Disqus - Latest Comments for samj

Re: Making Money in the App Store: I Give Up

samj — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 07:20:27 -0000

Your best bet is probably to showcase them to clients and get yourself commissioned to develop an app for a company.

Sam

Re: URL shorteners working with Internet Archive for long-term preservation

samj — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:00:32 -0000

Prevention is better than cure. By specifying short links in the HTTP headers and/or HTML HEAD element using rel=shortlink (included in both Wordpress & Drupal, among others), webmasters provide their users with more transparent links that are as reliable as the content itself (that is, broken and dangling links will be a thing of the past).

Linkrot is a real problem (it's like rust for the Internet) and every little bit helps, but the better long term solution is not to rely on third-party services at all.

Sam

Re: On Citizen Journalism, The Degradation Of Society, And Bitchmemes

samj — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 02:41:17 -0000

These citizen "journalists" play a more important role as eyes and ears of "real" "citizen journalists" at publications like HuffPo & TechCrunch... their output need not be squeaky clean as upstream writers will rely on multiple and/or reliable primary sources.

Re: Citizen journalism: I’ll take it, flaws and all

samj — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 20:55:51 -0000

With mainstream media working hard to euthanise itself by failing to learn from the dotcom days and erecting paywalls, citizen journalism, even just as a (noisy) information source for the likes of Huffington Post and TechCrunch, is absolutely critical for society. It can be all the eyes and ears we need where it is no longer justifiable to pay to have reporters on the ground. I like Paul's "look at me looking at them" take, and that he's kicked off some much needed discussion, but the suggestion that we should do anything other than encourage and promote citizen journalism (with guidance as to the ethics of journalism) is foreign to me.

Re: Paul Carr's piece is rubbish (and disgusting) (Scripting News)

samj — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:14:41 -0000

Citizen journalists will play a very important role once mainstream media euthanises itself by putting up paywalls, even if only to be the "eyes and ears" of sites like Huffington Post and, dare I say it, TechCrunch. I said to Paul he should be careful what he wishes for as the only thing keeping society on the rails is that some of the scandals see the light of day. Would citizen journalists have discovered Watergate? Probably, but people do need to know how to handle the information they discover and posting photos with [what turned out to be false] speculation is not at all what we need.

Sam

Re: Windows 7 Launch Sales: 234% Better Than Vista

samj — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:13:50 -0000

Your "face off" pitted a major OS release against what was effectively a service pack. Were there any surprises here?

Re: Google Acquires reCAPTCHA

samj — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:16:47 -0000

In supporting reCAPTCHA I was supporting "a project of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University", not a commercial enterprise (Google or otherwise).

Reminds me of the time I manually entered a sizable CD collection into the free/open CDDB project only to have it "acquired" by Gracenote and locked up.

Sam

Re: VMware vs. Amazon … ROUND ONE … FIGHT!

twitter-36093693 — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:01:43 -0000

Sam I think the variability of revenue is an important point here. Say Amazon has $200M in EC2 revenue (I know that's more aggressive than Randy's estimate but I've heard numbers that high often)...what would that have equated to in internal IT spending for VMwares customers? I think the number would be a multiple of 2-3x at least?

Re: VMware vs. Amazon … ROUND ONE … FIGHT!

randybias — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:27:12 -0000

No Sam. By claiming Amazon doesn't have a history of 'playing nice', I'm only claiming that. I'm not claiming VMware is any better. If I were, I would just say it directly.

Re: VMware vs. Amazon … ROUND ONE … FIGHT!

randybias — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:26:03 -0000

I don't think this is true, although I agree with your general thrust. Standards, interoperability, and compatibility are regularly achieved through both openness and 'de facto' standards.

Using Microsoft Word, as an example, simply reinforces the primary point of my article, which is that Amazon missed the bigger opportunity by not being more open sooner and that because they did VMware is able to make a Microsoft-like play.

Comparing to the Microsoft Office suite directly, however, doesn't make sense as those were not open standards to begin with, while the vCloud API is starting out as open. Also, none of the vCloud-related products are shipping from VMware so plenty of folks have an opportunity to get in there and build vCloud API-compatible products. In other words, Microsoft dominated from two main factors: 1) a closed document standard and 2) market dominance. In this case, VMware does not have #1 and #2 it only has inside the enterprise market.

Re: VMware vs. Amazon … ROUND ONE … FIGHT!

samj — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:41:00 -0000

No, it's not at all fair to compare legacy vendors to cloud providers based on market cap. It's like assessing the market share in terms of vehicles on the road by comparing the revenue of Toyota and Tesla - the former can get 10x as many cars on the road for the same price.

Comparisons of Microsoft vs Google Apps revenues are similarly misleading as for each Microsoft user displaced by Google there is a much smaller spend (which is exactly why people are flocking to these services).

Of course this means that the providers have to do a lot more with a lot less (ditto the ecosystem around them), but this also means the agile upstarts are relatively safe from the dinosaur incumbents.

Sam

Re: VMware vs. Amazon … ROUND ONE … FIGHT!

samj — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:28:57 -0000

In claiming that Amazon don't have a history of 'playing nice' you're implying that VMware does. BS, they're just as ruthless as the next vendor and by "forcing" vCloud down everyone's throats rather than just using it themselves and letting us come knocking I'd say they're even moreso than Amazon.

It'll be a cold day in hell when Amazon adopts vCloud and to be honest I don't think the API is up to the task (at least in its current form), which is no surprise given its lineage. OTOH I'd rather the Amazon EC2 API stay shacked up because it's very implementation-specific and would give them an unfair advantage similar to the one VMware is currently seeking.

Sam

Re: VMware vs. Amazon … ROUND ONE … FIGHT!

samj — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:22:57 -0000

Sure there will be lock-in for both vCloud and OVF. Users aren't stupid and will quickly learn that they need to use VMware to avoid compatibility reasons just as they continue to reach for Microsoft Word today even though document standards are "open".

Does OVF work for portability today? Not so much. Will vCloud (or whatever they end up calling it) work for interoperability tomorrow? I very much doubt it.

Sam (who'd rather no particular vendor enjoy an unfair advantage by having their native standard "forced" on others)

Re: Danish Woman’s One Night Stand Video Is a Government Hoax

samj — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 04:45:32 -0000

They have just this second (~10:30am CEST) made the video private following a rash of comment censorship. The last comment I read was something like "come back in 15 minutes and you'll see this comment is gone". Seems these people prefer to rub salt in their own wounds - once the cat's out of the bag on the Internet it's kinda hard to put back in.

So, did anyone grab the video itself? You can do this in Safari by grabbing the URL from the activity window (it'll likely be in FLV or if you're on HQ then H.264 format) but unfortunately I was using Chrome at the time.

Sam

Re: srs.li now supports rel="shorturl" and friends

jou — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:27:23 -0000

Well, I don't like rev=canonical much either, but I just want it to work with as many websites as possible…

Re: srs.li now supports rel="shorturl" and friends

samj — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 09:35:53 -0000

Thanks for adding rel=shortlink support. I'd suggest dropping rev=canonical (which has been widely criticised) and rel=shorturi (which doesn't really exist). The rel=shorturl guy(s) are still flogging the horse so you can make your own mind up about that.

Sam

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

yaniv — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 06:55:30 -0000

Oh, I agree re existing domain names being short enough and the value to the reader - that was my point, I guess it wasn't clear enough.

Re 3rd party tracking, yes, the value is the ego boost, and also the ability to understand how something spreads across the net and who are the real influencers. For companies like http://tra.cx this is invaluable information. It could be provided by the conversational media (e.g. Twitter) or by the publishing infrastructure (e.g. Wordpress).

And of course, once we have multiple stat-providers, there will be companies that will create services that will aggregate all these stats in one place, creating a new industry segment, and so the cycle continues...

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

samj — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 04:50:15 -0000

Domains are usually short enough to be used as is (e.g. http://dell.com/az93 or http://microsoft.com/win7) and the result is clearly a much higher quality link that tells the reader something about the content before they click.

Regarding 3rd party tracking, what is the use case really (beyond feeding the egos of people whos egos don't need feeding). I realise that there are marketing benefits for the few of us who are in that industry but the cost of creating millions of links to each resource (rather than one or two - the canonical and short links) are many and not always obvious. I found today that browsing a twitter search for new content was almost impossible for example because my browser's colouring of visited links was broken.

Incidentally Wordpress blog software will be including shortening services (perhaps using wp.me) in its stats module soon... these will presumably capture stats as well, thus solving the problem.

Sam

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

yaniv — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 04:41:15 -0000

Good point. Using the same domain name will improve performance, and reduce use confusion. It will also fix the incentives - the folks with the most incentive to keep links from rotting are the content publishers. See http://yaniv.golan.name/blog/2009/08/18/of-brew....

We'll be losing the "tracking" aspect of the current 3rd party short URLs, but this tracking is already quite unreliable given the non-unique nature of the short URLs. Perhaps it would be in the interest of Twitter etc to provide this click tracking capability. It'd still be unreliable, but would be far less damaging to the net infrastructure.

Re: Twitter is a Twademark. Tweet: Not Yet, Maybe Never

samj — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:57:37 -0000

Yes, just recently (in May), but that doesn't make it enforceable. More on that point soon...

Re: Twitter is a Twademark. Tweet: Not Yet, Maybe Never

iHouse — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:54:48 -0000

But "Twitter" is already registered by Twitter, right?

Re: Twitter Updates Officially Become Tweets

samj — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 07:56:32 -0000

Thanks for noticing and documenting this guys - it may well end up being the smoking gun that keeps "tweet" in the public lexicon where it belongs.

Re: Twitter is a Twademark. Tweet: Not Yet, Maybe Never

samj — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 07:38:44 -0000

"retweet" is not trademarked but it would be covered by a successful trademark of "tweet" anyway.

Re: Twitter is a Twademark. Tweet: Not Yet, Maybe Never

samj — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 07:38:00 -0000

So far as I can tell Twitter were NOT the ones who "really promoted this word" - the grassroots community and media did and until very recently Twitter used the term "updates" and distanced themselves from the term "tweet". The real question now is not whether they get to have "tweet" (it was never theirs to trademark) but whether they get to keep "Twitter".

Sam

Re: Twitter is a Twademark. Tweet: Not Yet, Maybe Never

samj — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 07:35:26 -0000

Doug,

Indeed it is unfair that Twitter have allowed rampant abuse of their trademark and are now taking action when it's too late for others to change. Fortunately for you your book isn't dependent on Twitter accounts or APIs - otherwise they could just turn you off like they did for @retweet (though not necessary in compliance with their own terms of service).

IANAL but you may be well advised to stand your ground in this instance, and in any case your book is in a different class and simply references Twitter - imagine if it were not possible to write books about Ferraris for example, or Microsoft software?

Sam