many of the posts are going to be duplicates, many of the people you follow will have other "non-interesting" interests and many will hold conversations with people you don't follow which will end up appearing non-sensical on your end. The signal to noise ratio is just too big. Now imagine what happens if you follow 4000 people..

How did Twitter become this popular? I still can't fully understand it. It can't be all PR and hype, right?

And yet...I'm still using it :).

Check out these two videos of how digg and facebook work behind the scenes. (Wow, what a relief it is to use normal length URLs). Both definitely worth a watch.

They both praise memcached and mention that relational databases can only go so far.

One more thing worth mentioning is that digg was originally launched by hiring a programmer for ~2000$ and throwing it on shared hosting. So don't over-think it.

Oh, and myspace too.

I am the coordinator of our group's seminar at UCLA. That means I find people who find people who give talks :).

I decided to try to organize something a bit different. The basic idea was to have 20 people give three minute talks. This way, every person needs to read one paper and you get a good idea of the whole conference in an hour.

So I decided to start with WSDM 2009. I set up a blitzcc wiki with links to all the papers, and some instructions on how to choose a paper. Finally, I sent off a mass email to our group asking people to join our blitzcc. I didn't want to put up flyers yet, I wanted to keep things inside the group and keep it small, at least for the first time. Unfortunately I did not get a single response. Disappointing to say the least.

I didn't want to give up yet, so I went over the students in our group, went over their latest publications and wrote personal emails with the subject line "Papers that might interest you", listing the papers they might find interesting. That got much better responses... two people volunteered.Together with me and Mike Welch the coordinator that made four people :).

I was still a bit disappointed, I was hoping to see... excitement! In the end we had four people presenting and instead of three minutes per speaker, each speaker took 10 minutes. Overall, it went well. The responses were positive and the papers we covered were interesting.

We'll see what happens next quarter.

I like asking Professors what they think a Ph.D. is supposed to teach you. Recently I got an answer I like from one of my Professors. Basically he said, and I apologize because I am paraphrasing, students are supposed to learn how to come up with problems, identify the "good" ones and solve them. This is the best answer yet!

But if you can't come up with problems of your own, dropping another quote "great artists steal". Yahoo research labs have published a list of "Key Scientific Challenges" which can help you. If that didn't grab your attention they also mentioned something about 5000$ :).

There are certain moments when you see something new and it makes you go "Ahhhhh! Wow! I get it." and maybe even "That's cool". That is what people aim hope for when they are doing "research", that's what you may hope to feel when reading about a new startup or when Steve Jobs says "one more thing". 

Then there are certain people who say a certain problem is (90%  sovled).

That's why it makes me happy  to see things like this. Are electric sockets and chords a 99% solved problem?

That's before we get into that whole wireless energy thing.

I thought palm was dead. I thought there was no way for them to come back (from the dead).

After watching this video I think they might have a chance. Keyboard, innovatove user interface and integration of information from different web sites inside your calendar and contact list are some of the cool features. Looks very cool.

That being said, it remains to be seen if their customers and mainly if their developer community will remain loyal in the face of yet-another palm os.

Google was great. It is a very unique place to work at. Seattle is super, even with the rain and snow it is still leagues better than LA can ever hope to be. I'm back in LA, back in kerckhoff in my favorite corner. I'm full of hope, even if it is just for a second.

My favorite uncle in the whole wide world just died.

I have always been fascinated with data visualization techniques. If you are not familiar with digg labs you should take a look. Tim Showers collected some nice text cloud like visualizations. Science News has an article on how mathematicians attempt to visualize higher dimensional objects. An interesting example can be found in the seedcamp blog. Another one by IBM.

The rumor that Pandora may be forced to close down has come back to haunt us. For those of you who still don't know Pandora is an interactive personal music streaming service. You seed it with a few artists or songs you like, and it starts playing. As the songs are played, you can either thumb them up or thumb them down.

I have been a big fan of Pandora for a long time. The thing I like most about Pandora is that it allows you to expand your musical horizons without feeling ignorant. I got to know Hendrix, blues and metal better through Pandora. Another cool thing is there is very little crud: once you log in and tell it an artist or two, just type in pandora.com and it immediately starts playing. So Pandora is great, why isn't making enough money?

Well, in order to make money you need to spend a little and make a lot. Pandora is currently haunted by the evil RIAA. It is being charged more than satellite radio stations do, and certainly more than terrestrial stations that apparently pay nothing. The way it makes money is through visual ads and through affiliate marketing (I'm guessing those links are not just for our convenience). The design of the advertisements are very smart, you hear nothing but music but if you want to give Pandora feedback, when you look at the screen the ads change, grabbing your attention. That's really smart. So what's the problem?

Apparently, with the inflated rates the RIAA, these ads are not enough to cover them. So what can they do? Either lobby their way to lower rates or make more money. How about both?

I argue that if apple buys Pandora they can achieve both. Hoping for unlimited music from Apple may be too optimistic. However, Apple's pull with the music companies can still get Pandora a good deal. Integration with the iTunes music store will sell more songs. Having Pandora pre-installed on all iPhones and iPods can get it to a greater audience. Having Pandora on iPhones will sell more iPhones. Everybody wins. But I think there's more money to be made here.

I always thought Pandora is not reaching their full potential with the visual ads. Are audio ads such a sin? Podcasts do them? Is that so wrong? In case you really want to have uniterrupted music, add an additional 1 dollar a month to your monthly bill and you get ad free Pandora goodness.

No need to thank me...well...

There's this cool tool called wordle which creates cool keyword cloud like visualizations of blogs. Check out some search engine related examples.

What I admire is truly creative research that also has practical implications. This image viewing work I think qualifies. Checkout the video explanation here.

So there is 92% chances I'm male according to this site. Go there and check for yourself, just to make sure. They also can magically tell you your browsing history. It uses a something that can be viewed as a security bug in most modern browsers. Cool though and creepy.

Scarbulous is apparently shutting down their facebook app. I was mid-game and as far as I can recall winning too. You can still play on their site which I find weird.

This is not the first time companies kill potential cash cows. A thing I find silly to do at best. An analogy will help clear things up.

Say someone grew a whole field of corn on your land, better crops than you ever managed to grow on the land in the last five years. What do you do? Do you:

1. Chase him off, sell the corn and enjoy a one time profit.
2. Reach some agreement with him and let him continue successfully growing corn on your land while you collect a monthly check.
   
3. Burn the corn and shoot the other guy torture his family and swear vengeance will be yours forever.
   
4. All of the above

There is no "correct" answer but I'd go with number 2.

Nice little article on how to avoid vision overload.

Mashable has a nice article on alternatives sources of revenue for web companies. First of you've got to clarify what's wrong with the current ad based model?

What worries me about ads is their reliability. The article suggests donations instead. I think a more reliable sources of revenue would be good for companies since it gives you a source of income you can plan on. Personally, I like the two service level subscription model. The first level is free the second one is premium. The dating industry is big on that model. So why can't other web companies adopt that model?

It's the VC's fault really. Any web company that would start charging subscription fees would face competition from VC funded free services. Then data portability gets thrown in the mix. You end up with a business where the user can switch to another service as easy as switching to a different brand of toothpaste, only the other toothpaste is free and just as good. How can anybody build a sustainable business this way?

For those interested in web design checkout this list of thirty websites to follow.

Check out these insightful tips for college student productivity.

Checkout this readwrite article describing a site called gwap, a nice timewaster that harnesses the power of the people to characterize images, find objects in images and learn world facts. A lot of it is due to the captcha guy also of Carnegie Mellon. Very nice execution and good buzz for Carnegie Mellon.

I had this idea to write a ping-pong application for the iphone. But I had not idea how to figure out what the distance was between the iphones. Anyway checkout multi-iphone-pong for the iphone.

Check out this article from readwriteweb covering some of the more disruptive changes to "the web".

I've been making certain advances in my personal productivity and I wanted to share one of the more amusing realizations with you.

Consider the following situation. You have two open ended projects, you could spend hours, days or years on each of them. The first is you research project. If you do a  good job on it, a really good job, it might get into a leading conference, that will later help secure some job offer you really want to get.

The second project is a project in a course. Nobody expects it to be published. If you do an excellent job you'll get an A, a mediocre job will still get you an A, and if you do a really bad job you'll get a B. Sounds simple so far, right?

Alas the story gets complicated. And like any good tragedy you the main character have a flaw that will doom you. You want to excell. You really hate doing a bad job. Some might even try to insult you and accuse you of being a perfectionist. How do you overcome this tragic character flaw. The answer lies in strategic procrastination.

These two words that seemingly should never go in the same sentence come together to help you get over yourself. First step, assess the number of hours the average team will spend on the class project. Let's say the number is 30 hours. Step two, wait until deadline - 30 hours. Remember to factor in sleeping into the equation. Step three, procrastinate.

Some of you will read this and laugh. That's o.k. To you I say... ha ha ha... I'm being funny. Some of you just don't get it. Since I am a polite guy to you I say... ha ha ha... it sounds funnier in Yidish. To the rest of you, I sincerely hope that at some point in your life I'd have helped you,

What I blog is not always exactly news. For this reasosn, you already know the "right answer" to the question asked. Facebook VP says Facebook is analogous to a cable company. I say, really really bad analogy. So who is is analogous to a Cable Co.?

Maybe it is Hulu? I was all excited to see TV commercials on-line. They certainly can become an on-line "cable company". But they post incomplete seasons, trying to tease the users I guess. Tease them into what? Going back to the television maybe? That is a bad recipe towards becoming an on-line cable company. We want new content. We don't want to have to buy a cable box. We have the eye-balls, don't you want them?

The current analogous to a cable company is sidereel.com. No, strike that they are the tv-guide. The back-end, the pipes are sites like 56.com, megavideo.com, tudou.com. These sites cannot be simply dismissed as youtube want-to-be-s. They host videos longer than 10 minutes, some of them have nice features like being able to play several episodes in a row automatically. Should they be dismissed as simple pirate sites?

Compare Hulu to sidereel. Hulu just re-posted last weeks episode of house. sidereel on the other hand has above 17 links to the full episodes. Granted, sidereel's links are sometimes too slow and that is annoying. The fact that they don't include commercials doesn't make me too happy. I would prefer a source that would deliver the stream fast enough and would be happy if I can watch commercials to help sustain the model. Hulu needs to be better than sidereel.

Take southparkstudios.com, the official southpark site. They make the content available immediately after it finishes to air. They get it.

Youtube thrived on illegal content as well. They proved that illegal content, with brilliant business peoplel, can make business sense. The next cable company is somewhere out there, I am highly skeptical of it being Facebook, Hulu? Maybe.

Of the world's 100 largest economic entities, 51 are now corporations and 49 are countries. That's what's claimed by http://www.corporations.org whoever they are. I find that amazing.

The people closest to you in culture can most likely be found on-line, very likely in a different country. Could this change the country's part in people's life? Can digg.com declare itself a country? How about having a Limited Land Country (LLC)?

A semantic opinion aggregator named swotti is definitely intreresting and worth checking out. Searching for the MacBooc air gives you summaries of specific opinions regarding its design, weight, battery life as well as general comments. The site seems slow these days, probably due to unanticipated or premature popularity. Sign of things to come.

Some youtube news checkout TubeSpy, as covered by readwriteweb. An amusing lively way to see what youtube users are currently viewing. Apparently this was implemented using jquery and the youtube api. cool.

Also, if you are a youtube fanatic, checkout the youtube awards.

google face search

1. obtain training data site specific
2. learn site specific templates
3. try to learn a global detector for templateness.

• Limited storage: You can only write so much on one page and you can only do some much in a week.
• Easy Access: It is very easy to clear your mind GTD style.
• My horrible hand writing: For some reason it is easier for me to read my horrible hand writing.