Disqus - Friends of danw

Re: SpiralFrog loses $3 million in three months

Philippe Bradley — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 07:54:53 -0000

'gorilla' marketing firms? That can't be 'sic' - surely not. If it is, they deserve all the woes they get. Muppets.

Re: Where I draw the line on transparency

Philippe Bradley — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 15:13:41 -0000

Fred, what makes you feel the VC business particularly needs more transparency?

Re: The Declining Power Of The Firm

Philippe Bradley — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 10:49:32 -0000

People said the same thing about all oracles, mediums, snake oil peddlars and abstract artists. People who say things so obtusely that their meaning is retroactively attributed to them by an impressionable audience.

You'll have to forgive my miseryguts - I get a little suspicious/cynical when someone's output is written in such an unwavering, projected voice, but tends to repetition, jumps to conclusions, is not particularly empirical, makes questionable assumptions, and rarely links out to/references any existing literature/thinking. None of these imply falsehood, but the point I'm making is that they're frequent characteristics of models/theories/explanations that have no predictive value, and may not be true. That being said, they DO have value: it lies in the questions it makes the reader ask himself - the meaning is created by the reader and projected back onto what he/she just read (just like abstract art).
It's worth adding that in the past it's been the dark side of consulting, it's often associated with the 'cult of celebrity' and its value is debateable even if to many it seems like panacea.

(christ, this biochem degree is turning me into a monster)

But as Bruce (and others here) say, within his body of work there are some interesting formulations of some of the phenomena going on around us. What it needs is coauthoring, as Burce asks - someone to make it more to the point, provide the proper context, and help avoid some of the all too frequent repetition. At least reinterpretation by Fred, broadstuff, et al, is great, but a Becker/Posner type blogging dynamic - pseudo-competitive coverage between two authors on the blog, would be a huge boon for the readership

Re: The Declining Power Of The Firm

Philippe Bradley — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:33:08 -0000

" I certainly don't yet to know how to profit from it"

bioanalogy - (if) firms are breaking up into smaller, agile units, the economy will resemble the human brain - dense, dispersed clusters of small inter-related units (neurons!) forming transient, agile patterns, constantly being remodelled.

There are 4 components to the system you could copy: 1) be a neuron - basically small firms, startups, road warrior consultants and creatives; 2) be a synapse between neurons: the service that lets neurons talk to one another, form temporary networks and memories; 3) be the extracellular matrix - half incubator, half director, it's the YCombinator of the brain on which every neuron finds its position and develops under its occasional signals. 4) be the blood supply - the main supply of resources (multimillion VC?), but *not* directly involved with neurons. Often aligned with the neurons via the extracellular matrix. 5) be the skull (i think government's already got that one figured out pretty good)

This century, if the economy is edge-bound, is certainly going to need some damn good synapses and extracellular matrix. A shakeout is also needed to weed out the underperforming neurons.

Re: Can The Y Combinator Idea Turn Into A Movement?

Philippe Bradley — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 07:38:20 -0000

if you factor in the gloom-and-doom reports from foremski et al about the dangers facing the Valley's angel investor ecosystem (see below), it's hard not to see YCombinator, and similar models, as incredibly important going forwards.
- Phil (twt: @flipbrad)

http://www.siliconvalleywat...
http://www.siliconvalleywat...

Re: Can The Y Combinator Idea Turn Into A Movement?

Philippe Bradley — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 03:41:12 -0000

would YCombinator be successful with 'outposts' or franchises in other parts of the world?

possibly not, of course. perhaps PG is a key ingredient, a 'Dear Leader'

Re: Seesmic buys a Twitter client: a big step for desktop micro-broadcasting

Philippe Bradley — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:08:49 -0000

On the one hand, I agree with you - as I said, they get a get what is probably a good inhouse AIR developer (though they could probably have hired him without buying his existing projects, so that can't be the only motivation).

But then again, as I said, there are plenty of alternative Twitter clients, including AIR ones, that are equally as good, if not better. Just as people assume Twurl is a better client because everyone uses it, being first on scene does not make something inherently better. Credit to him for being an early-early adopter, and coding through a beta phase of a framework; that's proof that he's not a *bad* coder - but it's not evidence that he's logically any better than what's out there at the moment

Re: Livingstone - Big Ideas

Philippe Bradley — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:39:17 -0000

I've always wondered, and done a bit of research in academic literature, about meme tracking across different forms of media. Nobody yet seems to have a particularly good idea how to do it, but it's very interesting and potentially worth a lot of money to marketers (structuring messages for diffusion, understanding radpi vs. infectious nodes, etc). If you can beat Google to punch on this, you'll be a minor king in the 21st century!

Re: Livingstone - Big Ideas

Philippe Bradley — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 12:42:36 -0000

Additional food for thought on the issue - by tracking users, you can identify related content/objects/ideas - the brain is not a random machine, as you move from content node to content node on the net, you're often following a reasonably logical path between related objects (e.g. long, rambling wikipedia trawls). A service could therefore use user tracking to identify related objects, to form a Collection. Here's my key point: you could measure the spread of content across the web as new content nodes enter/leave a Collection;

A web spider following HTML links would doubtless find a content node first, but it can only approximate a guess at when that content node enters the web sphere as an infective meme (e.g. once an arbitrary number of incoming links is detected). That's much less attractive than an actual user tracking dataset - once x people have stumbled across the content during a web trawl of related objects, you know that content node is an active (i.e. used by internet users) instance of a meme

Re: Livingstone - Big Ideas

Philippe Bradley — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 13:35:55 -0000

If I've understood it right, what you're describing is basically: you add metadata/microformats (that pingback to a central server) to your content; the server pulls all the links in the content, dumps it into a pool of links its users have told it are related, looks for oft-mentioned links, and decides they're related (and then displays that either as results for search, or a 'you might also be interested in" browser toolbar/webpage widget

I'm really not sold on the idea of using bottom-up/manual/human-curated semantics to obtain relatedness between objects.
For starters, websites for a long time have allowed you to manually describe the content within - i.e. header metadata. It wasn't long before all search engines stopped being reliant on metadata - because of Problem Number One: spam. Relying on honesty and fair/accurate human-sourced descriptions of objects is failure-prone and abuse-prone.

Secondly, people are lazy. I can barely be arsed to put a few tags on my blog posts; but what about all the 'objects' (ideas and concepts) expressed in a book?

The future web is a face-off between relying on humans to describe all of those, versus getting a computer to read it and try to understand them, versus assuming that the book contains at least one concept object related to the other things I just browsed and go on to browse...

I would willingly submit my browsing history to Mozilla or a firefox extenson every so often so that it can be compared to millions of others so that related browsing sessions can be identified and the objects within tagged as related. But I will NOT tag/describe every object (e.g. page) I visit, let alone the ones I create. This relying on option 1 are dead. As a former DMOZ editor, I've seen just how unreliable human curation of content can be. Computer organised curation is barely better (evidenced by spam in google search results), I think inferring relatedness based on observations of user behaviour actually has a lot of merit.

Re: Plugin Functionality - In the browser or on the page?

Philippe Bradley — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 14:14:44 -0000

in-page mashups are a great for users; this is my first comment written from within Google Reader (using the gReader extension https://addons.mozilla.org/... and it's a wonderful, much-needed addition to Google Reader.

Several issues though. Firstly, I don't think right now there's a viable way of streamlining a plugin into all webpages; the app developers have to work on a site-by-site basis. Maybe a future web standard can add 'hooks' into pages so users can hook in whatever extra feature they have enabled extensions for, whether the extension developer knows about that page or not. People love to customise their experience!

The second issue is that if you are the application being hooked in, you're effectively a parasite infecting a host; was Google's permission sought before a rival's content was integrated into its own page? Parasites in biology can be symbiotic, but a great many are not.

I used to have to visit your site (and register as an ad impression, if you have ads) - no longer necessary, I can stay within the clean, largely ad-free comfort of my RSS reader. If our content is being consumed entirely off-site now thanks to mashups (Google Reader is a paradigmatic mashup, pulling in data from lots of sources to display within its own site/application), we need better ways of monitoring offsite access and consumption of our content.

Re: Livingstone - Big Ideas

Philippe Bradley — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 15:52:34 -0000

sounds a fair bit like Shyftr ? http://www.shyftr.com/popular/

Re: Livingstone - Big Ideas

Philippe Bradley — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 15:55:48 -0000

in the information age, organising it is THE meta problem. The most successful players in the industry are the ones that tackled the meta problem - hence the focus on Google and Yahoo. The last century was the age of content creators - when News Corp and the BBC took on huge dimensions. This century's business is being the librarian for our previous century's consequences

Re: Disqus doesn't seem to respect the "Allow comments" option on posts and pages

Philippe Bradley — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 16:04:45 -0000

+1 for resolution

Re: Diplomacy By Humor

Philippe Bradley — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 13:20:22 -0000

good thing you only serve your US readership with this video!

gotta feel sorry for Hulu - as the child of the major studios it's tied by outdated, nation-based copyright systems where few other video sharing sites are.

Re: Diplomacy By Humor

Philippe Bradley — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 13:21:02 -0000

I sure as hell wouldn't - i click off boring videos or articles, let alone spurious ads i have no interest in.

Re: Diplomacy By Humor

Philippe Bradley — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 15:21:53 -0000

Just highlights how contrary to the Information Age it is that national legislative heterogeneity interferes with online communication and business; we rarely see digital national boundaries, but when we do, it's usually a surprising and awkward event, painful for all involved. The sooner the offline world adapts to online (global) realities, the better.

Re: Plugin Functionality - In the browser or on the page?

Philippe Bradley — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 15:33:18 -0000

there's an interesting meta-zeitgeist going around - people talking about losing control of the conversations that their content spawns, also people losing control of the content itself, and with this post, losing control of what it displayed on your own site. Those complaining about it are almost unequivocally also people who benefit from it. Google takes others' content (e.g. emails) and monetises it with ads beside it. Loic uses RSS readers; brad highlights Jason's apparent hypocrisy.

Sorry guys, I don't control my data anymore (my blog posts, my comments, my videos, my emails, even my own HTML), but I expect to control everyone else's as if it were my own, free to aggregate it where i please, mash it up how i like, and dare I say it, even copyrights seem abstract, unnatural and easy to ignore; i might just copy your essays or music verbatim if it suits me, and put ads next to it.

Growing up net connected, that's the culture that's been instilled into me, and frankly, it's not as if society has put walls or a policeman online that are capable of stopping me (or more motivated hackers, in the Paul Graham sense of the word, but with loose copyright morals like my own, or those of the Mahalo engineers altering Google's pages)

Re: Self-replicating, open source 3D printers

Philippe Bradley — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 04:28:40 -0000

It was unfair of me to be so critical - Umair does make some very good points occasionally, and does substantiate them with logic sometimes - guess I was just having a bad day. Glad the only consequence was to make you laugh, and not start a vendetta!

I'll definitely check out that book. If I may return the favour, read Ivan Illich's "Tools for Conviviality" - it's not long but it's incredible stuff given how long ago it was written - predicting the internet/wikipedia, freedom of the amateur from his reliance on professionals, etc

Re: A Twitter Add-on That I Need

Philippe Bradley — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:02:36 -0000

That's what I tried, sadly the del.icio.us links fred wants are in a private RSS feed, and unlike dapper, Pipes can't login (yet?). Even so, toying with pipes has been a useful learning experience

this is as far as I got. This will return all @you tweets that contain URLs for you to check out; save it as an RSS feed or a widget for your blog or whatever. Entering your del.icio.us URL will not do anything (yet), but once Yahoo gets its act together, I can update it.. Anybody can use this.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipe...
short url: http://is.gd/6zA

Re: A Twitter Add-on That I Need

Philippe Bradley — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:36:41 -0000

hey, it's worth a try. the pipe is useful as it is now, but if you can find a different source for the for:me links, try that! with a bit of luck it'll work straight away, some fields might need to be re-mapped though.

Re: A Twitter Add-on That I Need

Philippe Bradley — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:37:36 -0000

how do you get for: links - can it be done from the API?

Re: Livingstone - The Boston Marathon Bet

Philippe Bradley — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:33:36 -0000

so, what odds did he get?

Re: Livingstone - The Boston Marathon Bet

Philippe Bradley — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:40:15 -0000

shit, must have missed that bit.
I dunno about his other motivations for running, but at 5:1, surely they must have been significant! no way in hell would I put myself through all that for 5:1 odds. Are his potential winnings worth it now others are involved?

Re: The Difference Between Wordpress and Facebook

Philippe Bradley — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 07:26:03 -0000

comScore stats - z0mg!