Disqus - Latest Comments for Ontario Emperor

Re: Redefining relationship through a collaborative Twitter project

Ontario Emperor — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 20:37:52 -0000

I tweeted some Oracle sessions on my own, while tweeting some other sessions (including Larry Ellison's keynote) in collaboration with others via Eddie Awad's @oow Twitter account. Collaborative tweeting is much easier to find, and offers much better quality. Highly recommended.

Re: Shaking The Cage

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:12:48 -0000

Looking forward to the new announcements on the spam front, but I would suggest that you not refer to Devin as you "back-end developer." Despite the fact that I was responsible for marketing a server subsystem, I had a former boss who refused to call me a "back-end product manager." He thought it meant I was managing butts. Since I have a high regard for the Disqus staff, I assume that Devin isn't developing a bunch of butts. :)

Re: Shaking The Cage

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 19:12:48 -0000

Looking forward to the new announcements on the spam front, but I would suggest that you not refer to Devin as your "back-end developer." Despite the fact that I was responsible for marketing a server subsystem, I had a former boss who refused to call me a "back-end product manager." He thought it meant I was managing butts. Since I have a high regard for the Disqus staff, I assume that Devin isn't developing a bunch of butts. :)

Re: Thoughts On FriendFeed

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:15:28 -0000

At least FriendFeed allows you an easy way to find your comments. Too bad there's isn't an easy way to quickly get to comments about your stream.

P.S. As to why I'm commenting here. I saw the item in FriendFeed, then clicked on the link to actually read it. Since I was here anyway, I'm commenting here. Then I'll probably go back to the FriendFeed conversation about this post.

Re: Remember the social camera? (Scripting News)

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 12:16:05 -0000

I would want to have control over who got my pictures. I effectively have such control today (albeit on low-quality photos) by uploading mobile phone photos to my service of choice (in my case, Blogger, though most of the known universe uses Flickr or some such).

Rather than supporting the IRSimple protocol, why not give good cameras full functionality and put an operating system (with Internet access) on them? If you're going to spend $1000 plus for a camera, why not add additional functionality?

When you think about it, it's bizarre that the cheap cameras (i.e. those in phones) have these capabilities, and the expensive cameras don't (unless I'm missing something).

Re: Twitter's business model (Scripting News)

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:22:59 -0000

I'm still thinking that a controlled set of advertisements - say, 1 advertisement for every 100 tweets - would be tolerable. Anything that isn't self-funding is bound to be shut down after disappointing quarterly results. If you're right and Twitter's destiny is to be bought and folded into another service, I suspect that if Phone Company X bought Twitter, then we'd end up with a bunch of small mini-twits.

Re: Why most conferences suck (Scripting News)

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 11:44:18 -0000

Two perspectives-as a conference co-organizer for the users of our product, we effectively have to "fight Disneyland" - in other words, to keep attendees in the hotel rather than have them skip the sessions and go up the freeway to Anaheim. Conference organizers (primarily customers themselves) try to provide meaningful sessions, but our vertical market isn't necessarily riveting at all times. Still, we've been told by outsiders that our conference is the best in our industry - which makes me wonder about the others.

As a conference attendee, the only two conferences that I've attended/will attend this year are one for our vertical market, and Oracle OpenWorld next week. Somehow I don't think you were thinking of OpenWorld when you were musing about conferences - if anything, Oracle OpenWorld has too much to do.

Now that I think about it, the users that run our conference like to have several concurrent sessions at once. I haven't been so hot on the idea (you end up with sessions with just a few people there), but perhaps they have a point.

Re: A new way to get in Club140 (Scripting News)

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:37:26 -0000

I disagreed with Benz's premise that Twitter itself is undesirable because of what Club 140 is doing. A tool can be used for admittedly silly purposes, or it can be used to distribute important information (Nate Ritter's experience with the San Diego fires comes to mind).

P.S. Your French is better than mine.

Re: What woke me up about the Clintons (Scripting News)

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 17:33:38 -0000

I don't know that Bill's behavior necessarily negates the principle of having a first spouse actively involved in running the government. Then again, I'm not that big a fan of term limits, preferring that voters should have the option of turning the incumbents out when they please (and despairing of the fact that voters rarely do so).

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:19:20 -0000

I read this post and Biz Stone's response, and I'm thinking that a small group of outside advisors, under NDA, is the...um...obvious solution. Not just for technical issues, but also for the monetization issue that they keep on deferring.

Re: Why does Twitter go down? (Scripting News)

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:22:00 -0000

I was going to post a reply to Biz Stone's blog post, suggesting that Twitter convene a select list of customers under NDA to advise them on both technical and monetization matters.

However, comments were not enabled for the Biz Stone post.

Perhaps I'm overreacting, but I find that interesting.

Re: A hint in a postscript (Scripting News)

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:37:19 -0000

My one concern about a Microsoft Microblog is that if Microsoft does something, they are going to do it for the benefit of Microsoft. This could result in several scenarios, ranging from limited support for non-Windows platforms (except for possibly SUSE), to the incorporation of Microsoft Microblog as a standard OS feature (rather than having standalone access).

Perhaps it's my paranoia speaking out loud.

Re: The mind of Yahoo (Scripting News)

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:40:27 -0000

Or perhaps Yahoo is trying to right its income statement to make the company look more attractive. A sad fact in today's society is that short-term financial performance is much easier to measure than long-term viability, resulting in companies having to resort to "right sizing" to minimize investor disappointment when revenues don't double on a quarter to quarter basis.

Re: I don't care if Roger Clemens is lying (Scripting News)

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:56:27 -0000

Alternative view - why is it so important to know what Obama and McCain are saying? Frankly, the actions taken by our local governments are MUCH more important than things that are done thousands of miles away. Yes, Obama or Bush could do something that affects your withholdings on your income tax return, but if the city doesn't pick up the trash, it's gonna stink outside your house.

Re: Random questions for the day (Scripting News)

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 19:54:40 -0000

Re item 4. Perhaps this is limited to the company town here in southern California, but I've heard so many advertisements for "There Will Be Blood" that I'm sick of the movie before even stepping into a theatre to see it. Before the California primary, there were actually more "There Will Be Blood" advertisements than there were Indian casino pro/con advertisements. I won't tell you what I wanted to do with that danged milkshake. :)

Re: Hillary for Republican Veep? (Scripting News)

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:16:58 -0000

Seriously, I'm surprised that Obama hasn't done more of a "McCain - Clinton" linkage in his own speeches.

If he were to do that during the primaries, he'd drive the anti-McCain Democrats his way.

If he were to do that during the general election, he'd drive the anti-Clinton Republicans his way.

Re: My name is Dave and I'm a racist (Scripting News)

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:15:09 -0000

I agree, to a point, with your thesis, although I think that "the man" and "the do-gooder" views are perhaps an overgeneralization.

Perhaps it's important to note WHY we're all racists. Quite simply, we're more comfortable with people who are like us than with people who are not like us. Put me, a white Christian conservative heterosexual male, in a room with a black Buddhist progressive lesbian, and I am going to be inclined to feel some discomfort. This is not a good thing, but I believe it is a natural inclination of humankind. And in some (not all) cases, if you attempt to fight it by overcompensating (i.e. "Today I'm gonna be diverse!"), you're still guilty of racism or sexism or whatever, since you're still making distinctions based on race, sex, etc.

Part of the problem is when we generalize a group and assume that it is monolithic. For example, there was a period of time when people thought that you could get the pulse of the black community by talking to an actor, a sports figure, a university professor, and a politician. No group, even Jim Jones' People's Temple group, is monolithic.

Good post.

Re: Proof that the end is near (Scripting News)

Ontario Emperor — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 21:13:18 -0000

Me too.

Seriously, regurgitation does allow the original message to be spread more widely. If I hadn't seen your post, I never would have read Mark Evans' post.

Now I just have to share Evans' post with eight people...um, maybe not.

Re: readers of Oracle blog aggregators unite (and take over) - Digging in a Habari sandpit

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:40:49 -0000

If nominated, I will not accept. If aggregated, I will not serve. (Seriously, my blog only deals with Oracle about 2% of the time, special events excluded.)

"Roger Howard" left some comments on my blog and stated that he did not object to the off-topic nature of the meme, but the propagation itself. It sounds like there may be two stories (or perhaps eight) floating around about the objectionable nature of the meme.

Re: 8 things - Digging in a Habari sandpit

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:45:58 -0000

Re number 5 - After graduating from high school on the east coast of the US, I attended college on the west coast of the US and have lived on the west coast ever since. Therefore, nobody needed to move away from me. And since Californians are (as they say) fruits, nuts, and flakes anyway, I fit right in.

I admit to being completely unfamiliar with the Hillsborough disaster, but even your very brief description of it is upsetting.

Re: Sarah Lacy and the cult of continuous partial attention

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 17:45:11 -0000

But if you're not recording the event in some way - whether it's liveblogging, livetweeting, taking notes on a laptop, or taking notes with pen and paper - how do you retain what happened at the event - or at least the important points?

That having been said, I believe that using liveblogging/livetweeting to plan when to raise your hands en masse, or to cough en masse, or whatever, is in my view another thing entirely.

Re: I hate the term mommybloggers

Ontario Emperor — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 10:37:10 -0000

Technically the term would be daddybloggers rather than fatherbloggers, but the issue still applies.

Re: 5 things I would like from FriendFeed

Ontario Emperor — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 20:57:35 -0000

You can self-group via FriendFeed's search feature, which lets you search and find things with identical titles. This, incidentally, allows you to find the original source of the artifact, which then allows you to follow "Corvida's Law" and comment at the original source before commenting anywhere else.

Re: A new addition to my blog family

Ontario Emperor — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 21:17:37 -0000

Wow! I was just hopeful that FriendFeed would be available on my mobile phone, but now you're talking about having FriendFeed available on a timepiece?

Seriously, I'm sure you'll have a lot of subscribers, due to the interest in the application. Good luck.

Re: Is fragmentation bad?

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:57:33 -0000

It turns out that FriendFeed's new search capability offers the best of both worlds. The discussions can remain separate, but you can use search (e.g. for terms such as more hyped yawn) to find other discussions that were launched by the same artifact.

Re: Is fragmentation bad?

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:58:31 -0000

And yes, I can't spell my own name. Have mercy on me, it's late. :)

Re: FriendFeed from the command line

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:19:23 -0000

I haven't used a Mac since pre Steve 2.0, and I don't regularly access Unix/Linux machines. However, it's good to know that the command line still rules.

Re: Barack Obama is a West Ham Fan

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:34:18 -0000

I'm admittedly not at a point where I'm a die-hard fan of any English team, but I can say that the way to tell a true fan is whether they remain a fan after their team of choice is relegated.

Re: Setanta Sports Monopolizes U.S. TV Coverage of Premier League Title Race

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 20:21:58 -0000

I hate when sports leagues sell their souls for the sake of TV revenue. Baseball has ignored the kids by moving to night games, American football is endangering itself by moving more and more to cable (with NFL Network not even available to significant portions of the cable audience), and soccer is hurting itself in the U.S. by having significant games only available on a premium channel.

Oh well, it could be worse. It could be cricket.

Re: Just the thing for your living room

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 19:46:20 -0000

It's just a snow angel.

Re: If you had to choose between Twitter and your blog what would you choose?

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:28:17 -0000

I can "tweet" a short message to my blog (e.g. via email), but I can't "blog" to Twitter. I'd keep the blog.

Re: Switching to Twitter-- FakeSteveTwit

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 12:39:13 -0000

I ended up at http://www.macworld.com/article/131486/2008/01/liveupdate.html. Is there a Fake MacWorld?

Re: Boy George Jail - They Owned the World and It Ruined Them

Ontario Emperor — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 02:00:00 -0000

We run into problems when we idolize ANYBODY. Charles Barkley had it right.

Re: http://randythomas.org/2009/01/01/one-year-bible-reading-lets-tawk-about-it-ecclesiastes-31-8/

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 22:51:54 -0000

Coincidentally, I cited this verse on Monday, but in a more secular context. In a post "To everything (turn, turn, turn) there are two seasons (turn, turn, turn)" (I got the earworm also), I noted how I ended up repeating myself in my blog posts.

In the process I also cited the related passage Ecclesiastes 1:9 (NIV: "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun"). While we go through the events of life such as those that you mentioned, we also need to realize that there are people before us who have gone through those same events. And, of course, Christ has faced everything that we will face, and has overcome these things.

Re: http://randythomas.org/2009/01/06/yeah-that-thing-called-life/

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 23:34:07 -0000

I can understand your reluctance to share things EVERY day. Sometimes God's message is for you alone, and sometimes our limited human minds require more than a day to process things.

Re: FriendFeed Replaces Google Reader? Maybe

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 19:29:09 -0000

Why I won't switch entirely - at least not yet.

(1) As of now, Google Reader has a better mobile interface than FriendFeed. Mobile Google Reader lets me read, share, and star items. FriendFeed has no official mobile counterpart. This prevents me from liking items on FriendFeed.

(2) The idea of "marking items as read" has not been implemented in FriendFeed, as far as I can tell. I am heavily dependent upon that particular feature.

(3) The last issue is kind of personal. My primary use of Google Reader is to find things to blog about, so you can say it's my counterpart to Blogger. My primary use of FriendFeed is to interact with people, so you can say it's my counterpart to Twitter. At least in my mind, the two applications address two separate needs.

Re: FriendFeed in Plain English: It’s About Community

Ontario Emperor — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 03:52:48 -0000

I haven't read enough of Riley to know whether this was intentionally linkbait, but at least he was honest about the short time that he had used FriendFeed, and it was easy enough to discover how little he had used it.

Re: This Isn’t Feminism, It’s Technology

Ontario Emperor — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 04:53:33 -0000

I'll confess that I haven't read Louis Gray's original list, and therefore can't comment on the virtues (or lack thereof) of his list.

However, it is in some respects hard to construct a list of "elites," male or female, at least in my case. For example, my Google Reader feed includes feeds from Mrs. Loquacious and Connie Reece. How does one objectively know that Mrs. Loquacious should be added to a list of relevant bloggers and Connie Reece shouldn't - or vice versa? Now I'll grant that Mrs. Loquacious doesn't blog a lot about tech topics, but when she does blog, I find her posts are relevant to me.

I suspect that if I were to construct a list of my favorite bloggers, it would include a lot of people who are well below Duncan Riley's category of A list bloggers. But my list meets my personal needs, as does your list and Louis' list.

P.S. For what it's worth, I had never heard of you before Saturday morning, and now I'm subscribing to your feed, and I just joined your group of Twitter followers as I was typing this reply. So the word is getting out... :)

P.P.S. @queenofspain is neat also.

Re: Why I Don’t Want Search On Twitter

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:24:33 -0000

@AndrewBadera mentioned that he's come to rely on @ messages. My primary use of TweetScan is to FIND @ messages.

I access Twitter through a web browser on my phone a majority of the time, and m.twitter.com works well for reading recent tweets, or reading your own archive of tweets. But m.twitter.com falls flat on its face when you want to look at replies - you end up getting redirected to the regular Twitter page for replies, which takes forever to load.

TweetScan pages load much easier, so I use TweetScan to check for replies. This offers the added benefit of also retrieving mentions of my Twitter handle which are not formally replies (e.g. "Did you see that dumb tweet from @oemperor?" would be retrieved by TweetScan).

So, in my case, I usually use search to help maintain my existing relationships.

Re: Share Who’s Fooled You On April Fools’ Day

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:20:54 -0000

Soccerlens is running a whole series of posts today, most of which are documenting sales of leading Manchester United players to competing teams.

And the Google Weblogs (beta) announcement was good.

My problem is that I automatically doubt anything that I read on April 1.

Re: Great Quality Customer Support With Disqus

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 10:58:36 -0000

I'm hearing good things about Disqus, and need to investigate it.

Re: MojiPage Releases Mobile FriendFeed Widget

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:00:07 -0000

I would hope that the FriendFeed API would cover implementation of commenting and liking. Otherwise, the FriendFeed API itself is pretty much pointless.

Re: MojiPage Releases Mobile FriendFeed Widget

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:00:58 -0000

Good news. Looking forward to the weekend. (Well, I was looking forward to it anyway, but now there's another reason.)

Re: FriendFeed And Intention

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 13:00:24 -0000

I made an intentional choice to stream everything I listen to on last.fm, which is when we discovered that FriendFeed does not currently allow you to selectively hide one "blog" but view others. But I found that commenting on songs in my feed is easier than blogging about them. Once FriendFeed can hide selective blogs, the noise problem for some of my readers will go away.

Re: More OpenWorld Blogger Updates

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 20:22:36 -0000

If you use the "openworld07" label on Blogger blogs, Technorati will capture it and use it as a tag. Presumably similar functions can be used on other blog types.

If you use the "#openworld07" hashtag on Twitter (I don't think the # is necessary, but it's nice), then your tweet can be found via Twitter's track feature.

Re: Twitter + OpenWorld and More

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 00:18:27 -0000

It's interesting to note that the Media Bullseye article was based upon information that Doug Haslam requested via Twitter. Shows how the technology can be used.

Personally, I found that the @oow Twitter account was most useful during Larry Ellison's keynote. It was valuable to read all of the different perspectives during his speech.

Re: Orablog Tag or 8 Things

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 11:37:37 -0000

As the person who probably inspired Jake to introduce the "Orablog Tag" variant into the populace, I guess I should put my two cents in - and duck.

I've actually written a post about it (truth to tell, I wrote three posts and a bunch of Twitter tweets, including one about Sigue Sigue Sputnik, and I won't rehash that content here. Follow my link for possible solutions to the issue.

Actually, I will touch on one item - is OraNA an aggregation of posts, or an aggregation of people? In the current business environment, I believe that it is most important that we understand the PEOPLE with whom we associate. Non-technical items such as blogger dinners help pave the way for technical interactions in the future, and can, dare I say it, help cement business and technical relationships.

I for one would err on the side of too much content - items, after all, CAN be filtered or skipped - rather than too little content.

(That having been said, I have not requested, and will not request, that my blog be aggregated by OraNA, since such a small portiono of even the technical content would be of interest to its readers. Methings Howard would go well over the deep end if he were forced to read my views on Ron Paul supporters...)

Re: I Need Your Help

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:16:41 -0000

If you truly want EVERY method to be considered, how about the good ol' meme?

The *opt-in* meme.

I'm serious.

If you remove the viral nature of a meme, and instead let people view it and choose whether they want to participate, a meme can be a valuable method for networking and sharing.

Something to think about, at least.

Re: The Long Tail of Meetings

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 15:07:28 -0000

It goes back to what APC mentioned; we need to be present for a part of the meeting, but then tune the rest of the meeting out. The only solution to these mass meetings would be, ironically, MORE meetings. It's better to get all the parties together, hold a single meeting, and tune out on laptops and smartphones on occasion so that you can do some real work (or, alternatively, tweet).

Re: Perspective, FriendFried and the Scoble Effect

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:56:59 -0000

We'll have to see what happens as FriendFeed grows. There are already complaints from people that were under the mistaken impression that their FriendFeed comments were not publicly available.

The most intriguing part of FriendFeed for me is the ability to follow someone's thought processes. I stumble upon a video, favorite it on YouTube, tweet about it, then blog about it. Then people can comment on how stupid a song "Send Me An Angel" truly is. :)

Which reminds me; I don't think my new StumbleUpon account is on FriendFeed; gotta add it.

Re: Do You Know Robert?

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:21:20 -0000

Jake,

Obviously you missed one of Scoble's more recent posts, "Switching to Gmail." :)

I have never met Scoble personally, but I've had some (positive) exchanges with him on his blog and on Twitter.

One thing that you can say for him, and for many other people interested in social media, is that they have a willingness to explore. Many of these explorers try out Gmail, or FriendFeed, or Google Reader, or whatever, just to see how they work. What's more, many of them set up their own admittedly silly services, such as Club140 and Atlocals, because they can.

In one sense it's silly, but on the other hand it gives people ideas that can be applied to sites such as Oracle Mix.

Re: FriendFeed is for Lurkers too

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:34:37 -0000

I too have been puzzled by Google's linkage of Google Talk with Google Reader Shared Feeds, especially since I never use Google Talk for its intended purpose.

One major benefit of the search function is its ability to find related conversations. Because FriendFeed doesn't necessarily link conversations (the conversation for your post is separate from the conversation linked to someone's Google Reader share of your blog post), search offers a way to find other conversations about the same topic.

Re: Robert Scoble: Terminator or Cylon?

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 18:48:12 -0000

Caught the general story on Valleywag, then got here via Scoble's FriendFeed. Personally, I'm only worried if we suddenly see the following post on Scobleizer:

"I've joined the new Web 2.0 service EarthDomination. Be assimilated with me."

Oh well, it could be worse. The planet could be taken over by puppets. That's a fate too cruel for humankind.

Re: Twitter, Hashtags and the 1 Letter Taxonomy

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 16:01:06 -0000

Very interesting ideas. My one concern is the #$ proposal, which may be offensive to Europeans and others who use a symbol other than $ for their currency. I don't have a real good alternative, however, and I'm using #$ anyway unless a better solution is found.

Re: London Earthquake and Twitter

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:56:35 -0000

I first learned of the earthquake via tweets from @RodrigoMx, who was monitoring English coverage, and lack thereof, of the quake itself. Ironically, BBC was late in the game regarding its coverage, but when my local news radio station in the U.S. started broadcasting the story, they named the BBCas their source. Perhaps my local news radio station should monitor Twitter instead.

P.S. @RodrigoMx is currently reporting that William F. Buckley Jr. has died.

Re: RAC SIG Events at OOW

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 16:23:57 -0000

Since some sessions are probably filled to capacity, I'm working under the assumption that they'll not only check to make sure that you have a badge, but to make sure that you have the RIGHT badge (i.e. one that is registered for the session in question).

Re: Cool thing happened on Twitter today…

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:43:51 -0000

You should add this as a use case in the unofficial Twitter wiki use case page http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Use+Cases

Re: Groundhog Day 2009: Pensacola Max Forecasts an Early Spring

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:10:36 -0000

Thank you for sharing the forecasting abilities of this talented Rottweiler. If his pee froze before hitting the ground, I would assume a long winter, shadow or no.

Re: Geek Speak…I w00t

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:11:42 -0000

I look forward to this, once Jake figures out a new time for the presentation.

Re: My CNN appearance and post-show analysis (videos included)

Ontario Emperor — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 20:49:03 -0000

Your piece, as well as a New York Times piece on Huckabee (among others), got me thinking - are we way off on focusing on the candidates' views on Iraq and the like, when people are really concerned about their relatives in prison, or the possibility that a divorce will reduce their income?

Re: The Onion: Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 08 Election

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:35:10 -0000

I didn't even know that the Onion did videos. Good stuff.

Re: Smears Working? 13 Percent Of Voters Believe Obama Is A Muslim (Updated)

Ontario Emperor — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 01:54:19 -0000

However, it should be recognized that Obama (or, for that matter, Clinton) is not putting his denomination front and center in his communications.

Compare this with Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Jimmy Carter, John F. Kennedy, and Al Smith. In this five cases, the candidates' religious beliefs were either emphasized by the campaign itself and/or were well publicized by the media.

Obama falls into the same category as Gerald Ford on the topic of religion - it's important to him, but he doesn't spent a lot of time talking about it.

With reason. Just as there is a segment of the population for whom Islam is inherently evil, there is a segment of the population for whom religion itself is inherently evil. I just blogged about, among other things, the attitude of a writer at Internet Evolution:

"Historically, people generally tend to become less religious when they are more educated and wealthy, and access to the Internet provides many with a gateway to escape physical, mental, or geographical boundaries. It remains to be seen whether this tendency will continue as technical globalization enriches regions of the world that were formerly impoverished."

When you have people with these kind of beliefs, it's no wonder that Obama isn't pushing the United Church of Christ every chance he gets, or that Clinton isn't waving the United Methodist cross and flame at every rally. Better to have people think you're a Muslim and be wrong, than to have them think you're a Christian and be right.

Re: Bill Clinton Is Incredible, Now Lying About Lies

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:11:53 -0000

If Hillary Clinton's forgetting stuff at 11:00 at night, what's she going to be like at 3 am?

Sorry, couldn't resist. But you almost have to wonder if Bill wants Hillary to lose, the way he keeps on putting his foot in his mouth.

Re: Bill O’Reilly Has Always Been A Violent, Crazy Bastard

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:52:15 -0000

The video is no longer available.

Re: “Social Networking Wars” An Hilarious Video From Current

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:36:59 -0000

You know what's sad? When he started talking about going to the real world...I thought that he was saying that he was going to sign into LinkedIn.

Re: Miley and Hannah: A Childless Adult’s Review

Ontario Emperor — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 17:43:45 -0000

You noted that Disney may have been responsible for the G-rated feel for this show (and it could also be a response to Jamie Lynn, not just her sister), but there's also the possibility that dad Billy Ray may have something to do with it. I've never really probed into Billy Ray Cyrus' life before, but it's something to think about.

Re: My Take on the FLDS Situation

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:11:43 -0000

I appreciate the information that you've provided in FriendFeed regarding the FLDS.

Re: In Defense of Miley

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 20:06:27 -0000

I'm not quite so sure that Britney is an anomaly as is stated in item 3. When you look at Lindsay Lohan, and link this up with the slightly older Paris Hilton and the like, there's a perception (rightly or wrongly) that fame goes to almost every teenage starlet's head.

I'm not sure what I would have done at age 17 if huge fame had suddenly been thrust in my lap. (Frankly, I'm not sure what I would do at age 46 were it to happen tomorrow.) So while I agree that this is almost a non-story, I can't definitely say that Miley will survive the fame trip at the end of the day.

Re: Mogoloid-A-Palooza, A Devo Themed Extravaganza

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:42:27 -0000

Didn't know that Devo cover bands even existed, but you'd have to figure that the Church of the Sub-Genius would somehow be involved.

Re: Dueling Billboards, Responding to the God Billboards

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 12:45:43 -0000

Got here from Friendfeed.

It would be highly ironic if DiGiorgo truly found a sign that stated "My way is the highway," since...well, let's just say it would be truly ironic and leave it at that. :)

Re: War of the Worlds from a Martian Perspective

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 27 May 2008 17:59:01 -0000

Yeah, but who is the Martian with the deep Orson Welles voice?

Re: The FriendFeed Orgasm And Why It Is Off The Mark

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:10:05 -0000

Thomas Hawk already addressed the hide capability, so I'll address conversation fragmentation. Even if FriendFeed disappeared tomorrow, conversation fragmentation would still exist. I can read something that Louis Gray wrote, write my own post about it, and have the conversation at my post. Or, as Sean notes, the conversation may take place at Digg or Slashdot or whatever. And FriendFeed actually helps you pull the comments together, to a point - I can use comments to redirect conversations to other places. (Robert Scoble will argue, however, that FriendFeed HAS to solve the redundancy issue.)

For me, FriendFeed's benefits vastly outweigh its disadvantages.

Re: Debating Disqus - Seems Stupid

Ontario Emperor — Sun, 11 May 2008 01:41:27 -0000

In my case, Disqus seemed smart. I'm a Blogger user, and my blog is hosted on Google's servers, so the fact that Disqus is also hosted is not a big concern to me.

What IS a concern is that Disqus content is not visible on my current device - a first generation Motorola Q with Windows Mobile 5 and Internet Explorer 4. (And yes, they're working on mobile access.)

Other than that, I love the application, and their customer service.

But I am fascinated by the response to your post; from the reaction, it almost looks like you ran over someone's grandmother! If you question FriendFeed now, you may be sent to a re-education camp... :)

Re: Does FriendFeed Politics = Leftist Politics?

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:16:04 -0000

Here's part of a comment I just posted in a Jeremiah Owyang thread: "[W]e probably need to take a step back and wonder if our data is skewed. I spend very little time on the "Everyone" tab of FriendFeed, or the everyone stream in Twitter; for much of the social media community, U.S.-centric political definitions are irrelevant."

Re: Idea: LinkedIn Recommendations for You As a Blogger

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:05:51 -0000

I've considered this, not for my general purpose blog, but for my collection of specialized blogs, but haven't done it yet.

Ironically, two of the recommendations for my day job are from people who know me from my general purpose blog, so perhaps I should reconsider.

Re: How To Never Run Out of Content For Your Blog Again

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 01:42:41 -0000

A related tip is to use scheduled posts. In my view, this goes one step beyond draft posts because you can pre-plan when items will appear. Ever since Blogger supported post scheduling, I've been using it often.

To find out more about my views about scheduled posts, check my blog...on January 25 at 7:00 am Pacific time.

I also have views on idea files...which I'll share on January 26 at 7:00.

Needless to say, I also see the benefits of batch writing. More on that on January 27 at 7:00.

One thing that I didn't mention in my forthcoming blog posts is that at one point, I was scheduling posts at 6:00 am every morning for my local-interest blog. That was a little too ambitious, though, and I eventually ran out of content for that series of posts. So it is possible to overdo things...

Re: A Marketing Lesson In a Gift I Received

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:11:17 -0000

Reciprocity is, for some of us (at least some of the time), a natural reponse when someone does something nice for us...which is why I'm working on a post about Wandering WiFi after a Wandering WiFi representative left a helpful content on a very small blog of mine.

I just have to remember to reciprocate more often.

Re: Oracle OpenWorld 2007 - Social Networking, Twittering, Flickring and Unconferencing

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 11:18:13 -0000

Thank you for this comprehensive post. I just got a Twitter account, and had discovered the "oow" feed by accident. Glad to find these other feeds.

Re: The Easy Way to Share Oracle OpenWorld Photos

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 12:21:24 -0000

Excellent news, especially the auto-tagging feature. My current photo solution is to e-mail the photos to my Blogger blog, but I haven't figured out a way to tag them via e-mail. (Therefore, they won't be tagged until several hours later, or whenever I get to a full-functioned computer.)

I'm adding future09ideas@photos.flickr.com to my Contacts list right now.

Thanks again.

Re: Different Ways to Follow Oracle OpenWorld 2007

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 20:05:16 -0000

In the unofficial stuff, there's also Technorati's capture of "openworld07" tag use.

http://www.technorati.com/tag/openworld07

Re: So Far at Oracle OpenWorld

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:26:49 -0000

Per Eddie's suggestion in Oracle OpenWorld Connect, I'd included a link to the "technology" feed of my blog, mrontemp.

Re: Guess How Many Database Editions Oracle Has

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:49:14 -0000

Our company has deployed some of our smaller systems on Oracle Database Standard Edition One since Oracle Database 10g came out (I believe that's when Standard Edition One was introduced). Our initial 8i implementations were on Enterprise Edition with Partitioning, but that's an expensive proposition (especially since our market is price competitive), so we began exploring other options. For some small customers, Standard Edition One works just fine.

Re: I am a Spammer and so Are You if You Played The Tag Game

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 08:28:25 -0000

(I apologize if this shows up twice; I encountered a server error when posting it the first time.) For the record, I think that Jake injected this into the Oracle world after seeing the "8 things" post on my blog, so I guess I'm partly to blame for Rogers' frustration. Obviously, my participation indicates that I'm not bugged by the practice, although I admit that the idea of tagging eight people with the meme was somewhat daunting. (For the record, two of my eight people participated, and the other six have not threatened to kill me. Yet.) I certainly respect those who came after Jake and broke the mold by only tagging a few people, or perhaps not tagging anybody.

Frankly, as I noted in my "solution" post on the topic (see link to this comment), I don't see why such posts can't be skipped. As Oracle the company expands its reach into more and more areas (I'm surprised they didn't buy Countrywide), there's going to be a bunch of ORACLE content that many of us are going to choose to ignore. Do we end up tagging someone as a spammer because we're interested in Oracle Database and they're talking about Oracle Business Intelligence? (M.B., if you ever see this comment, don't take it personally.)

Re: Big Database Acquisitions Today

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 11:18:38 -0000

Definitely a big day, with big ramifications, both techincal and business. Frankly, I hadn't heard anything about talks between Sun and MySQL - perhaps I missed the signs. Oracle - BEA, of course, has been discussed for some time. Oracle positions itself as a company that is able to integrate acquisitions quickly, and though I don't have firsthand knowledge of how effective they REALLY are at this, it certainly makes for a compelling story.

Re: Do You Understand This Oracle Press Release? WSJ Does Not

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:57:56 -0000

Perhaps it's an "emperor with no clothes" issue, where a journalist may be scared to admit that he/she has no idea what is being discussed, and therefore runs the press release in its entirety.

Seems like a scattershot approach, though - especially for a product that claims that it's going to simplify things.

Re: A Quick Update

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 16 May 2008 01:45:57 -0000

We can always follow you on Twitter...unless Twitter is down. :) Hope everything is working out well in the new position.

Re: The Naked Truth of Mogens

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:16:33 -0000

I really really hope this doesn't start a trend.

Re: Oracle Blogger Meetup and Oracle Ace Dinner Photos

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:38:17 -0000

Annotated. Thanks again for arranging a great evening at the Thirsty Bear.

Re: On conversations everywhere

Ontario Emperor — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 15:15:38 -0000

Terry Heaton has an excellent point. (Now I'm going to join the FriendFeed conversation about this...)

Re: 2007/11/15/online-video-a-tail-of-tulips/

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:14:41 -0000

It is very, very dangerous to mention 2.0 technologies and tulips in the same article. It may lead to some unintended associations (remember Tulipmania?).

Re: 2008/04/11/screw-you-coefficient/

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:22:10 -0000

Good formula, which can also be extrapolated to other areas - for example, bands that "sell out" and no longer play in the intimate clubs where they used to perform, and no longer play the rough songs that they used to place.

It's important to remember, however, that users aren't the only constituency to which companies must answer. In fact, companies take more time to respond to "the funders" (either stockholders or venture capitalists). Using Starbucks as an example, I previously argued that Starbucks should differentiate themselves from McDonalds and serve their core constituency. I subsequently reconsidered, noting that Starbucks' stockholders expect to see continued growth, and therefore WANT Starbucks to increase sales by attracting the McDonalds PlayPlace crowd.

The same thing applies to Flickr video. If Flickr is still a very good picture site a few years from now, "the funders" will consider it a failure, because "the funders" demand ever-expanding growth.

Re: 2008/04/18/twitter-get-out-of-jail/

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:17:01 -0000

The plight of the Egyptians in Egypt is sad to hear, but understandable. As Americans, we get worked up about an American in prison, but once the American is released we walk away from the story. Human nature, I guess.

Re: 2008/05/13/lastfm-launches-playground-which-is-a-lot-like-digg-labs/

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:59:28 -0000

I've started a thread at last.fm for people to share what they'd like to see in the Playground.

http://www.last.fm/group/Playground/forum/93500...

Re: 2008/05/14/twitter-is-down-i-blame-the-democrats/

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 14 May 2008 20:09:59 -0000

It's probably space aliens. There's probably a highly advanced race that has mastered the art of communicating in 140 byte messages, and Twitter threatens its dominance of the galaxy. Twitter's new hires are actually alien plants sent to sabotage the operation.

Looking over what I just wrote, I think it's the most reasonable explanation that I've ever heard.

Re: Death to Attachments

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 14:08:18 -0000

Let me take it one step further. I read much of my email (both business and personal) on my mobile phone. When I can, I indicate that I prefer to receive my mail in text format for that very reason.

As a result, guess what happens to email from those entities that send email in a nice pretty format that my mobile phone can't read? That's right, I never see your pretty message, or I may see it a day later, or a week later.

I can, however, click on a link - provided that it's a link that my mobile phone can understand.

Re: Death to Attachments

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 14:08:18 -0000

Re: Your Digital Friends: Less is More

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 19:48:58 -0000

Re ClustrMap - part of this has to do with population. Most of the western states are very sparsely populated relative to the eastern states. I don't know if population accounts for everything, however.

Re: Your Digital Friends: Less is More

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 19:48:58 -0000

Re: Stupid Website Driving Customers Away

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:28:52 -0000

It gets worse.

Figuring that Sterling Vineyards might also want to enforce Islamic law while they're at it, I entered a 1961 birth date with a country name of "Saudi Arabia."

This act sent me to a website other than that for Sterling Vineyards, probably because my ISP did not match the country that I reported.

Re: Stupid Website Driving Customers Away

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:28:52 -0000

Re: Social in Real Space vs Social Networking

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 11:25:40 -0000

I like the way that Oracle approached this. In advance of Oracle OpenWorld, they opened up Oracle OpenWorld Connect, which among other things allowed you to find attendees with interests similar to yours. This allows you to do some advance planning, request meetings, etc.

Regarding the gathering itself, I'm going to throw out something that is extremely old-tech, but extremely helpful - name badges. I am a name badge geek - one time I was the only person who was still wearing my name badge at the end of a particular social event. Where appropriate, readable name badges in which both the name and the affiliation are prominently listed are essential to allowing people to connect easily.

Re: Social in Real Space vs Social Networking

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 11:29:12 -0000

Irony of ironies. Less than one minute after I finished writing the comment above, I received an email from Oracle OpenWorld Connect. Even though OpenWorld ended two months ago, the Oracle OpenWorld Connect site is STILL active, and they're STILL looking for people who may interest me. To me, that's impressive.

Re: Tagging And Metadata and Why Bother

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 22:57:22 -0000

I definitely agree that tags are helpful as more and more content pours out into the world. I have two tagging strategies: the labeling strategy that I use on Blogger, and the hashtagging strategy that I use on Twitter.

When I started my current blog in February 2007, I knew that labeling of posts would be essential. This blog was in essence a combination of several previous blogs, including a technology blog and a religious blog, and I knew that I would have some readers who were interested in one topic but very uninterested in the other topics. Therefore I set up Blogger labels (business, politics, etc.) and promoted the most popular ones so that people could choose their desired content. However, it doesn't appear that many people availed themselves of the labeled segments. (By the way, what I didn't anticipate is that many of my blog posts would cross multiple categories.)

I use a different, much more informal strategy when hashtagging my Twitter tweets. In my view, Twitter is best suited to cover emergencies and scheduled events. If I think of it, I'll apply a hashtag such as #caprimary to my tweets as appropriate. I've also tried some of the metahashtags proposed by Stowe Boyd and others, but as of now they haven't really caught on beyond a select few.

Re: Twitter Packs Goes off the Rails Quick

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:51:49 -0000

Chris, I want to thank you for replying to my question regarding your derivation of the term "pack." In my geekier days, I used twenty-sided dice, rather than cards, to play my games, so I wasn't aware of the term.

I think that some of the fear that arose from this wiki was the fact that we were perceived to have lost control about what people said about us. Theoretically, I could go into the wiki and put Chris into the "black lesbian Dodgers fan" pack, and no one could prevent me from doing so.

I took a step back and thought about this more generally, and asked myself, "What level of control is appropriate for a given information source?" And since you're obviously not going to please everybody, should you err on the side of openness, or on the side of caution?

After thinking about it, I concluded that we'd be better off erring on the side of openness. Yes, someone could label me as a black lesbian Yankees fan, and I'd have to remove it. But that's better than having a moderated, controlled group calling me a black lesbian Yankees fan, in which I wouldn't have the ability to correct the record.

One note: if you're wondering who edited what, you can review the information at http://twitterpacks.pbwiki.com/changes.php. I couldn't find a link to this page on the wiki itself, but it does exist (a similar page exists for the Twitter fans wiki, which is how I knew to look for it).

Re: Yahoo Should Buy Twitter- Yes or No

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 14:49:56 -0000

From Yahoo's perspective, yes. From Twitter's perspective, no.

Yahoo could use the good PR, and the losses at Twitter wouldn't put that big a dent in Yahoo's budget.

However, a Yahoo acquisition of Twitter sounds to me like the Sears acquisition of K-Mart. Putting two troubled companies together does not necessarily result in a strong combination.

Who are the other candidates to purchase Twitter?

Unlike Jennifer Leggio (#1), I wouldn't mind a Google acquisition. Then again, I'm a fairly happy Blogspot user.

If Microsoft were to acquire Twitter, I fear they'd incorporate it into IE or Vista and neglect other browsers and OSes.

My big fear, however, is that a telco will acquire Twitter and make it exclusive to their users, to the exclusion of others.

Re: BlackBerry Rules the Smartphone Roost

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 15:13:50 -0000

I'm using a first generation Motorola Q, which syncs with my corporate email Exchange Server, gives me access to my personal email accounts, and has a somewhat decent web browser that accesses Google Reader, Twitter, and a few other applications here and there. Other than some of the browser limitations, the biggest issue that I've encountered is its lack of support for Google Maps' ability to plot your location based on cell phone towers. Even with that, however, the ability to access email at any time, at any place (well, within North America - this is the first generation Motorola Q), has certainly affected the way in which I work. Oftentimes I am not tethered to a desktop or laptop computer, which is nice.

Re: Ads or No

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:25:02 -0000

I have no objection to ads, and in fact have ads on a new specialty blog (while choosing NOT to have them on my main blog). My major concern with ads, paid or not (re comment 3), is whether they increase the time required to load the page. If page loading does not deteriorate, and if the ads don't dominate the page, then go for it.

Re: New Site Design Launched

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 00:05:32 -0000

Looks clean, and a good story about how you hooked up with the designers.

Re: Free eBook Manifesto - Trust Economies

Ontario Emperor — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 03:05:08 -0000

Thanks for providing the paper, and thanks for soliciting feedback. Personally, I think that the paper was lacking in two areas:

1. The paper talks about a "Return on Influence," but doesn't really provide evidence of any such return. Page 3 states that "it's possible that building a stronger relationship will drive more recurring sales and referrals and further adoption." Page 9 includes the phrase "when you reap the rewards." I really want to believe you, but the paper doesn't give me any evidence that there is such a return. I appreciate that a multi-year quantative study would be prohibitively expensive, but at least some anecdotal evidence would be good - i.e. someone who states, "Even when the guy from company A lost the sale, he continued to check in on me, not in a pushy way, AND I REMEMBERED HIM WHEN THE CONTRACT WAS REBID TWO YEARS LATER." Without such anecdotal evidence, the claim that true engagement results in financial returns sounds like wishful thinking. (Perhaps faking friendship pays off in the long run; it's sad to think so, but it might.)

2. Are the behaviors promoted in the paper designed to promote the company, or promote the individual? The behaviors that are discussed are individual behaviors, and if they're only promoted on an individual basis, then the company may not benefit. Let's restate my example above: "Even when the guy from company A lost the sale, he continued to check in on me, not in a pushy way, and I remembered him when the contract was rebid two years later. HOWEVER, HE WAS NO LONGER AT COMPANY A, AND THE NEW GUY WHO WAS AT COMPANY A WAS A REAL JERK." Perhaps this is outside the scope of this particular paper, but what about the challenge of changing the behavior of an entire organization so that they work on nurturing relationships with their customers and potential customers? Again, anecdotal examples would work wonders."

I hope you don't mind my quibbles, but I just feel that the paper would have more influence if some of these things were tidied up. I noticed that the paper that I read has a "born on date" of March 5 (hope you don't get sued by a beverage company), so perhaps these issues could be addressed in a future revision.

Again, thanks for the opportunity to comment.

Re: Twitter as Presence

Ontario Emperor — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 20:44:59 -0000

Don Lafferty: sometimes I choose to tweet, sometimes I choose not to tweet. I guess Twitter can be your personal spin doctor.

Chris: two major uses of Twitter are (1) to find out about breaking news (for example, I learned of Charlton Heston's death on Twitter) and (2) for technical support.

Also, as I noted earlier (via Twitter, of course), if you really want to detect someone's presence, their FriendFeed account (or other lifestream aggregator) might be a better tool. Sometimes I'm tweeting, sometimes I'm publishing in other ways.

Re: Starting Points for Online Presence

Ontario Emperor — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 01:30:19 -0000

I'd add an aggregator such as FriendFeed, which can serve as the one-stop shop (or perhaps the front end) for someone's online presence. (Don't forget that FriendFeed's "blog" feature can be used to capture any RSS feed.)

Re: Spend a Day Reading and Commenting

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:14:54 -0000

Well, I'm halfway through my "Read and Comment Day," and things are going well. I usually comment on a couple of things here and there, but today I'm making a concerted effort to focus on commenting, both on items I encounter in my Google Reader feed and in items that I find via Disqus.

Another way that FriendFeed users in particular can make sure they're interacting with others in FriendFeed is to attempt to keep their personal weekly FriendFeed "comments" and "likes" above a particular level. I'm trying to keep mine above 100/week, but obviously any goal that allows you to interact with the community more is beneficial. The one drawback, of course, is that a comment that goes to FriendFeed is NOT going to the original blog or artifact, so you may or may not want to participate in this way.

Re: What Were Your First Steps

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:13:45 -0000

Hmm, where did I start? It's all a matter of how you define "social media," as Colin and Nolan previously noted. Do I begin with my first blog, which I started in October 2003? Do I begin with Yahoo Groups/eGroups and the "modern" Usenet, which I started to use in 1998? Do I begin with the BBSes that I accessed with a 2400 bps modem back in 1991? Or do I go back to my college days, when our DEC PDP-11/70 at Reed could connect with other computers at Berkeley, Duke, and similar locations?

In terms of someone that I admired and followed and that changed my life most dramatically, I would have to nominate a BBS sysop named Starfish that I encountered in the early 1990s. I first found her on one board, then eventually joined her WWIV-based board. That's when I first learned that social media would be social. A lot of the BBS'ers would gather and play volleyball, drink cold brown thingies, or do whatever, with a fun time had by all. Of course, in the case of the BBS crowd, we all lived in the same area, so it was easy for us to, using a 21st century term, "meetup." Because our virtual connections are more likely to span geographical boundaries today (long distance phone charges are less of a concern), these opportunities are fewer and farther between. But there are still the occasional events (in my case, Oracle OpenWorld) where I can get together with others.

That's enough for now...

Re: Twitter Bashing- A Popular Sport Lately

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 21 May 2008 20:02:41 -0000

My participation in today's Twit-Out has clearly shown me that FriendFeed and Twitter are different beasts. In Twitter, you can ask all of your followers a question at once, or you can very easily direct a comment to a single person. FriendFeed is more akin to islands of conversation.

Re: Bowing to Our Twitter Robot Overlords

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:28:42 -0000

I follow @br3ndabot, just for the amusement factor.

I also follow @esvdaily (Bible verses), but now that I follow hundreds of people I never see its tweets.

Re: Brevity

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:04:45 -0000

Context?

Re: Expand Your Blog Reading

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:08:47 -0000

One thing that I do in Google Reader is to not only classify my feeds into categories, but to put some of the feeds into a second category called "PRIORITY-Low." When time is short, I mark all of the PRIORITY-Low items as read; when I have more time, I'll go through them.

Groupthink can certainly be a danger if you only read feeds from a particular category, especially when you consider that one person may attempt to influence multiple tech bloggers with a hot tip, therefore resulting in several stories that only come from one source.

Re: Google Launches AdSense for Feeds- Breaks My Subscriber Count

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:11:56 -0000

Didn't FeedBurner just make a change that reduced feed amounts? I saw the announcement in passing, but ignored it because I don't use FeedBurner.

Re: Advice for People Attending Conferences

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:22:32 -0000

Timely post, Chris, inasmuch as Oracle OpenWorld 2008 is only three days away.

Re: LinkedIn Throws a Little Upcoming Into the Site

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 18:56:49 -0000

This will be nice, since most everything that I put into Upcoming is business-related anyway.

However, I'd like for LinkedIn to fix their existing applications. They still don't load for me at times.

Re: Cultivating a Writing Habit

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 01:31:55 -0000

I especially liked your part 2. I'll often conceive an idea in the shower or while driving or whatever. And when you get an idea, jot it down (Dave Winer uses Twitter for this; private or semi-private FriendFeed rooms can work just as well).

One thing that you implied, but didn't really state explicitly, was to write in a lot of different media. Books, tweets, posts, thank-you notes, blog comments, what have you.

Re: Creators Take Note

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 01:21:26 -0000

I've never bought anything because of YouTube, but then again I'm not really a TV or movie person. I have, however, bought two CDs as a result of hearing the songs on last.fm. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, RIAA.

(The CDs, for the...um...record, were Sarah McLachlan's "Bloom" and Midnight Juggernauts' "Dystopia.")

Re: The Rise of Microfame

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:39:55 -0000

While I'm with Rita (and Steven Hodson) in noting that microfame has always existed, I'm also in agreement with Sheldon Steiger (and you) in noting that respect is more important than fame. Or, to put it another way, it's better to have microrespect than it is to have microinfamy.

Re: Video: not easy or cheap?

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 01:48:42 -0000

I've been watching all the tweets about kyte.tv, videos, five minute videos, shorter videos, longer videos, etc. ad nauseum, but this is the first time that I've actually watched any kyte.tv video. A few comments:

(1) Videotaping and audio recording pre-dates rap concerts, and gets into all sorts of copyright issues that date well before Metallica. Ignoring the fact that the media companies may not treat the artists fairly, does such taping infringe on the artist's rights?

(2) While the freeway looked safe, and I've pulled similar things myself, I wonder what will happen as California laws change. Would this be considered unauthorized use of a cell phone while driving? And the documentation is right there on kyte.tv for the cops to see.

(3) We're already seeing "citizen journalism" (or whatever you want to call it) affecting the mass media, although I'm not sure that they're talented enough to use it properly. However, as a matter of principle (I can't stand Harvey Levin) I haven't tuned into the new TMZ TV show, so I don't know how effective the practice is.

(4) Your major point is valid - if the content is important, it doesn't matter if the camera is only $15. I'm heading to Oracle OpenWorld in a couple of weeks, and if Larry Ellison (or, better yet, someone from BEA) should happen to drop by the bloggers' dinner, you can bet that a dozen people will whip their cheap cell phone cameras out and videotape every utterance.

Re: Micromedia Flash Mob Thursday

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:45:34 -0000

If I may offer a humble suggestion -

This week is a very difficult week to hold an event that requires worldwide time synchronization. Why? Because the United States is STILL on Daylight Saving Time, while most if not all of Europe has moved to Standard Time. This means that some of the European participants, used to the usual 8/9 hour difference, may chime in at the wrong time (I'm not sure whether they'd jump in an hour early or an hour late; I'm not good on such conversions.)

If it's not too late, you might want to note that the event will take place at 2230 GMT, just so there's no confusion.

Re: Dear Jeff Bezos (one-week Kindle review)

Ontario Emperor — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 18:46:45 -0000

Perhaps our impressions of usability will improve after Amazon cuts the price of the device, which they presumably will after the beginning of the year. Heck, if its primary purpose is to point to Amazon, perhaps Amazon should give it away...

Re: Is MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server dead?

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 14:03:04 -0000

All of the database vendors that you mentioned offer either low cost or free versions of their databases. I'm sure that many startups will prefer to manage their own data, rather than entrust it to a so-called "clueless bureaucracy" like Amazon.

Re: New Google Reader “friends” feature sucks…

Ontario Emperor — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 01:13:22 -0000

Actually, it's an inherent issue in Google Reader itself that doesn't necessarily have to do with sharing.

Let's say that I have set my Google Reader to find anything that I post to my blog, anything that includes my name, and anything that mentions Oracle. If I write an Oracle post on my blog, that post shows up three times in Google Reader - and that's even before I'm reading shared posts from others.

I'm not quite sure about the most elegant solution to this problem, unless you set some type of order rules for flagging items (e.g. if the item fits in category 1, don't put a duplicate in category 2). But I'm not even sure that would work.

Re: Facebook disabled my account

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 12:08:48 -0000

Corporations need to realize that negative comments about them are now easily retrievable by consumers and others, including competitors. Using Facebook as an example, the Jon Swift story helped to ensure that I will never join Facebook ("Ontario Emperor" is not my birth name, so Facebook obviously doesn't want me). While there's obviously conversation regarding whether your actions were right or not, Facebook obviously didn't need this type of publicity.

Re: What I was using to hit Facebook — unreleased Plaxo Pulse

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 15:01:01 -0000

Not related to Facebook, but to Plaxo. I was surprised a couple of weeks ago to see Plaxo reminding me of the birthday of a former co-worker. This person was not, and probably never will be, a Plaxo user, but her birthday was harvested when I ran Plaxo against my Outlook contacts.

This got me to wondering what Plaxo would do with all of the information it harvests.

I haven't investigated Plaxo much, but does it let you get your information out of Plaxo? And what else does Plaxo do with the information?

These information ownership issues are getting VERY interesting.

Re: Off to CES…

Ontario Emperor — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 02:43:02 -0000

Loved the PETA shirt that you found on your journey.

Re: Gizmodo on integrity…

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 17:12:04 -0000

You alluded to the issue of a news reporter making the news, which was clearly the case here. (I see a similar issue with InfoWorld's "Save XP" campaign.)

I haven't really considered the Hunter S. Thompson example, where Thompson clearly insinuated himself into the stories. However, that was Thompson's reason for being; he didn't turn around the next day and produce carefully crafted analyses.

And I already tweeted you about the Nokia thingie.

Re: Why we’re going to FastCompany.tv

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 14:21:42 -0000

Robert,

Good luck in your venture.

One minor correction - you don't NEED Steve Jobs to invite you to the keynote. If you haven't heard, it's possible to hack the MacWorld site to get a VIP pass for free. Not to discount connections, but there are other ways to get things (if you ignore the question of legality). Not sure whether this fits into the category of a stunt Woz would pull... :)

Re: Microsoft PR guy trash talks Apple

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 02:01:07 -0000

Question - back in 2005, you met with some "PR and marketing folks" at Target and told them about the influence of bloggers. What do you think happened? Why do you think the message never reached the person who originally responded to Amy Jussel?

Re: What made me cry: Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:05:31 -0000

Perhaps I'm parochial, but what excites me about Google Maps and Google Earth is the personal connection that I have, or want to have, with the places I'm viewing. When I look at a Google Earth view of Mikkeli, Finland, I get excited because our Finnish exchange student is studying there. When I look at a Google Earth view of Itajai, Brazil, I get excited because I spent a wonderful weekend in a nature preserve in the area several years ago.

When TechCrunch spilled the beans on WorldWide Telescope on February 18, my first thought was a "so what"? Again, this view is probably parochial, but I probably won't be leaving this galaxy in my lifetime, so I don't see how I can form a personal connection with a zoomed view of another galaxy.

Then again, I have not seen WorldWide Telescope yet. It may be possible that when I see it, I (like others that you have mentioned) will be transported to another dimension, musing on the vastness of the universe and (if I may say this) on the truly awesome nature of God's creation.

We'll see.

Re: The Joy of Tech is hillarious…

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 01:35:40 -0000

I laughed, I..."never mind"!

Re: UnFriendFeed: TechMeme

Ontario Emperor — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 03:42:59 -0000

I have no problem with someone trying out FriendFeed (including all the features, such as comment/like) for a while (more than a day) and then saying that it's not the be-all and end-all of social networking.

As you know, Duncan Riley delivered his judgement after one day's worth of trying the service out. And some (such as Louis Gray) argue that he didn't try it out - as of today, he's only commented on one item and hasn't liked anything. Perhaps FriendFeed needs to introduce a "hate" feature... :)

I'm hoping that Riley truly tries it out, then revisits his comments after a week or two. If, after that time, he still feels that FriendFeed isn't all that great, I could respect that.

Re: FriendFeed searches for an API

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:53:40 -0000

Search also provides a solution to the issue of all of the different discussions that might be launched from a single artifact. Let's say that someone writes a blog post - this launches a discussion. Someone else shares is in a Google Reader feed - this launches a separate discussion. Someone else tags it in del.icio.us, etc. If you search on the title of the blog post, you can find all of the different FriendFeed discussions that have been started because of that original artifact.

Re: Johnson and Johnson “breaks into jail” with BabyCamp

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:09:18 -0000

Perhaps Lori shouldn't have admitted that they went over by 6 - now the bloggers who can't attend will start asking, "Why didn't you go over by 7 and let me in?" Still, it was a nice message.

Alternatives to "she's my wife":
- "She lets me share her life."
- "She tolerates me."
- "She gives me room and board privileges."
Or,
- "I'm her husband."

Re: The TechMeme killer or the Google Reader killer?

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 18:36:05 -0000

My primary access is via a mobile phone web browser, and on that platform my two primary bookmarks are for my Google Reader feeds, and an ego search via TweetScan. (If mobile Twitter has a mobile version of the "Replies" tab, I'd use that instead of TweetScan.) I can *view* FriendFeed on my mobile web browser, but can't really interact.

When I'm on a desktop or laptop, I'll introduce FriendFeed into the mix, and then I can get more interactive.

Re Google Reader speed - I try not to let my unread items count go over 100, I currently subscribe to only three users' shared items (yourself, Chris Brogan, and Dana Franks), and I delete items out of my own Shared Items after about a day or two. For my configuration, speed isn't really a problem at this point.

It's interesting to note that Google Reader and FriendFeed have two different philosophies, since FriendFeed is person-centric and Google Reader treats each feed separately. The disadvantage of FriendFeed is that it forces you to look at everything that I do, including the songs I like; what if you don't care about the songs I like? Conversely, the disadvantage of Google Reader is that if you're interested in the person, you may miss out on a lot of what the person is doing, or in the progression of a person's thought (a Google Reader shared item becomes a tweet, which then becomes a blog post).

What would it take for me to switch my primary reading platform from Google Reader to FriendFeed, MyBlogLog, or something like that? (1) Good mobile interface. (2) Easy maintenance and configuration of feeds. (3) Speed.

Re: How our digital lives are spreading out

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:38:47 -0000

The biggest drawback of commenting on FriendFeed is that the author may not know about the comments. Let's say that I share this post in Google Reader, this sharing therefore becomes an item in FriendFeed, and a conversation breaks out as a result of my sharing the item. Chances are that you're not going to find that conversation.

For this reason, I try (but do not always succeed) to practice what I refer to as Corvida's Law, in which you make a conscious effort to post your thoughts on the original article before you post my thoughts on FriendFeed (or anywhere else, for that matter).

Until there's some easy way to retrieve all of these comments from all of these sources, Corvida's Law might be a good law to follow.

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 20:28:32 -0000

The one thing that FriendFeed lacks is a robust mobile interface. MojiPage is nice, and it now allows you to comment and like items, but I still feel like I can do more in mobile Twitter than in mobile FriendFeed (i.e. MojiPage).

Re: Leo Laporte leaves Twitter for Jaiku

Ontario Emperor — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 03:23:28 -0000

Coincidentally, I just requsted a Jaiku account. I'm hoping that I can use my Google login to access Jaiku; otherwise, I may wait until Google login support is available. I just want to give it a whirl and see what happens.

Apparently there's an update to this story that I still have to find. http://twitter.com/leolaporte is active.

Re: Shhh, no one is on Twitter

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 20:19:26 -0000

When I first joined Twitter last fall, I went to see if my friends were on it. I started with my MySpace friends, who included some teenagers (former exchange students) and others who I thought fit in the Twitter demographic. I asked them if they were on Twitter, and none of them was.

In addition, I've realized that my negative assessment of Twitter's continued viability is probably wrong. The stories about the funding, the potential of Twitter breaking into the mainstream, all indicate that Twitter is still on a growth path, even though the bleeding edges have passed it by.

My only question - if 20 million people join Twitter, are they ready?

Re: I’ve redesigned

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:39:19 -0000

The FriendFeed box is a nice touch. I recently added it to my main blog, above my Twitter box.

Regarding the comments at TechCrunch (with an ad at the very top, it should be noted), small ads do not bother me that much, or cause me to doubt someone's credibility. The ads that drive me up the wall are the ones on InfoWorld, in which the slightest click on the corner of the ad results in an ad displaying over the entire page, blocking the content that you want to read.

But different people use different designs. I like Dave Winer's blog design, and feel that it's fitting for his blog. Did you notice that he uses Disqus for comments now? :)

Re: The really interesting FriendFeed page to watch

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 02 May 2008 02:28:58 -0000

FriendFeed keeps a rolling count of the number of items that you have commented upon or liked within the past week. A few weeks ago, I set a target for myself to keep my comments/likes above a certain number. In some respects it's a forced way to engage, but at least it helps you to make sure that you ARE engaging.

But I believe that one of the strongest features of FriendFeed is where your aggregated lifestream (you and your friends) shows you things that your friends liked about their friends. For example, this entry appears in the aggregated feed right now:

"Allen Stern (friend of Mitchell Tsai) posted a blog post on CenterNetworks"

I've found that this is a great way to find out about friends of friends, many of whom have interesting content themselves. I've expanded my network in this way. Now let me check out Allen...

Re: The noise reduction system

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:35:16 -0000

Sorry for not posting this response in FriendFeed :)

I quit doing item 2 when I started following over 200 people in Twitter. Now my approach is "dip my toe in the water every once in the while, and perform vanity searches and interesting item searches every once in a while."

One choice that you didn't mention is being selective in whom you follow. Presumaly if you're following less than 100 people, the noise remains at a manageable level. I wouldn't characterize this approach as intentional ignorance, but more as intentional prioritization. After all, there are hundreds of thousands of people in Twitter that you DON'T follow, so even you are being selective.

Re: The noise reduction system

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:37:31 -0000

Forgot to say - filtering by minimum number of likes or comments does sound like an interesting idea, if they can figure out an intuitive way to implement it in the UI, and a way to turn it on and off on the fly. (My point of comparison is finance.yahoo.com message boards, which allows you to filter based upon star ratings - a valuable tool, based upon the number of questionable posts in Yahoo! Finance message boards.)

Re: Why FriendFeed won’t go mainstream (Part I)

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 19 May 2008 00:18:35 -0000

Perhaps a front end to FriendFeed can provide a less chaotic experience for those users who prefer less noise? It's probably possible.

Re: Why FriendFeed will go mainstream (Part II)

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 19 May 2008 01:25:56 -0000

The "freaking fast" part of item 5 is not a universal truth (although the "much more reliable than Twitter" certainly is). Perhaps FriendFeed grabs Twitter posts quickly, but there is sometimes a lag of a few minutes on my Blogger blog posts, a longer lag on StumbleUpon posts and Google Reader shared items, and sometimes I've encountered a lag of hours on loved YouTube videos. I'm not enough of a techie to know whether the fault is at FriendFeed's end or at the supplying service's end. Can anyone elaborate?

Re: How is technology changing the world of Washington D.C.?

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:25:11 -0000

When looking at how government needs to change, don't just look at the Federal Government. I live in San Bernardino County, California, and when I was last called for jury duty, I had to leave my phone in the car. Why? Because it has a camera on it.

Unfortunately, many "e-Government" attempts need to be examined via the filter of 9/11 - a world in which a shoe, or 4 ounces of a liquid, is perceived as potentially taking hundreds of lives. It's understandable why the Secret Service may get a little jittery...

Re: How much time are you wasting on Twitter?

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:22:19 -0000

When Denis shared your question "How much time are you wasting on Twitter?", two people responded "None." (Just don't ask about FriendFeed.)

Re: Has/How/Why tech blogging has failed you

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:40:09 -0000

Wow! You covered a lot of ground in that post, so I'll just limit myself to the first one, tech blogging focusing more on business issues.

Obviously the purpose of a blog is going to depend upon the capabilities, or lack thereof, of the individual blogger. For example, when Twitter was having huge uptime problems in the spring, I tended to focus more on Twitter's then-lack of communication then on any technical issues. The reason was simple - I do not have the technical knowledge to state whether Ruby on Rails was, or was not, the cause of Twitter's problems. (My last professional programming job was in Hypertalk.)

Whether you're taking a technical approach, a business approach, or another approach to the topic, it helps if you can either (a) add original content, or (b) feature content which your readers may not know about.

Business blogging in and of itself is not bad, but business blogging which regurgitates press releases doesn't help anybody.

Re: Hello world from my iPhone

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:22:47 -0000

Hey, it could be worse. Without exception, all of the applications available to me on my Windows Mobile 5 phone are dumbed down versions of the applications available in Windows XP. fftogo (the mobile FriendFeed client) is the best of the lot, but even fftogo has its limitations because of limitations in the FriendFeed API. Many of the other mobile applications - mobile MySpace, mobile Twitter, mobile LinkedIn - just aren't that good.

Re: Earthquake in Los Angeles

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:00:50 -0000

If you were mobile during the earthquake, FriendFeed might not have been an option. I've been locked out of fftogo for several hours now, apparently because of an issue with FriendFeed's API.

My real problem, however, was with mobile phone voice/text service (in my case, Verizon); I wasn't able to make or receive calls/texts for over an hour after the quake hit. Yet I was able to get to a mobile web browser and tweet.

Re: Earthquake in Los Angeles

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:02:07 -0000

Random thought; it would be nice if Twitter or Summize provided the ability to filter search results by date/time range.

Re: Earthquake in Los Angeles

Ontario Emperor — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:06:00 -0000

I meant, of course, FriendFeed or Summize. Oops.

Re: Our disappearing web

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 11:44:19 -0000

It's more than likely that people in 2108 won't be able to access the text of this post. No one saves everything, and at some point someone makes an editorial decision regarding what to keep and what to junk, and considering the sheer amount of data that's being generated, those editorial decisions are going to be made more frequently.

It's odd to see what is being preserved, and what isn't. Google's Usenet archives have preserved some of the postings that I made in the 1980s during my undergraduate years. But last night, when I searched one of my old Blogger blogs in the process of working on a post, Blogger's built-in search facilities couldn't find the relevant stuff that I had written in late 2003 or early 2004.

That having been said, it's still a lot easier to find out about things that happened in 2001 than it is to find out about things that happened in, say, 1981 - much less 1681. I guess partial data is better than none at all.

Re: Our disappearing web

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:02:04 -0000

Referring to mike n's post, the difficulty is in determining what will be important in 2108, and what won't be. Perhaps information about our cats WILL be important in the future; I have no way of knowing. Bear in mind that the majority of the contemporaries of Johann Sebastian Bach probably wouldn't have bothered to save his old-fashioned work. That's the danger in editorial decisions.

Re: 10 Reasons why Twitter is for you and FriendFeed is not

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 11:04:58 -0000

Re number 5 - as of a few months ago, Patrick Ruffini was squatting on the Barack Obama FriendFeed, as he tweeted back in February http://twitter.com/PatrickRuffini/statuses/7534... and as you (and Louis Gray) noted back in June http://friendfeed.com/e/407424cd-4b31-4740-825f... .

Did Ruffini end up surrendering the account to Obama's staff?

Hilarious post, by the way, but there are millions of people in the U.S. for whom both Twitter and FriendFeed are too complex. Twitter may be easy to use, but it's nowhere near as easy as a telephone - or a pen.

Re: Why blogging comments suck

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 20:17:57 -0000

The underlying assumption above is that this blog has a single comment system. In actuality, it has two - the comment system I'm using now, and FriendFeed.

So why not add a third comment system by invitation only where Gary Shapiro, Barack Obama, and other proven people can post?

Re: You are an idiot if you sell your Apple stock tomorrow

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:44:48 -0000

Robert McLaws, I guess Apple has a succession plan in place now. :)

Robert Scoble, it appears that Louis Gray has taken a different view of Jobs' importance to Apple's long-term prospects. However, it helps to remember that Apple survived without Jobs for several years, and in the process became not only a viable firm (Macintosh II, etc.) but also introduced some interesting products (HyperCard). I don't know the personalities in Apple, but I'm sure that even if Jobs goes off to India rather than staying at Apple, the company will survive and still do great things...maybe not insanely great, but definitely great.

Re: Google Analytics Down?

Ontario Emperor — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 14:39:54 -0000

The 1-2 day delay in acknowledging the problem is troubling. Of course, we get what we pay for...

Re: Why Google should have developed its own Gphone

Ontario Emperor — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 19:31:27 -0000

(Disclosure - I work for a provider of Android applications.)

Re your statement that “'1,000' similar but different Gphones" could potentially confuse the customer - don't we already have 1,000 similar but different Windows Mobile phones already?

I will grant, however, that you have a point with Apple. Despite our love for open this and open that, our darling is one of the most proprietary companies out there.

Re: baratunde.com - Blog - Facebook Follies (or the Dangers of Investing in Someone Else's Platform)

Ontario Emperor — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 00:10:10 -0000

I got to this post based upon a comment in a post Julia Roy posted earlier today. If you haven't heard, Julia sent a message about a photo collection to five relevant groups, and Facebook promptly accused her of spamming.

I have a different definition of "social networking" than Erica Joy (comment number 9). In my view, what you were trying to do was clearly within the realm of social networking. These were people who wanted to hear your message - the fact that these people numbered in the hundreds should not negate the fact that you were engaging in social networking.

Frankly, I question whether Facebook qualifies as a "social network." Of course, since I post under an alias, I could never join Facebook anyway...

Re: Twitter stole my mojo

Ontario Emperor — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 18:53:31 -0000

Sean, your analysis is all too accurate. I have seen it in my experience (although FriendFeed is more of the bandwidth-sucker than Twitter in my case), and you probably saw the incident in which Michael Arrington called out Robert Scoble for spending more time on FriendFeed than on his own blog.

And by the way, I wouldn't give up on Twitter's opportunity to fulfill number 6 so easily. If a persuasive message can be written in 140 characters, you can bet that it will be VERY persuasive because of its very simplicity.