Disqus - Latest Comments for alexiskold

Re: GetGlue API now supports Facebook Open Graph Protocol

Alex Iskold — Mon, 10 May 2010 14:29:01 -0000

Go ahead and use it - no limit for good apps.

Re: How Glue is Using SimpleDB to replace Relational Database

Alex Iskold — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 14:43:00 -0000

We are pretty happy with our choice. Obviously for any complex system / technology there is no silver bullet, but we think that SimpleDB is the right choice for us. One thing we had to do is to build composite indicies on our own and learn about tuning queries, but this is the sort of thing one would expect.

Re: distributing among 30 domains. You rarely query across, instead, if you need an object you hash to a domain first and then query. The same with person records.

Re: Recommend Movies, Books and Music With Style

Alex Iskold — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 13:04:58 -0000

Hi Jedi,

Thanks for letting us know.

You should be able to unsubscribe from people who you don't want to be receiving things from. Also, can you please email the names of the users who do that to support @ getglue.com?

Thanks again for your comments!

Alex

Re: The Dictated Blog Post

Alex Iskold — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 10:48:21 -0000

LOL. Here is what I know:

1) There has been good progress in deploying Quantum Technologies in real life. In particular, I have small personal investment in MagiQ Technologies (http://www.magiqtech.com), a company specializing in secure communications and made very significant progress over the last 10 years.

2) A lot of these Quantum Technologies are "entangled" (pun intended), and a few breakthroughs can quickly result in profound changes around us. I am not sure if we are talking about 10 years on this, but I do think that within our lifetime some fairly mind blowing things might be possible.

Alex

P.S. I was one of the first users of Dragon Naturally speaking from IBM and that thing had a hard time understanding my accent. I wonder how the dictation software you used handles accents.

Re: The Dictated Blog Post

Alex Iskold — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 10:05:25 -0000

I agree. Beam us up Scott!y!

Re: Macmillan Digital Marketing Manager Moves to AdaptiveBlue - GalleyCat

Alex Iskold — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 22:39:45 -0000

We are very excited to have Ami on board! And are looking forward to working with book publishers, enabling them to better understand and reach their audience.

Re: Affiliate Marketing Undervalues The Click

Alex Iskold — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 13:32:05 -0000

Could it be that Amazon rates are low historically because they started with books and their margins on books are too small? I mean I don't think they can possibly afford to pay 15% to an affiliate, I doubt they make that much?

Re: Affiliate Marketing Undervalues The Click

Alex Iskold — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 13:30:20 -0000

This sounds right to me, the only issue being click fraud.

Right now, Amazon is dealing with this issue simply by saying if it transacted - its not a fraud, but if they paid per click then they have to deal with the whole fraud issue that Google is battling and its not really their core business now.

Re: Affiliate Marketing Undervalues The Click

Alex Iskold — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 10:57:49 -0000

Hey Fred,

I am assuming you are looking at the Orders Report.

The click report that they provide is incomplete and confusing. They do show total clicks, but it is unclear for example, how many actual clicks each link you put up provided.

This is because they show the total number of clicks and then they show clicks on things that people actually bought. So if your link was clicked and then something else got purchased - there is no way to see. Or if your link was clicked and then nothing was purchased, there is no way to see that either.

So from my personal experience, GetGlue.com has millions of objects and tracking what is actually going on using that system is impossible. (Unless I am missing something here...)

Re: Affiliate Marketing Undervalues The Click

Alex Iskold — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 10:41:23 -0000

Fred,

Having seen affiliate monetization in action for the past few years, I completely agree with you. There is only 1 real winner - Amazon, capitalizing on the sum of the long tail.

In addition to the problems that you described I will add a few more:

1) The percentage that you earn resets monthly. Say you drove thousands of purchases the month before and was raised to 8% rate. The next month it all resets back, so while, as you are saying, the value was delivered in the past, Amazon erases that past from memory.

2) To your point about measuring value per click. Amazon does not even display clicks you drove, it only displays transactions you generated. They make clicks appear to be totally useless, while themselves putting ads in pages and monetizing them.

Re: Import Your Hulu Shows via iGlueHulu

Alex Iskold — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:54:23 -0000

Hey Tami,

What exactly went wrong? Bad credentials or something else?

Re: Introducing Top Lists on GetGlue.com

Alex Iskold — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 10:16:58 -0000

Just let us know what you think should and should not be where. Shoot and email to support @ getglue and we can compare notes.

Re: Introducing Top Lists on GetGlue.com

Alex Iskold — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 10:16:22 -0000

Do you mean world history? Want to give us a few pointers?

Re: Introducing GetGlue extension for Google Chrome

Alex Iskold — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:17:23 -0000

We do not have Safari plugin and we do not have plans to make one right now.

Re: Introducing GetGlue extension for Google Chrome

Alex Iskold — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:16:12 -0000

As soon as Google enables extensions on the Mac, the GetGlue plugin should work.

Re: Updates to GetGlue.com: Improved Commenting and Navigation

Alex Iskold — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 11:08:31 -0000

We had to make some tweaks to a few stickers and you are finding that. Its based on the feedback and our observation of how people engage with the system. Overall this should feel better. And one thing I can promise you - there will be more stickers for you to unlock ;)

Re: Category Stickers and Explorer

Alex Iskold — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:21:27 -0000

What would you want to get? Like what would be exciting?

Re: Monetize The Audience, Not The Content

Alex Iskold — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 12:25:21 -0000

I am glad we are at least willing to re-visit paid content, I think this is the simplest model, that has worked for a century.

We all pay for quality stuff and quality content is still scarce, it's the subpar content that is abundand.

I hope we converge on the world where major newspapers are syndicating best relevant bloggers and have a model where they are able to pay them and at the same time, they pay their own journalists.

Re: Monetize The Audience, Not The Content

Alex Iskold — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 12:20:45 -0000

Jeff,

my take is that the only way local papers can compete is by generating highly relevant, high quality local content. This content is as scarce as any other content (I am not talking about crap, but quality content).

Why wouldn't you want to pay for that?

I think the model holds, what does not hold is scale, but really the scale was never the same for local newspapers.

I think Fred is right, and at the very least, this model needs to be explored.

Re: There Are Two Phones In this World: iPhone and Not iPhone

Alex Iskold — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:05:11 -0000

So true. iPhone is the best gadget I've ever used. I love it in an unhealthy way. And I am not a gadget person.

Re: The need for an open library of semantic terms

Alex Iskold — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 11:42:16 -0000

Hi Charlie,

This is good conversation on important topic. A couple of things:

- There is a question of what exactly is being annotated. Several formats address the issue in a different way. AB Meta is focused only pages that are about things. RDFa and other semantic standards offer a way to embed semantic meta data into pages. So do microformats but in a more limiting way using CSS classes. Andraz from Zemanta and a few other folks have been working on semantic tagging.

All of the above refers to publisher annotating the pages.

At AdaptiveBlue we believe that getting publishers to annotate is not easy, because of the lack of direct benefit to them. This is why we developed technology that recognizes stuff in pages in a top-down (algorithmic) way.

Regardless, whether the page is annotated by the publisher or content is recognized the next question is what do tools do with this information?

StockTweets wants to link to their site, but another stock service might want to link elsewhere. The point is that given the reconized context there is a set of actions that makes sense. Further, different actions are interesting to different users. For example, you might want to go to Yahoo! Finance for Stocks and I might want to go to Google Finance.

Tools like Glue and now Ubiquity from Firefox address this problem, by offering a set of contextual links based on the content that the user is interacting with.

To sum up, we need to have a common way of annotating different types information in pages or extracting existing infiormation out of the pages and then providing a set of contextual behaviors based on that content.

At AdaptiveBlue we have a framework, which is extensible and flexible and supports the following:
- Defining types of concepts (for example, you could define a Job Posting)
- Ability to recognize these concepts around the web
- Ability to define a set of contextual actions around these concepts.

We would be very happy to kick off the conversation about opening up all of these and incorporating things like Ubiquity.

Alex

Re: A Time Without Exits

Alex Iskold — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:09:20 -0000

Yeah, its def not simple. It seems to me that a lot of the infrastructure that was solid in the past is now in question. I am hoping that we are evolved and smart enough to quickly adapt new laws and regulations that makes sense and actually in modern times.

Re: A much happier half-marathon

Alex Iskold — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 17:43:20 -0000

Thats awesome, you rock! :)

Re: Contextual Browsing: Music

Alex Iskold — Thu, 15 May 2008 08:51:03 -0000

Fraser,

I do not remember when was the last time that I was so excited about discovering new music. I buy a lot of it via iTunes at least once in a couple of weeks and I pick stuff that I really like from the stream of NEW.

But the 4 songs that I bought from the last album I listen to over and over again. There are magical bits about them that I can't pin point, but I love them.

Re: A Conversation About Context

Alex Iskold — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:24:42 -0000

Good thoughts, as always, Fraser :)

I have two distinct points about this

1) Its not really about what is the right way. Increasingly it is more about what makes people happy. People are going to consume information in heterogenous, odd ways that make them happy.

2) The idea of pulling different conversations into 1 place is a solid one. In programming there is a concept of Model-View pattern, where a model is an underlying data set and the view is one way for looking at the data. We have evolved to the point where distributed conversation on the web is the model, and each of us is looking for an individual view - a lens, or perspective through which to view it.

We need aggregators that aggregate and let us seamlessly emit thoughts back that end up at the right places across the web. The problem? Its hard to do technically and there is little incentive because fundamentally every business wants to be the owner of the bits.