Don Ho Dies, Don Imus Has No Comment

Don Ho, who once hosted the Don Ho Show, has died at 76. Don Imus, who hosts a show no mo because of ho, refused to comment when told of the news.

Bonus news coverage: If Doc became a jock, well that would rock.

Technorati tags: don ho, don imus

2 Out of 2 Grade Schoolers Prefer the Thinkpad

Cassidy helps Delaney figure out the newer,
but more difficult HP.

Even though the HP has a much bigger screen and much better speakers, Cassidy and Delaney both strongly prefer my trusty Thinkpad for their (very limited) web surfing. When I asked them why, they said they like the trackpoint better than the touchpad.

Me too.

Technorati tags: thinkpad, trackpoint

The New P.T. Barnum

First of all, I agree with everything Stowe writes about Andrew Keen.

But by giving that egghead our attention, we are doing one of two things, both of them bad.

If Keen believe the condescending psycho-babble that comes out of his fingers, then we are helping to prove his point by focusing so much attention at him, while he sits naked on the throne of claimed superiority. I’m not dumping on Stowe here- I’ve been as guilty of this as anyone. Keen should be ignored. Maybe Tim O’Reilly should add an ignore Keen provision in his new web constitution. That would be enough to get my vote. Not really.

If Keen doesn’t really believe the stupid shit that he writes, but is merely brand building by typing stuff so irritating to regular people that it can’t help but get him noticed, then we are pawns in the creation of the new P.T. Barnum. Personally, I don’t think he believes a lot of what he writes, any more than the average science fiction writer believes in dragons. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Keen launch a traveling cybercircus with juggling bloggers and a dancing Scoble.

When people become so joined with their philosophical positions that discourse becomes impossible, the only remaining option is to ingore them. That’s why I ignore anyone who is a zealous republican or democrat.

It’s why we need to ingore Andrew Keen.

That’s why I shouldn’t have written this post.

Has anyone seen my unicycle?

Technorati tags: citizen media

Flags, Banners and the New Networks

Fred Wilson says Google’s $3.1B purchase of Doubleclick signals the return of banner advertising.

He’s absolutely correct that banner ads have much more branding value than text ads. The question for website developers is what will advertisers pay for that value. Billboards along real highways command top dollar- particularly in the growing number of cities that have tried to limit or eradicate them. I know of people who live very well off of a couple of billboards- the three-sided one at the intersection of the Southwest Freeway and 610 in Houston being perhaps the most valuable billboard in the country.

But advertisers have traditionally wanted to quantify the success of banner ads by tracking not only impressions (the number of “drivers” who pass by the billboard), but also click-throughs (the number of people who “call the number” on the billboard). This serves to shift the risk of a bad billboard and/or a bad product from the advertiser to the the billboard owner. Good for them, but bad for us.

So like real world real estate, it became all about location.

CNN and Yahoo may be the Southwest Freeways and 610s of the internet. But what about the back roads and side streets? Will banners get sold and placed there at an acceptable rate? It all depends on how the advertisers view the traffic that drives those roads. And whether they agree with Fred that the branding benefits change the mathematical expectations. My hunch is that like everything else, a small percentage of the sites will make a large percentage of the money. That’s life, both in the world and on the internet. So I don’t think the return of the banner ad is going to be the panacea for Web 2.0.

But I do think banner advertising is due for a resurgence, if for no other reason than Google’s war chest and its desire to own the internet and all the data on it. There are two proven ways to make money on the internet: content and advertising. Ironically, the one that the hardest to make – the content – is almost universally free. That leaves advertising.

The internet has become the new CBS, ABC and NBC. You don’t pay for the content in cash. You pay by watching the ads.

And on the internet, there’s no TIVO.

Yet.

Technorati tags: internet advertising

Oh, the Irony

irony I think it is hugely ironic that a company that makes its money running fan message boards is threatening to sue Mike Arrington partly because of what some commenters said at the end of one of his posts.

I know a lot about message boards. I know a lot about sports message boards. I know that the last thing I would ever do as a message board owner is take the position that an interactive site operator is responsible for content posted by its users.

I wonder if anyone ever said anything nasty about someone else on one of Rivals’ message boards?

All of this, of course, is only my (constitutionally protected) opinion.

Technorati tags: techcrunch, rivals, message boards

The Politics of Twittering

I have moved from thinking that Twitter is merely cool to thinking that it’s very cool, and that there may be more real world uses for it than I originally thought. There will be challenges, for sure. But the potential to create a new communication medium is huge.

There are a ton of people using Twitter, and more sign up every day. I know from our early ACCBoards.Com days how hard it is to keep up with a ton of new traffic. We started out as a little message board for ACC sports fans. Suddenly, we were on the local news, then we got mentioned on ESPN, then players and high profile recruits began to post messages. Traffic went off the charts and our servers crashed. And crashed. You hope the traffic explosion will happen, and you think you’ve planned for it. But when traffic starts growing geometrically, you end up throwing your assumptions out the door and just try to hang on.

Managing the traffic load will be a problem for Twitter, but not the biggest challenge.

The biggest challenge for Twitter will be figuring what it wants to become. With traffic comes the opportunity to make good decisions, and the opportunity to make bad ones. And a lot of people will come out of the woodwork to help you make bad ones.

Will Twitter be happy being a popular and useful communication tool? Or will it try to recreate itself as some sort of business tool in the hopes of attracting some business dollars? I hope the former, but history tells us there will be pressure to try to become the latter.

If I owned Twitter, I’d stay the popular and useful communication tool course until I slayed the competition – much like Google did with search. The first rule of interactive online communities is you have to own the space. Once you own the space, you can worry about rule number two. TechCrunch is the blogosphere’s best example of the application of the first rule.

Along the way, I’d periodically add new and complimentary features to keep Twitter on the minds of the technorati and on the pages of Technorati. Private Twitter groups, for sure. Perhaps topical groups. I’d add a photo feature, maybe by teaming up with up and comer Zooomer.

Mostly, I would concentrate on doing a few things very well and avoid the dilutive urge to add new features for the sake of adding new features.

Twitter users will face challenges too. The biggest one will be deciding how to use Twitter. As a mini-blog, as a shared IM substitute, as a message board. Or as some combination of the three. With traffic and popularity will come the disrupters. The spammers. The foul, cruel and bad-tempered rodents. Tim O’Reilly to tell us how to deal with them. How will we deal with those problems?

The only captcha for that sort of thing is a healthy combination of common sense and self governance. If someone treats their Twitter account as a billboard for spam or self promotion, users will have to decide whether to stand by and watch or vote with their follow list. Ideally, one’s follow list will eventually equate to one’s eBay number. But for this to work, we have to make Twitter a different place than the blogosphere at large.

If Twitter becomes nothing more than a pocket sized version of the blogosphere, everyone loses.

Technorati tags: twitter

Who Are You Who Can Summon Fire Without Flint or Tinder?

There are some who call me… Tim.

Tim O’Reilly is still campaigning to save us all from the foul, cruel and bad-tempered rodents that sometimes infest the blogosphere.

To which I say we should instead choose to become an anarco-sydicalist commune. We could take it in turns to be a sort of executive officer for the week…with all the decisions of that officer having to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting…by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs.

Please.

This is an influence grab disguised as a navel gaze masquerading as something that we should actually give a shit about.

Technorati tags: code of conduct, navel gazing

Geocities -> Classmates -> Facebook

Richard Querin on Facebook:

While I’ve only seen glimpses of Facebook, it just doesn’t seem like my type of thing. I may be wrong, but with the very limited glimpses I’ve seen of it and from what these guys have told me, it sounds like Classmates.com meets MySpace.

I’ve never used Facebook, but I have made the mistake of signing up for Classmates a time or two. If ever there was a space that some ad-intoxicated Web 2.0 developer needs to enter and recreate, it’s the Classmates space. Classmates may be the single most annoying web site ever. I’d love to reconnect with some of my high school friends, but not if I have to suffer Classmates.com.

I have always thought that Facebook should remain the exclusive domain of college students. On ACCBoards.Com, I have noticed that when a prized basketball or football recruit signs with a school, some zealous fan always tracks down his Facebook account. Before you know it, this kid has a ton of new friends he’s never met, the large majority of which he will never meet. Seems OK for college kids, but a little too stalkerish for grownups. So even though they opened Facebook up, undoubtedly in pursuit of money, I cringe a little when I read about grownups using Facebook.

MySpace, on the other hand, has always seemed to me to be the new Geocities. You know- the place where people with no web design skills can create profoundly ugly web pages and wait for people with their own profoundly ugly web pages to link to them. Granted, it’s more feature rich than Geocities, but that has more to do with the passage of time than some evolutionary leap. Most MySpace pages I have seen look just like the ones I remember seeing on Geocities back in the day.

Maybe it is age. Maybe if I were younger, I’d be more into social and networking. At this point, I’m not all that into either. The funny thing is that neither are a lot of the people who claim these sites will change the world. Most of them are just trying to make a buck.

Getting rich off of social networking. I guess it beats Amway.

Technorati tags: facebook, myspace, geocities

Here's an Idea: Just Be Nice

Rather than try to recreate the world, how about just apply the real world rules of common sense and courtesy to the blogosphere. Everyone interacts with other people all day every day in the real world, and we don’t need Tim O’Reilly to rewrite the Golden Rule for us.

If someone is an asshole, do not empower them- ignore them. As a general rule, you cannot rehabilitate assholes. You can only disempower them, thereby taking away the incentive to become one.

This new code of conduct business seems to me to be more about an influence grab than it is about trying to make some self-important egghead sing kumbaya. Not to mention the fact that since it is utterly unenforceable, the only ones who will truly embrace it are those who would be nice anyway.

Seth pretty much nailed it. So did Mike Arrington (who I feel compelled to note has been known to club others wildly on his blog).

I’m not sure where this new movement is headed, but I don’t think it’s going to instantly make the blogosphere a kinder, gentler place for most of us.

Just act like you would in the real world and things will work themselves out. We don’t need to recreate the wheel every time someone has a flat tire.

Technorati tags: blogging, code of conduct