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Bob Warfield

3 months ago

in Steve Ballmer doesn’t need to go on Mathew's comments
100% correct-a-mundo, Matthew.

Had the same reaction and said so in my blog:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/what...

Cheers,

BW
1 reply
mathewi's picture
mathewi Thanks, Bob.

4 months ago

in Hitting The Reset Button on A VC
It depends whether you need a quick browser refresh, a warm boot, or a full-on cold boot.

Refresh for me consists of cramming enough new bits in the brain that the bad old bits are displaced. Quick resets come from hooking up for drinks with old friends I haven't talked to in a long time. They plug me into that other time and take me away from the present, albeit briefly. No friends handy, go find a book that will totally absorb you. A more medium scale reset comes from a vacation. I love to go scuba dive in the warm waters of Hawaii or the Caribbean. Or, a trip to immerse in another culture is ideal.

For the big reset, only one thing works: you have to learn something new. Something deep. Something perhaps a little bit hard. Something with a community you can connect with. Could be a new hobby or a relevant professional connection.

Cheers,

BW

4 months ago

in Xobni is Inbox Spelled Backwards on A VC
Microsoft doesn't know how to improve their own software or innovate, they never have with few exceptions (C# being a pretty good one).

Xobni is cool, I love having it. It does an amazing job of elevating Outlook from being such a dinosaur. My companion to Xobni is the LinkedIn toolbar.

Therein lies the rub. Xobni + Outlook in Microsoft's hands is the key to LinkedIn's kingdom.

More on my blog:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/03/03/10-i...

Best,

BW

4 months ago

in The Difference Between Wordpress and Facebook on A VC
Fred, you are so out on a limb saying blogging is the adult social network...

...and I am so right there with you, because you are absolutely right!

There's something else at work here. Everyone keeps wanting the one size fits all:

You can do all this with e-mail! Ewwww!

You can do everything with blogs. No, everything is better in a social network.

No, wrong again, do everything on Twitter.

All wrong. Each of these media is appropriate to a particular set of use cases, and just as importantly, but seldom talked about, each is appropriate to a certain set of personal learning styles which cause strong self-selection in terms of which ones each of us like. This latter is not an idea I've heard much elsewhere, but I've written about it quite a lot.

The latest had to do with one Stowe Boyd:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/04/18/so-t...

Best,

BW

4 months ago

in General Georges Doriot on A VC
Here and I thought it was Queen Isabella funding Chris Columbus.

Cheers!

BW
1 reply
gregory thag loaning his club to thorg

4 months ago

in Paul Graham Tackles Two Issues In One Post on A VC
The problems are as much or more in how deals begin as they are in the endgame. Graham presents one interesting model: do a lot more cheaper deals. I present another: Google spent a fortune to build real technical barriers to entry. It's almost impossible to do that in today's funding mentality.

More on my blog:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/04/15/how-...

Forget the endgame, if you can't get started on the right track there won't be an endgame.

Cheers,

BW

4 months ago

in Delicious on A VC
Unless Yahoo views that it is advantageous to stop non-Yahoo search engines from indexing Yahoo content like delicious. The theory would be that if Yahoo's search can find stuff buy Google can't, it's advantage Yahoo.

Kind of a scary game if that's what's going on, no?

Best,

BW
2 replies
lawrence's picture
lawrence I was also baffled when I saw that "cut off search indexing" line.

But I'm not sure they are blocking Googlebot. Check out "http://del.icio.us/robots.txt". I see this:

User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /

Also, try this query: "site:del.icio.us'. There's a bunch of pages indexed. Even though most of them seem to be profile pages (and not tag landing pages), Google's Site query is notoriously and intentionally incomplete. If you don't block Googlebot via robots.txt, you can also block them with "no follow" tags. A quick look at Delcious' home page source doesn't show no follow tags pointing to the tag landing pages. For example, I see this:

<li><h4>fun</h4>

Looks indexable to me.

And they're certainly not blocking the Yahoo spiders. Check out this query on Site Explorer - 58M pages indexed.:

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch...

I'm not a full time SEO (I just play one on TV) so I might be missing something.... but Del.icio.us looks fully indexable by each of the major search engines to me.
Jarid I was wondering the same thing... According to the del.icio.us robots.txt, they have restricted all of the major robots, including Slurp, which is Yahoo's crawler. However, they have only partially blocked the robots from accessing a handful of directories. All of the user pages and individual tag pages are still available on Google, etc.

So, I don't have the answer as to why they did it, but it doesn't seem to be for any competitive advantage.

4 months ago

in Google Engine: Competitor or knock-off? on Mathew's comments
Aaron has missed the point here. App Engine is actually much easier than Amazon Web Services. AWS is pure API's. If you wanted to run your app in Python, you'd have to figure out how to set it up on the raw virtual Linux machine. Google kicks things a level up and let's you start in a relatively easy scripting language. Once they add Ruby on Rails and PHP, that's an awful lot of the known universe.

More on my blog:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/04/08/earl...

and:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/04/08/well...

Cheers,

BW
1 reply
mathewi's picture
mathewi Thanks for the comment, Bob.

4 months ago

in Something Important Is On The Horizon In The Music Business on A VC
Fred, you are so wrong! LOL

Much more on my blog:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/04/04/why-...

but suffice it to say that streaming totally cedes control and I don't want to do that with my music. It's great for discovering new music, but I want control of the bits. I don't want to buy them over and over: certainly not per play and definitely not by using my attention as currency for your ad model. I don't want either a streaming startup or big music company in control of my music. Neither has a good track record for it.

I don't want these things for the same reason people should have access to their social graph data or the SaaS data.

Cheers,

BW
1 reply
druce The distinction between streaming and 'file-based' seems a false one. They're the same bits sent through the same pipes.

Streaming clients don't do a good job of implementing a 'track' concept, ie letting you save the track you just heard.

Downloads don't do a good job of starting play immediately.

But they're the same bits. Make better clients and the two merge into one. The notion that one gives more 'control' just means one client does the thing you want.
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