2005 May

May 12 2005
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Some things take a long time XML, EDI and the lesson of RSS

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I hate paper – it seems mad that in 2005 there aren't more, readily available, solutions for small businesses to get rid of paperwork. In 98 before XML took off I had a stab at mapping existing EDI meta-standards to have a forms that create HTML forms for things such as purchase orders etc. See EDML Although you could argue that any online transaction is a form of EDI, existing efforts to migrate to XML have been slow. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned from RSS – a trivial standard that the people working on large scale syndication standards such as ICE, used to scoff at. Perhaps EDI needs an RSS equivalent , something that handles just purchase orders and invoices, for example (which account for the majority of EDI messages), maps to existing standards such as EDIFACT and ANSI X12 (does not re-invent the wheel), and keeps…

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May 11 2005
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Dodgeball acquired by Google

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As a two-person team, Alex and I have taken dodgeball about a far as we can alone. Since we finished grad school (ITP @ NYU), we've been trying to figure out how to grow dodgeball and make it a better service along the way. We talked to a lot of different angel investors and venture capitalists, but no one really "got" what we were doing – that is until we met Google. Congrats to Dens and Alex!link » tags: [news] [google] permamark in: Wists

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May 11 2005
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In numbers: Iraq war costs compared with Bush tax cuts

Posted by | trivia | No Comments

No axe to grind here, was just curious, so dug around the web for some data: Cost of Iraq/Afghan war so far: $300 billion (From end 2001 till end of this year) Cost per year: $75 billion Number of tax payers in the US: 130 million Average cost of campaign per taxpayer: $2300 Average cost per year per taxpayer: $575 Average cut for Bush’s 2003 tax cuts, per person: $1,083 (Median, i.e. most likely tax cut per person was $227)

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May 10 2005
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Books: Lebbeus Woods: Experimental Architecture

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Was pleasantly surprised the other day to find out that a favorite architect of mine, Lebbeus Woods, lives in the same building as me. Outside of architecture, Wood's designs have featured in the films Alien 3 and 12 Monkeys. (as you can see I am messing around with Wists' new blogging tool)link » tags: [books] [apt] [architects] permamark in: Wists

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May 10 2005
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Movie review, Kingdom of Heaven

Posted by | diary | No Comments

Half way through Kingdom of Heaven our hero is given a choice: Marry the good king’s, beautiful, nice daughter, who he is in love with and she is in love with him, and become king of Jerusalem, rule it wisely and keep the peace. In exchange, the corrupt guy who is going out with said daughter, who is trying to provoke war and murders people periodically and who wants to murder our hero, will be arrested and executed. Sounded like a no-brainer to me. However, our hero, does not want to sell his soul, to have his enemy arrested on a trumped up charge. At this point I switched off and enjoyed the cinematography. The good king dies, the corrupt guy marries the beautiful princess and provokes a war where thousands of people die and he is captured. The hero takes over and manages to kill enough of the enemy…

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May 08 2005
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VE day remembrance. The Just War trap

Posted by | diary | No Comments

The BBC have a very moving picture of an old, old man crying at a VE day remembrance service in Europe. WWII is refered to as a ‘just war’ to allude to the idea that a declaration of war can be on morally solid ground. But even if that were the case, justification is not the same as success. If 40 million deaths and many more injuries, homes lost and lives ruined and half of an entire race wiped out in genocide is not an unprecedented disaster then what the hell is? The allied victory in the Second World War was entirely Pyrrhic. For me, remembrance is second hand, of the lessons I learned from my grandparents’ generation who lived through WWI and WWII. Remembrance of a 16 year old boy with shell shock, shot for desertion to the allied refusal to bomb the railroad to Auschwitz. Because of the…

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May 05 2005
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Ads in RSS

Posted by | rss | No Comments

Dave Winer on ads in RSS “The feeds themselves are ads for the stories they link to, which are revenue-generators. Anything that keeps people from clicking, that confuses them, takes them off course, is going to drop the click-through rate.” here here. There are only three possibilities for ads in RSS: 1. where the feed is an aggregated feed or search result from many sources, then the ad is similar to what the search engines do (but this is a volume game – the individual ad revenue is less than at the destination site). 2. where MOST of the RSS ad revenue is given back to the publisher – so that the publisher can decide whether the ad revenue outweights the potential revenue from the added traffic. 3. Where the RSS feed is full content – although to be honest most people can make more revenue off fancy advertising at…

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May 04 2005
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Comment spam trail leads to a company with pending $1.5billion IPO with CSFB

Posted by | business | No Comments

I disabled comments a while back because of the spam issues from gambling and porn sites, but noticed that 10% of my traffic was to inbound links to some poker site comments that I hadn’t deleted. The inbound linking is to game Google into indirectly boosting pagerank for the eventual destination using clustered keyword terms, a more sophisticated variant of placing outbound links in comments. The traffic came from what appear to be affiliates of a CPA affiliate program site, 888.com, which in turn linked to poker sites that were owned by the same company as 888.com, operating out of the UK’s Gibraltar. These companies are owned by Cassava Enterprises, who, one might imagine, are a small, shady company, operating offshore. However, it turns out that Cassava Enterprises are in the process of going public in the UK for an estimated $1.5 billion, underwritten by Credit Suisse First Boston. See…

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