Twitter and Facebook - because feed readers didn't make it

I've been a Twitter value skeptic as noted in Explaining twitter and CB Redux, but the world is not cooperating.

Communications, especially corporate communications, that once would have gone to blogs are going to twitter. At the same time desktop feed readers are dead but Facebook is very popular.

Both Twitter and Facebook use subscription technology (feeds), but they're quite different from the persistent world of the blog post. Importantly, a single tool is used for both authoring feed items and consuming them.

The blog/feed paradigm, I fear, didn't quite cross the cultural chasm. The technology got stuck with the geek elite, which is not a happy place to be. Maybe there were just too many moving pieces ...

So we're taking a diversion. I don't think it's the right way to go, but this isn't the first time I've seen this play. I hope I'm wrong.

If we do wander the Twitter back roads, it won't be a permanent diversion. Sooner or later, in a slightly different form, we'll return to persistent, open ended, indexed, document like artifacts with feeds ...

Help Google give you better ads - and think about your identities!

Google is now targeting ads based on what it knows of your interests, but only a computer-specific basis.

So the next time someone at work fires up Gmail to launch a corporate video chat, you can review the ads on the overhead projector and find all about their hobbies -- or at least the hobbies they search about from work. Hopefully hobbies involving whips, manacles and pumpkins aren't part of workplace searching.

This is probably a good time to think about your identity management strategies. Remember, on the Internet everyone knows you're a dog. If you're using something like Google Video Chat for business communications you should fork out $10/year for a Google Apps domain (DreamHost recommended over eNom) and assign anyone wishes one a business-only Gmail ID.

In the meanwhile you may wish to review your Google Ads Preferences.

Now, it might have been nice if Google had made this an Opt-In program, but before we pull out the torches and pitchforks note that

• You can Opt out from Google Ads Preferences.
• The interest tracking is identity/machine specific. So if you search for dungeons and manacles at home, but search for seed varieties at work using the same Gmail account, your home machine will feature exotic ads and your work machine will have work ads.
• If you search for rude things at work you may be in trouble, but since most corporations track work browsing you're in trouble anyway.
  

I'm going to use it to see if I can get Google to show me more interesting ads!

Update: I tried adding interests, but Google's "interest ontology" was pretty dull. It was also tedious to navigate. It also lacked key discriminators. I'm not interested in Windows hardware, but I am interested in iPhone or Apple hardware -- but those filters were missing. I gave up after a few minutes.

Ideology measured

I took this survey ...

FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: A Nation Neither United Nor Divided

... The CAP survey posed 40 political and ideological statements to a group of 1,400 American adults, and asked them whether or not they agreed with them. You can answer the questions for yourself here; they cover a wide range of topics in the areas of economic and domestic policy, foreign affairs, societal and 'values' issues, and the proper role of government. Although benchmark surveys of political ideology are nothing new, this is one of the most comprehensive and best-constructed efforts that I've seen...

I scored 239/400. Interestingly that's supposed to make me "very progressive", but the average score is 210. So a 10% above average score makes one "very progressive"?!

That seems suspicious, but it turns out that the range of American scores is only between 160 and 247!



So Americans very tightly bunched around the "200" score, which is kind of odd. It suggests that people may have very strong opinions in selected areas, but very few people have very strong opinions that are all aligned to one extreme or another.

I fall out as somewhere between "Democrat" and "Liberal Democrat". Some of the questions were internally illogical however, I would have answered "none of the above" if I could have.

Things get weird on the extremes. The average Obama voter scored 244 and average McCain voter scored 169? That's an amazingly polarized electorate.

I'm having trouble making sense of this ...

Which would you choose?

The Devil smiled, and said ...

Really, it's not hard.

You have two choices.

Sign here and you will live in reasonable health until your 80th birthday. On that day my servant, Victor Von Cheney will visit you. The torture will be terrible. Your bones will break, your teeth will crumble, your eyes will see darkness, your spine will twist and your hands will lose all feeling.

You don't care for that?

Then sign here. You will live a normal life. There will be some good times and some hard times but you will live with you mind intact into your 80s. Of course there will be some illness. Macular degeneration will steal your vision. Osteoporosis and arthritis will crumble your spine and mangle your nerves. Neuropathy will make you clumsy and, of course, your teeth will go. You will pass Von Cheney on the street but he shall take no notice of you.

No, really, you must choose.

Advice? You are asking the Devil for advice?

Well, in truth, I feel for you. It was not I who made this world.

I shall tell you three things. Select your memories. Declare victory when you are ahead. Do not save for a better grade of wheelchair.

Now choose.

Insuring against the end of the world

A fascinating development ...

Credit protection madness - Paul Krugman - NYTimes.com

Marketwatch reports:

The cost of buying protection against the risk that the United States will default on its mounting debt has surged in the past months, outpacing the rise in corporate-credit costs, now that the government has absorbed more private-sector debt...

... the people buying these contracts are crazy. A world in which the US government defaults would be a world in chaos; how likely is it that these contracts would be honored?..

The fundamentals are insane, yet "serious" people are offering this product. The comments on the post are quite good, particularly this one by "TC":

The price of CDS on the US may not necessarily be driven by outright purchases of CDS on the US. Rather, these contracts are often used as part of more complex arbitrage strategies. This could cause the price of a CDS contract to deviate from theoretical fair value by a significant amount...

So this development is fascinating because ...

• In the esoteric world of finance 2.0 there's an angle from which this "makes sense" -- probably the same angle used by AIG's wizards in 2007.
• The people who are selling this know they'll never have to pay out -- because if the US collapsed we'd be using seeds as currency.
• There exist buyers who are either speculators betting on delusional customers or currently delusional customers.

So it's a bit of a mini-review of the past year in one news report.

The Apple Chromestellation Netbook: OS X mobile + Safari + MobileMe. What role AT&T?

Peter Burrows almost has it right. He forgets that the iTouch is running OS X (albeit a strange spinoff of 10.x at this time) but he's close ...

The Big Question About The Rumored Apple NetBook: Will It Run MacOS? - Peter Burrows BusinessWeek

Dow Jones Newswires is confirming reports yesterday that Apple plans to introduce a Netbook. The story says that Taiwanese display maker Wintek Corp. is providing 9.7 to 10 inch screens to huge PC contract manufacturer Quanta Computer, and that the device will be on the market in the second half of the year.

.. One good guess is that it’s the world’s biggest iPod Touch, rather than the world’s smallest Mac. Such a device would not run the MacOS ... better for browsing the Net and watching your movies and such via iTunes, not to mention less demanding games and other graphically-oriented programs found on the App Store. And if the device had a real keyboard...

Everyone's responding, as they should, to the collapse of the laptop pricepoint and to the coming Google branded Chromestellation netbook. Microsoft will give away a Netbook version of Windows 7 tied to Windows Live, so what will Apple do?

A zillion people have noted that the Apple iTouch is basically a keyboard-free $230 small display netbook, now with about 25,000 App Store applications including the Amazon Kindle.

Add a keyboard and a bigger display and Apple has a $300 Netbook with a browser that uses the same AppKit engine that powers Chromestellation. This can compete with a $200 generic Linux netbook.

Apple also has a currently feeble (albeit slowly improving) online companion - MobileMe. They also have something called AppleTV with video distribution via another product called, I think, "iTunes".

So it seems Apple can't help but sell an iTouch/Netbook with media distribution and, probably, a tie to MobileMe.

The interesting question is what role AT&T or other mobile carriers might play. What does Apple's AT&T contract let them do? Will Apple and AT&T sell a carrier-subsidized MobileMe bound Netbook with embedded GSM 3G wireless? Will there be special prices for bulk school purchases? Will school books start being sold electronically via Amazon for display on the MacNetbook Kindle.app?

We should know by the 2009 back to school buying season.

Gordon's 2nd law of happiness

Gordon's 1st law of happiness : "The secret of happiness is ... editing."

Gordon's 2nd law of happiness: "As soon as you're ahead, declare victory."

Good news for the gray of hair

The other day I teased my 7 yo. "What do you mean Dad has gray hair?!" I said for the benefit of a bystander. She replied, "It's not gray, it's gray-white".

So this is good news ...

Well - Unlocking the Secrets of Gray Hair - NYTimes.com

... Notably, scientists haven’t found a link between signs of aging in hair and real aging in the body. A major study of 20,000 men and women in Copenhagen looked for any links between heart-disease mortality and physical signs of aging like gray hair, baldness and facial wrinkles. They found none.

“People with premature graying of the hair don’t die any sooner than anybody else,” said Dr. Leo M. Cooney, professor and chief of geriatrics at Yale University School of Medicine. “I think the study shows that gray hair has something to with your genetics and very little to do with premature aging...

Obama replies to Buffett - change can't wait

Warren Buffett recently complained that the Obama administration is trying to do too many things at once, that they should simply focus on the economy.

This reads like a reply ...

The White House - Blog Post - Taking on Education

In the opening of his speech today at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the President met critics head on who complain of too much change, too fast:

Every so often, throughout our history, a generation of Americans bears the responsibility of seeing this country through difficult times and protecting the dream of its founding for posterity. This is a responsibility that has fallen to our generation. Meeting it will require steering our nation’s economy through a crisis unlike any we have seen in our time. In the short-term, that means jumpstarting job creation, re-starting lending, and restoring confidence in our markets and our financial system. But it also means taking steps that not only advance our recovery, but lay the foundation for lasting, shared prosperity.

I know there are some who believe we can only handle one challenge at a time. They forget that Lincoln helped lay down the transcontinental railroad, passed the Homestead Act, and created the National Academy of Sciences in the midst of Civil War. Likewise, President Roosevelt didn’t have the luxury of choosing between ending a depression and fighting a war. President Kennedy didn’t have the luxury of choosing between civil rights and sending us to the moon. And we don’t have the luxury of choosing between getting our economy moving now and rebuilding it over the long term.

The Kennedy comparison is unfortunate, maybe he probably should have paid more attention to Vietnam and less to the moon landing.

I trust Obama on this one. Bush and the GOP laid waste to much more than most people imagine. We're on a boat with a thousand leaks, we can't patch them one at a time.

Americans who don't like this should have voted for Al Gore in 2000.

PS. On reflection, I think America is now discovering that they've elected a geeky intellectual who meant what he said. That must be unsettling.

Influencing the world - a ranking

Technorati has published a list of The 50 Publishers That Blogs Link To Most. Excluding YouTube (#1) here are the next ten or so (emphases mine, I assume this excludes Chinese blogs?).

1. New York Times
2. BBC News
3. CNN.com
4. MSN
5. guardian.co.uk
6. Washington Post
7. Yahoo! News
8. Reuters
9. Los Angeles Times
10. Telegraph.co.uk
11. MSNBC
12. The Wall Street Journal

The WSJ is behind a paywall, so it's not surprising it ranks relatively low. The NYT may be more or less bankrupt, but at #1 I don't think it's going away.

Yahoo News is just an aggregator of course, but it reminds us how much traffic Yahoo! gets. Google News isn't nearly as prominent.

Note how highly The Guardian ranks. They've really been up and coming over the past year, rising to become a major world paper. I read their feeds - excellent stuff. Between the BBC, The Guardian and The Telegraph the UK is still a big player in the English language market.

Be good to see a curve to find out how quickly things fall off after the top five or so. I'd guess pretty darned quickly ...

Is Google search becoming less effective? Is it Google, or the net?

It's just a feeling, but lately my Google searches seem to be less effective.

When I search on topics I get large volumes of "me too" news and announcement blog postings, but fewer results that contain real knowledge or insight [1] It's not so much that I get obvious splog sites, more lots of boring results.

Anyone else wondering about this?

If it's real, then, like most things in the world, I suspect some multi-factorial cause.

I wonder if Google is currently losing the war with spam and spam blogs; if they've been forced to retune their algorithms in a direction that makes them less useful.

Maybe people who used to contribute insight are doing something else. Maybe they're wasting time on Twitter [2] or starting new businesses or digging gardens in case Limbaugh's dreams of national failure come true [4].

Maybe Google is cutting back on the depth of their searches to save money. I've noticed a sharp drop in how well they index my personal contributions [3]. Perhaps by emphasizing the topical and recent they're reducing the value of their search engines.

Perhaps it's simply the gloomy weather and the annihilation of the world economy. Could be. Or could be something really is wrong.

I'm hoping it's just a passing ailment, but for the first time in ten years I'm going to see if other search engines are giving better results.

[1] When I search on tech topics, and keep finding my own tech.kateva.org posts in the top 10 even with "personal search" turned off, something is weird (the site has only a mediocre page rank).

[2] Yes, I'm now a freshly minted Twitter-value skeptic. I've come off the fence. Twitter reminds me of the Segway -- good, but vastly overhyped. Remember the Segway hype during the crash of 2000? Anyone remember the crash of 2000?

[3] Which, by definition, must contain lots of insight and not, say, be unworthy.

[4] The blogs I follow continue to be insightful, but their volume is down significantly. So I do think there's some input volume reduction in addition to possible quality and search issues.

The nature of time - essential reading for reality hobbyists

Are you an amateur epistemontologist? Curious about the nature of reality? Not willing to accept the illusions of the senses?

Then you've got reading ...

The Envelope Please… | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

The results are in for the Foundational Questions Institute essay competition on “The Nature of Time,” which we discussed here. And the winners are:

... Julian Barbour on “The Nature of Time”

... Claus Kiefer on “Does Time Exist in Quantum Gravity?”

... Sean Carroll on “What if Time Really Exists?”...

Love it.

Why we need a reformed GOP: Helping small business

Amidst all the stimulus package discussions, I haven't heard anything much about helping small business -- much less anything like my proposal for a national small business generation service.

The good news is that Obama is pressing for affordable healthcare coverage. That will be a big help for small businesses and start-ups.

Still, this is the sort of cause Republicans used to care about. In the 90s the GOP, instead of voting as a block against the stimulus package, would have pressed for small business support.

Not so much now.

Another reason why we need a replacement for the Party of Limbaugh.

The Machiavellian Dems ...

It's true. We've been studying The Prince (free for iPhone btw).

Charles Blow - Three Blind Mice - NYTimes.com

... The Democrats know the Republicans are afraid to confront and disavow Limbaugh, so they keep poking him, and he keeps snapping like a rabid dog. This is a brilliant bit of Machiavellian strategy on the part of the Democrats. (I didn’t know that they had it in them.)..

Alright, I'll confess. This strategy was so obvious it just emerged. It didn't take any cleverness to come up with.

Sigh. We commie-pinkos-liberal-socialists know it's bad. It's bad because we're toying with people, which is certainly not nice -- and we do so want to be nice.

On the other hand, it's such fun. And now the Party of Limbaugh is supposed to be "Going Galt", which is taking comic timing to a whole new level.

We need to stop soon. Really. It's bad for us. Besides, we know the nation desperately needs a reformed GOP or, and this will take too long, a new party to replace the GOP.

Poking Limbaugh isn't helping the GOP reform.

Or maybe it is.

Poke.

BTW. Charles Blow has a NYT blog, and it's quite good.

Misreading Atlas Shrugged

Pompous idiots of America, who are so innumerate they can’t grasp the concept of marginal tax rates, and so ill read they can’t remember Clinton era taxation, have decided to  ‘Go Galt’ in retaliation for … ummm … something.

It’s all so much fun, nearly as much fun as watching the Party of Limbaugh kiss the bum of the Great Bellow. Just imagine Malkin and her kin greeting winter in some Wyoming retreat …

It gets better. I’m told, by a reliable source who refuses to let me use her name, that this isn’t only hysterically funny, it’s also sadly ironic.

Allegedly, the needy adults (no children or disabled persons in Rand’s world) and politicians where not the most despicable characters in Atlas Shrugged. The worst of the worst were corrupt businessmen who bought politicians and sold fraudulent goods to credulous dupes.

The villains, in other words, were the corporate titans of Wall Street Malkin and Limbaugh worship. The Heroes would be more like Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett – major Obama supporters.

Alas, I can’t verify this personally. I don’t deny Rand, though a certified loon, nonetheless had some marvelous insights – but I can’t stand her writing.

Can anyone confirm my source’s recollection? I should add that on matters of this sort I’ve never known her to be wrong.