Disqus - Latest Comments for JoeDuck

Re: Is the link economy really broken?

JoeDuck — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 08:02:43 -0000

Agree. This is an area where Google's defense of the algorithm due to SEO abuses distorts things in a major way. Solution? Not sure.

Re: Is the link economy really broken?

JoeDuck — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 07:56:39 -0000

How can we fix this? Google needs to find ways to reward good linking practices for pages that surface other good relevant links. I think until that happens it's unreasonable to expect sites to change much.

Re: Yammer: This thing is a prize winner?

JoeDuck — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:19:33 -0000

I think the next round of "winners" will be less tech innovators as they will be biz innovators - effectively using the tools we now have to solve old problems cheaply.

Re: Yammer: This thing is a prize winner?

JoeDuck — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:10:48 -0000

Thanks for panning this choice as I was about to do, but felt a little guilty since my (retirement planning) startup didn't even make it to the final 52. I'm now comfortable it's not sour grapes, rather the fact that few of the TC50s seemed to have a biz model. Frankly I don't see much of one here either for the reason you note - this is a one day (one hour?) project for Twitter or a a Google team, both of which have large customer bases already.

As with the TC40 and startups in general I'm guessing the real winners will bubble up unpredictably on the basis of forces well outside of the control of even major players. That said it was *fantastic* of TechCrunch to livestream the whole conference and do such a fine job of keeping readers posted in near-real time of developments.

Re: Web Services That Cater To Both The Publisher And The Reader

JoeDuck — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:08:55 -0000

Insightful as usual Fred. I'd suggest that the most profound change agents of the future will be the non-tech folks that until recently (and even now) struggle to get their appropriate share of voice. Blogs are more tech-centric than real life but this will smooth out over time. Another factor is that there are signs that women will soon overwhelm men in terms of online content production - this will shift the mix of content as well.

Re: Let a hundred Facebooks bloom

JoeDuck — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 20:23:04 -0000

I had two very interesting things to say on Twitter ....this, and ... whoops... I have forgotten the second one.

Re: Let a hundred Facebooks bloom

JoeDuck — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 19:58:06 -0000

Thx for the Prologue tip - that sounds promising. I wish everybody would blog, but we'll never even see 1/100 doing so. However almost everybody will do some form of messaging like IM or Twitter or Facebook or any of the thousands of options, and we need a way to converge that data into coherent forms that are not constrained by applications.

Two new challenges I'm noticing at Twitter are people dramatically reducing their blogging and the info overload if you try to follow more than a few hundred people. Soon will we need to tag our contacts as "friends who say interesting stuff" and "friends who don't" ??

Re: Venture Fund Economics: Gross and Net Returns

JoeDuck — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:07:44 -0000

2014! But my new improved onliner attention span is only 14 minutes....

Don Dodge had some IRR detail also - very impressive numbers if you continue to manage and pick companies so well.

Re: Venture Fund Economics: Gross and Net Returns

JoeDuck — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 20:28:10 -0000

Fred thanks for sharing this great level of detail and insight. Super interesting and very much in the spirit of blogging transparency which makes life a lot more interesting for all of us.

Two questions:

* Hasn't Union Square fared far better than the average fund over the past 5 years? That's great, but I think we should be careful not to generalize too much about VC funding success from your example...

* I'm not sure I follow how the net IRR calculation relates to time. Is that based on 6 years with a single payment to investors at the end of that period?

Re: Delicious 2.0: Who bookmarks any more?

JoeDuck — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 02:59:53 -0000

Indeed, bookmarking is so lamely 2007ish! For me the advantages of bumping into new stuff outweigh those of archiving most old stuff, so for most research or idle surfing I just keep on searching in new and different ways. Although tagging is very important I think it needs to be automatic to be of great global use - ie when smartphones start geotagging pix and they are pushed out we'll get some amazing results without any cumbersome human intervention. Tagging an interesting picture? $.01, auto tagging a million pictures per hour? Priceless.

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

JoeDuck — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 05:30:20 -0000

Yes. TechMeme does a fine job of surfacing the buzziest content and adding comments from smaller blogs but is failing to present really good stuff ahead of OK stuff from the key blogs. I like your idea of creating a way for great comments to generate some form of "guest post" at popular blogs which would make for a better conversation and encourage more comments.

Re: Bloggers Are Still The Bleeding Edge – If Not More So

JoeDuck — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 02:56:10 -0000

Nice post Steven. As you note a lot remains to shake out, and regardless of what big media, little media, or bloggers want to happen you can be pretty darn sure it's going to shake out organically and from the ground up rather than as pronouncements from legacy media or big time blog folks. And that's a good thing.

Re: Hello Knol — goodbye Mahalo?

JoeDuck — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 22:23:28 -0000

As an info consumer I want a consolidation of all relevant info rather than a single site or even many sites that are "authoritative". I really like knols openness and what appears to be a community driven process rather than Wikipedia's editorial elitism which now works too hard to remove good stuff in the name of consistency.

Re: Wrong — Steve’s health is my business

JoeDuck — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 22:07:32 -0000

Of course Job's health is material information and it should be disclosed if there is any indication he'll be unable to perform his duties for years into the future. I'm not sure how far down the corporate ladder you need to go before health is no longer a reasonable issue, but certainly in this case it is. I'd suggest that part of full SEC disclosure all CEO's should have their health records on file and viewable by shareholders.

Re: Microsoft: Still unclear on the concept

JoeDuck — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:39:03 -0000

Yoda says Ballmer Drive Matt Crazy He Does.

I'm not as skeptical of the MS zeitgeist. The game is pretty well defined now. MS controls software, Google controls online. Software's still the big ticket item but online is catching up fast. Both companies are trying to position themselves to be the key player in the online space. Google is winning, but MS has a *lot* of money to burn and more time than most people assume before the revenue winds shift against them. Google won't see MS size revenues for at least 3-5 years - a virtual eternity online.

Re: The Death Of The A-list

JoeDuck — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 21:37:27 -0000

Enjoyed the sentiment of the post, but methinks that picture crosses the line of the news that's fit to print..

I hope you are right that the A list is fading away, though I think that's too optimistic. Link patterns really favor the initial bloggers, and they like to stick together. That said I am a big fan of Scoble and think he has done a lot to bring new people into the mix thanks to the way he links out and produces such a huge volume of content and does not use the strategic, commercially driven linking we find at most of the other top blogs.

Re: Denton: Evil genius or just plain evil?

JoeDuck — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 23:44:38 -0000

... whether it encourages bloggers to go for the cheap and titillating is the subject of debate

Well, maybe a dummy debate. Gawker writers are masters of the cheap and titillating and are paid well to be that. There are flashes of brilliance here and there but we are not talking about a journalistic high road here.

Valleywag is no... www.MathewIngram.com!

Re: Yahoo: Night of the Living Dead

JoeDuck — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 23:39:55 -0000

I don't think MS ever lost interest in the deal, correctly assuming the Yahoo board's intransigence would have many unintended consequences that MS could later exploit. MS could hardly have ordered a better surrogate fighter, though he won't come cheap to them.

My view is that shareholders - esp big ones - are more pissed at the board than is commonly assumed, and Icahn will win the battle easily.

Re: BoingBoing: It’s our blog, and our rules

JoeDuck — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:12:23 -0000

BoingBoing isn’t the New York Times

Thank you Matt for this important reminder. I sure hope I don't confuse these two bastions of journalistic integrity ever again.

Blogging standards are starting to look like Google's don't be evil standard = what is right is whatever we say is right.

Re: News flash: Flash websites still suck

JoeDuck — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:07:26 -0000

Great post Matt.

This news is good for the sake of indexing content that is already out there, but it's probably a mistake for sites to think this is a green light for full flash development. At search conferences Google reps (and everybody) used to laugh at the heavy flash sites created at huge expense by big, SEO deficient advertising firms.

That said this is an important development in that it may shake up current rankings as heavy flash sites are less repressed in ranks than before.

Actually, for the linking reason you note above bloggers are SEO magicians - sometimes without even knowing it. Congratulations!

Re: Google and the end of everything

JoeDuck — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 08:33:23 -0000

A great big think item Matt, and unless he qualifies his idea more I'm with you on this one.

However it seemed to me he's making a more reasonable and subtle point than a wrong suggestion that correlation=causation.

Generally science bases descriptions of behavior or biology or other phenomena on data *samples*. As the sample size approaches 100% our models become closer to the full reality rather than just a model of that reality. I don't agree that we are anywhere near the point of having enough data to do much more than target ads a little better, but in the areas where we have huge data sets I think we will start to find that Google analysis may be able to predict and describe things better than any previous models.

Far more significant will be conscious computing, which is likely to change the game for everything and everybody almost as soon as that Genie's out of the bottle - probably in about 15 years.

Re: Techmeme and the Noise Problem

JoeDuck — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 06:25:51 -0000

Duncan it's encouraging to see more discussion about how to bring "new voices" and info into the fray. A big part of the challenge is that even if you could remove all the noise there is a lot going on and a lot of new perspectives every day.

Re: Memo to Jakob Lodwick: Grow up

JoeDuck — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 06:50:06 -0000

test reply

Re: Memo to Jakob Lodwick: Grow up

JoeDuck — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 06:48:11 -0000

I probably should have read Jakob's history of comments before I made the Sierra connection which I agree may be a stretch here.... but since I'm an online commenter I thought it was appropriate to argue first and collect data later...

Re: Memo to Jakob Lodwick: Grow up

JoeDuck — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 03:18:41 -0000

Neekolas I think from a biz point of view you have made several good points about professionalism, etc. I'm talking a lot more generally here than just Jakob.

Also - I know *you* were not shutting anybody up - on the contrary you want him to keep posting. I was (unsuccessfully) trying to be snide and funny about your use of epicurean meaning that I think the other terms you used are, in fact, a pretty accurate description of some successful ..... hipsterpreneurs! Good term there dude.