DISQUS

The guy could be Brad Pitt and the wife could be played by Angelina Jolie.

Oh wait, that'd be documentary.

There are plenty of these already in existence.

But that only proves this is a good idea.

I think something like this might already exist. If you do a google search for a Craigslist/Google Maps mashup it might be there. Of course, this isn't by subway line per say, but it least it's a map.

If not, it's a good idea, and definitely sounds feasible.

This post is a pretty solid takedown of the ValleyWag article, which is mainly an attempt to add a sensational narrative to the core story -- BitTorrent's layoffs.

That being said: Like a lot of folks, I really don't get the idea behind BitTorrent having its own retail media operation. If, as you say, they thought they had an advantage over Apple et. al. courtesy of lower bandwidth costs (on their end) then they're sorely mistaken. Users, obviously, don't give a pig's lick about the bandwidth cost of their provider. And so having a lower cost basis per GB is hardly a competitive advantage.

As for the layoffs, part of the problem facing their CDN-like business is their name: BitTorrent. Their natural customers -- major media companies delving online media -- associate BitTorrent with a system of piracy (fairly or unfairly). They have to spend energy getting their foot in the door -- explaining that it's not the same thing -- when other competitors in the p2p distro space don't have to.

Thanks Tim. I think your broader elucidation of my point is spot on. This kind of mentality probably goes a long way to explaining why various open source/geeky projects haven't really taken off or proven as disruptive as they should be.

Firefox is obviously an exception to this, but it's not surprising, given stuff like the "Awesome Bar", which is all about making browsing simple enough for a total moron. Eventually I'll have to upgrade to FF3, but I tend to loathe any upgrades, so I'll wait awhile.

The divergence you cite between law and actual behavior is right on. When I focus on all the idiotic laws that get passed in all kinds of areas I get really depressed. If the world really looked the way politicians would like to mold it, I'd want to plug myself into a morphine drip and never take it out.

I get a lot more optimistic on all kinds of things when I see how the world actually is.

Even with that though, the morphine drip sounds nice sometimes.

I've never gone back and looked at bookmarks in delicious. A few times I've tried to get into bookmarking items with a "toblog" tag or whatnot, just as a reminder to blog something. I've never blogged something that I've given that tag to, however.

For work, I keep a schedule of future earnings releases, so I have been using an "earnings" tag for purely utilitarian purposes, tagging releases that announce future earnings dates of public companies. It's so narrow and most of the time I'd have no purpose for it.

Having never visited the site itself, I can't remember... did the old Del.icio.us have a similar frontpage leaderboard, like the new one has?

It's kind of Digg-like looking and it confirms that the site really isn't mainstream at all. Like Digg and FriendFeed, it seems like another place to share links about technology.

I should add, however, that he does seem to be hitting on some important ideas.

You might call me a moron -- I might call myself as such as well -- but I've always found Umair's writing to be borderline impenetrable. But as I said, I'm open to the possibility that its my own intelligence at stake, rather than his writing

It's bizarre what constitutes a conflict of interest to some people. 9/10 times that's invoked it doesn't make any sense.

That's funny; that's the same album I downloaded yesterday from Amazon yesterday. Good stuff