I like the quote from John See's on the cover of the plan, start with the applications, not the technology:

Typically, technology committees go before school boards asking for a computer lab, or computers for classrooms. The first question board members will ask is, "Why do you need them?" Why not answer that question in the plan? It may be better to go to a school board saying, "This is what we want our students to be able to do"

• reading, researching, exploring
• writing, editing, taking pictures, collecting research, making docs
• sharing, messaging, commenting, evaluating
• planning, calendaring, collaborating (via the above applications)

• A campus-wide wireless network, 54Mbps or so.
• An internal and external Web server.
• Any computer that can run Mozilla Firefox 3
• A bunch of new Web sites that enable the above applications (could be built on top of an application server like Drupal)
• A set of policies for learning contexts that govern what data and work can go from internal network out to the public Web, and vice versa

• A lot of fancy new computers are not needed (just more older 'commodity' computers that can run a good Web browser well)
• No further work on the internal ethernet network is needed (better to replace ethernet with more wifi hubs or extenders)
• The real time, resources, and energy should be spent on the Web-based applications that will be directly part of the curriculum, instead of equipment

• Standardize on free, bulletproof software instead of a single hardware platform: a robust Web browser that can use Web-based applications like Firefox 3.
• A 1 year-old refurbished Dell laptop with Ubuntu costs $400, new MacBook costs $949, but they have identical performance running Firefox.
• Computers can be more easily maintained by standardizing on one simple configuration for everyone. If a computer is running badly, it can be wiped and re-imaged (instead of troubleshooting software installations).
• Software can be limited to what's free and available on all operating systems (Mac, Win, Linux): a Web browser like Firefox 3, a text editor, and media management applications like Songbird & Picasa.

Posted by ben at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Newspapers and magazines are losing money very quickly. News content remains very popular, but most of it is available for free. News aggregator sites serve newspaper content to large audiences for free, and Craigslist has killed the major source of ad revenue that newspapers need, and people are used to getting magazine content for free online. Newsweek is exiting the mass-market, and it appears that many large newspapers will as well. Many people agree that journalism is an important part of a functioning political culture and society, but no alternative to the present course has emerged.

Henry Blodget points out that even if it stopped printing on paper, the New York Times could not pay for it's news room full of reporters and writers. Walter Issacson proposes a "pay by the slice" model, like iTunes for music. Amazon introduces the Kindle 2 as an analogous device for newspapers. Chris Anderson says "free" is the only business model that works, and it's okay if that doesn't support a lot of journalism. Andrew Keen says "mass-amateurization" is destroying our culture and must be fought. Michael Kinsley says that it's okay if we have a much smaller number of newspapers. Dave Winer says kill all the elitist journalists, we can make a new journalism out of bloggers and participatory media.

The conclusion I come to is that the sea change that has happened is the end of 'passive' culture, not journalism. It should be possible to re-invent journalism as a richer, participatory medium, with experts and professionals directly collaborating with (and directly responsible to) the enthusiasm and amazing creations of bloggers, makers, photographers, people of all kinds. The more sharing and creating of things that's happening online, the more engagement and value there will be there, and it will become something that can pay the bills for those who do it well.

Large media companies and newspapers could protect their futures best stopping the attempt to hold on to existing ad rates and formats, and instead moving their best advertisers quickly into performance-based online properties and formats. No one yet knows what will work, but they can do themselves a huge favor by trying a dozen experiments instead of moaning. And the bloggers & geeks can help invent new things, instead of imagining that this is a revolution where it will be a victory if a valuable part of society goes away.

Posted by ben at 1:20 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Posted by ben at 12:28 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Photowalking, originally uploaded by George.

George Oates (who I know some and whose work I like tremendously) was laid off in the latest round at Yahoo. Also, many extremely talented people from Brickhouse (Samantha Tripodi, Chis Martin, Jeannie Yang, Ben Ward, Ken Thornhill, Premshree Pillai, and Kevin Thornback, none of whom I knew well, I just saw and was awed by their work). Like Tom Coates ("Still reeling from the last few weeks"), I am still trying to get my head around the entire thing. I still don't understand how these people got cut. I can't imagine Flickr without a key part of its DNA. I have respect for Kakul, Heather, and the rest of the crew, but I think this shows that the decision making there has gone off the rails. I started using Flickr in 2005, and have loved it and the culture that has developed around it. But, I am going to move my photos off Flickr and find a new home for them, with many regrets.

In the larger context of Yahoo, it is doing yet more damage to itself. It simply won't survive as a commodity site or development platform alone. Mail, a front page, and news (all indications are that every other part of the company is flat or declining) are not enough to sustain the company at its current size, and focusing on advertising innovation while the entire structure goes through a recession seems wildly off-base. What they should do is do what other smart people did during the last bust: invent something really good. That's when people started Flickr, and Google, and Blogger, and on and on. Despite many assets and a lot of value, Yahoo's management would do better to improve the company's prospects by laying themselves off.

update: a couple of people have said that they don't understand the 'protest' I'm making; I should have been clearer. It's not a protest at all, Flickr is still a great thing and the people there are good, etc. I'm quitting it just because I had more of an emotional relationship with it than a practical one, and that's been changed. It's a purely personal thing, left over from the time when sites like Flickr were labors of love, built mostly from enthusiasm. That's rare these days, but that's why I do what I do, through booms and busts.

Posted by ben at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

<?php
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Posted by ben at 9:53 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

There are lots of bits and pieces of information around that seem to tell you about what's going on in the world, but even the best of these are, finally, someone's subjective judgement call, what they think is happening. They may be professionals, etc., but I want to get a feel for myself of what's happening, not just accept the opinions of others-- for example, there is usually a pretty serious gap between the politics of Berkeley, California and the rest of the U.S. There's no easy way to get a sense of how big the gulf is, no easy road to figure out how anyone could conceivably want to have someone like Sarah Palin as Vice President.

Of course, I can immerse myself in firehoses of data of all kinds: populate my RSS reader with Republicans, watch 500 channels, visit 10,000 folksy web sites. But I really just want broad themes, changes, and trends. I want an engine that analyzes and summarizes lots of raw data into a few groups of things that are similar.

And no, this isn't some smirky internet-age bullshit! Based on Ben Fry's recommendation in his book, I got a copy of Exploratory Data Analysis via inter-library loan. It was published in 1977, before most people knew what a PC was, and waaay before anything like the Internet. In the very first chapter, John Tukey starts with talking about making simple "stem and leaf" graphs with paper and pencil of the megawatts generated by hydroelectric dams in the U.S. Why? He wants to show you how to "write down a bunch of numbers in such a way as to give a general feel of 'what they are like.'" What a great thing! I don't care too much about the numbers, I just want to know if there's any rough pattern there, and there is: most of these dams either generate about 30 kilowatts, or around 1,100, two groups that tell me where to start if I want to know more about that (I don't).

In information retrieval land, this is known as clustering (one of my hobby horses that I usually talk about with anyone I know for longer than 30 minutes). Instead of a laundry list of thousands of things, I get a set of groups of the words that are used together often. I can get a feel for what's happening in the data without sorting through it myself.

For example: I vaguely know who Kenzaburō Ōe is, but I don't really know what his books are about. I just want a feel for that, with some idea of what the themes of his books were. I can either read a page of Google search results, or I could see derived clusters for those documents. To me, seeing the groups is a much better interface to start exploring if I want to know about him (and I do).

The motivation to get a sense of what's out there in the world is an old one-- it goes back farther than 1977, even. Now that more and more of the stuff of everyday life (cats, politics, hobbies, cancer, errands, religion, etc.) is in the form of data online, I can imagine doing that. I should heavily note that clustering techniques applied to social data still produce very uneven results, and a lot more work is needed. But it's becoming possible to think of a better interface to information than a search box.

Posted by ben at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Ok, I hate tag clouds. With a passion. Never again. But, since I was sorta happy with the term frequency normalization thing I was working on, I figured what the heck (the road to heck is paved with half-assed text analysis). And another thing, aren't there like, 2,810,000 (and one) twitter clouds out there?

But here it is anyway, twittercloud. It's slightly different than other clouds, in that you can generate a cloud from a query term (not just whatever is hot or an individual's tweets), and you can see what tweets are generating the term right in page. It auto-refereshes with ajax to give you that clean feeling. Also, I happen to think frequency normalization gives a nice weighting that makes more interesting words pop up. Anyway, it was fun!

UPDATE: Now includes Flickr photos (a tag search based on the query term and cloud word) and much better twitterbot detection.

Posted by ben at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Deep in the depths of the dot-com bust, when I was lucky enough to have work of any kind (in my case it was commuting 200 miles each day contracting for Cisco), the people I worked with were fatalistic about the future of the work we did. Many people thought the money had been drained out of the exploratory culture of the boom, and that we were in a very conservative time.

The truth was the opposite in fact; much of the boom was spent doing variations on e-commerce ventures and content sites, with the idea that each vertical or market segment would need it's own one of those. Counter also to the conventional wisdom, these sites were not created because their entrepreneurs thought that business logic had been suspended, but instead because the tiny community of venture capitalists were funding only specific things. The 'bust' came not out of the sites' lack of income (it was no secret that very few ever had enough business to survive), but in the withdrawal of venture funds.

After the bust, many people left the business for school, or other jobs. A few people (who couldn't do anything else) kept creating new things however, and many of them were more creative than anything that came before (and set the stage for the current boom). Google, Blogger, Napster, and Friendster (a non-semantic search engine, easy blogging tool, media sharing tool, and social network, the hallmarks of today's Web) were all created in 1999 or 2000 in the shade of obscurity. The examplars of the successful social media Web were born in 2001 and 2002, when little venture capital flowed: Wikipedia, Flickr, del.icio.us, and Facebook.

In retrospect, it's easy to see that it's more possible (though harder of course) to create something new when no one is watching and no one cares, out of shear love of an idea. But it's not something that many seem to remember these days. Instead, it feels like 1999 all over again, with companies launching sites with the same functionality and ideas, venture-funded start-ups doing variations on social media ventures and aggregation sites, with the idea that each vertical or market segment will need it's own one of them. In fact, I can't think of a single company that's launched since 2002 that isn't a derivative of one of the bust's labors of love.

The complete lack of creativity and new ideas is typical today. I guess we all have something to protect: the market funding, the high-paying jobs, the advertising revenue. The more to protect, the more conservative it gets. I hope that someone, or some company, somewhere, will think back to the first boom and remember what happened. The business cycle will happen, the money will evaporate, and only those that have made something truly new will survive that.

Posted by ben at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

China is going through huge growth, about 10% a year. While there remains a huge part of the country to lift out of poverty, one would think that this amount of growth would result in plenty of opportunity for everyone to make a good deal of money with less competitive pressure than in 'mature' markets. But apparently in some areas, the opposite is true; since the plants are partly owned by the government (and the managers not entirely responsible for keeping costs below income), they will sell products below costs in order to compete with other plants. This is, according to the article I read ("Ownership Distortion, Low Level Technology, and Excessive Competition," by Jie Ma and Weiying Zhang), the economic state of "over-competition," where too many competitors end up compromising the market and their own viability.

This rings a bell, because in a venture-capital fueled, social-media start-up frenzy much the same condition exists. 35 life streaming apps. 4,324 photo/video sharing sites. 321 twitter clones. Countless business-vertical mashups (102 travel business mashups alone). Why will any of these gain enough traction to garner general use (and "change the world" as their entrepreneurs like to say) if the market is in this crowded state and the owners are not risking their own money? Is this lottery-like state really an ok but brutal winnowing process, or more like the airline industry's race to the bottom?

For example, two competing commenting platforms in the same market causes some upset as one tries to market to the others' users. When so many blogs are being added all the time and the phenomenon is going mainstream, there should be plenty of room for at least two products. Instead, there are an overwhelming number of choices (who has time to sort through 14 options?). Decision theory says that "more choices may lead to a poorer decision or a failure to make a decision at all", losing situation for all these creative, hardworking start-ups.

So what's the alternative? I think the collections of start-ups in overlapping spaces should, as quickly as feasible, abandon the idea that they can create the be-all, end-all (e.g.) social shopping user base and content silo that will crush competing sites. Instead, they can open-source the basic containers and objects (much as Open Social and OAuth have done in one discreet area). That way, the personal data is by definition portable and owned by no company, and start-ups that aren't really, functionally different will have a shorter life (and I will never have to upload my profile picture again, ugh), and the viable sites will have a clearer shot at being viable businesses. What is the likelihood of this happening? Probably not so great, but these are the same geeks who advocate the Linux model for operating systems (where an app can be easily recompiled in the different distributions, and each distribution can use parts of others). There's really no reason other than a kind of protectionism not to extend this to Web applications.

Posted by ben at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Posted by ben at 2:14 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

"Twiphlo" (yeah, twitter iphone location... can't have a fake startup without a cutesy name) is my tiny contribution to making one particular activity easier: combining twitter with location updating, as an iPhone web app (yeah, I know web apps are dead on iPhone). The idea is that you can replicate some of the functions of brightkite and myloki without dealing with multiple services by just updating Twitter's location field in your profile. And, when having a history of your twitters with location information is interesting, you can see your past locations and tweets on a map. It also generates a geoRSS feed and a KML feed (Google Earth).

Of course, I only made this for myself, but it's there to try and to use if anyone finds it useful:

http://practicalist.com/twiphlo

It's functional in a web browser, but it works best in Safari or on an iPhone.

Disclaimers & Details: This is a test app. It gathers personal information. Use at your own risk. You may lose data, it may not work, Twitter may be down, etc. This application saves your Twitter password to a cookie on your local device only, mildly encrypted. Your username, locations, and tweets are stored on my secure database, to draw the map. If you are uncomfortable with this, bookmark this link and the app will not store any information locally or remotely. I will never have access to your Twitter account, and all the information stored is public already (unless you've set your tweets to private by default).

Posted by ben at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

As I approach the singularity (doing the whole spectral clustering thing on my own, rather than relying on genius kids for the heavy lifting), this caught my eye as a great rationale for doing the semantics-free work:

An interesting property of corpus-based theories of cognition (such as Latent Semantic Analysis) is that they cannot be tested independently of the corpus. Imagine that we collect a corpus, run and Single Value Decomposition on it, and use the resulting space to predict human similarity judgments between certain words. Imagine that the model does not explain the data very well. Is it that the model's processes are unrealistic, or is it that the corpus is not very representative? In this situation, those two factors are confounded. A possible solution is to test the same model with different corpora and different tasks. If the models explains the judgments' variance across different situations, we have more convincing evidence of the psychological reality of the model. ("Creating Your Own LSA Space," Jose Quesada, Carnegie Mellon University 2002.)

Chris Anderson's article "The End of Theory" takes this to a overwrought extreme:

Google's founding philosophy is that we don't know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that's good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required. That's why Google can translate languages without actually "knowing" them (given equal corpus data, Google can translate Klingon into Farsi as easily as it can translate French into German). And why it can match ads to content without any knowledge or assumptions about the ads or the content.

Clustering as an interface, by contrast, doesn't care about semantics, and doesn't even try for a strict ranking. Groups and rough hierarchy fit human models of organization much better than a long list (much as piles remain the usual way people organize). Loose piles don't have to be semantically understood, a set of items is easier to take in and choose from (with two dimensions -- item and group -- rather than one). And when the algorithm is based on purely on user activity analysis, a better interface for presenting results, solving the interface problem (and thus engendering and capturing more user interaction) is really solving the whole problem of giving people information in ways they can understand it and use it.

UPDATE: Taking this further, it's been seen for a long time that changes in behavior often happen when a few people that are part of a small group cause that entire group to adopt the change (like buying a kind of shoe, or phone, etc.). This is called the "cluster effect":

"The cluster effect is similar to (but not the same as) the network effect. It is similar in the sense that the price-independent preferences of both the market and its participants are based on each ones perception of the other rather than the market simply being the sum of all its participants actions as is usually the case. Thus, by being an effect greater than the sum of its causes, and as it occurs spontaneously, the cluster effect is a usually cited example of emergence."

Posted by ben at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

In a recent post on Hitwise by Heather Hopkins, "Content Aggregation is King?," the bind that existing news media is in is highlighted again:

"Aggregators are taking a larger piece of the pie but the size of the pie is growing with visits to content creators and all News and Media websites growing. The trouble is - creating all that content is expensive. It's tough to justify the cost of content creation if those that sift and sort are gaining on those that create."

The deal between the a consortium of newspapers and Yahoo to outsource listings functions to Yahoo in return for a cut of revenue was predicated on the idea that there is a way to do some basic arbitrage on this situation, but even that doesn't work over the longer term. News media simply can't justify the cost of their content creation staffs, even if they get rid of the printing presses and costs of classifieds businesses. And they have yet to really deal with this (probably because they are still much larger than the aggregator sites even now).

Maybe, as the news media starts seriously shrinking the content pool, the aggregators will start to strike deals like Yahoo did, but more expansive and lucrative. Done right, such deals could raise all boats. For example, rather than aggregating traffic on one domain, Yahoo (or Google, etc.) could drive traffic to news media sites that federated their news with aggregated content from all over the Internet. A network of these sites, served by a single ad engine, could broaden the ad inventory far beyond what Yahoo would ever be able to support on its own and save some amount of a business model for content creators.

It may take a risk by someone on the scale of the 2001 AOL-Google deal, which similarly tied a content network to advertising engine. Marissa Meyer talked about it as "a very big bet, a revenue guarantee" to AOL:

"It caused a huge amount of controversy at the time because by some of the models that we had run, the deal was going to bankrupt Google. Like Jonathan Rosenberg actually got up on the table and jumped up and down about how much we shouldn't do this deal because Google was going to go bankrupt. We had models, one said that we were going to go bankrupt, one which said we might break even... and one year into the deal what we saw was that by signing AOL and broadening the reach of our advertising network we attracted so many more advertisers, and RPMs (revenue per thousand pageviews) went up across the network and we outperformed our expectations by a factor of two, maybe even three times."

Posted by ben at 2:24 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Many of the good ideas below came in talking about personal information with Doug Fritz, the bad parts are my own ideas.

When Friendster and Flickr started getting traction (2002 and 2004 respectively), I wasn't a huge fan of the functionality, but the social aspect was totally addictive. I got seriously into each (and even got comfortable with the photostream concept eventually, though the fact that I can't easily control the order of the photos without using the organizr still bothers me). These sites ability to connect me with other people blew away all other shortcomings. At the time, the fact that I was putting so much personal information into a public space didn't bother me at all; I assumed a that the Web made old ideas of privacy kind of obsolete, and we would all eventually adapt and make new social norms to cope.

But now that social networks are taking on large chunks of people, I am not so sure. Facebook with a dozen real friends is a much different thing than Facebook with 140 "friends." The information I post there is, to me, the things that define me personally as I choose to represent myself. In the social network context however, the sites ultimately have more control over how I get represented than I do.

I had an experience with that when my story about a stolen cellphone and pictures from the thief unintentionally uploaded to Flickr briefly became news. There were some wrinkles in the story that caused people to be suspicious that I was doing marketing, or lying about the phone being stolen (as opposed to lost). I knew the facts of the matter and was not looking for any large amount of attention in posting the story. But once there was that attention, the people who read the story simply did not believe it and couldn't be convinced otherwise. They used personal information about me that was publicly available (on Flickr, my blog, and other sites) to make the case that I was perpetrating a hoax (for example the fact that I worked at Yahoo was used to say that I was marketing the Flickr service). Even the Reuters reporter that interviewed me asked "how can I know you're not deceiving me?" I didn't have an answer for her. The effortless flow of personal information (flow that I started) did not lead to anything like the truth, and caused some people to think that I was not a real person at all. Privacy as we knew may be gone, but the idea that everyone is now a public figure (with none of the protections of public figures) strikes me as wrong.

We can say that in the context of computer networks "information wants to be free," and I support the idea that copyright is an outmoded framework for intellectual property. But when it comes to representing ourselves, how can it be that personal information should flow everywhere and be used by anyone however they want? Open Social and the Data Portability initiatives are good starts for independent mechanisms, but I still have to give these systems a truckload of personal information, with no way to take it back after it's out there.

An alternate solution would be to allow people to own their personal information store, and choose to allow social network sites access to this store. Sites that behaved badly could be banned. This is much like OpenID and Oauth in concept, where one's identity is tied to a DNS-like way of creating a single namespace for unique user identifiers. It could take the form of a fancier version of an "Attention Profile Markup Language" file; a "Social Profile Markup Language" file, say. It would be stored on my own web server and under my direct control. If I wanted to share with Friendfeed or mybloglog (for example) what sites I've been posting to, saving, liking, or reading, I could allow them to access my SPML file under the condition that it be removed if I decided not to use the application any longer. (This is a geeky solution, but that's usually where these things start.) There should be a better solution to the new portability of social data than exists today, or my own understanding of my personal information will mean less and less.

Posted by ben at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

When I was a teenager I was lucky enough to own a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100, with a 300 baud modem. It allowed me to program in BASIC, compose documents in a Wordstar-compatible text editor, and even access CompuServe (sorry about those hourly rates Dad!). It started instantly exactly where I left off, no need to save at all (until you had to change the batteries, then it was time to break out the cassette tape recorder drive). It's eight-line by 40 character LCD screen used little power, so I could use it for 30 hours or so on one set of batteries. I doubt anyone has ever looked so completely scary nerd while believing that they were the hottest shit as I did with that thing. I wish there was something like it now, something smaller, lighter, and simpler of course. I would just like to be able to write wherever I am, without carrying or pulling out a laptop, and I would like not to worry about saving, battery life, weight, expensive equipment, etc. Something like the Flip for words.

Specifications 2GB RAM (enough for 8000 pages of text or about 5 million words, surely enough for anyone), full keyboard, non-backlit LCD display, low-power Bluetooth transceiver (file access only), 1 mini-USB port for data transfer and charging. 22 hours of use per charge. RTF/HTML format text editor. 8 x 8 x 0.3 inches, 1 pound.

Update: Rob Mcartney points me to the Alphasmart, a little bulky but maybe just the right thing! Ordered one... thanks Rob.

Posted by ben at 9:46 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Posted by ben at 4:08 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

In an article about the politics and economics of consumer choice in cable entertainment ("Bland Menu if Cable Goes à la Carte") in the New York Times, the author talks about how it's actually a good thing that the costs of producing niche programming are borne by all cable subscribers, as otherwise such programming would be very expensive and possibly not attract enough buyers to exist at all (even the most popular channel, ESPN, would rise from $3/month to $12/month). This makes sense, and could be a useful way of thinking about two other media businesses that are in some trouble: the Web and newspapers, both of which are in that bad à la Carte downward spiral.

In the case of the Web, despite the large amount of investment and growth in Web users, the economics still do not support niche content in any serious way. Small publishers have not made a living off of their content, depending on VCs or large distribution networks for investment to stay afloat, or publishing despite the lack of money. And even the most popular blogs on the Internet make a tiny amount of money compared to any other publishing medium like books, magazines, TV, etc. For example, Boing Boing is estimated to bring in $50,000/month in advertising revenue, which sounds like a lot until you consider that a single full-page ad in a local magazine like New York generates the same amount of revenue. Traditional media companies like AOL and Yahoo! have tried to aggregate many small publishers and sell ads across all of them, but despite getting a lot of traffic for this content, the rates for ads remain low (and at flat growth rates). The money remains in search text ads. Jaron Lanier pointed out in an Op-ed that this model doesn't work for content authors.

In the case of newspapers, their audience is falling steadily and won't sustain the costs of keeping the staffs of reporters and editors working (let alone the costs of publishing in print). They have had some success working with internet networks like Yahoo!, but this is likely not sustainable nor will it replace enough revenue to keep things going at current spending levels (magazines haven't had the same problem, but that's another topic).

So given that the cable model supports a number (not a huge number, but a number) of niche content players, and given that the Internet functions well as a big lab for new ideas but not for building content businesses, maybe what's needed is a sort of content consortium, or at least association of creators, with thresholds for membership and the ability to bargain collectively for better compensation. This would be different from a union, more like the Author's Guild or Screen Actors Guild, where plenty of work is done outside their auspices, but productions that generate a lot of revenue must conform to standards of pay. The cable model shows that if companies seeking to exploit content have to buy in to a collective pool of content, content costs are lower while allowing even niche content to thrive. This model doesn't need the cable networks to work for the author's benefit.

In a rough environment for content creators, where the economics are against them (but no one wants them to stop creating), the authors and makers should hang together more than they are. Some kind of association would re-balance a business that is out of kilter, draining the money out of a very valuable part of the culture we live in.

Posted by ben at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

The use of A-B testing and bucket testing for optimizing tasks can provide a clean, programatic way to make many design decisions. It's an invaluable technique for comparing two similar but incompatible choices, and the results are impossible to have much debate about. Because of the urge to move fast, some groups have been tempted to use A-B testing to create artificial certainty about qualitative questions, however:

Testing can't give insight into what the product package should be; it will never tell you why the results are what they are. Trying to test features individually and then assemble them into a coherent package will not give insight into the success or failure of the entire package, nor provide a sense of what the right product is. At best, it results in a sort of "drunken sailor's walk," as each new incremental test takes the product in a different direction.

Testing won't tell you which product will be more successful; direct comparison is seldom the way that people decide what to buy (Pepsi beats Coke in taste tests year after year, yet Coke has 44% of the market and Pepsi is stuck at 32%). In fact, attempting to compare a new products to each other this way can result in audiences simply choosing what's familiar. This can be seen in the heavily AB test driven designs of the search results pages of Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask, which are all very similar.

A great deal of research has been done into the product choices people make, and it consistently points to the formation of a "story" around a product being the most important factor in whether it succeeds or fails (the most eloquent person on this topic is Seth Godin, ex-Yahoo! employee). This is not the marketing at all, but how the actual product makes overall sense to people who use it, surprises them with something new and better, or disappoints for some reason. There is no way to create a story out of a list of features or parts, instead it's the combination that either works, or it doesn't.

Posted by ben at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

technorati tags:facebook, f8, social, network, applications

Posted by ben at 3:01 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

In a meeting last week, I said I wanted to try to involve some other designers in a project, but just got a blank look and the question "what can design do?" -- designers can't really help with the actual making of the product, they meant. Ugh. It's true: Silicon Valley-type engineers and other very smart people have put designers to shame by creating products and services that no one imagined but that many can't live without, and for which "design" (the role, as it is commonly understood) is just not critical.

Rather than working within people's existing needs and expectations (the traditional approach of practical-minded designers), the work of engineers has changed people's habits, thinking, and behavior. Designers are relegated to optimizing a use-case, working out the complexities, or putting a nice shiny coat of varnish on top (and rounding the corners). This approach, and the "undesigned" look of Google, Craigslist, MySpace, etc. has led people to talk about design more as marketing (and to be avoided) than as part of the product. The real work is in the engineering design, and invention happens there first.

I've tried the fancy idea of using "design thinking" as a way of making product decisions, to be more strategic (and less production-oriented). It works for IDEO, but not so well for me -- it feels more like business development than inventing. Heroically, Bruce Nussbaum has tried to save us all by equating design and innovation, as the secret sauce that will enable the West to compete with China, etc., but I don't think it's gonna stick.

Ok, I'm starting to finally get it: this may be a time when the myriad possibilties of creating new-to-the-planet things means engineering (exploring the deeper design of systems). But I am not ready to give up all the fun to engineers! I would rather undergo some wrenching adjustments to what it means to "design" and be relevant again. I want to be able to say that 'design creates new things to make people happy,' not 'design makes it look pretty or more usable.'

Like an architect would, I am going to have to know a lot more of what an engineer does, and be able to work directly with a good part of the code if I really want to play in the deep end of the pool. I am going to start designing in code, maybe bullshit, arty code, but code nonetheless. This is a little rough and later in life than I would have liked, but what the fuck, bring it on!

technorati tags:design, designers, engineers, web

Posted by ben at 3:40 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

It was impossible for me not to know about the iPhone as soon as it happened, I am a sucker for anything Apple. But I don't actually want one, which is weird to me, as usually I would want one of each from the entire Apple Store. I don't love my Treo at all, but the main value in it for me is as an Internet device; for that the damn keyboard is the affordance that makes it workable and useful. I really do hope that the touch screen is a great text entry thingy, but having used many, I can't really see how it will be.

But I do like the phone for the way that the interface is implemented. It is nicely visually polished, and the interaction design is ok, but what really makes it sparkle I think is the cinematic way that all interactions have smooth transitions from one state to the next. Looking at the demo of retrieving a voice mail, all the steps flow smoothly into one another, and when I close an item it zooms back into the place where it came from.

It's profoundly relaxing to see, and makes me realize how much brain overhead it takes on a daily basis to look at my phone and interpret what is happening, what just happened, and what I can do next; these things take very very tiny bits of attention, but it really adds up. It's like a tracking shot in a movie; where rather than cutting from shot to shot to show someone doing something the camera simply moves to follow them continuously ( I think of the opening sequence in Nashville and Boogie Nights — it works to introduce the characters because it's obvious whose story it is from the shot, instead of asking you to interpret artful framing or a sequence of different emphases into a whole).

Web design could use some of this continuous quality. The fanciest Ajaxified sites are still mostly a deck of flash cards, unfortunately.

UPDATE: I now own one, of course. My skepticism lasted only until the price drop :)

Posted by ben at 4:58 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

My cell phone was stolen last Friday. I had it disconnected and arranged to get a replacement. It had been set up with the excellent service from ShoZu to automatically upload all pictures taken with the phone to Flickr. So today, completely surprisingly, I find pictures on my Flickr account of the family of the person who took the phone. I'm not sure they knew what was happening (they replaced the SIM card with their own, clearly, but probably didn't notice ShoZu), I have no way to find my phone with these pictures, and I've disabled my ShoZu account so it won't happen again. See update, below.

But: what a great illustration of how social media, inadvertently or not, blows away all normally private separate identities and separate worlds! I don't just know something about the person who took the phone, I see some of the more intimate details of their family and life. Social media and applications create conditions which would otherwise be impossible. These technologies are only beginning to have a profound impact on social norms and behavior. The photos are below.

Posted by ben at 6:50 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

A few people get together and create a new product or service, in secrecy. The product or service gets a ambiguous name like Jiffr or Remebo, is then previewed with venture capitalists and other entrepreneurs, and is launched, sold to a large company, or (most often) fails.

The most valuable products are those utilitarian ideas that almost anyone would need and are engineered to be able to serve millions of people without too much added cost (and thus are very profitable if successful). Throughout this process, the bulk of the product design is done by the engineers or business owners, who mostly trust their own instincts about what the right experience is. Sometimes a design firm or designer is brought in to add some visual polish or create a logo.

So what's so great about this model? It hasn't produced any truly new products in a long time (Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft were created publicly at schools, MySpace, Flickr and Blogger were created right out in the open as businesses). Despite the extremely hot focus on start-ups and the possible wealth to be had from a successful one, as ways of creating new ideas they are functioning pretty badly. Each new product is somewhat interesting, but after a pretty solid year of trying a lot of these, there isn't a single one that I still use (in particular, I am still wishing for a good Web-based RSS reader).

I think Om Malik may be right about what "Web 2.0" really is: a collection of exciting new enhancements for Web sites that will be integrated into the offerings of big companies like Google, Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo!, rather than a hothouse for new companies. This would be fine if we had mature Web products that just needed refinement, but none of the major pieces of the Web work too well yet (search is "5% solved," Linux is a ten-year old, social networks are in their very awkward pre-teen days, email is choking, Windows has chronic illnesses, even my iPod crashes a lot).

What's the answer? Stay in school. Don't read eHub. Assume that your ideas have occurred to other people. Don't take the venture capital money for the first idea. Don't be secretive about ideas. Think past the semantic Web, Web 2.0, social media, etc., the implications of which are pretty clear to everyone, already being executed on and will be fairly played out in five years. What will come after that?

Posted by ben at 7:56 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

At my job (and in Silicon Valley in general I think), Agile development is supposed to be the best way to do things. Specifically, the Scrum method encourages an evolutionary approach, where an entire team works together in short cycles and creates a product iteratively (first a barely-functional demo, then a rough prototype, then a more finished version, etc.), without an overall plan.

Scrum works very well for implementation, since it empowers a team to do its own planning, breaks a large project down into brief chunks and reduces the amount of churn and decision-making that can cause delays and rework. It is an approach with an evolutionary philosophy: no one can know at the outset what the right solution is, so let's just start working and refine as we go.

Coming from the perspective of design, there are some built-in tensions to this approach, however. Design as a discipline has as an article of faith that people can sit down and create a drawing or visualization of an idea that will make things better, and that this idea can help push the expansion of what's currently possible to engineer (this is not to say that only designers can do design, just defining the activity, everyone does design all the time).

Scrum allows no time for the messy task of conceptualization (other than beforehand), and divides up all the aspects of a project into small, unintegrated tasks, making it hard to see the 'big picture.' The team-focused environment encourages strong collaboration, but does not ensure that the value of a product is realized by itself (and the proponents of the method don't claim it does, either). In fact, the method ensures that engineers, designers, and product people spend less time thinking about whether the product is the right product overall.

What's needed is less of a focus on methodology, and more of a focus on ideas and people's talents. Scrum is a fine method to do work, but doesn't actually solve the problem of making good products. Rather than talking about intelligent design vs. evolution and assuming that one way of doing things explains the entire world, we should be valuing time spent on hard thinking and idea generation just as much as we value the time spent implementing things. There are certainly limits to emphasizing creativity, but there is a sameness to Web products these days I think. We need more really new ideas.

Update

People are fundamentally spiritual beings, with big needs for meaning and a sense of themselves in relation to the world (whether they believe in God or not). Scientific thinking is always needed and important. But what we most need now is that messy old-time religion: creative thinking, design thinking, the faith that we can know the right thing to do, to make the world better.

Posted by ben at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Most people have a tremendous longing for something, a place in the past they wish they could have again, regret about a bad thing they've done, a wish for something that seems out of reach. You keep going ahead with your life in some way, but you have a "hungry backward look" (Phillip Roth's phrase) towards when you were younger, or to someone beautiful, graceful, smart, etc. It's a strong desire that feels necessary to ourselves, part of who we are, and at the same time probably impossible.

(Also, although I imagine this longing is universal and basic to being human, most people won't admit this; they will tell you their sexual tastes and family problems first. That wish might seem greedy, or grandiose, inappropriate, or just plain ridiculous.)

The truth about these desires (I think everyone knows on some level), is that no matter what they are, they would not transform your life fundamentally -- you would still be the person you are today, the person whose life has brought you to this point. What you actually want (I believe), is some way to re-experience a memory exactly as it was, or live the small vision you had in your head, the way you can play a CD or video again and again. But memories are mushy and indistinct, and fade (unevenly). Watching my daughter grow is breathtaking, not just because she's so fabulously big now but also because realizing how fast she's changing makes me a little panicky -- the sweet baby part of her life is slipping away so quickly. The way that memory erodes is just like mediated experience: first comes the movie, then the spin-off sequel, then the TV series, each one less connected from the story and emotions that made it powerful at first. And the more you try to recapture the feeling, the more it gets away from you.

The cure for this is similar to when you are wrestling with any hard thing: write down some something, make lists, get whatever it is into a place where you are not just wrestling with your own thoughts and hearing them rattle around in your head. The cure, in fact, is for people to make more authentic, public media (photos, journals, podcasts, shoutouts, posts, tags, avatars, etc.); not imitations of professional media, not stagy fake material or imitations of other people's stuff, but the small-scale, awkward, unselfconscious storytelling that comes naturally when you are talking to a friend. This kind of authentic media is in very short supply -- in fact, most bloggers are doing the exact opposite, wanting attention and aspiring to manage some slick bullshit public persona.

The tools are available to reify and make public all the small, modest pieces of life, and cheaply. What you are doing when you do this is ultimately getting all the thoughts and memories out of your head and into a place where you can have some sort of perspective on them. If memories, and the memories and experiences of others, were out there and always available, they would for us what Portnoy's Complaint and other books probably did for Roth: put him at peace with the sometimes conflicted, embarrassing, messy, but ultimately good person that he is.

Posted by ben at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

When I do a Web search, Yahoo!, Google, and a couple other companies do an amazingly sophisticated job of showing me a page that has a finely tuned blend of information — matching on words, ranking based on inbound and outbound links, social filtering, and many small adjustments for the corpus I'm looking within. That is, they produce a page with a great deal of relevance. Over and over again, this generates an expectation that when I need some information, a Web search is a good way to go. It's hard to remember, but just a few years ago that wasn't true. We had the Web, and all the fancy ideas, but nothing nearly as good for general usefulness as Web search has become.

Unfortunately, the rest of the Web was left behind. The general information sites, the catalog sites, the entertainment sites, the message-boards, instant messaging, even email services have not benefited from the algorithmic approach to making pages. They remain stuck in old, unsatisfying and primitive ghettos. John Battelle, in his book The Search outlined one or two scenarios that would take networked services into the same kinds of mechanisms that Web search provides, but there doesn't seem to be much talk about increasing the amount of relevance for the ordinary mass of sites out there.

Part of this I am sure is because doing Web search requires a massive amount of horsepower, and no one can justify spending ten-times what everyone else spends on hardware and software to sell products. But part of it I think is just that most of the more pedestrian sites out there are direct translations of offline resources, whereas with search, there is no equivalent that is a directly analogous experience, and there are no existing expectations to get past.

But of course there is a big opportunity there. In general, I don't mind shopping among just major brands, or reading a mass of feeds from the more popular sites, or trying a few different popular albums to see if there is one I like. But, as has been flogged to death, the biggest opportunity is in giving me access to the ���long tail��� of smaller other products, publishers, and artists work, the few things in the world I'm sure to love. Amazon has been doing very interesting things with services and infrastructure pieces that are not core to it's main business (A9, Alexa, Local Maps, S3, etc.) but are directly comparable to the kinds of work that Yahoo!, Google, and MSN are doing. RSS, Atom, and other standards are enabling huge amounts of ideas, products, people, and work to be addressed via a simple format. Aspects of social networking are making their way into the bulk of the sites and services that people use.

My guess is that before too long, that magical relevance, the wonderful confidence that what I want will just appear, won't just be in search results pages, it will be everywhere.

Technorati Tags: ecommerce, long tail, relevance, search, technology

Posted by ben at 9:32 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

What could be more uselessly meta than blogging about the reasons for blogging? Whatever. Here we go:

The Good

People blog for attention, or in the expectation of getting more attention. Since blogging originated with geeks, "attention" paid to blogs has been turned into a set of equations (trackbacks, comments, etc.). In this realm, blogging is about promoting oneself in a marketplace of ideas. The more traffic you can drive, the more important you are, and the more influential you are. By enlisting your friends, commenting on other more prominent blogs, or just plain pimping your content to others, you can try to get people to visit your site and track your status. It's a more efficient version of the ways people have always spread ideas, influenced people, and measured their impact. It's open to almost everyone, it promotes the free flow of information, and it provides a real alternative to existing media outlets for more immediate, more opinionated, deeper dives into topics.

For all the good, blogging has big limitations, however, in the gap between the technical solution and the genuine human need (and, as I am a blogger with just slightly above zero traffic and just trying to impress his wife, I think I'm perfectly positioned for the discussion).

The Not So Good

First, people in general don't have a getting media attention problem, they most likely have an experience-deficit problem. That is, the fundamental drive to be social and belong does not get solved by blogging, or any mediated experience. You can see this in online romances (the torrid email exchange is followed by an awkward meeting), or telecommuting (people on the conference call or email thread are second-class citizens). The simulation doesn't satisfy. Bloggers don't think this way, however; for them, everything important is on the Web, and the first impulse after having an experience is to blog about it.

Second, bloggers are mobs, or latent mobs (and a weird kind of mob, where no one in the mob knows they're a mob). All relationships in blogs are individual-to-individual (or even hand-to-hand). Where conflict happens there's a lot of amplified passion and strife that flares up and dies down, without much understanding or knowledge being created (and the winners will often be the people who shouted the loudest). People say things to each other on blogs that they would never say in real life. When there's an argument between bloggers, small fires turn into big ones quickly and often and the results are boring and stupid.

The distorting effect of the technological solution also causes "blogger-voice," people speaking with the same high-pitched self-consciousness you hear in loud cell phone conversations, bad acting, or people caught lying. Since the stakes for bloggers are high ('love me'), the audience goes on the same emotional roller-coaster with the blogger, and that investment exaggerates their reaction (either it 'sux' or it 'rulez'). Doing the public voice gracefully is an art. The people whose writing does stay with me are all journalists or writers (unrepresentative samples: Danah Boyd, Steven Johnson, Mickey Kaus, Paul Ford, etc.). This suggests to me that people who have experience with writing and thinking in the real world are more valuable than those who live in only in the electronic one.

So...

To me, all this doesn't mean that blogging is bad, I hope that there are more bloggers so all these issues can sort themselves out. It means that blogging doesn't really change what people's actual needs are that much. In the end, blogs are just slow motion phone calls, speeded up postcards, tiny threads of communication between two people, with the goal of understanding and intimacy. The public quality is real, but ancillary. The self-consciousness that the public display engenders is something to get over, a test of the blogger's ability to keep their personal perspective and identity. Good luck!

Technorati Tags: blogs, media, mobs, motives, psyche, social, technology

Posted by ben at 5:24 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

I work at Yahoo!, but I have a small role and no influence on or knowledge of corporate decisions or policies about China, or any contact (beyond a couple of meetings of fellow employees at a conference) with Yahoo!'s Chinese business partners. This post is personal opinion only.

The way that Yahoo! has handled the jailing of four Chinese dissidents (based on personal information handed over by Yahoo! to the Chinese government) has so far been to say that it is powerless to change the political reality and laws in China, and this is surely true. In hearings about the issue at the U.S. Congress, Yahoo! has focused on sort of asking the U.S. government to pass laws (like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, as Bill Gates pointed out) that would give companies like Yahoo! guidance on what business practices were acceptable in countries outside the U.S. (so that, presumably, it would have some cover in negotiations with the Chinese government over its practices in China).

It's clear from the legalistic language that Yahoo!'s public representatives use that the company is in a real bind: if they withhold information from the Chinese government, they are likely to lose the ability to do business in China and inflict major damage on their business. People in China are better off overall if companies like Yahoo! are investing there; they get jobs, investment in other supporting local businesses, and a lot of knowledge transfer from American experts (every Chinese citizen I've talked to believes that U.S. companies should stay in China, though of course the people I've talked with have been mostly the beneficiaries of investment). But that benefit doesn't excuse any actions that contribute to putting political prisoners in jail; that goes beyond being a business decision. Yahoo! can't change its public position without consequences from the arbitrary Chinese government, but groups like Reporters Without Borders will continue to effectively publicize the consequences of Yahoo!'s compliance with Chinese law. For the people who have to make these difficult decisions, it is surely a no-win situation.

I believe that there should immediately be some quiet modification of the way that U.S. companies gather personal information on their Chinese sites (that is, gather as little as possible and keep almost nothing), without waiting for U.S. laws to be passed (from what I can tell, there will be bills introduced that U.S. companies will have to follow like the FCPA, most likely next year). Despite all the equivocating, the enabling of Chinese repression can't continue and will change, if without publicity (companies and governments don't like to make difficult decisions publicly unless they have to). But with no company willing to be a leader on the issue, improvement will be hard to come by and will take longer and will be more complex than anyone will be happy with.

Technorati Tags: china, politics, technology

Posted by ben at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

In my art history classes in graduate school there was a generalization made by a famous historian, Erwin Panofsky:

When a society is out of balance and disorganized, art tends toward the abstract. When the society is balanced and stable, art tends toward naturalism." -- Studies in Iconology, Humanistic Themes in the Art

The sense of longing for technical solutions to spiritual problems reaches an intense level in one of the more tortured reflection of technological capitalism: social networking Web sites like MySpace. Here, the lack of offline connectedness creates a new online connectedness (this time, it's not hidden from parents or adults however, and thus the same dangers and brutality that have always come with young people hanging out together are there for everyone to see and be shocked by). The Web sites, the cell phones, the messaging services reflect the trouble that a large society and culture has in providing for the spiritual needs of people: they are a reflection of our collective frustrated desires, not the cause of them.

In the times that Panofsky was talking about (5c-16c Europe), the changes happened slowly. The Dark Ages lasted a long, long time, and whatever took their place lasted awhile too. Now, the world changes very fast and the cycles overlap, and there is no single relationship that pervades an entire society or culture. In this world, there are two basic choices: more connections (the Western vision of technology-fueled markets) or more ideology (the chosen group, the fundamentalists, the belief in burning ideas). We have to hope that ideology loses for all our sakes, but connectedness in its current form isn't satisfying very well.

Technorati Tags: art, desire, social, technology

Posted by ben at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

The Web needs tagging or some other bottom up and scalable system for managing the tons of information that everyone is creating. Librarians and specialists will not be able to keep up with classifying the tsunami of information, and we'll all lose out if we don't find some way of capturing the patterns of behavior that people sharing information create: there are business needs for sure, but mostly there is a lot of general improvement to people's lives that can be had (e.g. if I subscribe to popular links for a tag on del.icio.us, I know most everything that people are thinking about a topic on a real time basis, and I am included and benefit from thousands of small intentions and thoughts).

So the goal is a good goal. Tagging has become sort of popular, but some problems have started to crop up. Many people still are unable to see the value of the practice, and for those that do tag there are limitations built into the standard model (it works much better as a tool for collaborating than for personal organization, and you spend a lot of time reinventing the classification wheel). In response, some geeks have started talking about extending the model to include relationships between terms or normalization, or ranking through collaborative filtering. That's natural (in fact, it has a precedent; in the 50s there was a single-term, non- hierarchical classification system for libraries called UniTerm, but it was not generally accepted and instead we have the hierarchical Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal systems). Time Tags and Zone Tags are interesting ways of adding layers of social meaning to tags.

This direction feels wrong to me though. Tagging has had success because it is lightweight enough metadata to be easy, and it's non-hierarchical nature lends itself to social applications (like quick aggregation of photo themes on flickr). I think a better approach will be to build tags into the interaction model of applications, turn the actions and intentions of users into inferred or implied tags, then surface that information as a basis for explicit meta-tagging action later (instead of putting so much of a burden on the user).

Right now, for example, a searcher types in one or two words as a query to a search engine, then they might pick one or two Web pages to visit. Essentially, they have tagged those pages with the query term, but that metadata is currently lost to the searcher. Instead we ask the searcher to take explicit action to save a Web page, then tag it with terms that may have nothing to do with their original query; the relationship between the two metadata linked to the same entity could be very valuable to both the user and the system. I think this kind of explicit/implicit tagging could add a lot of relevance and richness to a lot of sites and applications.

Posted by ben at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Large numbers of people joined the companies and culture that participated in the venture-capital-fueled dot-bomb, which was believed to be created by the vast potential that the Internet had to change many aspects of human interaction, business, and culture. For many, this personal involvement in discovery was the rationale for their participation. It turned out that the Internet does alter a great deal, but much more modestly and incrementally than was supposed then. The end of the boom created a large group of people, versed in technology, who no longer had a transformational, exciting focus in their work. The rebirth of the boom most recently has led to some of the same feelings, artifacts and parties, but this time instead of some illusion that there is nowhere to go but up there is the assumption that at some point the party will end, but still the enterprise is somehow one involved in 'changing the world.'

Many have looked for a similar transformational experience in creating technology to help developing nations (as seen at the TED conference in 2002 with Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway device, demonstrating a water purification device). Others have joined politics (as documented in the _New York Times Magazine_ in "The Dean Connection," in which many people have traded their devotion to creating new interactive software for electing Howard Dean). An older, but similar group of ex-liberals called the "neoconservatives" created a set of thinking about American power that informed much of the drive to invade Iraq; George Soros points out in _The Atlantic Magazine_ that this has the qualities of a "bubble" of American political power that was based on false precepts, and has now collapsed.

The drive to be involved in an enterprise that is personally meaningful and connected to helping others is a strong, and undoubtedly good, one. Working long hours and pouring oneself wholeheartedly into a community of others that share your passion for a single goal is powerful stuff. But despite the appeal of transformational events and communities, the larger world is often ignorant of the desires of a few people or the beauty of their dreams. In the case of faith in technology in general, a desire to solve the problems of the Middle East with American power, and especially in a project to defeat George Bush, those who wish for success need to combine their elaborate plans with more rigorous checking-in with those that are not part of the special group, or else they will suffer the same broken hearts as the dot-com boomers and many, many others before them.

Posted by ben at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments ()