DISQUS

You must be a developer :) I can't even remember which VMware environment I'm in half the time.

OS is not important to most end users except for how the browser behaves. I still prefer aethetically the way that most sites look in IE7 over Opera, Safari and FF (even FF3 - not that impressed), but FF is more stable so I switch between them constantly, and they behave differently depending on which system I'm on.

PS those new up and down "voting" things sit on top the names on the page here and I had no idea what they meant......

me three

(normal) People don't know how to get followers or how to respond to people they're following but who aren't following them. To them it's just useless noise to most people except the same people over and over who like to hear themselves talk.

I"m German, I hate Hitler like you can't believe, yet I still think it's funny. Tasteless, yes, but making fun of twitter is the point.

even funnier if you can understand what he's really saying :)

There's a compliment Mathew, not only a reader for over a year, but one that remembers what you wrote about. Nice :)

you guys are cracking me up. I've got another contender. He's white, kind of on the small side too (so glad you don't disciminate) and his name's Harry (well it's really Hairy but we try to make him feel he's among peers). His only requirements: water bowl, the mailman coming once in a while for a mental diversion, and plenty of chewies. He's cheap!!!

They copied the entire game outright. They even named it practically the same. Should they just be able to do that and get rich off of it? Why would anyone want to create anything if anyone can come along, copy the idea, and make tons of money off of it? I'm with Hasbro on this one. Maybe their methods were short sighted but they have every right to protect their IP.

I LOVE that he did this (yes repeating my comments on left on Allen's site about it) but this guy brought forward a discussion that so many of us in the western world don't talk about. Our lives, and our inevitable deaths.

That he reached beyond his own pain, his own life jolt, and shared his talks and life story with so many is simply a gift that takes a huge soul to give back to the world. Since I moved into my (current) company and have moved out of silicon valley, I have to admit that my life is so much richer now. I talk with people who are have led amazing lives, do inspiring things, and many of them get or take no credit for it - they do it because they care.

In a world where we worship at the alter of an awkward 23 year old for his skill and luck, getting outside my myopic world is simply the best thing that ever happened to me.

Silicon Valley is a place for dreams. I would even go so boldly as to say that if the USA didn't have the leads in so much in technology and innovation, much of it fueled the cradle of SV, then it would be hurting a lot more than it is today. But SV can also suck you dry, because it's not about who's the best and what's the best solution but too much about cronyism and nepotism.

That /rant/ being ended, i can't thank Randy Pausch enough for what he left us. And you all should do the same - take your life down for you family and loved ones.

1. Make sure people are judged by the revenues they bring in. Those that bring in revenues should get to run the place. People who don’t bring in revenues should get fewer and fewer responsibilities, not more and more.

assuming their job is to bring revenue.... :)

I'm curious what measurables he means here: 1. if your engineering team can’t give a media team good measurements, the entire company is in trouble (metrics?)

I like this comment someone left on Gawker about it :
Lalina: But is it funny? Does it work? My feeling is, if you have to explain the joke, it's not a good joke.

I don't think anyone mistakes comments or wall postings or my social network itself as content. But I think blogs, story & literary sites, citizen journalism sites, and sites like Yelp and even a few forums are content. They are not context. Yelp maybe is straddling the middle but I don't think all user generated stuff is "contextual" (blogs being the best example) unless we assume that any blogger is now the content provder (not a user) and users are everyone else who reads and comments on the blog.

higher education - maybe. But on the lower education rungs, the US is slipping and slipping badly. I have dual US-EU citizenship and have been working in the US (even did a short stint as a substitute teacher in an inner city school district), Germany, Czech, Russia and compare notes with my friends around the world. The US needs to get its act together on public education on the K-12....(I could write a book on this but I'm too lazy!)

lol yeah, crap, I'm getting closer to 50 than I am to 21!!!!

Ok TechCrunch says: 'underlying data—”aggregated Google search data, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.” If that sounds kind of vague it is because it is. '

I was afraid they were going to make this mandatory... good

that SUCKS. Am I the only one who doesn't want accurate site stats flashed to the world? I wonder if people will leave google Analytics now b/c of that, so no one can be sure if the google Ad Planner is accurate or not (creating the same problem as currently exists). I realize mostly smaller companies will be more worried about this vs. the facebooks of the world, but it still feels really violative (is that a word?) since they own such a large portion of the REAL analytics market.... I don't know. I just feel this should be a private communciation between a site and its advertisers.

wait a minute.... if I use google analytics in my site, this stupid pop up i keep getting every time I log in now asking me if i want to share my data (to which I always vehemently click "no no no") they are going to just share my data with anyone who wants it?

I'm noticing issues with google analytics NOT matching my own database data (google analytics has worse numbers). So they're going to share this crap data with others??

Hi Fred, I'm a writer for a site that features interesting people, and I have to say that I went thru a big cycle of what you refer to above. I even (ahem, sorry) stopped reading your blog for a while and many others I used to enjoy because I had to kind of de-process myself. After reading Scoble's post about whether to change his baby's diaper or answer another email I was really disturbed (not specifically at him just this whole plugged in thing).

I'm now finding inspiration in every day people. They are doing great things, and many of them are *barely* online.

If you want to read some interesting stories totally outside tech, feel free to take a break and read about interesting people on www.storyofmylife.com/storytellers. The only reason I'm here plugging the site is b/c I have been struggling with exactly what you were/are above and finally feel great about what I'm doing - what I'm doing now is not about me at all. I started and stopped my blog a hundred times, and wondered why I was doing it. When I started shining the spotlight on people who are out there doing great things and not very often getting recognition, my entire perspective changed. I must say, I'm a much, much happier girl now that I'm not plugged in 24/7.

350 pounds, not bad.... :)

The reason most people I know don't care about/use Digg is that it's got this control-freak group of "groupies" who control everything. Mixx is kinda new, but not driving much traffic to its font page 'winners' yet. Catch-22 in a way.

You and I have been chatting about this a little bit. I still read my paper every single day. I also read the news online (and as the AP becomes more and more filler) I'll find I've already read many of the articles.

So with one foot in each world (and I prefer Huffington's ménage à trois idea of journalism-blogger-reader better) one of the things I"m finding irks me is that it's nearly impossible to get to an individual AP writer. They bury their contact information. On the flip side, bloggers who never comment on their own posts or post with mostly negative comments (ie only comment on trolls) I also find myself reading less.

I am tending towards idea that a blog post is the beginning of the discussion / conversation (albeit usually short lived) vs. a newspaper article that I read and am usually finished with by the end (ie I have no expectation of anything further) whereas a blog post is a starting point.

Interesting post Mathew!
Good insight: "a kind of stress-testing approach, as though by subjecting that person to the full glare of the public floodlights, they could ensure that their significant other was good enough to hang onto."
- true for some cases; probably the myriad of reasons people publicly go through is as varied as the reasons relationships fail.

It's true that reasons for writing about ourselves is narcisstic, vain, or a need for attention or just purely validation of Self. It's also true that there are more important things to write about that impact the world and future generations.

But being noble can be exhausting, and not everyone is cut out to be a world shaker. It's why the world-shakers stick out. Most peoples' worlds are pretty narrow. I'd say that a lot of people are lost, hurt, lonely, scared, curious, wanting to know if they're normal, looking for some validation. This often comes from seeing other people, particularly if they're in the public eye and good looking, going through the same things as we do, but being emotionally impacted and wondering if we're crazy....

I was standing in line once at a supermarket behind two young adult, hispanic females, heavily made-up, overweight, dressed in flashy clothes and gawdy jewelry paying with food stamps (the reason why I mention these facts is in reality they are about as far away from hollywood as anyone) talking about "Brad" and "Jennifer" and "Angie" as though they were discussing their BFFs. This disconnect between facing the harsh realities of their own lives and into the glamorous lives of others is as old as the hills. Schadenfreude and voyeurism go hand in hand to validate that our lives aren't just "quiet lives of desperation" or if they are, others are too.

As a developer, I can totally understand the desire to keep a walled garden because of privacy and control. As working for a business with users who give up their time, their content, their connections - I can totally see why wanting to keep them in the fold is important and doing your best to bar them from being harassed. As a consumer, I am 100% about not re-entering my data, and going for standarisation, but not sure WHO I want or even trust to "guard" my data. At the end of the day, these sites are nothing without their users.

What a messy smorgasboard of conflicting feelings.

seems more like a good way to avoid real work... lol

I agree, made me laugh. I can see a furious write-off.

ok but more importantly, how do you follow the conversations? Do you go to twitter site and just read and try to figure out the list of threads? I mean the design hurts my eyes :) but it'[s more about trying to figure who's responding to @someone that I don't follow that makes me have any idea what's going on.

Meaning, if you have no network, or don't follow the same people other people who are responding to other people are, how do you follow the conversations? Do you just keep adding people everyone else you follow is following?