Jan 12 2006
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Alito and the Intelligent Design theory of government

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I watched some of the Alito hearings in awe. Alito is very impressive, a great speaker, coherent and logical – but he is damaged goods since his reason and logic has boundaries. The evidence – the refusal to acknowledge that the constitution is a ‘living document’. This is the latest meme to attack the very foundation of American Democracy by people who cannot accept the Constitution unless it is ‘Intelligently Designed’ and not Evolutionary. Since the constitution clearly does change – there are amendments, the argument against it as a living document is not creationist – i.e. it does not pretend that the amendments are fiction, that would be crazy. Instead, like Intelligent Design it tries to create a mechanism whereby things do change but they change because of an original, divinely inspired and complete design – the original Constitution. This is the exact opposite of what the founding fathers…

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Jan 11 2006
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Adwords, Adsense now Adballoons – Google is stealth testing Yellow Pages killer, ad network for maps

Posted by | search engines | No Comments

Although unannounced publicly, Google appears to be testing its Yellow Pages killer, maps based advertising. If you do a search for Hotels in New York on Google Local, you get something that you don’t get for a search for ‘hotels in San Francisco’ – ads. Right there as little blue map balloons rather the red, algorithmic, local search results. Not only are the ads local, but they are contextual i.e. hotel searches bring up sponsored results for local hotels. In some ways this is a relatively obvious move, however its big news considering that: 1. The Yellow Pages advertising market is bigger than the entire existing online search advertising market. 2. Offline Yellow Pages directories will clearly be replaced, over time, by online products, and it looks like maps are how this plays out. 3. Ad products are where Google makes the money that justifies its gargantuan Market Cap. so…

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Jan 09 2006
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why is weblog search so hard?

Posted by | search engines | No Comments

Buried within the comments of Jermey Zawadny’s post about Feedster is this comment: “I don’t recall Feedster ever being all that useful. But I also don’t find Technorati particularly useful. Why can’t someone just create a simple search engine for feeds/blogs?” The truth is that it is very difficult to build a search engine with real-time updates, since search engines are optimized for retrieval and usually use batch indexing. In addition, the majority of weblogs are spam, further compounding the problem. Blog search, which may once have seemed niche, will eventually be a standard part of search engines. At the moment, nobody, including Google, have a weblog search product that works. If they did it would be very useful. The real reason this is important is that it has nothing to do with weblogs, long term. There are only two things that matter in search – freshness and relevancy. At…

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Jan 09 2006
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Fantasy things to say to a VC

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Let the Good Times Roll by Guy Kawasaki: The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs Heh, great post. Having never had a proper job since i left architecture, I used to fantasize about doing job interviews since I could really tell the truth if I wasn’t looking for a job. Now that its possible to bootstrap a modest web service, I fantasize about really telling the truth to VC’s. Top 5 fantasy replies to questions in a presentation to a VC: Q. How big is your market? A. $0 [The current market size is $0 because I haven’t been doing any paid work because I have been building this product for a marketplace of 1 – me. I built it because I really want this and believe in it.] Q. What is your burn rate 6 months from now to fund growth? A. No real growth will be apparent 6 months…

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Jan 09 2006
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Does Digg Reveal the Average Lifespan of a Successful Internet Service.

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Digg is the real deal for web 2.0, in the sense that, for all the hype, it does absolutely nothing new but is about to render obsolete, geek central itself, Slashdot. Zawodny goes through the usual ideas as to why digg is successful – and then hits it on the nail – ‘Lets face it. The slashdot guys are getting old’. Sure there are some improvements over Slashdot in the way the Digg does things, but this is not the product shakeup of Google Maps vs. Mapquest. Digg wins because the community has more vitality. Digg is about fashion, it makes Slashdot look like a bunch of ageing rockers. We are seeing the first generational switch in web applications – and that is really web 2.0. If this is natural churn, then someday someone else will beat Digg, and if this is a precedent then the lifespan of an otherwise…

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Jan 06 2006
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Verizon threatens Google

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It seems that a war is brewing between the carriers (Verizon) and the service providers (Google). The carriers want to tax revenue generating traffic based upon the revenue potential rather than the traffic, and they want to charge both the sender and the receiver of the traffic. This is like charging Walmart trucks more than other trucks for a bridge toll, just because Walmart make more money than other companies, but where the equivalent of the toll has already been paid for by Walmart’s customers. One can assume that everyone is being superficially friendly but playing hardball in the background. The problem is that its impossible for the carrier to know the value of a single ‘bit’, since it varies according to what the ‘bit’ contains – is it part of an app, an ad, a video or text. Verizon want a slice of the action because they know that…

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Jan 06 2006
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2006 predictions

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Last Year’s predictions. Technology: 1. Digg gets acquired. 2. Google releases Google Calendar and Google Micropayments and OEMs Google maps as a UI for portable iPod like GPS handhelds. Click spam becomes a real worry. 3. Microsoft does a $10billion plus acquisition. 4. Apple takes on Tivo with a Mac Mini style product with Front Row built in. 5. Energy scares and middle east politics dampen the economy such that 2006 is not like 1999 for Web 2.0. Not technology: 6. US switches foreign policy away from direct military involvement to insurgency funding in Venezuela and ups anti-Chavez rhetoric. 7. Castro dies and Chavez threatens to stick his nose into Cuba. 8. Cracks appear in the Saud’s control over Arabia and information leaks suggesting that Ghawar oil field is water logged. 9. Natural gas prices spiral, US house prices cool and plans for renewed US nuclear power push are drawn…

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Jan 02 2006
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Lee Smolin, Relativistic Darwinism and Entropy

Posted by | half baked ideas | No Comments

Lee Smolin’s answer to this year’s Edge Question: ‘What is Your Dangerous Idea’ is my favorite, touching on something I’ve been thinking and reading about for the last year. Seeing Darwin in the light of Einstein; seeing Einstein in the light of Darwin 1. All systems leak – so they are fuzzy and relative. No system is fully open, or it ceases to be a separate ‘system’ and no system is fully closed, or it cannot be observed. Yet most science looks at or approximates closed systems. Just as the motion of objects depends on a frame of reference, I suspect the notion of how systems interact, how entropy flows between them, requires sensitive measurement to provide predictions , since all systems will tend to interact at a fine boundary between chaotoc and stable conditions, over time. Because of the required accuracy, these measurements will be dependent on something analogous…

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Jan 01 2006
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Much to learn from the biggest non story of 2006

Posted by | politics | No Comments

I normally beat up right wing incompetence, but time to have a go at left wing paranoia. Unlike stories of outing spies etc., many people in technology know that using tracking pixels or cookies is ubiquitous, accepted practice, i.e. neither unusual or sinister. So the thing that can be learned from the story below, is that if something sounds sinister, people will report it as such and one can assume that this is the case for other accusations against the government. ABC News: U.S. to Probe Contractor’s Web Tracking

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Dec 31 2005
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Con(n)Ed – their name says it all.

Posted by | business | No Comments

ConEd win this years prize for worst customer service. Having waited on the phone for half an hour because they don’t take credit card payments over the web (I mean my corner store does that), they don’t take credit cards over the phone – despite the fact that they say they do. Not just that – but if you change your bank and your payment doesnt go through, in their infinite wisdom, they decide that they will stop you from being able to pay by phone for six months. They basically don’t want your money. Please, please let Con Edison go bust.

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