Disqus - Latest Comments for EthanBauley

Re: Donors Choose: The HP Match

EthanBauley — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:49:36 -0000

Well as someone who holds an MFA in music performance I'd argue that
"ability to create art that resonates with people" is the same thing as
"nichespertise". That is to say: I am conflating these two things in my
mind already ;-)

Also agree that there is opportunity for "unproven underdogs" but
bootstrapping authority and readership when you have nothing else to build
on is extremely difficult; it's rare that people execute.

Said yet another way: there are thousands of unproven underdogs (in
music/art, for example) that deserve wider attention, start blogging, have
great things to say...and don't get any traction.

People need an additional reason to tune in besides "this content has
merit". Maybe it's because of an insane stunt that they did, or because you
want to network with them, or whatever. But in my experience, it's not a
perfect meritocracy out there (insofar as "lobbing content out onto the web"
is the extent of the strategy).

Re: Donors Choose: The HP Match

EthanBauley — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:17:50 -0000

The "blog star" comment and resulting post/conversation was one of my favorite all-time pieces from this community.

While I'm busy commenting to week-old posts, I will make one addition/distinction though:

All the communities driven by "blog stars" occur because the "star" has an undeniable vertical expertise (or as I am calling it "nichepertise" ;-)

This may be obvious but it was unsaid in the previous discussion, as best I can remember.

There are sooooooo many more opportunities in niche verticals to develop this kind of power. However I'd argue that the only people who can take advantage of those opps are people who have already demonstrated real-world/"offline" successes in a given niche.

The "blog" the most commonly used tool, but the value is in giving the audience access to expertise they can trust.

Any thoughts, Cap'n Mercury?

Re: Donors Choose: The HP Match

EthanBauley — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:07:26 -0000

I have to admit that I am digging the "familar name to old time readers" distinction.

Fred, don't forget all of us who stuck with you in the early days, when you were just a diamond in the rough.

(((That is a TRULY "epic lol" since you had already been on it for 3 years when I showed up ;-)))

Re: The Donors Choose Threepeat Is Complete

EthanBauley — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:47:09 -0000

I have to say that I'm pretty blown away by how much bigger the total $ raised was this year, especially when you exclude the HP contribution...

And your note about increasing the # of participants is interesting, too...it seems like the Meetup incentive really drove that metric. Really cool idea for layering more game dynamics on top of the Challenge.

Next year we should do something wacky with the DChoose API + the SMC!

We'll have to have a brainstorm on that one ;-)

Re: Facebook Fan Pages

EthanBauley — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:59:57 -0000

You're right, they are not really solving any big problems

There's not really a differentiated value prop at all vs Twitter, x/c for the scale of the user base.

You can have some fun increasing "engagement" with conversation with fans. One issue is that it's pretty tough to build a fan base.

The admin/identity tools are incredibly weak.

I have worked on several, for celebrities and a 800k+ soft drink brand...it's a missed opp in general.

Lack of good API and data i/o hurts too. You can't automate cross-posting of content, etc

Re: On Drumming And Distractions

EthanBauley — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:35:22 -0000

To Nate's point about the analogy itself: practicing drum kit/independence is different from "multitasking" because a lot of it is muscle memory (vs brain/attention/neurology). You're training your body to be able to execute musical ideas at some performance in the future.

I'm no Daniel Pink, but I can't imagine that there is a way to [proactively] train different parts of your brain to be able to process discrete bits of information in this way.

Or maybe the next major wave of innovation in social filtering/relevance needs to come via enhanced biology ;-) Why create bing.com/twitter when you could just pipe the firehose right into yer brain?

Great points MG. I finished my MFA in drumming in 2006 and now I'm a communications consultant so (like Nate, I think) I know exactly what you're talking about...

Re: Is Blog Reading Mainstream?

EthanBauley — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:12:17 -0000

To Diego's (excellent) point...whenever I have a discussion about "blogging" with communications/marketing folk, I show them screencaps of Whitehouse.gov (yes I know it's on Drupal as of this week ;-), NYTimes Bits, etc.

To Fred's point about the Twitter investment thesis, "blogging" is just another proxy for "software for publishing on the web"

Related:

Quantcast has directly measured data on Wordpress...61M monthly uniques from the US, 214M globally

http://www.quantcast.com/profile-search/wordpre...

Re: Music, Technology, Art, Economy

EthanBauley — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:44:59 -0000

tac, someone just posted links to vids of the whole set...the sound is
great on most of them, you gotta peep!

http://www.twentyfourbit.com/post/203633210/tho...

Re: How can we “shape serendipity”?

EthanBauley — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:27:43 -0000

ya

well i'd say basically for all kinds of content there's two axes:

- being able to find exactly what you know you're looking for (fast, easily)
- someone/thing recommending stuff you didn't know you wanted (with
minimum wasted effort)

Re: Is the problem you are solving really a problem?

EthanBauley — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:53:20 -0000

Great stuff, and I think one of Umair's points reconciles the "what's the incentive" counterpoint: venture investors in the tech space seem to have been pretty limited in imagination.

That's wildly anecdotal, but insofar as tech-based companies are likely to address many of the "big" problems in a disruptive way the nets out "better for society"....seems like his thesis stands to reason.

Re: How can we “shape serendipity”?

EthanBauley — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:43:38 -0000

I can barely understand most of this blog post ;-) but there's two primary tech-mediated forms of serendipity I've been exposed to:

1. clicking on links in blog posts/articles I'm reading (pre-Twitter era)
2. surfing the "stream of stuff from people I'm subscribed to (Twitter era, also incl FB newsfeed of course)

The primary function here is: trusting the sources enough, in aggregate, to allow them to waste a bit of your time as an investment. The return is finding something that you didn't know you needed/wanted.

So I think that this is getting at the same "attention economy"/info mgmt issues that have been discussed elsewhere, but from a different and useful perspective ("serendipity").

That is to say: I think it's possible to have a stream of 100% serendipitously awesome stuff I wanna click on, with 0% "noise". Or: serendipity doesn't necessarily have to carry the cost of inefficiency. A combination of a reputation score (quality over time) and velocity (what content do most people like right now) would probably solve this.

Just putting this out there.

Re: Urban Architects

EthanBauley — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:56:57 -0000

I enjoyed this comment because it goes to something I've been thinking about a lot: teaching humans to use machine language seems easier than teaching machines to use human language.

Carry on

Re: Urban Architects

EthanBauley — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:48:50 -0000

Andrew, you should try to get a meeting with Fred. Sounds like you could really add some value at USV

Re: Music, Technology, Art, Economy

EthanBauley — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:21:09 -0000

Ya seriously, as if wacc or Eva isn't totally contrived

Re: Statistically Generating The Perfect Pickup Line

EthanBauley — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:50:10 -0000

congrats on the engagement

Re: Consumer Centric Health Care

EthanBauley — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:47:51 -0000

That note makes me wonder why articles like this don't provide an extensive bibliography.

Also seems like a revenue model: pay for the annotated bibliography? Or: a related book club, led by the author?

Re: Game design, the secret to reconstructing capitalism.

EthanBauley — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 16:38:24 -0000

I don't remember what I said yesterday but I was serious about big bro

Also I was playing sim city yesterday and it's got some great
complicated rules

Re: Game design, the secret to reconstructing capitalism.

EthanBauley — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 21:53:49 -0000

I'm in new jersey right now watching "big brother", you ever seen?
Great "game dynamics"!!!

Re: Game design, the secret to reconstructing capitalism.

EthanBauley — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:01:25 -0000

Ya I think so :-)

Re: Music, Technology, Art, Economy

EthanBauley — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 09:54:04 -0000

Ya isn't that pretty much where we arrived here?

Great stuff

Re: Business and Games

EthanBauley — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:41:21 -0000

great post

an application of game theory/card games that i use more often concerns the idea of "creating new games"/businesses/markets/communities, etc.

that is, it's not whether or not a given game (e.g. bridge) is similar to a given business situation, it's that *designing a business or institution* is similar to inventing a game.

know what i mean?

community design (institution design, org design) is the coolest thing ever, imo

;-)

Re: Twitter DM Feature Completed

EthanBauley — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:30:44 -0000

hey kevin i just tested it and it spit out a bunch of craziness:

http://twitter.com/ethanbauley/status/3518108163

Re: Music, Technology, Art, Economy

EthanBauley — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:29:33 -0000

read this:
http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives...

<http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives...
strategically critical for a business to create top quality information that
is complementary (not "complimentary") to its core offerings

Re: Making sens of these turbulent times

EthanBauley — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 04:23:25 -0000

thx homie, glad someone is listening

btw found this via friendfeed search, which i've never used before

Re: Music, Technology, Art, Economy

EthanBauley — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:34:27 -0000

To put a finer point on it, I don't think iPod + iTunes is at all
comparable to the diamond rio (or whatever), for example. The deal
they did with the labels, the software on the desktop, the iPod
itself, etc. These are end to end systems that are extremely
disruptive to adjacent industries, not just hardware an software.

Another way of looking at it would be to just look at the financial
statements. I can, and do, sit around thinking about how our economy
doesn't value many important things, but they have managed to capture,
in the form of financial profit, some pretty esoteric stuff.

I dunno. I don't see how anyone can credibly belittle what they've
done over the last 8ish years.