Google Search History Adds Stars

Today looking though my google search history, I noticed that each clicked link has a star ("bookmark this") next to it. I am not sure when this was introduced but it goes a long way towards making Google bookmarks a replacement for Lookmarks. Since most bookmarks are ultimately the result of a Google search, this is a very convenient feature.

I haven't looked at Google bookmarks in a while, but I now see RSS feeds by tag. All that Google needs to do to create personalized Web search bliss is tie in Google bookmarks with Google Reader (bookmark posts or allow add tagged posts to a bookmark feed), and establish a permissions model for sharing items with friends. At their current rate, it should only take about 2 more years.

technorati tags:google, lookmarks

Unloading some Web clips

Whew. My clip queue is congested. Here are some more gems from the past couple weeks.

Literate programming is the writing of computer programs primarily for human beings to read, similar to a work of literature; hence the name "literate programming." This contrasts with the traditional view that a programmer's primary creation is source code to be read by a computer.

Literate programming - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

When your query is submitted, an alert is sent to all appropriate Guides who are currently signed in to the system. Because the Guides can see the question you submit, you can submit your question in natural language, just like you'd ask any person a question.

Bezos dances with ChaCha

The iFood terminal at Nordiska Kompaniet's food hall lets customers hook up their iPod and download audio recipes.The process is described in five simple steps (we couldn't resist including the Swedish original): 1) Docka - Plug in, 2) Ladda ner - Download, 3) Handla - Purchase, 4) Lyssna - Listen, and 5) Laga - Cook. After choosing from a wide range of recipes and downloading audio instructions to their iPod or other mp3 player, shoppers can purchase all necessary items from a colour-coded deli area.

Springwise: Dock and shop

That leaves less time for other projects that we’d intended at Curious Office. Yet, I think our plan is to do things LINEARLY vs. sequentially. Each project takes time to execute well.

Curious Office » Blog Archive » Change of course for Curious Office?

A Wikipedia entry on yourself is a powerful reputation management tool. Google floats Wikipedia pages to the top of people searches, and unlike traditional press coverage, you get to edit it. Or more wisely, get someone else to edit. Three do-it-yourself steps for building your own Wikiality after the jump.

SILICON VALLEY USERS GUIDE: SVUG #18: How do I get into Wikipedia? - Valleywag

To me the chain of dependencies here and opportunity for failure at each step is just too great. That’s not to say that people can’t be successful using this model. It’s just that I personally don’t know how to traverse all those failure points with any great degree of certainty.

Jackson Fish Market

"I just looked at my parents in their cashmere sweaters and thought, 'Who am I to go to an elite liberal arts college and spend all my time reading while, in the real world, thousands of kids my age are sacrificing their lives for our country?' It's not right."

800,000 Privileged Youths Enlist To Fight In Iraq | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Jason CalacanisSerial entrepreneur looking for the next big thing...see all my questionsWho's are the top 10 web designer in the world today?

LinkedIn: Answers: View Question

What's Your Value-Add? (hint: everyone knows but you)Tuesday, November 28, 2006This is a trick question. Your value-add has little to do with how you think others value you. It has everything to do with how others actually do value you.

Webnotions Blog :: Comments on design trends and issues :: VainNotion

RSS is mainly used by bloggers and media companies to distribute their latest blog updates and news flashes. Adding to the mix, Offertrax is bringing Really Simple Syndication to the retail sector, offering consumers more purchasing intelligence and online merchants a new way to convert site visits into sales.

Springwise: RSS connects consumers & online merchants

"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted." A quote from Martin Luther King, extolling the virtues of the wayward mind (via TWS).

Mind Hacks: Creatively maladjusted

They consider the product fungible and relatively unimportant compared to a strong, coherent team. This creates a tension for self-funded startups. For example, Findory could continue as is, but would never get funded without the team. But, forming a full team puts the company at considerable risk because it drastically increases the burn rate.

John Cook's Venture Blog

And how about the long overdue rebirth of group buying? Back in 1999, Letsbuyit.com was too early, and spent too much money, but the potential of uniting like-minded buyers and demanding bulk discounts from retailers or manufacturers is still staggering.What will make things easier this time around is that a) everybody is now online, and b) social software has taken care of the aggregation challenge. All this now needs is a CROWD CLOUT entrepreneur that will add a group-buying feature to existing networking sites. More on CROWD CLOUT and transparency of demand, including lots of start-ups in this field, in our March 2007 briefing.

trendwatching.com's TOP 5 CONSUMER TRENDS FOR 2007

The darling coffeehouse of Fifteenth Avenue (East) finally has that little sibling that it's always wanted.

Metroblogging Seattle: brave new victrola opens on pike

This paper reflects two trends we see here at Radar: the first is towards multicore systems and the growing importance of distributed execution; the second is the increasing relevance of languages like Erlang, Haskell, and E.

O'Reilly Radar > Threads Considered Harmful

we need new tools to check data consistency across multiple shards, move data around shards and so on - a lot of the flickr code infrastructure deals with ensuring data is consistent and well balanced and finding and repairing it when it's not.

O'Reilly Radar > Database War Stories #3: Flickr

These are typefaces packaged with Windows Vista.

C * Calibri * Cambria (typeface) C cont. * Candara * Consolas * Constantia (typeface) C cont. * Corbel (typeface)M * MeiryoS * Segoe UI

Category:Windows Vista typefaces - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

So how does a creative person increase demand for their work?

Berkun blog » Blog Archive » Creativity: Supply vs. Demand

technorati tags:clips

Blogged with Flock

Weekly Clips

Regarding using tags to share information outside of a corporation.

"anyone can use the aarf tag and associate it with a bookmark. This potentially lets us get information from a larger audience. Which may turn out to be a bigger spam issue more than anything else.

The Seattle Times: Tech Tracks

Check out this cool project to translate a mysterious Chinese book:

"The words of a man's mouth are as deep waters, and the wellspring of wisdom as a flowing brook." This quote is the opening for the small book described below. In December of 2005 this autograph book was found at a used knicknack store in Hong Kong's central district and purchased for 380 Hong Kong dollars. The identity of the book's original owner is a mystery. The stories the book reveals are hidden in plain sight.

Words of a Man's Mouth

Great community building tips from Judy's book founder:

I have a friend who is starting a UGC / social network site in the health space and he asked me to send him an email with my lessons learned from Judy's Book. I'll post it here for you all to read and comment on. Keith, Here's my advice... 1) Focus, focus, focus Focus the network on a specific category. Health is way too broad. At Judy's Book, I wish we had just focused on restaurants. And for that matter, we should have started with Seattle restaurants. Restaurants as a category are the area where there is the intersection of consumer passion, review writing, and daily activity.

A Sack of Seattle: Tip 1 for creating a user generated content site

This is an important distinction, nicely summarized:

Search is finding. Personalization is discovering.

Geeking with Greg: The value of recommendation engines

Shelfari? Another Seattle book-centric Web Site, really?

"The Amazon affiliate revenue is not going to float you. No way," said Spalding, whose company derives a tiny amount of revenue from its partnership with Amazon. He declined to say how much, but noted that "it is tens of dollars a day, not hundreds of thousands."

Shelfari an online meeting place for bibliophiles

Beta launch tips from Mr. Arrington:

In addition to my personal experiences with companies, I recently wrote “What Annoys You Most About Betas?” on Crunchnotes to help me prepare for this post. The comments to that post give a lot of direct feedback from early adopters and much of that information is reflected here as well.

Don’t Blow Your Beta

Knuttz games Digg, possiby by creating a "content funnel". Simple but smart:

The critical missing detail: I cannot explain why Knuttz suddenly got the “formula” right on January 1, 2007. If someone can show me that it is on that date that they implemented their “traffic funnel”, then that is all the proof needed that it’s indeed a killer strategy.

Why are diggers nuts about Knuttz? » Alister Cameron, Blog Consultant

technorati tags:clips, quotes, blurbs, inspiration

Blogged with Flock

Attack of the Screen Scrapers

2007 is the year of the mashup. Standardized SOAP Web Services were supposed to make inter-application interoperability over the internet straightforward, but many companies are not motivated to provide public APIs. What happens when the site whose data you want to use in your mashup doesn't provide an API? Screen scraping - using a program to read data from a web site intended for humans - is the icky but necessary solution.

Why is screen scraping icky?

• Web pages are intended for humans to read, the site operators whose pages you are scraping may not appreciate you hitting pages using a program. It will cause extra load on their servers and skew their server stats.
• Screen scraping robots are generally fragile, and need to be updated after re-designs to the pages you are scraping. This means if you build an application using a screen scraping robot, it can break at any time.
• Robots become complex (and more fragile) quickly. Doing anything interesting with a screen scraper will require intimate knowledge of the Html that you are scraping. Most interesting tasks will require multiple page requests. You may need to fake values in a form post submission, or even supply cookie values.

A couple of companies have cropped up that are trying to build businesses providing scraping tools and services. Their existence, legitimizes screen scraping. The two I am aware of are:

• Dapper, funded by Accel Partners (http://www.accel.com/)

• KapowTech, who make openKapow (a free tool) and alsow sell a robot server stack.

Because screen scraping scripts can be fragile, having good tools is critical. The openKapow client is a deluxe tool. It is impressive at first, but its visual programming features are perhaps aimed at people who don't want to learn programming. I would much rather have a tool that outputs an XML script or Java class.

Both of these services use proprietary hosted code to actually run the robot you define. This is nice when you are getting started, because you don’t have to worry about uploading anything to a server. The downside is that you are locked in to a proprietary hosted framework (unless you opt to buy the kapow server edition), and won’t be able to do any tweaks or bug fixes except using their tools.

Having looked carefully at both these options, I think serious developers will still need to develop their own screen scraping libraries. Dapper is a good tool for a quick and simple mashup (though it didn’t work for a moderately complex page I threw at it). OpenKapow isn’t worth learning unless purchasing the full product is an option. The more time you spend learning the tool, the more committed you are to the platform.

I would like to see open source screen scraping libraries (and may try to open source any that I write). I think screen scraping is an icky but inescapable technique for the growing Web service ecosystem.

Enjoying the service of the Machine

Ooh. This gave me a great idea over the weekend. More later ;).

But the ESP Game is only one instance of a general class of game that Luis calls "games with a purpose", i.e. games that "run a computation in people's brains rather than in silicon processors."

O'Reilly Radar > Google Image Labeler, the ESP Game, and Human-Computer Symbiosis

technorati tags:turk, shoptu, games

Defensible Businesses

With regard to investing, and whether you should invest in a particular company (here refering to publicly traded companies and the stock market).

There are five numbers that we have to look at to determine whether a business has a Moat.

1. Return on Invested Capital (ROIC); and thegrowth rates for
2. EQUITY
3. EPS
4. SALES
5. FREE CASH

Rule #1 Blog: Phil Town on Investing: THE BIG FIVE, NAHMEAN

technorati tags:mba, investing

Slide and MySpace - Parasitic or Mutualistic?

Mashups will be a big thing in 2007, but many big sites still do not offer APIs. When an established player creates a "walled garden," wanna-be operators find a way to plug in. Un-authorized mashups such as the one below have to be tolerated by the host application (as long as they remain mutualistic) because it encourages the ecosystem growing around their application. You can't tear the ivy off the wall without taking the wall with it:

Slide took a big risk early in 2006 by giving users the ability to auto-insert slide shows into their MySpace pages and blasting bulletins out to all their friends. They did this by asking users to hand over their MySpace credentials, and doing all the hard work for them. This is a clear violation of MySpace’s terms of service, though, and most people, including Slide, expected to receive a cease and desist letter and/or get access turned off. But tat never happened, and Slide’s big bet has paid off. So far.

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Rumor: Slide’s Venture Round Was $20 million

technorati tags:slide, myspace, mashup

Happiness Plateaus

Happiness, as measured by national surveys, has hardly changed over 50 years. The rich are generally happier than the poor, but rich countries do not get happier as they get richer. The Japanese are much better off now than in 1950, but the proportion who say they are “very happy” has not budged. Americans too have remained much as Alexis de Tocqueville found them in the 19th century: “So many lucky men, restless in the midst of abundance.”

from Economics Discovers its Feelings in Dec 19, 2006 Economist

via Citizen Agency » Looking over the CA horizon into 2007

technorati tags:bizphil, philosophy, generation-x, wealth

Birdsville Hotel

File under places to visit, a little while down the list from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe:

For more than 100 years the Birdsville Hotel -- the so-called dead heart of Australia's outback -- has been a refuge and drinking spot on the fringe of the forbidding Simpson Desert.

Remote outback pub up for sale - CNN.com

technorati tags:travel, australia, pub

Askville Quest Coins

We have been recently working on a "points" version of HelpShare. Amazon has gone so far as to introduce 2 points schemes within their Askville site. One for answer value ("experience points"), and one for participation ("Quest Coins").

The quest coins reward community members for participating in questions they didn't ask. Presumably this works as a spam filter for the site and makes the community more active. I'm not sure the second currency is worthwhile because it adds complexity to the user experience. However, different classes of users (askers, answerers, and questers) will each care about different currencies in different ways. Overall,I think it will be effective means to motivate community moderators.

Askville also has a separate virtual currency called Quest coins which users will earn for various actions, including asking a question, voting on answers, providing answers, etc… We’ve kept experience points separate from Quest coins in order to keep experience points tied directly to how well you answer questions in various topics, while Quest coins will be a currency that will be earned (or lost) through various different actions each user makes throughout Askville.

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Amazon Askville Launches With Dungeons & Dragons Angle

So this is 2007

So far, 2007 is off to a good start. A lot of random little things have been happening this week.

• A friend visited.
• There was a fiddler on 15th.
• A comet appeared.
• A storm snowed.
• An idiot said some stuff.
  

Also, our kitchen was almost chosen to feature in a kid's TV show.

HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray

eProductWars.com is a really cool example of algorithmically (or at least statistically) generated content. I don't need opinions or analysis, give me graphs! Check out how Blu-Ray has been catching up to HD-DVD lately.

Future Problem Solving

Every year from 3rd grade to 12th grade, I participated in a competition called Future Problem Solving. Notably, we worked on problems such as Global Warming as early as 1985. I hadn't checked on the health of the competition (or the organization that runs it) in a long time, but it indeed still exists. This year's topics are:

• Fundraising and Charity Giving
• Protection of National Treasures
• Cultural Prejudice
• Caring for our Elders
• Privacy

In a quick search, I couldn't verify that the program is active in Washington state. But I did find this annoying referrendum or legislation dedicated to the team we lost to several times.

WHEREAS, The Colfax High School team, comprised of Susan Adams, Matt Carpenter, Heather Hochstatter, Joe Poshusta, and teacher/coach Tenny Brannan, placed first in the state-wide Future Problem Solving Program's academic competition in 1990; and WHEREAS, In the June 1990 international competition held in St. Louis, Missouri, the Colfax High School team placed first among the three hundred teams representing fifty states and various foreign countries including teams from as far away as New Zealand; and

Untitled

There is more of a story here that I had forgotten - or not paid attention to when I was younger. I will have to dig more into the writing and philosophy of E. Paul Torrance. I am tremendously grateful to this program (and my own parents, coaches, and teachers) for my own creative development:

The 87-year-old UGA professor emeritus of educational psychology invented the benchmark method for quantifying creativity and arguably created the platform for all research on the subject since. The “Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking” helped shatter the theory that IQ tests alone were sufficient to gauge real intelligence.

In addition to developing the most widely used tests of creativity, Torrance also created the Future Problem Solving Program, and developed the Incubation Model of Teaching.

'Father of Creativity' E. Paul Torrance Dead at 87

technorati tags:fps, creativity, colfax, nostalgia, problems

Zoodango vs. Biznik

From John Cook's Venture Blog:

Seattle Internet entrepreneur James Sun survived the first episode of NBC's "The Apprentice," though his team lost a car washing challenge which landed him and his cohorts in Donald Trump's boardroom.

Fun. I will enjoy watching zoodango go head to head with biznik. I have to say, my money's on biznik. But with all the free marketing the zoodango founder will get from being on "The Apprentice," it should be an interesting fight. Of course there are different types of professionals for both sites to service - biznik is more for targeted toward freelancers, whereas zoodango may target more "mainstream" professionals.

technorati tags:seattle, startup, biznik, zoodango

Making money with Prosper.com

In 2006 Prosper popularized person to person lending in the US and introduced a new form of investment. Attracted by good returns with manageable risk, I invested a little bit to try it out. Unfortunately after the better part of a year I am currently only breaking even.

My lack of success is due to intentionally starting out funding risky loans with a higher interest rate. I wanted to start with the riskier loans to push the envelope and see how large a return I could get. I now have a better idea of how to distribute my money. The losses from the defaulted loans will quickly be recovered by the interest on loans to more reliable borrowers.

I also think a fair amount of these defaults were due to bad luck. As Prosper matures, more performance data is now available. By looking at this data, you can calculate the risk that any loan will default and decide for yourself.

Here is a snapshot of my account a few months ago:



As you can see from my statement, 7 loans out of 90 were late - after capturing the image above, 3 of the loans defaulted - canceling out my earnings.

Here is the message I got from Prosper for one of the loan defaults:

Dear Adam,

One of your Prosper loans has defaulted and been sold to a debt buyer. Proceeds from the sale of this loan, if any, were credited to your account upon the close of the sale.

Loan: Need to pay rent asap! (Loan #160)
Borrower: mickiesowner
Sale date: Dec-21-2006
Sale reason: Delinquency
Principal balance before sale: $49.36
Loan value before sale: $64.26
Proceeds from sale and forfeited group rewards: $1.72

Borrowers whose Prosper loans default will have their delinquency and default reported to a credit reporting agency, and will never be able to borrow money on Prosper again in the future. Learn more about defaulted loan sales.

Ouch! That's a pretty horrible return.

Here are some tips to help you maximize your prosper earnings:

1. Use advanced search instead of standing orders.

While standing orders are great for distributing your money faster, I have come to prefer hand-picking each loan. This only takes about 10 minutes a day and prevents loans to people with good credit with questionable stories.

2. Start with low-risk (good credit rating) loans, and build your way toward riskier loans.

Starting with safer loans will build a solid stream of income that you can then gamble on the riskier loans.

3. Watch out for students and requests for loans to "pay bills".

Many of the riskier loans list their monthly cash flow. This is good, obviously you want to make sure they are going to catch up. As a friend said - there is no "SuperProsper" for the borrower to go to as a last resort - Prosper is their last resort.

4. Astronomical interest rates (> 30%) indicate that the borrower is clueless.

Often people asking for loans have no idea what a reasonable interest rate should be, or what they have a chance of paying back. Also, when choosing high-risk loans, choose those with a low total amount - it will be more likely that the lender can pay it back.

5. Don't take out a loan to "re-invest" in Prosper.

This was one of the first ideas that occurred to me. I thought I should borrow money at a low interest rate, and turn around and lend it at a higher rate. In actual fact, it is difficult to find enough loans to invest in. There are currently not enough borrowers to make a profit by re-loaning like this. I recommend starting with your own money (however little) and establishing enough interest income first.

If you do try Prosper, please remember that is risky. I am not a qualified investment advisor, and I cannot be held liable for your losses. Good luck!

More Linux Notes

After installing GRUB, Ubuntu will request a reboot to complete its installation running from the hard drive. On both of my systems, the reboot produced the ominous message "Missing operating system." This message is the result of Ubuntu having set its own partition as the active partition. The Windows bootloader, which is still installed in the master boot record, cannot boot Windows because the Windows partition is not flagged as active; the Windows bootloader also has no knowledge of the Ubuntu operating system, so that cannot boot either.

LinuxDevCenter.com -- Creating a Dual-Boot Windows XP and Ubuntu Laptop

RPM Package Manager (originally Red Hat Package Manager, abbreviated RPM) is a package management system. The name RPM refers to two things: a software package file format, and a free software tool which installs, updates, uninstalls, verifies and queries software packaged in this format.

RPM Package Manager - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

MySQL vs. PostgreSQL

Mysql vs postgres - GEANT2-JRA1 Wiki

technorati tags:linux, rpm, mysql, postgresql

Friday Clips

Curious Celebrity Patents:

The following 18 patents are all by celebrities not usually known for being inventors. You can follow the links to the actual patents to learn more about each one.

Ironic Sans: Celebrity Patents

Recommendation algorithms vs. collaborative filtering vs. in house editors. Hmm:

And the fact that the front page news is gathered by humans, instead of the algorithmically determined news at Digg, means the company will always have a higher cost of doing business.

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Daylife Launches, Starts Very Long Uphill Climb

The end has no end:

The singularity is simply a phantom that will materialize anytime you observe exponential acceleration retrospectively. Since these charts correctly demonstrate that exponential growth extends back to the beginning of the cosmos, that means that for millions of years the singularity was just about to happen! In other words, the singularity is always near, has always been "near", and will always be "near."

Kevin Kelly -- The Technium

As the next level of organization kicks in, the current level is incapable of perceiving the new level, because that perception must take place at the new level. From within our emerging global cultural, the coming phase shift to another level is real, but it will be imperceptible to us during the transition. Sure, things will speed up, but that will only hide the real change, which is a change in the rules of the game. Therefore we can expect in the next hundred years that life will appear to be ordinary and not discontinuous, certainly not cataclysmic, all the while something new gathers, until slowly we recognize that we have acquired the tools to perceive that new tools are present - and have been for a while.

Kevin Kelly -- The Technium

technorati tags:singularity, patents, recommendations

Learning Linux

I recently installed Ubuntu Linux. It is very accessible, but there are a ton of little things to learn. Here are the notes I've been compiling.