Tech Online Recruitment Specialist Dice Inc. Acquired by General Atlantic and Quadrangle Group
Interesting transaction in the IT jobs space (disclosure, I consulted to Dice in 2002).
Category: General
A VC: Really Simple Stealing
RSS theft is nasty but happening everywhere. Shades of the old frame-and-scrapers of the mid-90s. I really like Fred’s Internet Axis of Evil, but he misses a couple, like pop-ups, meaningless registration, page takeovers ….
The Internet Axis of Evil
Spam Zeitgeist
I use a spam blocking service called Messagefire that sends me a daily report of stuff it’s snagged. I skim it every morning to find any misdirected good mail. Two themes seem pretty hot in the subject line. First is the "jack rabbit vibrator" (I don’t want to know). Today sent a winner, "Hot Latina Wearing Diapers."
My heart be still.
Elementary Principles of Web Design
"Principle 13: Omit Unnecessary Stuff
"Vigorous Web Design is concise. A page should contain no unnecessary stuff, a nav bar no unnecessary choices, for the same reason a sentence should have no unnecessary words and a machine no unnecessary parts."
With apologies to William Strunk and E.B. White.
One of the producers just came in with a redesign proposal for one of our sites. We went over the page, mostly deleting, deleting, deleting, when I recalled some stuff I scraped this morning from Amazon.
Look at the progression of the famous Amazon horizontal nav, the tabs that launched a thousand imitators.
1999
2001
Today, less is more
The Supreme Court is Turning me into a Raving Libertarian
WSJ.com – High Court Rules With RIAA in File-Sharing Case
Okay, I’m generally an apolitical guy, but last week’s Supreme Court ruling that municipalities could extend eminent domain takings of private property for commercial economic development got me started and this morning’s ruling against Grokster has me foaming.
This latest is hands-down the biggest setback to technology policy in the history of the court. This is analgous to banning any implement, tool, or technology that has the potential for lawbreaking on the grounds that the potential is indeed the primary use.
Given the plaintiff list — all I can say is the vested interests got their day in court and came away happy. My recommendation is to innovate, don’t litigate, because the train has left the station on file sharing and these corporate IP retards are going to be playing whack-a-mole forever with users determined to pirate, share, manipulate and break their media free of its formats, locks, and copyright protection schemes.
Playing with video
Messing around with Google Video
Recent experiments by me with a Sony digital video camera and Adobe Premiere have pushed me into an obsession with the production of web-ready video in the expectation that video will soon go the way of audio and follow an RSS-path towards something akin to podcasting called vidcasting.
With high hopes set for devices such as Sony’s PSP to finally build a platform for portable video, I give it a year before vidcasting begins to surface as a meme.
The question is one of gnarliness — podcasting can be as time-consuming as one wants to make it depending on relative degrees of obsessive compulsiveness and the complexity of the production tools, but I found the learning curve on opensource products such as Audacity signficantly reduce the turnaround time to about a four-to-one ratio of post-production to capture time.
Video is a different matter. Thanks to the speed of a firewire connection, D/V can be sucked off of the camera and into the PC very easily. Editing tools I’ve been playing with are Adobe Premiere — which is way too feature-laden for my uneducated tastes (this bed is too hard), the video editor that is bundled with Windows XP (this bed is too soft) and Adobe Premier Elements which fits the bill nicely thanks to its ability to output onto recordable DVDs (and this bed is just right).
I recorded some rowing races earlier in the month and due to the keen interest by the rowers and their parents have had to find some time on the last two weekends to edit the raw footage, title it, and encode it for web viewing off of Churbuck.com in .wmv format. This past weekend I encoded the files into one 25 minute flick, complete with a DVD menu system, and burned the results onto discs for distribution to parents.
It was, all in all, a good experience and Premier Elements was adequate for my purposes. I now need to read a good book on videography to teach myself the do’s and don’ts of over zooming, panning, using a monopod to cut down on handshaking, and what to do to override autofocus so the lense doesn’t autoseek on something in the foreground when I’m trying to capture the background. I’d put the production to capture ratio at roughly eight-to-one, mainly because I was trying to figure out hairy add-ons like scrolling credits that really aren’t necessary.
Battelle’s scoop last week that Google was launching in-browser video playback today, drove me to Google’s existing video submission service, where I opened an account under my gmail name and uploaded one of the rowing clips. It was an easy process and the file is currently under review before being posted. I was asked by Google if I wanted to charge users for viewing (which I did not), so evidently there is a market to be made. Now my concern is hosing my bandwidth allotment for Churbuck.com. Once the clip is approved I’ll be interested to see how it is tagged for search finds as there was no tagging facility offered in the upload process. Google, according to Om, is using an opensource player, VLC, which I will download and checkout as part of some webcasting due-diligence I’m now performing for CXO.
Key insight learned from these recent video experiments: the size of the image plays a huge role in helping the viewer assign sounds — conversation — with people. The smaller the image, the more disconnected the audio. Amazingly stupid insight, but nevertheless something I’ll keep in mind when building future web videos displaying in small apertures — keep the number of people to a minimum, the images are too small for the user to assign voices to faces.
Google Video either turns into America’s Dumbest Digital Videos or really gets some quality and makes some people some money. Wonder what Google’s cut of the action is? Google Video deserves some attention.
Readings – What the Dormouse Said
The intersection of technology and the counterculture has always been a quiet but persistent theme in the sound track of the history of computing. John Markoff attempts a chronicle of the two worlds in his latest book, titled after the line in the Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit that exhorts the listener to "feed your head."
The foreward is brilliant, where Markoff — who has been on the scene in Silicon Valley for over three decades — relates a conversation he had with Steve Jobs when the subject of LSD came up, and Jobs discussed the impact the psychedelic had on him and others in scaling the role technology could enhance and extending the capabilities of the mind. Markoff makes a succinct, but eseential delineation of the world into two camps — Information Libertarians and Information Proprietarians. Proprietarians are exemplified by the movie industry, the RIAA, Bill Gates (who early on cast himself against the practice of sharing code with his now famous open letter in Dr. Dobb’s to those homebrew users who swapped his version of BASIC for the Altair), and those who would predict the demise of intellectual property through file sharing and piracy. The libertarians, Markoff says, are at the essence of the OpenSource movement, whose forefathers extended government funded projects such as ARPANET and opened up the standards of TCP/IP to the world and not a commercial entity.
It’s a neat dichotomy, one that forces a binary alignment of the world into the Stewart Brand camp where "information wants to be free" and the Gates camp where "information is expensive."
The book chronicles the efforts of Doug Englebart, John McCarthy, Alan Kay, and the coterie of coders and visionaries that transformed the world of information technology from a centralized time-sharing model of data centers to infinitely scalable, truly personal computers, technology envisioned as tools to extend and share the power of the mind. While many components of the tale are familiar — Englebart’s and McCarthy’s projects at SRI and SAIL are stories often told — and the influence of Xerox PARC is almost mythical at this point in time, Markoff plows some new ground in his discussion of how LSD was regarded in the mid-60s, before it escaped the labs, and the impact it had on otherwise buttoned-up engineers.
There is a little over focus on SRI and SAIL and not enough details about the overall role the counterculture played within the industry that followed the early innovations. The tensions created in the PC industry as freak-met-suit, the countercultural influences on seminal communities such as the WELL versus the traditional glass house mentality as corporate communities such as CompuServe. Markoff needed to take another two years and another 500 pages to truly chart the social threads that have been woven together over the past forty years to create the most astonishing industry the world has ever known.
I highly recommend the book.
Jon Udell: Collaborative filtering with del.icio.us
Jon Udell: Collaborative filtering with del.icio.us
Okay, so the Long Tail thing is growing old, but this is the best representation of the thing growing organically I’ve seen yet.
One month into the new gig
Lack of blogging here due to 65 hour weeks the past month; but coming out of the cave of analysis now and beginning to carve out some time to return to this blog (9:30 pm on a Saturday is an indication of loss-of-life).
Tons of stuff to post and pose:
1. Audience enhancement — not development as an art of "names" embrace. Wish I could find the old Bill Ziff keynote to some b2b publishers association in the 80s. Brilliant manifesto for working with one’s "names" on every thing from qualified circ, direct mail, registration, renewal, and multiple media delivery channels.
2. Podcast production. Easy as pie. Download Audacity, get a digital mike, then find something to say. Last week CMO Magazine launched its first in 36 hours from conception to publication. Production costs were the salaries of those involved. Issue is how to make cash from the thing. (The story of getting copyright permission for the music in the aforementioned podcast is priceless. Good thing I tracked the owner down, he was the force behind the passage of the 1976 copyright legislation).
3. Lead generation – this is a whole new alien topic. Remember Glengarry Glen Ross? When the desperate condo salesmen are ravenous for leads and contemplate stealing them after bemoaning the old set is full of Polish people, deadbeats and people named Patel? Now take that scene and apply to tech advertisers.
4. Metrics – whole new game now that Hitbox and Omniture are in the game. No more seat of the pants guesswork. Death to Webtrends and garbage numbers. But yet … still they fall short.
That’s it for now. Now to figure out how to migrate my admin password for this blog from an old laptop to my new one, and blogging can recommence or need to go on pause and be reconstituted, most likely under blogharbor at Matt McAlister’s suggestion.