DISQUS

Ditto

rob [at] robhyndman.com

I guess I have to wonder how, if the NYT, one of the strongest media brands on the planet, can only scrape chicken feed together in online revenues, the big ad-driven social media sites are worth anything near what is claimed :)

I disagree with Blodget. I think $1 trillion at least. Can I have my journalist's cheque now please? ;)

I just catch them with my hand. The one certainty is that a fly will always fly *up*. Slowly move your hand up behind the fly until you're about 3-4 inches behind. Then swipe the air about 1-2 inches above the fly. Works 90% of the time.

Just realized that no one who's commented so far has really spoken about the social aspects of bookmarking - maybe I missed something, but I don't think so. Hmmm.

Holy crap, that's a lot of comments. You go, Mathew.

I bookmark everything. Need a tshirt: "I'm bookmarking this". But I only revisit very 'specific needs' pages - restaurant listings, that kind of thing - info that generally would be hard to surface in a search without some time spent digging.

I still bookmark the rest but I have no idea why. OCD? Perhaps there's a little Rainman in all of us.

In any event, between restaurant reviews, books I want to read, and the like I actually return to delicious a lot. This probably sez more about Google than it does about Delicious.

"We love the smell of competition in the morning". Nice.

I thought all content is advertising. ;)

"The ECF is the greater of (ii) $1100 or (iii) $220 per month remaining in the service agreement, to a maximum of 400 (plus applicable taxes)"

One month in to 36 month contract, that amounts to 35 months x $220 per month [what does "to a maximum of 400" mean in this context?]. That's $7,700, as Alistair says, the price of a used 2002 BMW 328i [http://twitter.com/brundle_fly/statuses/847628525].

This is at least wildly, uncontrollably, greedily rapacious. It's not just about not making sense. It's exquisitely well-timed commentary on the culture and business ethic of Rogers.

Hey I twittered this idea to you months ago - just after your presentation at Democamp :)

Frankly I think that if they had a vision they wouldn't be waiting until everyone leaves. And I see no evidence of action up to now. Except for that Google thing. (!)

I think the obvious question is why *now*, in the immediate aftermath of the Microsoft fiasco. If these people were deadwood mgmt wouldn't have waited until now. Unless mgmt is itself not up to the job. And if they aren't deadwood, they're likely leaving because they don't think mgmt is up to the job. So, in either case ....

Well, I'd take issue with you there, and I've always thought the "MSM ain't all it's cracked up to be" argument to be kind of a straw-man (or is that red herring?). Sure, but all in all the MSM was / is ohhh-kay, and there are filters in place to help assure some minimum quality controls. They sometimes fail, even spectacularly so (hello Judith Miller), but you rarely in the MSM see writers bit**-slapping each other with puerile, adolescent ferocity, or engaging in deep ruminations about the most banal details of their brain droppings.

But perhaps more importantly, for every MSM contributor there are, oh, about a gajillion UGC contributors. Which means a much hard job of sifting through the crap. And the aggregation tools out there really do only filter on popularity, and while that may sometimes be a rough proxy for quality, Jennifer Lopez has proved beyond any doubt that that is often spectacularly *not* the case, and I don't really want to spend *that* much time immersed in material that suits the lowest common denominator / has the broadest possible appeal.

Jury's still out, IMO. Or perhaps more accurately, we really, really need tools to help us take out the garbage. Can we have them now, please?

Did you see Ethan's post on this? Giggle.

Well, I think the case can be made that the reality of it is closer to what Aidan is talking about. There is just so much dross out there. And I think there is much more of a nexus between this and your recent blog post about why techcrunch bothered to write about Mixx than people might suppose. Why? Because they can, and not really because they should. Editing and professionalism can still go a long way to curing various content ills.

I'm not - GASP!! - getting all Keen-sian on you <insert other ideological purity assurances here>, just stating what ought to be reasonably obvious now. There is an ocean of crap out there, a lot of it is UGC, and sorting through it is proving to be awfully hard.

Er, "others would try ..."

Well, I think he must have known that holding AT&T down and beating it about the head and shoulders like that would encourage others to do the same, and that once people saw how successful giving people what they want would be otherwise would try to imitate the model.

Oh, and you also have to wonder how roaming will work if devices permitted by Verizon conflict with network requirements of other providers, eg in Canada. Open has a way of opening up closed.

You have to wonder whether this is the writing on the wall after the iPhone's launch.

What Jobs Hath Wrought?

Rob is very happy to hear that.

Yup - I'm wondering how anything that ugly makes it though to production. Bezos must have wanted this one *an awful lot* for all those smart people to bite their lip.

On the pay for blogging thing - like any other wireless service, I suppose people wouldn't be paying to read blogs so much as they'd be paying for the convenience of being able to do it wherever. I mean, it's just a device specialized for reading, isn't it? I suppose there *might* be lots of written content that people might want to access wherever or a device that makes reading a pleasure.

Well, no, there isn't, actually. ;)

The big problem is that they all have earnings. It's much easier to create a high valuation without them.

;)

Please just wake me when it's over. And in a couple of years we'll all have a laugh over how someone else with more money than brains bought something new and untested at the height of its hype, and got their head handed to them.

I think the real answer is to simply charge people for the amount of bandwidth they use - premium charge during prime time if that makes sense.

The Comcasts of the world have created this problem by creating inefficient pricing structures - structures they've adopted because they presumably facilitate billing and are easier to market. Structures they've been able to sustain because the market is not competitive. It is *easy* to blame them for this, IMO, because it's a pricing structure they created because it's good for them.

People who want to use more bandwidth - for any purpose (Omar - describing them - effectively - as porno fiends is not helpful) - are being cast in the role of the villain because there are no alternatives to the Comcasts - not really.

So, "more power to them"? No, less actually - because users who are willing to pay more for more don't have any way to do it - because of the utility-like infrastucture costs involved in providing access, there likely never will be alternative service providers who can offer the alternatives that power users would use if they could. So they're forced on to the slow lane, with all of the attendant resource sharing problems that this creates.

"Ingram: Microsoft risks being 'a fad'"

Heh.

Hmmm. Potentially interesting distribution for NowPublic. And the newspapers are looking like intermediaries ripe for disintermediation ...