Nov 01 2004
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They called it freedom. Why a Bush win has a silver lining

Posted by | politics | No Comments

When the Democrats became the Republicans, Election results in 52 and 64: I always wondered when the Democrats, who were traditionally a party with an extreme right, racist platform, became the party to the left. What is amazing is how absolute the transformation was, the Democrats basically became the Republicans. Maps of the election results in 52 and 64, illustrate this perfectly, they are almost the inverse of each other. Left and right, conservative and liberal, labels attached to parties are abstract; however conservative is the label that the Republicans want to own. The problem is that the current Republican Party may be socially conservative but fiscally it is careless. But social conservatism is not really what America is about. What made the US special to my mind was that most people, both to the right and left rooted for being socially liberal with a small ‘l’ – they called…

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Oct 14 2004
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Google lock in

Posted by | search engines | No Comments

With desktop search Google now has an application that makes it much more likely that you will continue to use their search engine. They have created a switching cost – after spending several hours indexing your drive, you are less likely to switch to a different service. Although there is a lot of hoo hah about desktop search, its still amazing that it took till 2004 for searching your own machine to become a mainstream app, when you have been able to search thousands of other computers around the world, within an instant, since the last millennium. Expect Microsoft to counter aggressively, their business is built around owning the command line or desktop and they will likely build in indexing out of the box, meaning that Google desktop users will end up with two or more indexes. Whatever Microsoft do, Google have shown the way forward, their desktop search makes…

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Oct 13 2004
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Paypal founder backs local services site, Yelp.com – Yahoo and Google local, Citysearch, Craigslist and now Yelp!

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Backed by Max Levchin, co-founder of Paypal, Yelp! is a service that allows you to find, share and manage recommendations for local services from people that you know. Most online local services sites are not that useful, basically just an online version of the Yellow Pages. In fact, until this year, Dex, one of the major suppliers of local listings, did not even have search. Google and Yahoo have embryonic local services sites but Yelp adds persistence and reach to the word of mouth process, which is the way most people find local businesses. It’s a marketplace worth more than the entire online advertising market at $14Bn in the US and $40Bn worldwide and so is starting to attract a great deal of interest. Add Yelp to Yahoo and Google local, Citysearch and Craigslist and an interesting space is shaping up. www.yelp.com Disclaimer – I worked on Yelp.

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Oct 11 2004
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Blogging and Youth Culture

Posted by | rss | No Comments

The real growth in blogging and syndication is amongst Xanga and Livejournal users and these systems are walled gardens. RSS and syndication are an anathema. Good lowdown on Zephoria: “[young people] use the Profiles in IM to find out if their friends updated their LJs or Xangas, even though they are subscribed by email as well. The only feed they use is the LJ friends list and hyper LJ users have figured out how to syndicate Xangas into LJ.” apophenia: a culture of feeds: syndication and youth culture

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Oct 08 2004
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Mixin up the medicine – Lessig’s brilliant powerpoint mashups

Posted by | media | No Comments

Arguably the first music video ever, and possibly the first Powerpoint presentation, in “Don’t Look Back,” Bob Dylan holds up cue cards with words from the song Subterranean Homesick Blues on them and flips them, while staring at the camera, as the song plays: ‘Johnny’s in the basement Mixin’ up the medicine…’ Slideshow presentations went downhill from then on: Times Roman font, meaningless bullet points, a blue blend background, droning presenters wearing company polo shirts and pleated khaki pants. Powerpoint is an art crime. Because of this, I rarely pay much attention to conference presentations. However, one of the best things I saw at at Web 2.0 was how Larry Lessig has perfected his trademark slideshow. Like in Subterranean Homesick Blues, the slides flow along nicely with the lyrics. A lawyer defending the right for people to create digital collages produces a presentation that is an art form in itself,…

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Oct 07 2004
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RSS is not a space

Posted by | rss | No Comments

I’ve heard three people refer to the ‘RSS space’ at Web 2.0. This is dangerous hype. RSS is not a space, its a description of a way to transport links with clean titles. Advertising in RSS feeds will probably be worth $100 – $150 million within the next 18 months, and RSS readers will eventually be baked into all browsers as a fancy bookmarking feature – and that’s it. If people wanted to get excited about a piece of geekery that weblogs have helped drive then ping servers would be a better thing to look at. If you become the king of all ping servers then you have something that is a real threat to the core business of search engines. When quantitative information such as price appears in RSS product feeds, then ping servers are hugely valuable and search engines based on crawling are fundamentally broken.

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Oct 06 2004
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The world’s best toothpick

Posted by | design | No Comments

When I arrived in the US from bad teeth land one of the first things I asked my dentist for was a set of American teeth. Unfortunately I was told there was nothing that could be done. However at dinner with friends last night I was introduced to ‘Rota Points’, the best toothpick in the world. The bits in between my teeth are gone now, even if I’m still on page 27 of the Great Book of British Smiles. Intradental Cleaner

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Oct 05 2004
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Gawker additions

Posted by | media | No Comments

Gawker launches 3 new blogs: Screenhead a funny-stuff compilation. Jalopnik a cool-cars blog. Kotaku a video games blog. My car is crapped out and I have to avoid video games, because I will play them till my eyes bleed, but I’ll be a regular reader of Screenhead.

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Sep 27 2004
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Origins relaunch

Posted by | online genealogy | No Comments

The Origins Network: British Origins, Irish Origins, Scots Origins and Origins Search, has relaunched, changing from pay-per-view to subscription. Origins is the definitive site for UK and Irish genealogy. Disclaimer – I was a co-founder.

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Aug 24 2004
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Olympic medals table by number of gold medals per population

Posted by | trivia | No Comments

If you take the current Olympic medals table (ranked by number of golds) and re-order the top 20 gold medal winners to those listed by number of people per gold medal, according to population figures, the rankings are somewhat different. By this measure, the leader, Australia, is 7 times more athletic than the US and 30 times more than China. Greece is doing well with its home advantage at number 2. Rank: 1. Australia 2. Greece 3. Romania 4. Sweden 5. Hungary 6. Belarus 7. Netherlands 8. Ukraine 9. France 10. Italy 11. South Korea 12. Japan 13. Great Britain 14. Germany 15. United States 16. Russia 17. Canada 18. Poland 19.Turkey 20. China

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