Disqus - Latest Comments for Alex Beamish

Re: Online doesn’t compete with newspapers

Alex Beamish — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 14:22:12 -0000

We probably heard the same arguments about radio affecting newspaper sales or VHS recorders affecting movie attendance. Online news actually complements newsprint reporting. That's it. On-line should not try to do in-depth reports, and hard copy shouldn't try to be up-to-the-latest-minute.

Re: Nick Carr is right — sort of

Alex Beamish — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 13:45:21 -0000

Well, I know why I blog; it's a way for me to self-motivate, to get things done.

If I look over the past week and think, "I've got nothing done!", that depresses me, but if I go back over my blog and see that, while I didn't get much project work done, I was at least busy doing useful things, then that's OK.

As for why Nick blogs, that's starting to sound like "Why an I here?" Don't sweat it, Nick, have a glass of wine, enjoy the company of friends and family, make some music, enjoy the weather. You think too much.

Re: Google moves Office troops into position

Alex Beamish — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 11:24:21 -0000

I think the recent story about Google working with eBay is going to be looked back on in a year's time as a huge development.

With Google promotings ads for stuff on eBay, and Google providing a way for the buyer totalk with the eBay seller, it's going to generate more ad revenue for Google, promote Skype (which Google owns) and help sales at eBay. The is way more efficient than relying on buyer and seller getting together over forum postings or exchanging E-Mail message.

The planet has shrunk yet again. And the supply of old comic books and size 14 pumps doesn't seem to be getting any smaller.

Re: What would you ask Mike Arrington?

Alex Beamish — Mon, 28 May 2007 13:52:48 -0000

So, what do you think Web 3.0 is going to be like?

Re: Advertising head says TV will suffer

Alex Beamish — Tue, 29 May 2007 13:24:04 -0000

I think Sir Martin may be overplaying it a bit by talking about 'severe pressure'; there will be a shift in the market, but that's it. Surely radio stations experienced a hit when TV advertising started up, but people still advertise on radio now.

Internet advertising is just another medium, and television isn't going away any time soon.

Re: Web 2.0 — mirage, distraction or gimmick?

Alex Beamish — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 10:30:53 -0000

Web 2.0 is really just another way of saying client/server or thin client/fat client.

The first interactive computer systems were the ultimate thin client -- the computer did all of the work, and all the client did was display output and accept keystrokes. (Anyone remember the Lear-Seigler ADM-3A, marketed as the Dumb Terminal?)

Early web sites were static pages only, followed by dynamic pages -- but apart from a few browser widgets like dropdown lists, entry fields and pushbuttons, the client was still thin and dumb. (No hotel heiress jokes, please.)

We've now progressed along the continuum where the client's fatter and smarter -- and the web experience is much better for it. I bet Tim and Marc are happy to see the web the way it is now -- it was pretty geeky to begin with.

Yep -- Web 2.0 is here to stay, and that's a Good Thing.

Re: As Homer said: “Stupid like a fox”

Alex Beamish — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 09:15:27 -0000

Well, not everyone wants to 'monetize' their going concern. Google held out as long as they could before finally doing an IPO .. and now they have worry about all of the SEC rules and regulations, hire platoons of lawyers, accountants and Public Relations experts and spend a lot of time making sure they're not talking about something that might freak out the market.

Craigslist doesn't need the money -- in my market (Toronto) it's free, and as the column states, Craig Newmark only starting charging for ads to cut down on spam. The fact that the business stayed afloat was almost a nice-to-have.

And you should never discount how faithful a user community can be. If a craigslist competitor showed up, it might work for a while, but it probably wouldn't steal any craigslist regulars unless it was easier to use, had better stuff or suddenly had half a million regular users.

Finally, there's my experience with craigslist -- I had a bunk bed that I wanted to get rid of, so I posted an ad, asking for just a six pack or a bottle of wine in exchange. I didn't go with the first person who responded, but with the young mother who wanted the bed for her son. I helped the father load the IKEA parts into his car, he handed over a bottle of Chilean wine, and we both felt good about the deal.

No, the opportunity would happen when craigslist goes and 'monetizes' itself with splashy ads and irritating pop-ups, and someone else quietly introduces a simple, text-only competitor. That's the kind of business I want to start. :)

Re: Craigslist: blocking a leech, or a feature?

Alex Beamish — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 14:05:56 -0000

Probably a better way to implement this add-on (in hindsight) would have been to demo the system to the higher-ups at craigslist and find out how they could work together, rather than setting up a service that causes an increase in the server traffic by a factor of 20.

Alternatively, if Listpic had implemented a solution that only loaded the servers an additional 10%, but had added significant value, craigslist might have been much more open to the idea, and possibly even an acquisition.

It sounds like the craiglist community liked the idea -- and since that's what is driving the site (mostly), it seems likely something like listpic will happen.

Re: Is it too late for LinkedIn to catch Facebook?

Alex Beamish — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 10:03:53 -0000

Very good point .. when I think of Facebook, I think of twenty-somethings sharing their photos and favourite campgrounds. LinkedIn is more of a corporate/networking thing, and that's it -- a solution looking for a problem.

If LinkedIn and MeetUp could get together, that would be a great combination -- I've sent out feelers to some of my LinkedIn connections about getting together, but it hasn't happened yet.

Are there any numbers available on the LinedIn network so that we can compare them to Facebook?

Re: Warning: bitchy Canadian telecom post

Alex Beamish — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 05:18:35 -0000

I can almost imagine the meeting where the marketers and the engineers are arguing about this one. It turns into something from This Hour Has 22 Minutes pretty fast.

Marketker: We can call the new plan 'unlimited!'
Engineer: But it's not. Our subscribers will blow up our network if they try to do that.
Marketer: Oh, that's OK, we'll put in a footnote forbidding them from doing lumpy stuff like VoIP, media streaming and stuff like that.
Engineer: So then it's really a limited plan.
Marketer: Yeah, but you can't sell that.
Engineer: So you're going to sell an unlimited plan that's really a limited plan.
Marketer: Only for people who want to use VoIP, do file sharing, media streaming, that kind of stuff.
Engineer: But isn't that what the Internet's all about?
Marketer: I think we're finished here.

Unlimited plans made sense when we were limited to 56K dialup modems. Now with broadband and wireless, not so much. It's particularly galling when service providers cut off customers because they were using too much bandwidth -- but remain maddeningly vague about how much is 'too much'.

You can probably guess that I'm an Engineer.

Re: Let me know what you think

Alex Beamish — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 08:45:44 -0000

I read your blog via RSS (yay Google Reader), so I normally get just the text. So this time I did pop by to have a look at the design. It seems to missing a visual element -- there's no top, there's just white stuff in the middle and gray on both sides.

If it were my blog (like I'd be able to write something every day -- ha!) or even my web page, I'd make the top portion light blue to frame the content. To me, that would be 'minimalist' design -- I think the current design is less than minimalist.

Re: Video: Never pictured Dylan in an Escalade

Alex Beamish — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 10:12:09 -0000

What is it?

Well, it's a disjointed, spacey, arty car commercial for a big, black Cadillac SUV, starring some birds and a few cattle. Oh yeah, and it's got Bob Dylan starring as the sunglass-wearing black-hatted cowboy.

Hmm. From the soundtrack, and from what I could see of the driver, I thought it might have been Neil Young, or maybe Dennis Hopper. Odd.

Re: Of media and software design

Alex Beamish — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 12:17:14 -0000

As a software developer who has moved from something like the waterfall method, based on the teachings of Systems Design at Waterloo, to a more Agile or XP (Extreme Programming) method using Test Driven Development (TDD), I'm not sure journalism can be moved completely over to an Agile method. And I don't think newspapers can be made that flexible at all, as they are tied to physical print deadlines.

The concept of Agile or XP development is that you get a framework up and running, then add features incrementally. At any time you should be able demo a working system, even if it has a few Not Yet Implemented screens. With TDD, as you expand your features, you expand your test suite, usually by writing a test, confirming it fails, then writing the appropriate code to make the test pass. Development only continues when all tests pass -- if you've broken an earlier test by your new code, that must get fixed before you move on.

It seems to me, trying to apply Agile or XP methods to journalism would have the journalist going back to their sources for "Just one more question". Done electronically via blog that wouldn't be too bad; done by phone would be slow and inefficient (and probably drive the source mad).

Then again, many hands make light work, as Pamela Jones of Groklaw (www.groklaw.net) has found out. In the end, it becomes a balance between getting the news out fast, or getting a fully-baked story a little later. With newspapers you know that you're going to get a story that's 12-24 hours old. With a blog, it might be as recent as five minutes ago, but with a greater chance that part of the story may be inaccurate due to the speed with which it was reported.

Interesting times.

Re: Would you pay for no Facebook ads?

Alex Beamish — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 12:23:07 -0000

I thought that was Facebook's plan all along.

The service is either free (but you have to put up with our targeted ads), or you pay for no ads (unless you want some, in which case Facebook gets paid twice -- once by the advertiser, and once by the subscriber).

And then maybe Facebook would starting paying members who forward a 'cute' ad to their friends. But not with real money -- it would be the Facebook Buck, redeemable in subscription credits or at the Facebook store, where members can buy Facebook T-shirts, hoodies and other branded merchandise.

Re: Would you pay for no Facebook ads?

Alex Beamish — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 14:14:00 -0000

Well, there's 'leaving Facebook' and then there's 'cutting back my time on Facebook' -- I only visit the site occasionally, mostly to stay in touch with some of the friends and family that I know through Facebook. The introduction of ads probably won't affect me too much, but a heavy Facebook user who gets tired of the ads may decide to cut down on their visits.

Mark Zuckerberg may have his hand on the wheel at Facebook, but never forget that his subscribers also have the option of changing their traffic patterns, and that will most certainly affect the future path of the SS Facebook as well.

I was once a loyal CompuServe member (73067,1500) in the pre-Web days, happily paying by the minute for 2400 baud access to the OS/2 and Canopus forums. But times changed, and after a few months of using the Web and leaving my CompuServe account dormant, I closed the account -- it just wasn't relevant any more. And today it seems impossible to imagine a world without Facebook, but fads come and go -- and with a few wrong turns, the site could implode in favour of the next big thing, and then we'll be reminscing about the good old Web 2.0 days of Facebook.

Perhaps by then it will be just another answer in the 2010 version of Trivial Pursuit .. "What Social networking site got its start in 2004 at Harvard .."

Re: Gmail colours: Is this really news?

Alex Beamish — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 13:59:34 -0000

I noticed it this morning. It smells to me like a solution looking for a problem.

I'd be much more interested in a way to group folders together (as Google Reader does) so that I don't have to scroll or page down to see all of my 80+ folders.

Re: Andrew Keen: Totally wrong, as usual

Alex Beamish — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:51:16 -0000

Best blog headline this month, and maybe this year.

Re: Google needs to mind its own business

Alex Beamish — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 10:37:38 -0000

This test shows the bias towards Mathies at Google -- there should be a choice between a left-brain and a right-brain test. And being left-brained, I have no idea what a right-brained test would look like -- and I'm going to get myself in trouble for even guessing, so I won't.

Re: The Dropbox Poets Society

Alex Beamish — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:52:37 -0000

My stuff needs somewhere / I hope I get dropbox soon / Friday would be nice.

Re: “I love Fake Steve Jobs” and Facebook’s PR crisis

Alex Beamish — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 12:57:45 -0000

>> 2. Everytime he links he sends boatloads of traffic. I don’t know why I love that, but it makes me happy to see that Fake Steve Jobs has boatloads more readers than Valleywag does (Valleywag says they have tons of traffic, but they don’t click on anything. I’ve been on both sites dozens of times and FSJ’s audience clicks at 20x the rate that Valleywag’s does). <<

Hi,

I'm a counter-example -- I read Valleywag (hilarious, for the technically minded, in the same vein as The Inquirer) but this is (I think) my first visit to your blog. The only other time I hear about you is when Mathew Ingram mentions you.

Cheers,
Alex

Re: Thread

Alex Beamish — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 08:41:00 -0000

Some excellent comments -- good to hear from the WinFS guy -- absolutely right, you cannot deliver the Cadillac with verion 1.0. And the XP guy and I agree -- do small iterations, always have something you can test and deliver. Build slowly and carefully.

Microsoft in particular is a victim of its own success -- having to support a bazillion kinds of hardware and be backward compatible at the same time. It`s an impossible task.

Joel sounds like a really intersting guy, but I disagree with nailing a developer down to milestones. I`d rather develop something a few small pieces at a time, and be able to demo that to the stakeholder. And if the stakeholder has a release date in mind, then I`ll work towards that date, working my way down the feature list, and whatever makes it into the release by the deadline is whatever makes it into the release.

I`d rather deliver a slimmer, well-built piece of code, than something we smashed together to meet some deadline that no one wants to touch afterwards. As Joel himself says, it`s a marathon, not a sprint.

Re: Thread

Alex Beamish — Tue, 12 May 2009 12:58:00 -0000

Who has the best matching logarithm to enable the right kind of people to find the right kind of other people?

That should probably be `algorithim`, not `logarithim`. A logarithim is a mathematical function, and an algorithim is a logical procedure or plan.