Build your own search engine with no hardware cost, with Alexa: $1 per CPU hour consumed. $1 per gig of storage used. $1 per 50 gigs of data processed. $1 per gig of data uploaded. John Battelle’s Searchblog: Alexa (Make that Amazon) Looks to Change the Game
Writely continues to add word processing features which are actually useful, unlike Word which takes several thousand options and millions of calculations per second to provide the functionality of a typewriter. It looks like the entire Microsoft edifice is held up by Excel, the only product I can think of that is better than competitors’. Is Excel really worth as much as a medium sized country, in the long term? Web word processor adds PDF conversion | CNET News.com
The worst mistake we made at Moreover was to raise too much money. The Bay Area prides itself on the sophistication of its investment structure, but most of the successful Web 2.0 ‘exits’, from a founder perspective, have been non-Bay Area companies or ones that didn’t raise too much cash. Perhaps the further you are from Mountain View, the less likely you are as an entrepreneur, to be seduced by Bay Area style startup investment. If you are in a casino and you are $5M up, the best thing you can do is walk away from the roulette table. If you are a young entrepreneur $5M is a life changing experience and selling a company after bootstrapping or a seed round of investment can give you that. A series B round could very well give you more – but it is a much bigger gamble and as recent evidence suggests,…
Sam Harris’ Atheist Manifesto. Most of what he says is reasonable, however, the editor suggests that Harris argues that religious toleration is a menace – this is not a defensible argument since it empirically leads to persecution. Its true that there is not a single ideology that is truly tolerant of other ideologies, therefore an anti-ideology like atheism can be more tolerant by making no absolute claims of its own but adaptable guidelines based upon evidence and reason. One should not be intolerant of belief itself but unreasonable acts based upon it. However, since ideological dogma, of which religious dogma is a subset, is not based upon reason – its acts are very often unreasonable and intolerant. A consistent maxim for an atheist would be to be tolerant of religious faith, but intolerant of intolerance itself. This is not a nihilist view, but a defense of moral relativism. Its also…
Riffs is a very nicely executed relook at reviews, another slot in the web 2.0 trend of looking at things that are a good idea but haven’t had a makeover since the dotcom days. Interestingly enough Riffs founder Bruce Spector was behind one of the original web components – the first online calendar app. someone with enough vision and clout to propel Riifs. Publishing on the web is becoming standardized the way the browser and search engines standardized Internet based information retrieval. Before the web, full text search was a relatively obscure area dominated by the likes of Verity. Today the lack of full text search within Windows seems amazing, the web having made it mainstream. Looking at services like Riffs, which make publishing content an almost subconscious activity, something interesting is happening: the interface for publishing is gravitating towards the same interface as search. Google has a bunch of…
“Attention shoppers – some Web sites ditch the online cart and offer new experiences” “it isn’t just Etsy that is trying to innovate. Wists (www.wists.com) allows users to bookmark pages visually via a small image and summary, which can then be shared with other users. This sort of thing makes sharing wish lists of goodies with others easier, for example.”
If you are a completely miserable git – like me, you will love consumerist. Its a blog that will focus consumer frustration, spraying lame companies with virtual offal. Along with Sploid, its a Gawker media property that I will actually read – in fact this time i may actually contribute. The Consumerist: Shoppers Bite Back
In Worldnet Daily’s ‘lets rape unfaithful women’ OpEd is the following sentence: “There may be a genuine moral argument against rape to be made outside of the Judeo-Christian ethic, but I have yet to hear it.” – how very deaf you must be. I’ve noticed increasing reference to the so called ‘Judeo-Christian’ tradition. This lumping of Judaism with Christianity together with the claims of Millennium Christian radicals is an insult that could possibly lead to injury, since historical precedent suggests that jews will eventually get the blame. Given that there are three religious sects that worship the same deity and find common ancestry in Abraham: Judaism, Islam and Christianity, reference to the Judeo-Islamo-Christian, or, more elegantly, ‘Abrahamic’, tradition makes some sense. The permutation: ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ stems, obviously, from the fact that Christianity supersizes the Torah into its own edition, whereas Islam rewrites it. But what of the other alternatives: Given…
“if a woman consents to extramarital sex, she is committing a moral offense which is equal to that committed by the man who engages in consensual sex with her, or by the man who, in the absence of such consent, rapes her. Christianity knows no hierarchy of sins. Since only the woman who is not entertaining the possibility of sex with a man and is subsequently raped can truly be considered a wholly innocent victim under this ethic” I’ll paraphrase this nonsense because the writing is so bad: ‘A woman who considers, for a second, the possibility of sex outside of marriage is no better than a man who actually rapes her.’ This is what some people who call themselves Christians actually believe. As an aside, the guy who wrote the article describes himself as a Christian Libertarian (i.e. someone who both rejects and blindly worships authority). Here are some…