Wha? Craigslist evil?

13 Wednesday Dec 2006

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I love Craigslist.  It rocks.  I gave away an old George Foreman grill to a good home last week.  I even gave away what must be the most hideous crystal picture frame you can possibly imagine (well, you probably can’t even imagine it).  I buy stuff, I sell stuff.  It’s much easier than ebay.

And Kevin Burton is accusing them of being evil because they don’t want to sell ads?

C’mon, you’re kidding right?  Evil?

I remember thinking that it was crazy that making money was considered evil, and I thought that was still the prevailing opinion of the blogosphere.  Google doesn’t want to be evil, whatever that means, and everytime they try to make money in a different way, people jump up and down about them going back on their promise to not be evil.

That was whack already.  Now Craigslist is evil for not accepting money?

Look, Google isn’t evil.  Craigslist isn’t evil.  Even Microsoft isn’t evil.  They do what they do within the realms of mostly reasonable business ethics. I happen to agree with most of Kevin’s points that Craigslist is wasting a great opportunity to do real good in the world. So maybe they’re shortsighted, but far from evil.

Really, we all need to get over it.

Ahhh… it begins: YouTube filtering

11 Monday Dec 2006

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It begins. YouTube is allowing CBS employees to creatively “rearrange” comments. I don’t mind, really, as I never read the comments.  Are they going to allow CBS to adjust of ratings? Will they allow CBS to filter/censor clips?  Not now, of course, but later?

BitTorrent trying to grow up

29 Wednesday Nov 2006

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Good post on TechCrunch about BitTorrent trying to grow up, and not just the really impressive distribution deals they’ve signed.

First, I’m impressed with the movie/TV industry that they’ve embraced the new distribution channels (like YouTube and BitTorrent) as well as they have, but then again, they didn’t have much choice.  It took a long time for the RIAA to get on it, and they’ve spent more time in court than selling music.  In fact, if it wasn’t for Apple, they wouldn’t be selling much music at all (and that was more of a success from the iPod, than from iTunes).  The movie people saw the writing on the wall and knew they’d rather join them than beat them.

Second, I for one am glad that BitTorrent is trying to stay legit. It may piss off their users, but I think they have to do something if they’re going to stay relevant.  Relevance still follows money more than anything else, and if BitTorrent can make actual $ off their network and reach, more power to them.  (But it’s gonna be a tough battle; it’s only interesting right now because of the free media you can find.)

Third, I just have to bitch about the people on TechCrunch who commented on the story who said that it’s a bad idea to take out Bram Cohen, or more generally the founders of a startup from management.  I don’t know Bram Cohen, I know nothing about him, but I can say that I’ve met many founders of startups and there is absolutely no correlation between the ability to create a protocol (like Cohen did) or write a piece of software or develop an algorithm, and the ability to run a business.  If anything, there is probably a negative correlation.  As a co-founder of a company myself, I know that success has much more to do with execution and management than it does with that one idea that one guy had that one time.

Presto: a $150 fax machine

28 Tuesday Nov 2006

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TechCrunch is has a post about Presto and describes it well there.  But isn’t that just a fax machine?  And aren’t fax machines cheaper than $150?  It does print in color though.

OK, maybe it is cooler than a fax machine, but at least the fax machine can send back.  Grandma can write a note and send it back to you with a picture of her latest macrame wall hanging.

The coolest thing is the picture that they have on the post.  I swear that woman’s going to have a heart attack.

Where have you gone, Joe Dimaggio?

28 Tuesday Nov 2006

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So I’m no Joe Dimaggio, but I have been gone a long time.  I haven’t written in over 2 months.  Bad Thai, bad, bad Thai.

During that time, a lot has happened: Homestead had a major crash, I lost my voice for a week, there were those pesky midterm elections (you voted, right?), my son had the biggest 1st birthday party ever (it seemed).  But now I’m back.  Hopefully.

We’ll see.

Some good news: Supreme Court to examine ‘obviousness’ of patents.  Hopefully, they court will raise the bar on obviousness, ‘cuz this is totally ridiculous.

TechMeme’s sponsorship model makes sense

25 Monday Sep 2006

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TechMeme’s new ad model is all the buzz (and of course, is at the top of TechMeme itself) today. And almost all of the opinions are glowing.

Actually, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn’t like it. That’s a rarity: an idea on the web that has a positive consensus.

And then there’s John Tokash. I really wouldn’t want to jump on the man (he’s one of the greatest people I’ve ever met), but he posted his disapproval of the new system, then sent me an email taunting me to take him down.

Bring it on!

First, yes, I agree with him that of course, sponsored posts on TechMeme will get more attention than non-sponsored posts (that’s why they’re paying for them). And yes, that means that more bloggers may write about them and so they’ll climb up TechMeme’s ladder.  Is it the death of TechMeme? Hardly.

John argues that Google’s sponsored listings are separated from their organic listings in a way that prevents them from being tainted. But the parallels between TechMeme’s and Google’s systems are everywhere. If a sponsored link on Google will get some people to click on it, look at the site, and then later link to the site from their own website.  Voila! Bump in Pagerank.  That’s exactly analogous to the “artificial bump” in TechMeme.

The reason that both systems aren’t artificial is that a human has to consider the site (or blog post) that they’re looking at and then decide if they’re going to link to it (or blog about it).  In both cases, Google and TechMeme are trying to approximate global interest in a site or post, and if sponsorship boosts that global interest, then both systems should reflect that.

The flaws in the systems are exposed when the global interest if faked (link farms, blog comment spam, etc.).  Those are real, troublesome issues, but are independent of whether or not Google & TechMeme offer sponsored space on their websites.

Ball’s in your court, John.

Long Live the Homestead Talent Show

22 Friday Sep 2006

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If I say so myself, the Homestead Talent Show is one of the coolest things that we do. I’ve asked employees before, and they say that the two coolest things we do is the talent show and the retreat (where we all the employees somewhere for a few days of fun and “work”).

The talent show is something completely different.  Every year, I go around harrassing people to do something, anything on stage in front of their co-workers. And the things people do are fantastically creative, even if they’re completely untalented.  It really shows the spirit of Homestead and how much enthusiasm we have for each other and for the fun that we have. There are companies that are much larger than ours, with probably more talented people, and I’m sure they couldn’t gather enough spirit to pull together a talent show like ours.

Even Justin, our CEO, performs every year. He ain’t no stiff suit.

This year, Roger spliced the video and dumped them up on YouTube. Check it out!

The Revenge of Dark Helmet

21 Thursday Sep 2006

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I don’t write about TV much; I don’t really know why.  I love TV.

Anyone who knows me knows that the best show on TV is Mythbusters.  Geeky awesomeness is soooo awesome. Awesomely awesome.

And House is a great show, but if you’re going to have a token hot woman, can you make sure that she’s hot? There really aren’t a shortage of hot actresses in Hollywood.

And then this came along. Spaceballs is becoming a cartoon show. Did I say awesome already? Yeah, awesome.

Is it going to suck? Probably, but you gotta give it a shot.

Decline of YouTube?

18 Monday Sep 2006

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Mark Cuban is predicting the decline of YouTube over on his blog. He claims that if you take away all the copyrighted videos, “Youtube turns into a hosting company with a limited video portal”.

Yeah, I go to YouTube primarily for copyrighted stuff. I missed Conan O’Brien’s opening to the Emmy’s and I went to YouTube to see it. My wife jumped on the wagon when she discovered all the classic Sesame Street skits that people have uploaded. Actual user created content probably only accounts for less than 10% of what we watch there.

But we all know that you can’t take all of that material away. It’s just not practical. So these snippets, trailers, etc. are there to stay and YouTube will attract users with them.

Even if you could identify them and take them down, who can say that the copyright owners would actually take them down? Right now, I don’t see NBC bothering to take down last night’s Leno monologue. The owners are already trying to use YouTube as a channel. Also, they’re already losing dedicated ad time to the Tivo/DVR movement, so they have to move to product placement.  And once they move to product placement, the more people who see it, the better.

And even if the copyright owners decide to take down the videos, YouTube is stil the default place where you put personal videos that you want to share with others, just like Flickr is the default place to put your photos. That’s not a bad place to be. Ad revenue definitely drops, but then so does bandwidth and hardware costs. I have no idea if it would be profitable…

Anyway, things will get really interesting when the bandwidth and hardware infrastructure gets fast and cheap enough that users can put up and watch full feature length movies on YouTube. Napster is different from YouTube now because full songs/albums, things that people have generally paid directly for, were easily accessible. Most people don’t pay for video content except for movies and DVDs. When those are available on demand for free, the game changes…

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