Disqus - Latest Comments for Greg Gershman

Re: Silicon Valley Arrogance

Greg Gershman — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 12:29:41 -0000

What's interesting is that if you look at all the "successful" startups from the past few years, just as many, if not more, were from outside the Valley, and came to prominence without being annoited by the Valley. MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, del.icio.us are just a few examples, there's plenty more.

Re: The next step in Digg clones (Scripting News)

Greg Gershman — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 14:21:19 -0000

I think that's a great idea. I believe John Battelle had something like this setup on his blog, called SearchMob (http://battellemedia.com/archives/002868.php), but he just recently shut it down (http://battellemedia.com/archives/004091.php). I don't think he was thinking about it in the same way you are though.

It strikes me that this kind of system heakens back to the good old days of blogging, before it became about subscribers, page views and CPMs, and was simply about likeminded people sharing ideas.

Re: http://www.rev2.org/2005/10/09/interview-with-greg-gershman-blogdigger/

Greg Gershman — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 23:43:42 -0000

Cool Sid, I hadn't read through this in a while, it was interesting to see it re-posted. It's always weird to read you're own thoughts a second time. ;)

Hope all is well.

Re: http://www.rev2.org/2005/10/10/fresh-start/

Greg Gershman — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 23:51:22 -0000

Sid, Blogdigger has a fair number of posts from your archive, if you like, I can set up a data dump for you. Let me know if I can be of help.

Re: http://www.rev2.org/2006/01/09/those-web-20-verdicts-theyre-coming/

Greg Gershman — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 09:45:15 -0000

Thanks Sid!

I think we are going to see many services focus more on the bottom line this year; cool and useful services are nice, but when it comes to a business they have to make money. It's not always related to the public facing side of things.

Re: Dembot - Why Mahalo is Fundamentally Flawed

Greg Gershman — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 08:48:34 -0000

I agree with you assessment of Mahalo; I've yet to find it useful in any way that has encouraged me to return there. But I don't see how your distinction from Google holds. You said, "Everytime a user clicks on an ad, they are being taken to information that is promotionally paid for as opposed to being there because it is the most valuable." I can't see how that's different than Google. If your distinction is in the motivations of the creators, I see the distinction, but would argue that Google's more interested in making money at this point than they are in providing accurate search results.

Re: Weekend DVD Round Up

Greg Gershman — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 11:34:23 -0000

I'm in the process of going through Season 1 of Lost as well; I got into Season 2, but have to go back and catch up on 1. It's very, very addictive.

Re: Creationists: Food for Thought

Greg Gershman — Mon, 15 Aug 2005 05:06:35 -0000

A Creationist would probably tell you that the oil was created for them to use as well. Creationism as a science is similar to the World on the Back of a Turtle story. If something doesn't make sense, just add another turtle.

Re: GrabPERF: Whole bunch of bug/performance fixes, part 2

Greg Gershman — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 12:22:05 -0000

No, thank you!

Re: What do you use as your resume?

Greg Gershman — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 19:01:41 -0000

Heh, just as long as folks looking at my resume don't know about your resume, I'm set. ;)

Re: The Vine has been tagged in real-time

Greg Gershman — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 11:57:20 -0000

Nice meeting you this morning! Hope to see you at more DC events soon.

Re: Time for a commercial break

Greg Gershman — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 13:48:57 -0000

Brilliant! I've been looking for that water ballon commercial ever since I saw it during Lost.

Re: More about finding good stuff from Demo

Greg Gershman — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:40:39 -0000

Carson: thanks for the plug!

Jason H: I apologize that the ads were distracting; we try to set them so that they are distinguishable from the main content but also there for our users. It's tricky, because sometimes they do provide useful additional information, but sometimes do not, and we have to try to find a balance. I'd like to follow up with you to get your thoughts on how we could do it better.

Scoble: Regarding postive/negative comments about things, try Opinmind, they've got a cool sentiment search engine that is powered by blogs.

Regarding the other issues that you bring up, these are all important; the problem is that each one of these issues is essentially a seperate problem to be solved. Finding the best products is different than finding all the posts that mention specific keywords, both of which are different detecting sentiment. I think some of them are best handled manually, for example, the best posts from DEMO would probably be best compiled by someone from the conference who knows in advance who is there, has collected a list of their RSS feeds, and reads them in an aggregator and re-blogs or links to the best ones (or the wiki scenario you suggest).

Regarding the mixture of authority on specific subjects and cleaning noise out of the result set, we're working on a solution to this that I think will help solve the problem. I'd be happy to give you more details, if you're interested.

Re: Danger of blog rumors

Greg Gershman — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 11:16:34 -0000

I've seen the opposite; if something is untrue, but generates buzz for a company, they are usually more than willing to let the rumors (and links) fly.

The new tech-media outlets (TechCrunch/GigaOM/Valleywag) are obsessed with breaking news, to the point where they seem to be dismissing with due diligence. Perhaps it's just the nature of the medium, and we need to adjust our truth filters to have a 24 hour time delay.

Re: To Beat Google, Yahoo Needs To Change The Game

Greg Gershman — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 14:03:46 -0000

Scott: agreed. Google owns search, and uses that to increase attention to their other properties. Yahoo (or anyone else for that matter) needs to find a paradigm for using the web that is not search-based (like social/Facebook, although I'm not sure that is going to work).

I also like Eric's ideas above, and have been hoping for some time that Yahoo will somehow tie together all the various social components it has acquired to produce something that does better than what Google does (it doesn't have to be search, in fact I hope it's not).

Re: Google Introduces User-Generated Content For Maps Without Community

Greg Gershman — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 08:06:04 -0000

Interesting; I wonder if the inherent smaller-ness of sites like Yelp gives them some kind of usability advantage over something huge like Yahoo or Google; although Yahoo has attempted in the past to create some kind of social aspect across all the various facets of their site, there isn't the same sense of community that a smaller site has. Google the same. There are some counter-examples, such as MySpace, but they might not count as the application itself helps to create a smaller social context within the whole.

Re: Web 2.0 names that hurt

Greg Gershman — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 10:00:51 -0000

I won't debate the effectiveness of our branding, but, just so you know, Blogdigger was around a full two years before digg. And Talkdigger was inspired by our name (or so the founder told me).

I agree it's very difficult to come up with a good name nowadays without being or sounding derivative.

Re: Web 2.0 names that hurt

Greg Gershman — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 19:07:31 -0000

No problem, thanks for the correction!

By the way, the other name I was considering back in the day was RSS (pronounced arse) Kicker; so we're at least not as bad as it could have been. ;)

Re: The Tyranny of the Blogosphere

Greg Gershman — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 07:28:03 -0000

Right On, Ken! I couldn't agree more. One of the benefits of blogging is helping to organize your thoughts...and if others happen to find it interesting, so be it. But regurgitating the same headlines isn't a way to develop a unique voice.